my tears ricochet

Chapter Forty Three

The chaos descending upon the prison felt biblical. First it was the dead walking, and now plague crept through the cellblocks and burned their own numbers further and further into nothing. They all carried grave dirt beneath their finger nails and the sound of shovels scraping dirt and stone lingered late each day.

When the prison had first appeared, Rick had seen it like an oasis in the middle of a sandstorm. They could build a life within the gates and fences, grow stronger because of the security it afforded. And now it was eroding, each death a symbol of how small they could become again, how little protection there was in a world that meant to devour.

Daryl could hear the dead calling from beyond the fence. He could hear them from death row,.

It didn't matter where he went. The sound carried in the wind relentless and it still found him in the little courtyard with the burned bodies. Death was piling up at his feet and despite everything, nothing had ever been as viscerally awful as the sight of two bodies sitting in blood and ash.

"You found them like this?" Rick asked, uneasy as his feet skirted around the blood smeared across the pavement.

Tyreese's face was frozen between grief and destruction. He had summoned Rick, Carol, and Daryl from the bigger courtyard and dragged them to see the mess for themselves. "I came to see Karen and I saw the blood of the floor. Then I smelled them," he broke off for a moment, looking at the smoke curling in the air from the charred remains of what had been people. "Somebody dragged them out here and set them on fire! They killed them and set them on fire!"

A note of hysteria caught itself on his shout. Tyreese's attention seemed to jump from the butchering of people and to the abandoned can of gasoline left on the ground. Its was premeditated, he realized. Whatever had happened might have been a mercy killing compared to how the sickness was ravaging people, but it left a trail of damage in it's wake.

Daryl looked at the man and remembered coming across him teaching Ivy how to toss a football back and forth. Envy had consumed him whole at the sight of it. Tyreese was a good man with even better intentions. Of anyone to be taking an interest in his kid, he might have been the best one for it in the prison.

But something small inside his chest had felt threatened at the pair of them together and how normal they seemed. Ivy had spent those days avoiding him and stringing herself out in misery and one afternoon with a stranger had her talking again. Daryl had been agitated by the blisters of jealousy beneath his skin and barely held back a fight.

This man wasn't the same man who had thrown him the ball and tried to drag him into their little game. He was angry. Rage burned through Tyreese's skin and bones until he could feel the heat coming off him and not just the corpses.

When he turned towards Rick, the man was already angling himself back some. Rick could see the same threat Daryl knew. "You're a cop. You find out who did this and you bring 'em to me. You understand? You bring 'em to me."

Daryl edged along his shoulder, trying to space out the tension some. "We'll find out who—"

The man shoved him off, planting his feet a little harder. "I need to say it again?"

"No. No," Rick said, keeping his voice level. "I know what you're feeling. I've been there. You saw me there. It's dangerous."

"Karen didn't deserve this."

"No," Rick agreed.

"David didn't deserve it. Nobody does."

"All right, man, let's—" Daryl tried a second time to pull Tyreese back some. The man spun around this time and pushed him backwards into the wall, red sparking behind his eyes.