my tears ricochet

Chapter Fifty

Autumn turned the world cold again. Daryl felt it in his bones, the way leaves slowly peeled off of the branches in waves. It was the season of decay suspended in slow motion; green curling into auburn, death tucked beneath the brilliance of it all.

Merle would have felt that itch to bag a buck or two right around now. They had their favourite spots in the woods to sit up in the stands, comfortable with their backs to the night, peering out with rifles until something strolled up to the salt lick. Daryl had known his brother through silence and relentless chatter both, easy languages to share in the untouched avenues of forests.

Daryl laid out three false trails before the sun had truly risen and laid out watching for Joe's group to pass through. He was one man against a group practically feral for easy violence and Daryl wasn't going to win that draw. Ivy was somewhere and he wanted to follow through at a healthy distance so if they did come across her, Daryl would be right at their backs ready to strike.

The best case scenario was that Beth and Ivy had hit Terminus already. The distance was far between it and where Daryl was, and he hoped that the girls had a head start that could buy them time. He would just drift along behind one sweep of the danger and slip through once the men got tired of the chase.

A safe haven held no appeal for Joe's group. And it wasn't enough to make them want to take it for themselves. They liked the easy wilderness, the old language that came with the woods and hills. Their fluency made it impossible to ever settle in domestic comfort.

Daryl straddled that line. He would have been just like them if he had fallen in with their kind at the start of the fall, instead of shuffling along to the standards set by people like Hershel or Rick.

Len's body would have been a red flag. His butchering hadn't been far from the temporary refuge of the night and it wouldn't take a mastermind to piece together his red hands. The men wanted revenge from strangers for acts of brutality. A fellow companion would be a different story, a different lust for payback.

Loneliness struck Daryl like an arrow to the chest. He was alone drifting through the trees like an old ghost, a temporary twin to what he had been after the prison collapsed. A monster seethed under his skin and bones, curling itself tighter, feeling every mile as an obstacle to finding his daughter.

He didn't know how Beth and Ivy managed on their own. Their grief would have been so fresh and painful. Nobody would be watching their backs for them, nobody would be guiding them when they were starting out with nothing. Ivy's tower had been a smoking ruin curtesy of the tank; her last refuge from the world annihilated by the man who kept taking from her.

It wasn't much better than fleeing the farm with nothing but the clothes on their backs, but at least they were together. A united force bent against the cold wind, a horizon marking their passage. Beth and Ivy seemed so small it made Daryl's mind ache thinking about the pair of them trying to survive; stumbling into men like Len.

Nothing had happened, Daryl forced himself to remember. Len had taken some kind of beating that left him scorned and the other man was dead. He hoped that meant that he was put down before he could have progressed with the assault but he couldn't know, not truly.

A body's remains were spread out along the ditch of the tracks. He forced himself to look at it, to judge the length of the visible spine. It wasn't either of the girls. Most of the flesh had been plucked from the bones and the left hand had been broken off, left to lie a couple feet away from the rest of what had been a person.

It was an old death. But Daryl gazed at it with familiarity, hands aching from driving wire straight through Len's throat. The body had been left alone and he recognized the shape of abandonment; crooked fingers calling from the long grass.