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C A R L
With the slam of the creaky screen to the back door, Megan and I finally make it back inside the house. We managed to lose the small herd of accumulating walkers a decent way's back. Cutting through the woods allowed us to confuse them.
"That was too close for comfort." The girl says swinging her bag off of her shoulder, then dropping it to the floor by the stairs.
She then turns around to me. "I'm going upstairs to check on the stuff." I subtly nod my head before I hear her soft footsteps distantly echo up the staircase.
Neither of us have acknowledged what happened back there. I put the both of us in serious danger, and the girl is well aware of it.
Seeing my childhood home burned down to nothing just solidifies the fact that I now have nothing tangible left from the world before. Everything to me is just an old memory that ended in sudden tragedy.
"All there." The girl interrupts my brief thoughts as her footsteps thud down the last few steps.
The entire way back to the house, Megan has been trying to give me a way out of my thoughts. She's been dancing around what happened back at my old neighborhood, knowing that I don't want to talk about it. She avoids it and acts like it didn't happen, for my sake. She's right to do so.
I can't help the sour look on my face as the girl speaks to me.
"I'm going to try and heat up some food." I shake my head, avoiding the cloud of discomfort that the girl and I are both actively trying to ignore.
I don't give Megan time to respond or even react before heading toward the stairs, leaving her down in the living room. Grabbing the end of the railing on the second floor, I swing around it and make my way toward our supplies. I crouch down, placing my elbow on my thigh as I investigate our selection of several different canned foods.
Picking up each can one by one, I try to decide on what to heat up. Beans, spinach, tomato soup. None of the labels peak my interest until my eyes land on our only can of sweet peas. The large size of the can would make for two decent portions of the food. I weigh the can and its contents in the palm of my hand. I could go for some peas.
My eyes search the hallway for something to light a fire on. They land on a large metal bowl on a small table at the corner of the hallway. I step over Megan's blanket and go over to the bowl. I see a variety of decorative fruit inside of it. Then, I grab it and dump its contents out onto the wooden floor. The waxy fruit bounces around before rolling to a stop.
I place the metal bowl onto the floor next to where I left the can of peas. I already know my next move because I remember seeing a bookshelf in the room I've been staying in. I lightly kick the door open with my foot, sending it into the wall.
I lazily grab the thickest books off of the shelf and throw them through the open door, into the hallway.
"Carl?" I hear from right outside the bedroom door. "Is everything okay?" Megan's voice quietly echoes through the hallway as she sighs.
"Yeah," I breathe out. I know she was asking in a less general sense, but I decide to pretend to not know what she's really asking. "I'm just finding stuff to burn in the fire." I briefly squeeze my eyes shut at my word choice.
Soon after our exchange, I send a few more books flying out the door and into the hall. I hear her quietly gasp after I throw the first one.
"Sorry." I project my voice so that she can hear me from where she's standing. That's weird. I never apologize to the girl, no matter what I do or say to her. It's one of our unspoken things.
"It's okay, Carl." She sighs from the hallway.
I grab the last thick book off of the bookshelf and keep it in my hand instead of throwing it. Walking out into the hall, I see the girl sitting on her blanket. Fake fruit is scattered on the floor behind her and books with bent pages and damaged covers lay next to the metal bowl in front of her. The mess: courtesy of myself.
She sits with her knees bent as she reads the contents of the vanilla folder she took from the corrections office back at the prison grounds. Maybe she'll find out something useful.
I kneel down on the floor and grab a book with a dark green hard cover. Some words—in latin or something—are engraved in gold writing on the front. I shake my head before opening the book and ripping a few pages out. I try to keep the noise to a minimum so that the girl can focus on whatever she's reading.
As quietly as I can, I crumple page after page from this book and toss them into the metal bowl. Once I'm about a fourth of the way into the pages of the book, I place it down and reach for the can of peas.
The can is pretty far out of my reach, being closer to Megan's feet a little further down the hall. I look up toward her face and her eyebrows furrow in concentration as she reads through the folder that's resting on her legs. I notice she takes a second to flip a page. I cough under my breath to hopefully get the girl's attention.
Her eyes lift from the paper and she looks to me. I motion at the can of peas and she leans over the folder to see what I'm looking at. Once her eyes land on the can of peas, she doesn't hesitate to grab it with her hand and move it closer to me.
Weird. Usually the girl would make a remark, maybe even telling me to do it myself. Or she would do it, but not before rolling her eyes. But she just went back to reading the papers in the folder. I shake my head and look down to the can.
I grab the can in my hand and get my knife from my holster with the other. I stab the can of peas, making a considerable amount of noise. As I cut open the rim of the can's lid, I try to be cautious of the noise I'm making.
Looking up from the can, I try to make sure I'm not disturbing the girl ahead of me. To my surprise, she looks to be done reading about whatever was in that folder.
I'm finally able to bend back the lid of the can after cutting around it most of the way.
"Find out anything we could use?" I ask the girl. She stares ahead at the wall with her arms folded over her knees.
"No." She loosely says with a straight face.
Not paying much mind to her response, or lack thereof, I reach over and grab my bag out of the room I've been sleeping in. I move my hands throughout the bag in search of the lighter I brought from the prison. Once my hands land on the cool metal of the lighter, I pull it out of the crowded bag and bring it into the dim light of the hallway.
I flick open the lighter which creates a small flame upon doing so. Bringing the flame to the crumpled paper, a wrinkle on the top shrivels up before I see the orange flame consume it. The flame soon spreads to the other pieces of paper.
The fire quietly crackles and some of the pages audibly crinkle as the flame consumes the rest of them.
I can hardly imagine what violent flames it must take to burn down an entire house.
Before I get too deep in thought, I bring the can of peas over the fire, letting the flame's orange tips surround the bottom of the tin. I watch as the base of the metal can turns black over the flames.
It isn't too long before I realize that the flames are quickly dying. The thin pages of the book shrivel and turn to glowing orange ashes. The light in the hallway rapidly ceases as the fire dies. I look out the window and notice that the sun is at its latter end of setting.
"Shit," I curse under my breath and place the hot can on the ground. The flames didn't last nearly as long as needed to actually heat up the peas.
I grab a different book, opening it and flipping through its pages. The thick page makes a sturdy sound as I test its endurance. These pages might make for a longer lasting flame. I sigh as I rip the first page out, repeating the process again and again.
"Is that why you wanted to go on the run alone?" Megan speaks out of nowhere. "To go find your house?" She asks me. I meet her gaze as my hands stop ripping the pages.
She sits on her blanket further down the hall from me. Her curious eyes never leave mine. The girl knows I won't answer her question. She just asks for her own sake, not actually expecting a proper response.
"Is that why we left the prison, Carl?" She asks. She sounds certain of her accusations. After spending a lot of time together, the girl surely knows exactly what she's doing.
She probably also knows that I'm uncertain of the actual answer to that question. And even if I was certain, I wouldn't tell her—nor admit my motives. Maybe, after previously growing a little closer to Megan, I would tell her if my childhood home was on the list of reasons for leaving the prison. Truthfully, I don't know if it was. I mean, I didn't lie to her when I said I longed for the outside world again.
"A guy we ran into on a run made a map of my neighborhood. He met my dad in the beginning of it all." I start. "The map said that my house was burned down. The guy was off his rocker, though. I had to see it for myself before I would believe anything he said."
I break the eye contact with her. The girl's eyes stay on me as I continue ripping pages out of the book in my hand.
Her glare doesn't burn into me like it usually does. Megan just remains deep in thought, her eyes leaving me to believe that I am the subject. I stare at the pages as I crumple them up, knowing that Megan is probably pissed off at me for keeping my burnt down house a secret. What's new?
I notice that the bowl is now full of the denser pages. Placing them to the side of the bowl, I keep balling up more pages in hopes that I can just add them to the fire as the first few burn. A hot meal nearly controls my every thought after the tiring day we endured.
After setting aside a few pages, I drop the book and pick the lighter up off of the floor. Flicking it open once again, I take the flame and gently touch it to a page in my other hand. I place the paper on top of the others and wait for the flames to take their time to creep their way down the bowl.
My hopes of a hot meal falter as the fire never spreads. Instead, it dies with the one piece of paper I managed to light.
I close my eyes and sigh, sitting back against the staircase railing. I tilt my hat over my face and straighten my legs out across the floor, giving up.
"My house burned down too." I hear Megan whisper. Her weak voice and sudden change of tone catch me off-guard.
"What?"
"My group home." She says and I take my hat off of my face, realizing that she's being serious. "Before I went to juvy."
"You were a foster kid?"
The most I ever knew about the girl's past was that she was in the correctional facility. She never even mentioned that on her own accord, let alone anything from her life before prison.
"Yea, there were four of us in the home." She sighed. Her eyes stayed glued to the floor. A hopeless, defeated demeanor consumes the girl as her blank expression leaves her emotion to remain a mystery. "I was the oldest."
"How did you end up in foster care?" I blurt out.
Her eyes briefly connect with mine before returning back to the floor. I've pestered Megan about her past for so long, without success, that my mind can't help but race with questions. Part of the reason I did pester her was because I knew she'd never give in.
"Growing up, it was just me and my mom. I never remembered my dad much. He left us when I was little." She explained. "She died a few years before I got put in the detention center." The girl shrugs. "Some kind of pneumonia kept her in the hospital for her last few weeks. I must have been nine or ten years old." She shakes her head and looks at her hands as she fidgets with them.
"I don't even remember what her voice sounds like." Her muted voice gently breaks with her last statement.
"I don't remember my mom's either." I admit, recalling my mother's death only a few short months ago. All I can remember was the sound of her screams as Maggie riddled her unconscious with my knife; the knife that is sitting in my holster right now.
I choose to leave that part out of what I confess to Megan.
"Then you went to the group home?" I ask, trying to get her to continue.
"I had one set of foster parents before the home. They sent me and my deaf foster sister there when one of their relatives died." Megan huffs as she rolls her eyes. "They inherited a pricey piece of land in Virginia."
Things fell silent in the dim hallway as I waited for her to continue.
"She was four by the time we got moved into the group home—my foster sister. Her name was Ivan. I called her Ivy."
Megan suddenly stops talking and quietly laughs to herself. "It's just been so long since I've said her name out loud."
I notice her cheeks lift under her hopeless eyes as she faintly smiles.
I smile back at her.
"Little Ivy." She huffs to herself. "I watched out for her like we were born into the same family. I was the buffer between her and the house mom. That woman hated tending to the needs of a deaf kid." The girl seemingly gets lost in thought for a second. "Hell, she didn't bother to learn even just a few words in sign language. I was the only person Ivy could ever really communicate with."
"She was my sister. Maybe she still is, I'll never get to know for sure." Megans voice drowns out in the tense silence of the empty house. Her conclusive tone leaves me to be more curious as she sounds like she's done talking.
"How did the group home burn down?" I ask, not fully thinking about my words.
Megan doesn't answer as she stares at the floor for quite a few long seconds. Instead of responding, she reaches under her blanket and pulls out the folder she took from the office. The girl avoids looking in my direction as she places the file on the floor and slides it over to me with her hand.
I pick up the folder, reading the tab on the top of it.
Carter, Megan F.
"This is your file." I say out loud, remarking more to myself than to her.
I take the fact that she even gave me her file as permission to be able to search through it. I swing the cover open and see a stack of neatly printed lines of text.
First and last name. Height, weight, birthdate.
"You're a year older than me?" I remark at the girl, briefly looking up from the pages.
The girl still refuses to make eye contact with me. My attempt at any sense of normalcy fails as the girl stares at the floor, ignoring my words.
My eyes continue to scan down the first page as they land on a picture. In the picture, a young Megan stands before a wall with lines marking the number of inches.
My eyes finally land on her face. Her hair is tussled around the frame of it. Megan's eyes hold an emptiness as the rest of her face remains straight, seemingly stunned by getting her mugshot taken.
I suck in a breath when I see the date of the image.
She was only twelve years old when she went to the correctional facility. That means she was in there for a few months before the outbreak. I look to the girl across from me, her story printed in in ink right in the palm of my hand.
"I don't have to read it all, if you don't want—"
"Go ahead." She shoots me a loose smile, mustering up whatever expression she can.
My eyes drift back down before I peel back the first page. The second page has much larger blocks of text. I decide to skip it for now, and flip a few pages. Each of the middle pages contain endless information about her court hearing. My fingers keep flipping until they land on the second to last paper in the folder.
I skim through the words until my eyes land on the list of charges that the girl faced.
Arson in the Third Degree
Reckless Endangerment in the First Degree
Following down the list, there were a bunch of other technical charges that I don't quite understand. I take a breath before continuing to read toward the bottom of the page.
Defendant Plea: Guilty On All Counts
As I read more and more, I begin to understand her hopelessness. I shake my head and flip back a few pages, finding the witness testimonies. There are several typed out witness statements as well as questionings, but a certain one catches my eye.
Lay Witness on behalf of the Prosecution: Campbell, Ivan Louise
"They made your foster sister testify against you." I sigh, projecting my voice to Megan. The girl looks up from the floor, staring me in the eyes. She lets out a stiff nod, folding her lips in response.
"I walked her home from school that day. I can still remember what it was like to hear her calling out my name." Megan's cold voice breaks through the stillness of the scene. "Faye, can please you take me home? My nose is stuffy." Megan mocks as she laughs at the memory. "But, my name was the only part she ever really said out loud."
"Faye?" I ask her.
"My middle name." She answers. "There was another girl named Megan at the group home so we both went by our middle names."
"Then what happened?"
"I walked Ivy home from school. I told her to stay put while I went to the convenience store to get a thermometer. I told her that when I got back we could light the fireplace and watch movies to make her feel better." Her voice cracks. "I was only gone for ten minutes." She looks down as she shakes her head. "I walked back from the store and saw Ivy standing on the front steps of the house, crying. She told me that she tried to light a fire in the furnace down in the basement. She couldn't hear the smoke detector until it was too late."
Megan withholds as much emotion as she can when she speaks. Her blank face and monotone voice struggle to maintain themselves.
"I'm assuming that the furnace—or something else in that basement—wasn't upheld to certain safety regulations. The place was so run-down, the fire didn't take long to rip completely through it." She shakes her head. "By the time I got there, the basement was gone and there was nothing I could do about the rest of the house."
"I knew we were going to be separated no matter what—" She cuts herself off. "I mean, we were lucky enough to land in the same group home after our first set of parents fell through."
A few tense, silent moments pass as I stare at the girl, waiting for more answers.
"I told Ivy to tell them it was me who set the fire. Our foster mom already had it out for her, and I knew I was probably never going to see her again." Megan clears her throat after her voice threatens to break. "I didn't really think about how it would look that a troubled, juvenile foster kid managed to burn down an entire house." She scoffs.
"By the time the firemen and police got there, the house was unrecognizable. I told them that I left the fire unattended in the basement while I went to the store." She stopped to swallow down her words. "After seeing that it was a group-home that burned down, the police assumed that the fire was intentional."
Even after every heavy thing this girl says, her eyes do not dare to shed tears. Although red and irritated, I never see one tear come from the girl.
"Did you ever get to see Ivy again?" I ask Megan.
"The last time I saw her was at that house that day." Megan sighs. "I didn't know where they would take her then. I can't imagine where she is now, if she's even still alive." The girl ends her speculation with a huff.
"So that's how you ended up in the correction center? How many years did you get sentenced?"
"Now who's the one asking too many questions?" She asks with a sly smile and I chuckle in response. "The bail was some ridiculous amount of money. And I got a minimum of six years with the possibility of parole."
"That's a lot." I huff, quickly regretting my words as I realize that her face fell immediately after my voice finishes echoing through the dark hall. "Well, you're out now and that's all that matters, right?"
Megan's face softens. "Right."
A few moments of awkward, tense silence pass between the two of us. "Whatever happened to that can of peas?" She seemlessly the changes the subject.
"I couldn't get the fire to start." I say, sighing. Megan nods in response before she looks down at the floor.
My eyes land upon the file in my hands. A smirk can't help but play on my lips when I get the idea. Sitting back up on my knees, I reach into her file and see the last page containing her list of charges. I take the lone page and crumple it up, tossing it into the bowl.
I look over to the girl and see her already looking at me with a confused look on her face. My fingers skip through a few pages, before returning to the front page. I grab the page containing her mugshot, before plucking it from the file and handing it over to her. She hesitantly takes the page from my hand, not knowing what to do with it.
Looking back down to the file, I grab another page, and crumple it up, placing it into the metal bowl. As she catches on, I hear Megan quietly chuckle to herself. Grabbing a third page, I ball it up in my hand before looking at the girl once again. This time, I exaggerate my movements as I toss the wrinkled paper on top of the others.
I hear the crinkling of paper and I look toward the girl. She hesitantly balls up the piece of paper in her small fists. She then reaches her arm toward me, handing me the paper.
Raising my eyebrows, I angle the metal bowl toward her instead of just taking it from her. Megan scoffs before gently tossing her paper into the bowl.
I quickly finish off the last few papers in the file. Then, I take the vanilla folder and rip it in half. It takes a little more pressure to crumple one side of the folder, before I toss it in with the rest of the mangled file. With one half of the folder in my hand, I use the other to take the lighter out of my pocket.
"Would you do the honors?" I ask Megan, sliding the metal lighter across the floor.
She lets out a chuckle before picking up the lighter. Flicking it open, she sits up on her knees and places her other hand on the ground to keep her balance. I hold the front cover of the folder out toward her. Megan then reaches over and touches the flame to the corner of the folder in my hand.
The cover quickly catches on fire and the flames grow larger than I expected. Seeing these flames replenishes the hope that I once had of a warm meal. I drop the file into the bowl and not even a few seconds pass before the crackling of the fire breaks through the silent ambience of the hallway.
I grab the open can of peas off of the floor and hold it over the growing flames. I look over to the girl to see her face being illuminated by the flickering orange glow. She looks to the fire as she sits back down on her blanket and puts the lighter on the floor.
The girl's eyes flick toward me when she catches me staring at her. She sends an effortless smile my way.
It isn't a forced smile to break out of her momentary sadness, or a sheepish response to some remark I made. This girl feels a sense of relief from this fire. Whether it be from finally having warm food, or having her past disintegrate right in front of her, the girl finally catches a break.
The corners of my lips subtly rise as I ignore the burning heat rising closer to my hand.
☆
"I normally hate peas." Megan says, twirling her fork in the green contents of the paper plate she's holding. "These are the best peas I've ever had." She laughs to herself. I chuckle.
"You wouldn't think they were the best if they weren't this warm." I joke to the girl.
The fire was so large that I overestimated the amount of time the peas would need to cook. The girl and I had to wait a while before they were cool enough to eat. I learned that the hard way when I took a bite right after taking the can off of the flame.
Megan hums as she scrapes the last bite of nearly burnt peas into her mouth. She places the paper plate and plastic fork onto the floor next to her blanket.
Folding her hands over her stomach, she leans back against the wall and sighs. "How about some crackers?" She asks me.
"Why not." I remark. The ambiance of the hallway remains light and airy. The heavy and dark atmosphere from earlier this evening has disappeared after we finally got something in our stomachs.
I hear the crinkling of a wrapper as the girl pulls a full, un-opened sleeve of crackers out of her pack. "I packed these for the armory run today. Guess I got distracted." She shrugs.
I reach my hand out toward her. She leans forward a little as she pulls a few crackers out of the sleeve and places them in my palm. For a second, I have the urge to shoot her a quick thank you, but that's not a phrase we ever exchange. I think it's been mutually assumed and understood between us ever since we've gotten to know each other.
We crunch our saltine crackers in silence. The dark hall echos with crinkles as Megan puts the half-empty sleeve of crackers back in her bag. After I eat all of mine, I wipe the loose crumbs off of my pants.
Ever since Megan changed the subject to the peas, she and I haven't discussed anything that happened today.
"So," I pause, speaking before I even know what I'm going to say. I quickly try to think of a way to pester the girl even more than I already have. "Faye, huh?" I ask the girl, a smirk growing on my face as I poke fun at her.
"Oh, shut up." She bluntly says before quietly laughing to herself.
"No, it's cool." I remark, causing her laughs slowly fade. The girl takes her eyes away from mine and looks down at her feet that lay sprawled out across from her. "I like it."
"Well," Megan starts, her face softens as her mind races with a memory. "When Ivy said it, it sounded more like she was saying Fee." She explains, acting embarrassed about her nickname.
"Hey," I say, slightly sticking my hand out. "Fee is badass." I remark, causing the girl to roll her eyes as a smile creeps onto her face. "At least your middle name isn't Anthony."
"Yea, you're right." She sighs. "Anthony would suck as a middle name." Megan retorts, laughing at her own remark before even getting to finish it. I let her have her amusement. The girl has clearly been through a lot today.
"Alright, alright." I huff. "We should get some sleep. It's getting pretty late." I say, and the friendly commotion of the house immediately falls silent. She nods before beginning to straighten out her blanket along the floor.
Standing up after what seems like hours, I roll my shoulders and take my hat off of my head, before rolling out my neck. I place my hat back on top of my head and walk toward the room, leaving Megan alone as she fixes her blanket.
As I go to enter the door to the bedroom, something stops me. "Hey, Fee?" I call out to her in a mocking tone, my hand resting on the door frame.
Her head perks up and her tired eyes find mine through the distance and the dark. "Your secret's safe with me." I say, my voice lacking its usual joking manner as I speak to her.
She looks down, seemingly ignoring my words. Megan continues to pat the blanket as she lays it out, straightening the wrinkles in it. I look down to the floor, giving up before starting to fully step into the room.
"It's not really a secret." She states. Her defeated voice echoes down the hallway, behind my back. I stop in my tracks before I can fully enter the room. Taking a step back, I turn my head and look at the girl down the hall.
"It's still safe with me."
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A/N
I'm obsessed with this chapter even though it literally two scenes
Carl was being nice??????
Also I def need to make her a mugshot, and if I do, I'll put it at the bottom right here xoxo
edit (8/30/22) :
- here's the mugshot!!
☆vote if u luv me☆