my tears ricochet

Chapter Seventy Six

They had taught her lessons in holding a line steady and now Ivy could only see a deadline forming, charging straight against it with only the stars watching from overhead.

She slashed a way through the best she could, running and scrambling over the road and bodies, cutting a path straight towards the park. Maggie had spent weeks planning that wedge of green space into a future garden to maximize potential and it was tauntingly close to the gate but Ivy already knew she wouldn't make it there. The swarm was dense and it had been designed to lock at three different points along the wall and gate. It was heavy enough that a grown man had to force it open, that she had seen Tyreese and Tara struggling to slam it shut just hours before.

Ivy didn't have a single chance of getting through the gate without dying in the process. She wouldn't waste the effort in trying.

She just had to keep going until the end caught up with her.

And she wasn't going to stop until the end found her.

Some unlucky soul had been torn apart on the sidewalk, buried beneath a pack of walkers still gorging themselves on the flesh attached to bones. Ivy tumbled towards that pile and nearly got swept up by one hand, picking herself up off the pavement and hurtling further into the darkness. Whomever had died, their body left behind a distraction that Ivy used to her benefit, fleeing through the slight opening and away from the thicker current.

The air burned with copper. Gore, blood. Decay. It all rotted in the air and flooded her lungs.

Ivy swung the hatchet again and it glanced off of one skeletal face before she could recover, bringing it back across so it sent the body pitching sideways. Abraham had done that once, punching a walker twice until it stayed down. "Come on!" She screamed, alone. "Is this it?"

'I left that prison trying to find you.'

Daryl wasn't there and she wanted her dad, she wanted him—

It was the Governor before her. It was Gareth. It was Carlos. It was her father. It was the man in the woods, the man who pinned Beth to the ground. It was Phillip, it was always going to be Phillip. Their blood caught at her skin and she was burning up from the fight, running like she always had. Her knife got lost in the throat of one walker and she didn't bother wasting seconds struggling with it, instead clinging even tighter to the hatchet as she kept swinging.

A body hit the ground and she kept going.

She kept moving.

This was the lesson her mother taught her best; how to run even when it hurt. She had walked straight out of Ivy's life and never stopped, and later, Ivy had followed that same path; yanking herself free from the doorway with her hands bloodied, running so she would never have to ever stop.

"I'm still here! I'm still—" Ivy cried out as she pushed deeper; fire in her bones and soul, a Dixon's temper igniting in a burst of heat.

Stars scorched the sky overhead and Ivy couldn't afford to look at them. If Ivy got to the park, she could get to the wall. It would shield her back and she could have a chance of bringing down as many walkers as she could before losing to their numbers. Eventually they would overwhelm and destroy her, ripping her apart while she screamed and begged, mouths so desperate to consume every last piece of her.

They would shred her into nothing.

But Ivy would take a few back, would leave an exchange for the violence of it.

And maybe Daryl would find her knife and know that she kept trying, that she had been fighting all the way to the end.

He had wanted Alexandria for her and Ivy had stubbornly wanted it for him. Anything to make it worth choosing her from the beginning.