𝐖𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐄𝐀𝐃 𝐋𝐈𝐕𝐄 | CARL GRIMES [TWD]

2 | eaten & gone

The camp. Because the camp is not her camp. It's a place she exists, doesn't own. By the time she returns to it she is tired. She's always tired these days.

What's left of the rabbit Sylvie leaves to brown and crisp on the open flame while she secures the traps around the fire. She has always been proficient at multitasking. In snatches of time between gaining and losing different people, it used to be just be her and Wes, their only company the dead and the pines and the deer. Some days she would gather and light firewod and he would fix the perimeter; sometimes she'd find the water and he the meat; sometimes he'd find something else and be to out of it to do anything — in those times, she did it all. Just like here, now. It's almost like nothing has changed. Almost.

At the edge of the camp, a handful of empty cans are scattered, the wire that is supposed to suspend them now collapsed. Sylvie thins her eyes in scrutiny and crouches at the break. She draws a callused fingertip across scuffed earth. Tracks. The pawprints sunken into soil are small as a rabbit's, but the four tiny notches carved into wet earth dispell that suspicion. A squirrel must have lingered, she concludes as she pinches the two wire ends, chewed apart and discarded. "Damnnit," she hisses. Without thinking, she boots one of the cans. Hard.

You could have killed it. Skinned it. Eaten it.

She slaps her own head to dislodge the thought. Lately she's been doing that so much that she might knock something out of place up there, if a few of her threads haven't aren't already come undone, that is. Ground yourself, she warns. With mechanical ease, she picks up the frayed slivers of wire and fastens them back together.

———

Later that night at the fire, she devours bronzed rabbit, meat nearly hot enough to scald her throat and gums. Before her, the fire laps up at darkness. Without thinking, without judging, without any sense, she puts her palm against the blaze and wails.

———

At dawn, Sylvie wakes and fixes herself a sparse breakfast of blueberries and now-cold rabbit. Plates and bowls are a luxury she hasn't bothered to hunt for, so she resorts to arranging the food on her lap and scraping it into her mouth with her uninjured hand. Once she finishes, she wipes her mouth clean on her arm and unfolds a local map she seized from a museum two weeks ago.

As far as scavenging goes, her main concerns are food, water and medical supplies. No clothes, no extra blankets, no pillows. It's a meagre existence, but it's existence all the same. (And like always, she reminds herself that her guns are still there for when she decides existence is too taxing.)

On her first day alone, she ran until she tasted blood. Once she crested a steep slope of road, she'd halted — a horde of skin eaters, likely in the hundreds, all were stumbling in the same direction as her. North. She's been pursuing them ever since. When she can, she fuses with them, lathering herself in guts and staggering and groaning; when she is feeling more human, she picks over different locations. The museum had been one of her first stops. After that, she'd discovered that most major spots on her map — independent gun stores, an auto-shop, a residential circle — had already been plundered, so she switched her strategy. Smaller locations took priority, but too many of them turned out to be dead ends too.

So far her haul has been modest but vital. A dozen bottles of water entombed beneath dirtied cloth; every sip tastes like freshly-filtered pool water, but it keeps her alive. Tins of spam and juice-soaked peaches which now necklace her camp, empty but sticky. The rifle that had been tucked under a loose floorboard in a place that was more confederate shrine than bar. She uses it to hunt, prefers a bullet to a snarw. Snares trap. Guns butcher. Drawing blood, seizing life, calling on the dead...