Jinx || Daryl Dixon || The Walking Dead Fanfic

-7-

JINX

They'd ended up going back to Atlanta to the red brick building where Jinx had first seen Rick, T-Dog and Daryl with the Hispanic teenager. She didn't mention that she'd seen them there, but she finally learnt the full story.

Apparently there had been a group called the Vatos there, somehow they'd been managing to keep a care home running where many of their elderly family members were living. Rick had decided it would be a safe place where they could stay while they figured out their next move, but when they arrived they found the scene of a massacre.

Everyone that had been there had been systematically assassinated and the food and medicines had all been taken. It was a shocking sight, but with nowhere else to go they'd ended up staying a night there before deciding to continue on the road. When they'd left it had been decided that Daryl would take Merle's bike and Jinx would ride in the RV to preserve fuel. There was space now without Jim or Jacqui.

They decided to try and continue on to Fort Benning. Rick was trying to keep hope alive for the group, but it was a losing battle.

Jinx leant against Daryl's bag, using her shoulders to shuffle her own bag on top of it into a kind of headrest. She watched as Shane cleaned his gun and showed Andrea how to clean her own. It made her restless being around guns in an enclosed space, she didn't mind the sheriff having a gun, but she didn't trust that Andrea knew what she was doing.

"Oh Jeez" murmured Dale as the RV came to a stop in the middle of the interstate. It was packed full of cars and they couldn't see a way through. Daryl was on the bike though and found a path for them to weave through. Jinx averted her eyes from the windows, they didn't have the fuel to turn back, but she didn't want to see the dead in the cars they passed.

With a clunk and a whistle the RV's engine gave out, "Dead in the water" Dale called it. As he was about to say they had no hope, the group looked around, if they had any chance of finding a way to repair it, this would be the place.

By the time Jinx had climbed down out of the RV, Daryl was already looking through the cars closest to them to see what he could find, and T-Dog suggested siphoning more fuel. Others suggested finding food and water, but Lori said what they were all thinking "This is a graveyard". Everyone paused for a moment, but they didn't have a choice, their best chance was in these cars, they all started to move.

The first two cars she looked in were a bust, nothing more than half a pack of gum and some empty soda bottles, but in the third, a beat-up looking old jeep, there was a belt with two hunting knives attached lying helpfully in the passenger seat beside the body of their owner. She slowly picked it up, warily watching the corpse for any signs of movement, but it was truly dead. She looked in the back and found a shotgun with a couple of boxes of shells lying across the seat and a cool box with a few bottles of water.

Before she had a chance to take her finds back to the RV a chill came over her, for less than a second, time froze, then she saw members of her group duck down under cars as familiar growls and the sounds of dragging feet filled the space around them. She dropped the gun and cool box back down onto the seat and climbed into the footwell below them, silently closing the door behind her as if in slow motion as the biggest herd of the dead she'd seen moved through the spaces between the cars.

She held her breath, not even daring to breathe for fear that dead would find her. She was too afraid to move, even when she heard a high-pitched scream that could only have belonged to Sophia. The minutes felt like hours as she laid in the back of the dusty car, but eventually the sounds of the herd faded into the distance, and she risked peeking out of the window.

She watched as Daryl and T-Dog shoved dead bodies off themselves and stood up, smart camouflage she thought to herself, but glad she hadn't actually had to try it. She grabbed her haul, attempting to tie the belt around her waist, but it was far too large so she threw it over her shoulder instead. Making her way back towards the RV she could see who had had to fight. Daryl was filthy, but he'd found himself a leather vest with angel wings on the back, it suited him. Andrea had blood spatter all over her face, neck and hands and it appeared she'd had to fight off a walker that had made its way inside the RV. The most worrying though was T-Dog, he'd cut his arm pretty badly and was drenched in blood.