safe in your skin | the walking dead

chapter three | let me know you're real

Word spreads fast, like a wildfire licking at dry grass, and by the time Beth had packed the truck with everything they needed and went to the makeshift schoolhouse, both Kaia and Silas were bouncing in their seats. She shakes her head blithely at their palpable excitement, beckoning them over with a tip of her chin, waiting until they thanked their teacher, Katherine, before leading them outside to be bombarded by questions.

As expected, Silas is bursting with things to say, barely able to get one sentence out before starting over. "Miss Katherine said I had to keep up with reading but— oh, and can we sleep in the truck bed like we did in Kentucky that was soooo fun— I don't really have to read while we're gone, right, Mama, because I'll be working hard just like you—"

"Breathe, kiddo," Beth laughs, placing a hand on the top of his head and mussing his hair a bit. He was getting tall, she realized with a deep ache, especially for his age, nearly past her ribcage. Silas had been hers since he was a little older than Kaia, all baby-fat and forlorn eyes, and now he was sprouting like a weed.

Kaia, on Beth's other side, just shimmied a little dance at the prospect of going outside the gates, stomping her rain boots in the little puddles down the sidewalk. "Going exploring, going exploring," she chants in a little song beneath her breath.

At eight and five, respectively, Silas and Kaia were certainly grown enough to understand the dire circumstances that Harper's Ferry had faced. And while they were allowed to be excited to go outside the gates, to go 'exploring', Beth had also drilled into them the importance of this run, and of keeping safe.

Maybe Beth was slightly foolish, taking children with her into the unknown. But she'd rather be together than separated, and that would have to do for now.

The truck, parked at the main entrance, was familiar to the kids, a beige F-100 from the 70s that still ran smoothly. It predated even Beth's presence in their life, owned and well-loved by their Aunt Ginny, its bench seat littered with relics of their childhood, stickers and stains. Beth makes sure the tarp covering their sleep packs, provisions, and the duffel of guns is tied down tight before rapping the hood sharply, signaling to Oliver up in the guardpost that she was good to go.

Peeling past the gates of lumber and mesh and wire, that damn sign, and back into the woods— Beth feels the strain leech from her body, the windows down and warm air tangling their hair... even as her kids begin to squabble over the music, leafing through Ginny's massive CD album kept in the glovebox.

Kaia prefers harsher sounds, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin that she tries to blast so loud it rattles their eardrums. Silas is more soulful, moody in tone, liked Radiohead and The Shins. On previous trips outside Harper's Ferry, when the kids would be too annoying, Beth'd pop in June Carter Cash or Joni Mitchell, singing along purposefully off-pitch.

They settle now on a well-loved Emmylou Hariss album, played often enough that even Kaia could sing along to the chorus. The drive, had they gone straight through, past DC, would've been an hour and a half tops. But Beth takes the backroads that she knows they've already cleared, dipping and curving south through single-lane highways in Virginia proper, overgrown poplars and pines with limbs that reach like skeletal fingers, scraping the roof of the truck as they pass.

Thirty minutes in, they pass their first walker. It's all on its lonesome, dragging itself by fingers ground to bits on the cracked asphalt, nothing left of its legs but the bleached bone of femur. Beth resists the urge to cover the kids' eyes, speeding past the thing. It's some instinct that predates this whole shitshow, despite all her huff and puff about how resilient they are.

Kaia turns to watch it fade in the distance, pressing her nose up against the glass so it fogs. She sighs, girlish and small. "I never forgot about 'em, Mama. It's been so long since I seen one, but I 'membered."