Jinx || Daryl Dixon || The Walking Dead Fanfic

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JINX

It was completely dark by the time Glenn finished telling her about everyone else in their group and the five of them had fallen into a not uncomfortable silence for the rest of the journey.

Suddenly that silence was broken by screaming, quickly followed by the sound of gunshots.

The only place those sounds could be coming from was the camp, and they ran the rest of the way.

It was chaos when they reached the small clearing. Jinx ducked off to the side when they got there. She hit one of the monsters with her crowbar, all her frustration finally streaming out of her as she knocked it to the ground and beat it until what had once been a face was unrecognisable and it no longer continued to move. Then she continued to beat it some more.

After what felt like a lifetime, she dropped the crowbar to the ground beside the corpse and her eyes finally began to see what she'd done. She'd killed someone. Maybe they hadn't really been a person anymore, but no one knew what caused people to become these things, no one knew whether there was a cure, it was possible that she'd just killed someone who could have recovered.

Jinx sank to her knees next to the body and looked down at her hands. The blood on her hands looked black in the dim light of the campsite and she couldn't help but notice it coated not only her hands, but most of her forearms and there were even some spots higher up above her elbows.

As she sat unmoving on the bloody, dirty ground she could feel the cool dampness of the blood as it also soaked into her clothes and the tightness as it dried on her skin, even some on her face. In that moment she hated herself, more than she ever had before.

The screams and gunshots around her had begun to die down and the majority of the group had moved to stand beside an RV, but some stayed further away crouched beside bodies of what she supposed were loved ones the monsters had taken from them.

Jinx gradually convinced her limbs to begin moving again and moved towards the rest of the group. Standing on the outskirts the members she had yet to meet didn't even acknowledge her and she preferred it that way.

A blonde woman was cradling the body of a younger blonde and screaming her name "Amy!", thanks to Glenn's descriptions she knew the woman who was still breathing must be Andrea. The sound she made was something Jinx had hoped to never hear again, it was the wail of someone who'd lost one of the most important people in their life. She'd heard it only once before when she'd had the heart wrenching job of calling her uncle's stepdaughter to deliver the news of his death. She'd thought the cry she'd spent so long listening to down the phone had been bad, but in person where you could see the pain as well as hear it was so much worse.

She looked away, unable to stand the sight of Andrea's pain any longer and saw the sheriff holding a woman and younger boy, his wife and child were safe. Jinx breathed a sigh of relief as she continued to survey the rest of the group and found that each of the children Glenn had told her about seemed to be accounted for. Deaths are sad, but children's deaths are devastating.

She didn't sleep that night, though a few of the group did, mostly those with children. She found herself perching on the rocks along the edge of the river the camp was beside. Jinx had always loved the water, even as a child, her dad always told her she could swim before she could walk, and she believed him. She watched the ripples on the surface reflect the moonlight as she tried to ignore the obvious pain of the people not far away. Eventually the sun began to rise and chased the darkness back into the forest a little way away, reminding them all that the world keeps on turning with or without you.

In the half-light of dawn, Jinx moved a little further downstream to an outcropping of rocks where she stripped down to her underwear. Shivering she leant over the water and tried her best to wash the blood from first her hands, then her arms, face and finally her clothes. As she scrubbed the Atlanta sun quickly warmed the air and when she deemed that she'd done the best she could, she laid the clothes over another rock to dry, at least as they were black, they should dry quickly as well as hiding most of the stains.