Torn Apart • TWD

Chapter 15 - elephants weight

Daryl is huffy. Whenever he gets the girl's trails or to a house she has been living in, he's always too late and it's starting to get to him.

This has brought up a lot of memories for the group, trying to find a little girl who's alone and having someone cry till she's found. Though Judith is a baby, she's still crying for the girl and probably won't stop till the little brat's found.

The hunter has mixed feelings for the girl, they met when she caught him, took his crossbow and then shot him. Not the best start. But she's also a child trying to navigate the new world, trying to follow a dead woman's wishes even though people clearly scared her.

Daryl, T-Dog, and Glenn are one of the group today, everyone from the group would form smaller groups when they search for the girl, Rick, Maggie and Daryl are always in separate groups, so if one of the little groups finds her then there'll be a familiar face to ease the child. These three have already found one of her residences today and are following the tracks to the next one, but it's difficult to track a person when they're not in the forest with mud to make footprints in.

It's obvious the girl didn't know she was being followed, she hasn't cared to hide the walkers she's killed with either a blade or an arrow, and in every house she has stayed in for any amount of time, a night, days, she always leaves drawings. The child clearly likes to think of walls as blank canvases, every single house has scribbles of animals, patterns, and sometimes people, some of them are drawn messily, while others are so detailed it feels like they could jump off the walls.

That gave Daryl a good idea of what the girl's condition is at times, the ones that are sprawled on the walls with half-assed intent, she was most likely exhausted and barely keeping awake but she still forced herself to make the bare walls pretty.

He would occasionally find a trap with whatever resources she has found in whatever house it is, the contraptions are always only set up in houses that aren't very secure, where the elements have beaten it so badly that a tough wind could knock it over. The traps are mostly for any dead that could stumble in, so far he has seen no sign of human life getting stuck in one.

"This one," Daryl nods to the house at the end of the street while T-Dog and Glenn share a look of confusion. The group never understood his thought process with tracking this child, how he knows where she's been when the others find no indication of it, and whenever someone would ask he would only grunt.

With weapons drawn, the three slowly step through the already open door and Daryl instantly heads to the living room while the other two sweep the place. They've discovered that the girl sleeps in the living room every time, and that is normally the only room she draws in.

Normally his attention is grabbed by the pictures on the walls first, but this time it was the massive pile of blood that sat on the floorboards. Daryl whistles as he crouches down to closer inspect the unsurvivable amount of blood.

"What's wron- oh crap!" Glenn says as he appears from around the corner, everyone's mind has gone to the worst upon seeing the obviously human blood before logically thinking that there is too much of it to of come from that little girl.

"It's not old. Few hours," the hunter rubs his coated fingers together, trying to pull all the information he can from it.

"Did someone drag the body away?" T-Dog points to the lines of blood being pulled away from the pile, there are also bloodstains in the shape of little boots walking away, the child must have unknowingly stepped in the liquid while leaving.

"Would the girl do that? She did bury Lori," Glenn suggests with his shoulders shrugged.

"Nah, look at her footprints. She didn't care this person was dyin'," Daryl points out.