Fighting for our Future {TWD Daryl Dixon}

55: Leadership Qualities

Dad took a few minutes to calm down, but clutched onto me the whole time. After a few seconds of initially hugging, he loosened his grip on me. However he did keep his arm around my shoulder as we sat, waiting for his breathing to slow down.

Once his breathing finally did calm down, I asked him the question I've been dreading the answer to. Almost everyone is back already. Five people are missing though. Glenn, Nicholas, Sasha, Abraham, and Daryl. I already know that Glenn is missing, but where is Daryl?

"Dad..." I got his attention once he finally calmed down enough to be able to have a discussion with me. "Where's Daryl? Is he still leading the herd away?" I then sighed after remembering the recent events. "Well, half the herd..."

"Yeah. He's leading 'em away." He nodded and looked around to see all the dead bodies. "So what happened here?"

"A group attacked. The ones Daryl, Aaron, and Morgan ran into." I explained. "That was a battle and a half."

"Well, I'm just glad you're okay." He finally removed his arm from my shoulder. "You stayed in the house during that, right?"

My eyes widened. I don't want to lie to him, but at the same time I don't want to tell him what I did. "I uh.." His face started hardening, realizing that I did not stay home. "I think that we need to go talk to the community about our new situation." I told him while getting up. "They won't know how to handle this. We need to be their voices of hope."

"Nora...." Dad started as I turned, trying to walk towards the wall where several people are gathered. My back was now to him. I could hear him finally standing up. I did not move from my current position, and let him walk in front of me. He was now staring me down like an angry Karen that can't return their merchandise after having it for two years. "You did stay in the house, right?"

"No." I shook my head. "I did not." This might be the most pissed off he's ever been with me. It'll just get worse if he finds out that I didn't only fight, but I lured those invaders to me. "We can talk about it later. Like I said, we need to talk to the community."

"Alright." He removed his deadly eyes from me. "But we are talking later."

"Okay.." I said while nodding. 

The both of us then started walking to the wall that most of our community is in front of. They are all panicking while listening to the sounds of the dead trying to claw their way inside our walls. My father spoke up when we got there. "You can hear it. Some of you saw it. They got back here, half of them. Still enough to surround us twenty deep." Dad paused for a moment to take in all of the frightened faces around us. "Look, I know you're scared. You haven't seen anything like this. You haven't been through anything like this. But we're safe for now." Dad turned around to investigate the part of our wall that was hit with a truck earlier. "The panel the truck hit seems intact. We reinforced it just in case. Either way the wall's gonna hold together. Can you?" Dad paused again after his rhetorical question. "The others, they're gonna be back."

"They're gonna be back." Rosita agreed with my father.

"Daryl, Abraham, Sasha, they have vehicles. They're gonna lead 'em away, just like the others." Dad then raised his voice a little, and I could tell he didn't fully believe what he was saying, but didn't want to say the alternative. "And Glenn and Nicholas are gonna walk back through the front gate after. They know what they're doing, and we know what we need to do." I looked over at Maggie for a second, who definitely wasn't convinced by my fathers words, but why should she be, when he doesn't fully believe it himself. "We keep noise to a minimum. Pull our blinds at night. Even better, keep the lights out. We'll try to make this place as quiet as a graveyard, see if they move on."