Living On A Prayer (Daryl Dixon/ TWD)

Chapter 20

Adasyn

Sometimes I forgot how silent the world had become since the outbreak. There were no more sounds of cars passing on the roads, trains passing by on the tracks, or loud roars from airplanes flying by overhead. Staring out the car windows, I took in the beauty of it all in a sense. How bright the sun shone, how blue the sky was..the empty roads that would never see a traffic jam again. The tall green grass that was no longer being tended to. There wasn't much time these days to pay attention to it but when you did get the chance ..it was actually kind of wonderful. How the earth could maintain such beauty with the dead up and walking, the rest of the world being littered with death and agony. Empty promises and unanswered questions...well it surprised me.

"This is it," Rick's gruff voice called out, bringing me back to the tense atmosphere of the car. He shut off the engine and the three of us climbed out. It felt good to stretch my legs, long car rides were never really my thing.

We wandered over to the chain linked fence surrounding the place and Rick nodded, more to himself then anything. "Yea, this'll do. Leave the boy here, round up some supplies on the way out."

"Over there," I said, pointing out a lone walker stumbling around on the inside. Shane pulled out his gun but before he could shoot, Rick stopped him.

"Wait," he pulled his knife from his pocket, "we need to save ammo, take these things out in a more quiet manner."

I watched as he cut a small line across the tip of his finger, just deep enough to draw blood. He stuck it through one of the holes in the fence and immediately the walker picked up the scent, adding more pep to his ..limp as he stumbled towards us recklessly. He slammed against the fence, causing me to jump and Rick to snatch his hand back before it became a human finger special. The walker ran it's purple, rotten tongue over the smeared blood left behind and Rick wasted no time driving his pocket knife through the walker's skull.

"Guns are quick and easy but there are better ways to do this. One more, you're up Ady."

I pulled a knife of my own out, flipping it open as the growls of the other walker grew louder. I winced as I dug the dull blade hard enough to draw blood but wasted no time copying Rick's earlier actions. Within no time I had the walker down, and wiped the blade on my new pants Ashlynn had given me, the red sticky matter standing out against the bright green of the camo.

"Y'all done?" Shane asked. "We're wastin' daylight."

The inside of this place was the opposite of the beauty my eyes had caught on to earlier. There wasn't a sign of beauty in here, it was all tragedy and a sense of hope that had been destroyed. The blood splatters, the faint smell of the dead. they were all awful but not something I wasn't used to seeing by now. But the overwhelming signs of stuff that once resembled hope...that was what was hard to look at. The countless suitcases and backpacks filled with clothes and canned goods. The random cellphones lying around, most of them cracked and smashed. The buses filled with pillows, lanterns and sentimentals that once belonged to the people that had been taking shelter on them long ago. It was all so overwhelming.
At one point, this place was filled with terrified people from all over who thought that they had escaped the harsh realities ..who thought they had found a safe place, only to have it as well as the lives of their loved ones and their own lives taking away from them in the worst possible way.

"You seeing this?"

I looked over at Shane, a look of confusion shriveled up in his facial features. My eyes followed what his finger was pointing too, looking down at the walkers Rick and I had taken out before we entered.

"Uh...they were cops?"

"No, jack ass. There ain't no bites."

"Watch it Officer fucktard," I spat, glaring at him. "Rick!"