EXTINCTION EVENT | CARL GRIMES

t h i r t y - t w o ↣ last words

"I'm not mad." Enid starts with a sigh. "Don't you remember how you felt when the Anders—"

"Don't bring them into this." Megan cuts through her words.

"Sorry." Enid sucks in a breath. "I won't."

The girl besides me sighs, her dramatic breath taken downwind from me.

"Be careful out there." Megan squints her eyes a bit as the sunlight begins to bend its way over the wall. "Because I'm not saving you, anymore."

Enid soaks in the girl's words, staring down to the ground. After a sigh, the girl then hoists herself atop the wall. "I'm not mad at you. You know?"

"I know."

"Just thought I should make that clear, before I head out." Enid shrugs, before swinging her other leg over the edge and disappearing behind the wall.

Without a word, Megan turns away from the wall. The girl walks away with an unreadable expression across her rosy, sun-kissed face.

My feet soon follow after the girl. "What's going on with you two?"

"The same thing that's going on with everyone else." Her eyes flick down towards the ground as she shakes her head. "Glenn, Abe, him. It's in everything we do."

I scoff. "You two have a weird way of dealing with it."

"What?" She rolls her eyes. "Like we had a much better way of dealing with it, last night?"

My cheeks run hot. Embarrassment running its course through my stiff body. "That's what you think that was? Coping?"

"N—No," She adamantly shakes her head. "I didn't mean it that way. We just needed it. You know?"

My eye rolls and my lips purse. "Just like Enid needs to be a stuck-up bi—"

"Carl." Megan growls. The girl sighs with a subtle shake of her head. "We're all just—scrambling to hold onto whatever we have left, okay?"

No words make their way from my lips. Instead, I keep my eye glued to our feet as they continue to take steps back toward the house. The girl walks ahead of me as I hold the door open, waiting for her to walk into her own house.

Once we're both inside, Megan spins on her heel to face me. "And right now, Enid needs someone to help her scramble her way back to Maggie." She hesitantly says.

My eyebrows furrow, underneath my freshly-changed bandage. "I thought you said you were done helping her?"

"I am."

"Then who are you talking ab—" My breath hitches in my throat. "No—No, I'm n—"

"Please, Carl." Megan sighs. "I'd go with her, but I have to stay back and take care of Eugene."

"I wouldn't let you go, even if it weren't for Eugene." I growl. "Did you happen to forget what happened last time we tried to go to Hilltop?"

The girl's pleading expression turns into a hurt one, before her face hardens once again.

My aggressive rhetorical question immediately makes the feeling of regret wash over me. I allow myself a step forward, toward the angry girl, as I bring my sorrowful hands to her sides.