Life I Left Behind (A Daryl Dixon Story)

Chapter Two

Two months. Sixty days tops. That was all the time it took for the world to go to shit. What had started out as just a tiny blip on the world’s radar had quickly escalated into what was easily the most wide spread and horrifying epidemic the world had ever known. No one saw this coming. How could they? Horror movies weren’t supposed to come true. The dead were supposed to stay dead.

I swung my baseball bat as hard as I could. There was satisfying ‘crack’ as it met the target. The walker’s head jerked backwards and remained bent at sickening angle. I swung one more time and the skull broke open. The mangled corpse finally fell to the ground where it was still. I panted heavily leaning against the trunk of a tree. ‘One down, a gazillion more to go’, I thought to myself bitterly. I wiped the thick, black gunk-like blood off my bat and onto a patch of grass. I made a face. While it didn’t make me physically sick anymore to take down a few walkers, it was still disgusting. I wiped the sweat from my brow with a dirty sleeve. The Georgia sun felt hotter than ever today. I couldn’t wait to get out of the heat and disappear into the shade for a while. I glanced down at the walker and nudged it with the toe of my boot.

“Serves you right, dumbass.” I muttered. I slung my backpack onto my shoulder once more and headed off in the direction of my temporary home, which was nothing more than old barn a couple miles off the main highway. Judging by its horribly dilapidated condition, I was guessing it had been abandoned long before dead people had started trying to eat me. The paint had dulled to a faded maroon color, peeling off in thin little chips and the tin roof was just barely there, tiny little holes eating away at its rusted exterior. It was a miracle the thing was still standing.

I slid open the heavy wooden door just enough to slip inside before heaving it shut again with a grunt. It was mostly empty inside. Just a few broken down pieces of farm equipment and a whole bunch of hay and dirt everywhere. The one redeeming quality it did have was the tiny loft space. Using an abandoned, old tractor as a footstool, I was able to climb up to the ledge and pull myself up. Up there was my safe haven, though it wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things. Just a place to crash at night and to store the few belongings I carried with me; a backpack, a ratty sleeping bag, one metal baseball bat, a hunting knife, and a small revolver that I rarely ever used. Yep, that was it. I carried light these days.

The sunlight was dwindling, the few rays of light that managed to sneak in through the cracks in the boards and the holes in the ceiling were beginning to fade. I supposed I would have to try again tomorrow. I had discovered a tiny little town on an old map that used to belong to my brother. It was a few miles south of where I was staying. It was off the beaten track a little ways, so I had been trying to find it for the past two days. If I was lucky enough, I’d find more than enough extra supplies there to keep me going a few weeks longer. Today and yesterday had both been a bust, though. Yesterday, I hiked in the wrong direction and today I ran into a herd of walkers and had been forced to turn back. So tomorrow, I would begin again. Third time’s the charm.

I chewed up and swallowed a hunk of slightly stale bread and swished it down with a tiny bit of water before crawling inside my makeshift bed that consisted of my sleeping bag and a pile of hay. I had to admit, it wasn’t the worst place I had ever slept. I didn’t complain much these days. What was the point? It wasn’t like there was anyone around to listen to me. In fact, that might have been the worst part of being out here alone. The silence. There were days it felt it would just swallow me up. So sometimes I sang to myself. Quietly, as to not attract any walkers, but I would sing or hum. I had this bizarre, ridiculous fear that if I didn’t use my voice from time to time, that I would just forget how altogether. It was stupid, I knew that, but it didn’t stop me from feeling that way from time to time. Singing was alright. I would worry about my sanity when I started having full on conversations with myself. But it was just so…exhausting. There really was no other way to describe it. Being alone made me exhausted. What was the point? What was the point in trying so hard to stay alive when there was no one even left to live for?

No. I mentally shook myself. I had to stop those kind of thoughts. The bad kind that would creep into my head when I was feeling low and lost and try to plant themselves there. It was hard lately. They kept happening more and more, pressing in against me until it felt like I would just suffocate. If Gabe was here…if he was here he would hate to see me think like that. I couldn’t think like that, for his sake.

Gabe.

He should have been here with me, hiding in this stupid, crappy barn complaining about how hard it was to sleep in all this itchy straw. If he were here, none of the bad stuff would matter so much. Everything would be a little bit more bearable.

‘He’s not here, though’ a soft voice at the back of my mind reminded me. I squeezed my eyes shut tightly, pressing my palms into my eyelids, willing myself not to think about the last time I had seen my little brother. I refused to believe he was really gone, despite what I had seen that day. He was the real reason I couldn’t leave Georgia, no matter how badly I wanted to get away. He was the real reason I never strayed too far from Atlanta, where we had spent the last of our time together. Deep in my gut, I had this feeling that he was still out there somewhere and if I just waited, I’d see him again. I held onto that feeling with every ounce of life I had inside me.

It was all I had left.