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FREYA HADN'T MOVED, not since her father pulled the trigger that brought poor Sophia Peletier's tragic life to a final end. She didn't actually know if she could move anymore, not after seeing the little girl slumping to the ground before her. It was as though her legs had turned to jelly and she was afraid that she'd fall if she even tried to stand.
The only noise now was the crying emitted from the gaping mouths of Beth and Carol. A mother broken over her daughter, and a daughter broken over her mother. This new world thrived on that type of cruel irony.
When the shock wore off, Shane shrugged the situation off as nothing more than an inconvenience. He threw a glance over his shoulder at Rick, smug as ever with not even a hint of guilt for the widespread agony he'd inflicted upon Carol and the Greenes.
"Don't look," Daryl said softly, he was trying to rotate Carol's body in his arms. "Don't look."
Carol pulled herself up to her feet with a gut-wrenching weep and ran off to the RV. She didn't want to be sat mere feet from her daughter's rotted corpse, who could blame her?
Beth stumbled forward, choked sobs coming from her with every step. The men tried to grab her but she dodged their hands. She pushed a Walker out of the way and flopped down next to the corpse of her mother. "Ma?"
Whether the bullet had missed her entirely or merely just grazed her, Freya didn't know, but one thing was for sure — Beth's mother was not inanimate yet.
With an esurient snarl, her — its — hands clutched Beth's shoulders and pulled her down, eager to sink its teeth into her flesh.
Freya couldn't let that happen. Not after everything they'd lost already.
She peered down at the machete dangling over her thigh, knowing how easy it would be to just plunge it into the skull of Beth's mother. But if she did. . . Thatwould subject Beth to even more trauma, and that was the last thing she wanted to do.
So, Freya raced forward unarmed instead. She seized one of Beth's hands in an iron grip and used her spare set of fingers to work on prying the blonde out of her mother's deadly grasp.
Rick and Shane rushed over to help — the latter enacting a wave of fury in Freya's stomach, too little too late — and took hold of Beth's struggling frame. Together, all three of them managed to successfully pull Beth out of her mother's clutched. She was physically unscathed, but mentally. . . god, Freya couldn't even imagine how much irreversible damage had been done to the kindhearted girl.
After having its prey snatched right out of its gnarled fingers, a famished growl slipped out from the lips that had once kissed Beth goodnight. It made a lunge for Freya who was the closest to it.
