my tears ricochet

Part 117

"I can't... you have to talk to Rick," Glenn ordered, taking his one hand off the wheel to grab a radio device from the seat next to him. He couldn't drive and hold down on the talk button, Daryl realized. Glenn was driving fast and with concern, but there was a limitation.

He took it like a lifetime. "Radioing for Grimes," Daryl barked out into the microphone.

Static buzzed. He tried to imagine the other side. Hilltop either stood tall or lost. Rick was either alive or dead. They left to save one person and the rest stood to save one community. The scale of justice were teetering sideways. "I'm here," Rick finally called back. "Did you get her?"

"Simon's dead. Ivy's shot," Daryl said, summing up the blood. "We need a medic."

"Bob's back in Alexandria. You gotta go to him," Rick's voice sputtered through the connection. "The Hilltop's medical supplies got wiped out handling this. We don't have anything— if it's as bad as you're saying, you need to get home. There's nothing here to save her."

Distance stretched out. Home was in easy distance but yet Daryl felt so far from it, even as Glenn pressed down harder on the gas. The car surged, racing across the highway. A few rogue walkers stumbled out across the cracking asphalt and Glenn barely balked, swerving mere inches to avoid collision, but otherwise aligned to their destination. He ignored the pass that would take them to Hilltop and maintained course instead, steady as an arrow. Daryl fumbled for the talk button, his bloodied finger sliding as he tried to get ahold of fate. "I can't keep her awake," Daryl bit out. He was trying to staunch the blood flow with his hand, holding so she was slumped against him, deadweight and cold to the touch. "I'm losing her."

Pause. The silence bloomed. "I know," Rick's voice finally came back, tired and a reflection of everything Daryl felt. "I know."

The sky looked dark despite the poisonous sun looming overhead. Stories always talked about a phoenix rising up from the ashes but he didn't know when their luck ran dry. How many times could something die and rebirth before there was nothing left to summon energy from? How many times, Daryl thought, did Ivy come close to edge of dying just to come back around for another chance? Bridges and bullets. They always ended up on the brink of something.

He let the radio drop from his fingers. It landed somewhere amongst their feet and he didn't care. Ivy slumped against him, unaware of his one hand against the wound and his free hand coming up to her throat, desperate feeling for some sign of life.

Her pulse was slow, thready. Daryl closed his eyes and thought of skipping stones on a pond, seeing the ripples bleed out from the motion of impact. He opened his eyes just to see a farm flashed by as Glenn flung the car hard for a turn off, nearly catching the wheels off the loose gravel, recovering just to gun it harder. A police car was flipped upside down in a ditch, he could see the skeletal lines of railroad tracks in the distance. "We're gonna get home," he told Ivy just to say the words for himself. "This'll be fixed. You don't gotta fight anything now. There's nothing left but you have to be around to see it. The good stuff, yeah? No more playing solider in the woods."

They were changed. Daryl could scarcely remember who he had been before he found his family. And Ivy, lonely little girl tucked away in a closet with just a gun to hold onto, had grown up to fight for people. Love altered their lives and allowed their souls to evolve with it.

"Nobody can hurt you anymore," Daryl continued, blinking back tears as he held on a little tighter. "Everybody bad is gone. You survived it."

He could watch the world burn up with fire and wouldn't shed a tear for it. But this, the feeling of death sitting in the seat beside them—

It was more than he could stand.

The landscape was so familiar. It was what happened when roots were laid out. A person got comfortable with their life, made a friend out of a strange place.