my tears ricochet

Part 112

THE BEFORE

"Was this your first weapon of choice?" Simon practically crooned, holding the rifle so she was looking down the barrel at him, his finger on the trigger. "Nice piece of work, this one. You start off with this or a little smaller?"

Ivy said nothing. She pressed her teeth together and refused to move away from the loaded gun, refused to show fear.

But he brushed it against her jaw, bringing it up to tap at her forehead. "Bang," he whispered, mouth stretching out into a smile. His people were moving at a frantic pace, tearing down the campsites and gearing up cars for a convoy back to the other side of the border. "Gotta give me a little something, kiddo."

"I had a knife," Ivy heard herself say, the words muffled to her own hearing. The ringing was coming back. It left her disoriented at times, stumbling at the wrong time and missing bits and pieces of what was being said around her. She had gotten use to limited hearing, made herself strong in the absence of what she didn't have. And now the ringing was swelling up again.

"Oh? Little slice and dice action?"

"It was my mom's."

Simon moved the gun away. "I knew you had a sentimental streak. That's why you went trigger happy for the sake of Big Red, right?"

She just needed to outlast Simon. The herd, and then rest.

And home again.

"What happened to it? I wanna see that special little start you had. You kill anyone with it?"

"It's gone," Ivy gave him a ghost of a smile. "I had it and then I gave it up. Didn't need it anymore."

"Someone come and take it off you?"

"My dad was looking for me," Ivy told him easily. She felt the heat from the nearby campfire. One of the women had shared a meagre ration of soup from dinner and it sat bitter in her stomach. "I left it for him in a map to find me. I didn't need that knife anymore."

A knife was nothing. Ivy was a bullet and a blade, stronger than the memento of her mother's. She didn't need the small pink switch blade. But her hand still ached to hold it again, to feel the reassurance of it. Simon was still holding the gun and looking at her so she forced her spine straight like Abraham and tried to resist the urge to back down. "It was pink. My mom had it and then it was mine. After a while I got to use guns. That one," she dipped her chin slightly, mouth tightening slightly, "was just really good for shooting at pricks in the woods. People died easy with it."

That earned a hushed wave of whispers. One of the Saviours had shown up dead with her head bashed in, shockingly one of the women who tried tripping Ivy in the midst of a herd they were gathering. People were on edge. People kept dying, slowly, an uneasy pattern encouraged when Ivy slipped purple grapes into rations, attracted to what was growing with spiky leaves and reddish coloured stems.

Seeing the berries growing had given her flashbacks to the long days walking on the road and exploring the ditches with Beth, picking bunches from the vines just for Daryl to show up in a plain rage, terrified that they had consumed anything picked.

She understood his fear when she saw the first few fall victim to the poisoning.

It was a miserable death, gasping and ugly, undeniable as the poison took the people under.

And now she was back in the crosshairs of Simon's suspicions, balancing on the man's insanity. "You ought to have a little respect for the man holding the gun," Simon told her seriously, leaning forward. "That's how you stay alive in the game."

She respected the gun.

She knew how it worked, how to make it sing—

Ivy pushed away the old days of the Wraith and let herself focus on the moment. "You can have it," Ivy told him. "I don't need it anymore."