I was so scared and all I knew was that I was being roughly pushed forward, out of a building and into the cold, night air. There was a bag over my head and everything was dark. I fumbled for a knife on my walker-killing belt but easily realised that they had taken it from me and I was defenceless. I heard Daryl swearing in his Southern accent and I held back a sob, reaching my hands in front of me -despite my bound wrists- and tried to find him in the darkness. I had to know that he was alive and well.
"Get movin'," a voice growled from behind me and the man who owned it shoved me, too hard though and I fell on to the dusty tar of a road. I cried out as rocks dug into my palms and somebody roughly seized my upper arm and lifted me to my feet. I whimpered in distress and pain.
"Don't chu touch 'er!" I heard Daryl snarl from somewhere to my left.
"D-Daryl-" I cried out but was cut off by a ball of material being stuffed into my mouth.
Abruptly, I began to hear the buzz of voices. The words were all jumbled up for me and my disorientated brain so I only caught one sentence: "...there is one among us..." then I was again being shoved forward and the sack which had been over my head was removed. Everything was blindingly white for a while before my eyes adjusted.
I was in a ring -an arena of sorts- and there were people gathered around, screaming and chanting awful things like "KILL, KILL, KILL," and I saw my Daryl. His face bloodied and filthy, but he didn't see me, he was too busy staring intently; staring at the man standing before us.
Merle
No, it couldn't be! He was dead, we'd seen the amount of blood he'd lost, we'd seen that he's lived long enough to steal our van in Atlanta, but there was no way he could've lived out here for over eight months, one-handed, with no people to look out for him.
"These people killed our own, now what should we do with them?" My attention was diverted to the man, obviously the leader of Woodbury, he called out to the crowd, taunting them, egging them on and riling them up to be furious at Daryl, Merle and I. His right eye was covered with a gauze pad and blood and pus was soaking through the bandage. "You wanted your brother," he says in an undertone to Merle, "you got him."
Just then, there were multiple clattering sounds by my feet, a girl shouting out for us to run and I looked down in bewilderment to register a flash-bang grenade. "GET DOWN," I tried to scream at Daryl, but it came out as "GEH OUN," because of the material still balled in my mouth. I dived as far as possible away from the thing just as it made the banging noise and everybody around us was screeching in fear as they became temporarily deafened.
I felt a man grab my arm and I kicked and screamed until he flipped me over his shoulder, fireman-style and began running. "Don't make this harder than it is, Rora." Daryl grunted and I immediately stopped squirming and pummelling his back, only just finding out now that he wasn't a guard trying to kidnap me. He let me down, grabbed my still-tied-up left hand and led me forward, only stopping a few metres to take the ball out of my mouth so I could speak. We kept on going, keeping low to the ground.
I was still completely uncertain of what was going on.
"Over here, Daryl." Merle hollered from somewhere to our right. Daryl swerved off in that direction and I blindly followed him, keeping a vice-like grip on his hand. I had no idea where they were leading me, we couldn't see anything; it was all a foggy haze from the flash-bang.
Just as bullets started hailing towards our position, my saviour pulled me behind a brick wall, into an alleyway. It was dark but as I squinted I noticed Merle bending over the body of a small, teenage girl. "ROBIN," I heard it being screamed before I realised that I was the one screaming it. I shoved Merle aside and leant over her lifeless body. Quickly, I watched and gasped out in relief when her chest rose with a breath. She was only unconscious.
