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“I get it now.”
The crack of a gun, or maybe it was her skull, echoed through Beth’s head — so loud that all previous thoughts were drowned out from the sound. But as her body hit the floor she felt an entirely new sensation that filled her with dread. Everything went black, and it was like the world was being split in half beneath her. And she was falling. She spared a thought that this must be what dying feels like. Soon it would all be over for her and it was all her fault.
Down, down, down. As if she was stuck on the part of the roller coaster that dropped you suddenly, that lurch in her stomach was now all that her mind could focus on.
Images of her life suddenly flashed before her, which was when she knew she must have been dying. But with a pang in her chest, she realized these weren’t simply life flashes. It was her time with Daryl. Running from the prison, struggling on the road. “I’m not staying in this suck ass camp!” Daryl carries her in a serious piggyback and finding the gravestone. Her slim fingers intertwined with his huge ones, and the comfort she took from that — how right it felt. “Yer first drink ain’t gonna be no peach schnapps!” She could still taste the moonshine. And feel the roughness of the back of Daryl’s vest on her chest while she held him and he cried. Burning the place down. The funeral home was probably the happiest she’d been since her daddy died. She had imagined herself playing house with Daryl, and now she saw him watching her play the piano, and the way he touched the pads of his fingers to his lips. “What changed your mind . . . oh.” The walkers. “I’m not going to leave you!” The men take her away. She managed to hear Daryl scream her name as they drove away, and watching it play out again in this out of body experience brought fresh, hot tears to her eyes.
Down, down, down.
~*~*~*~
“Get your ass up, lil brother,” a familiar voice echoed through his head tauntingly, and then chuckled as if this was all a game to him. Of course it was, Daryl knew that. It was Merle’s way of being manipulative, and he’d done it all of Daryl’s life to get what he wanted out of his little brother. “And you best be trimmin’ that hair of yours, Darylina, you’re startin’ to look like our ole pal, JC.”
Daryl’s head ached and throbbed with the voice of his brother reverberating off his cranial cavity and into his last nerve. His chest hurt, too, and he wasn’t too sure why. The pain was breathtaking, like the wind was knocked out of him and his lungs had stopped working altogether. “Pick y’self up, Darylina,” Merle continued in his snide tone. “Beth ain’t gonna carry herself out that hospital.”
The two deafening gunshots replayed in Daryl’s mind; the first stopping his and Beth’s hearts and the second stopping Dawn’s. Three thuds followed; first Beth’s body, and then Dawn’s, and finally his knees hitting the same linoleum floor. It all came back to him. His search for Beth Greene came to an abrupt end, like blowing out a candle. His candle . . . his flame in the darkness.
“C’mon, lil brother,” jeered Merle. “On ya feet now, like Daddy always told you.”
Daryl stirred out of his dream and surfaced back to reality, his lungs instinctively pulling in a gasp of air as he woke in the shade of a circle of trees. Sweat dripped from his forehead into his eyes, which he wiped at with the backs of his wrists. In his hands, Daryl held a knife and an arrow he’d been whittling by hand.
As he started to regain consciousness, he heard footsteps to his right and birds in the branches above. “Moving to the suburbs?”