𝐇𝐀𝐙𝐀𝐑𝐃 │ 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐘𝐋 𝐃𝐈𝐗𝐎𝐍 ¹ [✔]

[31]: stupid, clever girl

"Why one?" she questioned. "Why just one gunshot?"

"Maybe they took down a walker?" he shrugged.

He knew they wouldn't be that stupid, though.

Unless... that stupid girl had something to do with it, he pondered.

"Please don't patronize me," Lori snapped. "You know Rick wouldn't risk a gunshot to put down one walker. Or Shane. They'd do it quietly"

Again, Daryl's thoughts went back to Marley being with them.

He called her stupid, but he knew she was smart. But she got scared easily... but not lately.

Daryl shook the thoughts away at the overcomplicated situation. Women were tricky in the man's eyes. Marley really took that to another level with him, though.

"But, Marley might not do it that quietly," Andrea said.

"But, it's just one gunshot, and she doesn't even have a gun," Lori counteracted, putting her hands on her hips.

"Things can happen."

"She didn' shoot nothin'" Daryl spoke up, that protectiveness rising up inside him. He had no control over it.

With that, everyone silently agreed.

It was a thing known throughout the long-gone camp back at the quarry, that Daryl knew Marley best. No questions asked. Except. maybe Carl knew her the second best.

Daryl obviously didn't know that everyone thought this. It was more of an inside joke for everyone excluding the lady in question and himself.

It went from as simple as Daryl telling anyone who asked, where she was; he knew her sleeping schedule; what foods she tolerated and which ones she detested. He didn't see anything abnormal about that. He didn't even notice it.

He was just... accommodated to her.

"There's nothing we can do about it anyway," he finally said, looking around the forest floor. His blue eyes scanning the leaves and foliage. "Can't run around woods chasing echoes."

"So what do we do?"

"Same as we've been," he said authoritatively, yet still holding that redneck twang. "Beat the bush for Sophia, work our way back to the highway."

+

After some more painstaking walking, and no sign of Sophia, or any knowledge on what that gunshot meant, the tired group decided to call it a day.

Unfortunately for them, it was just more walking, but in the other direction. But this time, their walking was a lot more quick. Less observant, and more desperate to get back to the highway.

The hunter had insisted that it was only about one hundred yards left till they got back... as the crow flies.

"As the crow flies, my ass," Andrea muttered, wiping off some cobwebs she had walked a few paces back.

Her heavy footfalls thumped against the dirt, tired.

She unknowingly had a walker on her tail, and as she walked past a tree, it fully noticed her and she fully noticed it.

Turning and walking backwards, panicked, she screamed.

The walkers hands grasped at her shoulders, and Andrea took her knife, still screaming, and stabbed it in the abdomen. This did nothing to stop it from coming after her.

The others were running to her aid as fast as they could. Andrea had wandered off quite far in her exhaustion.

Still struggling with the large corpse, she flew backwards, tripping over a log.

It stalked after her, and she kicked at it's upper body, screaming pathetically for help.

As the others got closer, two pairs of hooves got there faster, carrying a bat wielding Maggie Greene.

She waisted no time in taking out the awful smelling being, smashing its face with the end of her bat. It fell to the ground, she halted the horse, and the rest of the group just reached them.

"Lori? Lori Grimes?" Maggie questioned the blonde, whose eyes were still wide.

Maggie put her bat in a holster, and steadied her horse.

"I'm Lori," actual Lori said. The girl on the horse reverted her eyes to her, watching everyone else cautiously at the corner of her eye.

"Rick sent me. You've got to come now!"

"What?"

"There's been an accident. Carl's been shot. He's still alive but you've got to come now"

Everyone faltered in their tracks. Lori, Daryl, Carol and Glenn.

First, Sophia goes missing; the youngest. Then Carl gets shot; the next one up. It was like some sick game. And Daryl knew who would be next if someone was playing a sick joke somewhere that went from youngest up. But that's ridiculous, he thought. Something not worth thinking about.

Maggie noticed Lori falter. "Rick needs you just come!" she ordered.

Carl's mother quickly slipped off her backpack, leaving it on the forest floor and walking quickly towards the horse the other brunette sat upon.

Daryl wasn't having it. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! We don't now this girl!" he yelled after Lori, who looked over her shoulder at him. "You can't get on that horse!"

Lori was panicked, she didn't know what to do. She faltered again besides the horse.

"Daryl?" Maggie retorted, suddenly remembering what the redhead had told her back at the farm.

"Yeah!" Daryl said, a warning tone in his voice that said 'don't come any further'.

"Ariel, says it's okay."

With those words, Daryl knew, Marley was behind it.

She was far away, in an unknown place to him, and yet she was still trying to calm him down, and tell him what to do.

Not only did Daryl know Marley, but Marley knew Daryl, much better than he thought.

She knew how he would react, and she knew what to do.

Daryl nodded to Lori, Marley's message calming him slightly.

Lori hopped on behind the girl, looping her arms around the girl's waist.

"Rick said you had others on the highway, that big traffic snarl?" Maggie listed, more towards Glenn who replied a small, "Uh-huh."

"Backtrack to Fairburn Road. Two miles down is our farm. You'll see the mailbox. The names Greene."

Maggie yelped, "Hiyah!" and the horse bolted off into the forest.

She left everyone slightly curious and dazed. She had come in so wildly, and left without disappointment.

Daryl still held the words in his head.

"Ariel, says it's okay."

She could have said 'Marley' just as easily, but she knew that wouldn't convince him. Ariel had a paragraph worth of meaning to both of them. It seemed that they were both concerned about each other despite being apart.

She was doing something she hadn't done in a very long time... if she ever had.

Marley Van Allan was surprising Daryl Dixon.

His thoughts were cut short, as a loud wheezing sound came from his left.

Exasperated, he shot the walker in the head with a bolt.

"Shut up!"