No Tomorrow

.

*

"Through there, the bullet only grazed the side of his temple so he should be fine."

"....thank you, for everything you've done for us."

Hershel offered me a watery smile before I turned my back to him and entered one of the smaller rooms at the back of the small house, Daryl yanked the blanket up past his bare torso but he stopped when he saw that it was me. I crawled in bed with him on top of the sheets and very carefully put my head against his chest; he had a lot of bandages on the left side of his abdomen and a lot around his head.

"Mind telling me what the fuck happned to you?"

"Accident...damn horse threw me off a cliff edge and I shot myself with an arrow, but I found something...I found her doll."

"Mm...good, but do I need to say it?"

He kissed the top of my hair and snuggled into my chest the most he could without tweaking any of his injuries and grumbled.

"Please don't, I've already been through enough today."

I tilted my head back to try and give him a small kiss on the cheek and I laughed but let it go, as much as I wanted to scold him he had managed to come back to me alive and in one piece and for the time being, that's all that I worried about.

*

As the days slowly began to unwind into longer nights, one big thing was revealed to us by Glenn; though we never found another sign of Sophia, he told us that the barn on the property was full of walkers. Hershel was adamant that the undead were just sick people but Rick and Shane always had someone on watch by the doors anyway, most of the time it was either me or Jay or the two of us together for hours on end which was alright. The more time I spent getting to know my new genetics, the more I found out; like although we could put our bodies through a lot of hell they always seemed to heal from it in due time. I didn't find that out until one morning on watch Jay had sliced open one of his palms trying to get a better look at the barn doors, I was shocked that the things inside were as quiet as they were. I tried to make him show me the cut but he always danced out of my reach with a smirk on his face.

"Will you not fuss so much? I'll be fine, look!"

Jay shook his sliced hand around in the air until blood droplets stopped oozing from the cut and he finally turned his hand around to show me an angry looking scar that marred his palm, the thing looked to be weeks old. I shielded my eyes from the high sun and leaned over convinced that I was just missing what I was supposed to be looking at.

"Cool, huh?"

"No, not cool you damn fool."

I shoved Jay's chest but he just laughed and rebounded off the creaky barn doors, making the walkers inside snap and growl before their rotten fingers snaked around the cracks in the wood; there must have been 20 in there or something.

"You care about me after all huh?"

I went to snap at him but there was a commotion near the woods by the farm house and the two of us looked over expectantly, Rick and Hershel had two long poles and Jimmy kept getting in the way of both of them; a cluster of people near the house took notice of whatever they were pulling and started running down here in a full on sprint led by Shane.

"What is that? What the fuck is that?"

When Rick, Hershel, and Jimmy were close enough I saw that two walkers were on the end of the poles and were chomping and snapping at Jimmy, who was clearly acting like the bait to lead them on; everyone who came down from the house had a gun and my eyes zero'd in on the shot gun that Daryl was clutching.

"Not now Shane, not now!"

"Why does everyone have a gun?''

Hershel's snow white hair looked ruffled while he twisted around to look at Rick with a sudden spark of anger.

"That was one of the rules you agreed to go by if I let your people stay here, w h y do they have their guns?!"

Shane got up in Rick's face and waved a pistol around in the air and Daryl stepped away from our group and tugged me around his back by a few fingers.

"Move, better yet-"

As an argument blossomed to our left, Daryl held the gun to his right hip and used his left hand to reach back and touch at my cheek with a few wayward fingers; his thumb lingered by my mouth and I saw a sliver of a smile.

"Can you close your eyes for me? This will be over soon enough, I promise."

"But..."

Two shots rang out and dropped the walkers on their poles and my ears rang with the close proximity, I had never been scared of guns per-say, but the noise had always hurt my ears b e f o r e my transformation. I shook my head back and forth a few times like I was trying to dislodge water from the depths of my drums before I whimpered and buried my face into the back of his shirt and covered my ears tightly with my hands.

Think....keep yourself distracted....think of anything else, anything at all...

I felt Daryl's body shift and many muffled pops of gunfire but I kept my hands tight over my ears and hummed to try and drown out what was happening, my brain was a muffled whirlwind of scattered thoughts that only seemed to get worse by the second.