something in the orange "damned if i do, damned if i don't"
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The sun is dying. It's this dull, bruised smear sinking low on the horizon, lighting up the trees like skeletal fingers reaching toward the blood-soaked sky. I tug my hat lower, blocking out what little glare of it is left. My breath hangs in the air, cold and thin.
I almost lost my life again last night. Just another brush with death that seems to caress my cheek with a smirk that says not yet, but soon. At this point, it's bullshit. I want to tell whatever sick creator there is to either kill me or stop trying, quit teasing.
All I smell is ash and decay. I can still taste the smoke on my tongue, thick and bitter, coating the back of my throat like tar.
Alexandria is gone.
Smoldering at my back as I walk from it, nothing more but the crackle of dying embers and the soft, distant growl of walkers picking at whatever's left behind.
I keep my pace steady, boots sinking into the wet muck beneath me as I trudge toward Hilltop, toward where the rest of Alexandria found refuge after the Savior's bombed our home. Every step feels heavier than the last. My body aches, but it's my eye that burns—the one I don't have anymore. The hollow space where it used to be throbs in the cold, reminding me of that night—so long ago now—the girl, the gun, the bullet.
Mary Anderson's bullet.
I clench my jaw, feel my fingers twitch toward the revolver strapped to my hip. I should've left her back there. Or maybe she should've left me. Hell, maybe we should've both stayed behind and let the fires swallow us whole. It would've been easier.
I thought I was alone until I saw her, thought everyone was already half way to Hilltop. But there she was, standing in the ruins of her old house, eyes wide like a startled deer. She always was a little skittish, but now? Something snapped inside her the night her family was torn apart. The night she pulled the trigger. The night she tried to kill herself but almost killed me instead. And something snapped again, maybe even broke completely. Who cares? Not my problem.
Well, sort of my problem. We're walking to Hilltop together. Together is a term I use loosely, we are merely going in the same direction at the same time. And night is falling. I'm ready to stop walking. If she chooses to keep going, that's up to her.
Then I see it—a church, half-collapsed and swallowed by creeping vines, hunched under the foreboding forest like it's trying to vanish from sight. The cross on top hangs crooked, barely holding on. The windows are blown out, shards of stained glass littering the ground. It's the kind of place that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, makes you feel like maybe you shouldn't go inside, like something is still in there, watching. Waiting.
