Malevolent. The Walking Dead

[ 009 ] then, love the world

009: then, love the world

Spring sprung on them quickly. The normally brittle, snow covered plains were replaced with lush trees and pollen buzzing bees that Joey would swat away from her sticky skin. Her and Finn walked side by side, Bill not too far behind them, on an abandoned highway. It had been a few months since they left Colorado, and were making their way towards Tennessee. Joey had no idea where they were going, but Bill insisted on heading to the east coast. He thought that if they head to DC, there would be some sort of government installation. There has to be, he had insisted, when they were stopped on the road in Kansas. Joey thought they would have met a group of people, or had somewhere to hunker down along the way, but it was a lost cause. It was like they were the last people on earth.

"Personally, I don't think the third Godfather was all that bad," Finn defended, hands gripping his gun. Joey rolled her eyes. "Obviously you've never even seen it," she shook her head. "It's such a disaster you'd think Coppola forgot how to make a movie within those 16 years," she laughed, nudging him in the side. He prevailed.

"I think the expectations were . . . unfairly high. I mean, it was supposed to be the way Michael's sins kinda caught up with him. I mean, movie sequels hardly live up to the first one,"

"Lord of the Rings begs to differ,"

Finn rolled his eyes. "Okay, well, I'm not that much a nerd," he raised his brows, and Joey stopped in her tracks. "Douchebag," she shook her head, giving him the finger as he walked on. She felt back to walk next to Bill, who was looking at her amusingly.

"What're you smirking at, old man?"

He shrugged, looking between the two. "Nothing, nothing, just . . . are you two . . . you know . . ." he made a heart shape with his hands. Joey scowled and made faux gagging noises. "Are you delusional? No way. Nuh ━ uh. He's . . . no way," she shook her head frantically, shoving Bill's shoulder when he gave her a look. "Don't look at me like that! I would never, in a million years even . . . think about it,"

He shook his head, rolling back his shoulders. "He's like a brother to me, okay . . . just . . . shut up old man," she pushed his shoulder again, rolling her eyes. Joey didn't feel any sort of romantic feelings toward Finn ━ she'd be able to tell if she did. At least, she thought she would. Love was a hard thing to define, but it came in many forms, and she wasn't going to proclaim her care and love for Finn as anything other than familial. It just felt wrong.

"Hey . . . hey Jo. Jo!" Bill called out, breaking her from the part of her that zoned off into nowhere. She inhaled, breathing back to reality when she realized she had kept walking while Finn and Bill had stopped. "This is where we get off," he pointed to the exit, and she looked up to the sign. They had been walking on Route 40 for what felt like days, but it was the exit off to Nashville. The skin on her nose was beginning to blister from the sun, and as much as the wind was able to break a bit of its rays, she still felt gross more than ninety percent of the time, and was just waiting for some taste of civilization.

"Shouldn't we be heading to Kentucky, you know, instead of Georgia?" Finn commented, eyebrows furrowed from the sun in his eyes. Bill looked at him as if he was holding a gun to his head. "Why don't you just listen to your elders, kid?"

Finn scoffed, eyeing the city as they stepped foot in it, and how the grass grew out from the cracks in the pavement, carcasses boiling under the hot sun, and the smell of rotters being all but familiar. It made Joey gag, but it seemed to have worked its way into her psyche to just be used to it. Every city they go through seemed desolate, old quarantine zones, abandoned cars, silence. Nothing new. Anything that had any semblance to something that might have been around recently was completely desolate. It made Joey's chest feel heavy as she weighed the possibilities of ever meeting another group of good people again. But, Finn always told her to keep a positive mindset, and you were going to get positive things out of it. It was a good piece of advice that Joey hardly ever listened to. Stubbornness wasn't a good look on her.