THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

004 | Lady Bad Luck's Fault

━━━━━━ CHAPTER FOUR ━━━━━━
Lady Bad Luck's Fault
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          MOVIES GOT IT ALL WRONG. The moment the world ended, nature didn't grow more beautiful, but itsead, it greyed out. All that death was not nourishment for the forests and no green scenery could truly fool a knowledgeable heart: there was sickness upon the world, greying rot casting over it all. Not even the water shined as it used to, because it remembered too much of the carnage that it was forced to wash away on the behalf of a dead stewart. The waters Mallory remembered were most likely all gone, this far past the end of civilization.

With careful, light steps, Daryl followed the trail that to his trained eyes looked as clear as anything could be. The forest surrounding him embraced that washed out green, tinting closer to yellow, marks of witness for the heats of summer that were dawning on the land and that have long peppered his skin with beads of sweat. His crossbow steady in his grip, armed and ready to raise at need, was the first to advance while he moved forward, planning on being far faster than Mallory has been.

It gave him hope, the fact that there had been Walkers to take out one the way to her, yet her trail persisted, clear and steady, and in the opposite direction from the beeline to the prison that the dead were taking due to noise. Her movement looked deliberate in the trails and that alone was a fuel to Daryl's hope, a light he kept lit not in his eyes, not on his features, but in his soul.

Though he had promised Hershel to be back before nightfall, Daryl had no desire to turn back, not when the trail was this promising. For all he knew, turning back or pushing forward was a choice that could differentiate between finding her alive or dead.

Eventually, when the hue of his surroundings entered a golden phase to dusk, Daryl's steps led him into a portion of the forest where the murmurs of the river tried to tamper with his hearing sense, albeit not enough for the splash of water not to get him to come to a stop. The crossbow raised, his knees bent and he advanced much slower from there to a hidden position from where he saw the banks of the river.

His heart was the first to recognize her, skipping a few beats.

There she was, knelt in the river, with her back at him, there was blood on the back of her shirt, slightly torn, but she was not in any way erratic, as a Walker would be, but instead moving her hands up and down her neck, washing away at the dirt which stuck to her skin. Finally, he could sigh relieved: she was alive.

Before he could however lower his crossbow and approach her for a good old scold, a different splash caught his attention. From the opposite side of the river, a Walker stumbled clumsily out of the forest, aiming to traverse the water, towards her. To Daryl's surprise, Mallory seemed not to have noticed the thing. His jaw clenched at the thought of what would have happened then, where he not there, so he banished that troubling idea from his mind by shooting an arrow straight at the Walker's head.

Only once the corpse dropped in the river did Mallory finally flinch. The green end of the arrow stuck out of the water and, recognizing it, she turned around, with much puzzlement.

"Daryl," she called, pushed to do so by her disbelief of seeing him there, crossing over the bushes to join her by the river. "How did you-?"

"You didn't bring any weapon with you?" After a quick survey of the river banks, Daryl simply had to interrupt her with that question. "Come on, Mals. What were you thinking running away like that? You could have gotten yourself killed." With an exasperated sight, Daryl got the crossbow's carrying strap over his shoulder, let it hang by his side, and marched into the river after her.