THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

001 | They Always Punish Their Saviors

━━━━━━ CHAPTER ONE ━━━━━━
They Always Punish Their Saviors
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          WHEN YOU'RE FAMISHED, nothing should look unappealing to eat and quench that constant pain that had replaced your stomach, but when the plate hit the ground and Mallory saw the raw piece of meat drowning in a bath of blood, though there was nothing for her to regurgitate, acid climbed up her throat, forcing her to swallow it back down. Her only solution was to close her eyes and look away from the same "meal" that she had been given every day for a week now — eventually, Holroyd believed, she would be too hungry to refuse what he was giving her.

"I'm not one of them." Mallory disliked the sound of her own hoarse voice so she talked as little as she could spare the silence. Despite knowing what sight awaited her once she opened her eyes, her heart clenched all the same to see her wrists in chains, the ring finger from her right hand missing over the spot of blood dried on the floor. "You know I am not," she added with a sigh of exhaustion, but as soon as that sigh had her sight climb up to Holroyd's face, she caught glimpse of his knife's shine in the light of a candle flickering on his work desk besides her prison wall.

She flinched but there was truly no where to escape and both of them knew it.

Mallory's back pressed against the wall behind her, the chains holding her wrists and ankles rattled much louder than the shadow of her whimper. Her eyes close again, if only out of instinct. The ghost of her finger needed no sight of that trophy hanging around his neck for her to know from experience exactly what that man could do with his knife. However, once the tip of his blade grazed superficially over her cleavage, it was obvious he wasn't looking to cut anything more from her just yet.

Holroyd dragged the blade over her rapid heartbeat and moved her unbutted shirt aside, uncovering thick scars that marked her body. "These," he looked at those scars in disgust because should the world not have gone to madness, those scars should stay hidden save for the eyes of a mortician, "say otherwise. How many times did you die, woman?"

It was the same question, time and time again thrown in her face. "I told you—"

The knife quickly climbed to her throat, making Mallory hitch her breath and hit her head back on the wall. "One of us would never have to be asked a question like that. Death's the end. You cross past that line and keep on walking, you become one of them." With a puff, Holroyd straightened up, sheathing his blade on the side of his belt.

"Yet they don't talk like you and I, do they now?"

He hit the plate closer to her, careless as to the blood he spilled on the groud besides her, "Eat." With two fingers, he plucked out the flame from the candle, plunging the basement of his home into complete darkness. Mallory had long since given up on screaming, on begging for her freedom, so she pulled on her chains as he left not to cause a scene, but to make room for her to lay down. Once the door to the basement closed and she heart the lock click into place, she kicked the plate and the raw meat away from her, enjoying the shatter far more than the damp sound of flesh splattering on the ground.

How did she get there?

That question was a plague to her mind but nonetheless it haunted her, because memory was a shackle as much as it was relief. Her life used to be so good a couple of years ago. She had it all, so to say. As much as someone coming from a barely middle class family could have.