A Broken World

Chapter Sixty-Six

We rolled through the outer gate with the truck coughing dust and grief. The yard looked the same as always—chain link, crude gardens, shirts on a line—but the air felt thinner without Zach’s dumb jokes bouncing off it. We killed the engine. No one moved.

Daryl hopped out first. His boots hit the ground like a sentence. He swung the tailgate down and started unloading in clipped motions. Glenn and Sasha mirrored him. Tyreese went straight for the gate team to report in. Bob stared at his own hands as if they weren’t attached. I climbed down last, and the metallic smell of the Big Spot! came back hard, like the roof dust was still in my lungs.

Rick jogged across the yard from the beans. He counted heads. He didn’t have to ask.

“Zach,” Glenn said, voice low.

Rick’s jaw flexed once. He nodded. “Get cleaned up. We’ll sort this.”

Daryl already had the small pack with the batteries and medicine, the one that would matter most right now, hugged to his chest like a promise. He glanced toward the admin wing. He didn’t look at me, but I moved.

“I’ll come,” I said.

He gave the smallest nod.

We took the side corridor where the light ran in thin bands across the cinderblock. Voices layered from the cell blocks—kids arguing about a board game, Carol telling someone to watch their fingers with the knife, Hershel’s slow, even tone discussing beans like they were blood pressure. The prison had learned how to sound alive. Today it sounded like a fragile act.

Beth’s room was four doors down from the laundry, a rectangle of soft fabric and harder truths. The flip calendar hung near the entrance like a shrine: DAYS WITHOUT AN ACCIDENT. She hadn’t touched it yet. The black stenciled numbers still read 30.

She turned when we stepped in. She was holding Judith, swaying a little out of habit more than need. Her face was open, expectant. She looked at Daryl first, then me, then back to him. It didn’t take long. She knew. Hope is an optimist; the apocalypse trained eyes faster.

Daryl set the pack down slowly. He took his hat off. He didn’t clear his throat. He just said it, voice low, as clean as a cut. “We lost him.”

Beth blinked once. Twice. The movement stopped in her hands and then started again, mechanical, like she had to tell her fingers what to do. Judith fussed, tiny complaint against the big world. Beth kissed her hair. She didn’t ask how. She didn’t ask if he suffered. Maybe she knew those answers already and didn’t want them reshaping the memory of a boy with a lopsided grin who flirted like it still mattered.

“He was kind to me,” she said, more to Judith than to us.

Daryl shifted, that old stiffness rolling off him like he’d been dipped in grief and it dried there. “He was.”

She handed Judith to the crib, smoothed a blanket edge, turned to the calendar. For a heartbeat she just watched it. Then she flipped the metal tabs one by one until the black zero hung in the window.

The sound was small. Final.

“I don’t fall apart anymore,” Beth said. Not angry. Not proud. Just inventory.

Daryl opened his mouth like he wanted to protest, like he hated what this place built out of kids, then closed it. She took a step forward and put her arms around him. He froze at the contact for half a second—fight or flight or something worse—then let it happen. His chin touched the top of her head. I looked at the calendar and then at the floor and let them be two people who needed that moment without an audience narrating it.

When Beth stepped back, her eyes were dry. “Thank you for telling me,” she said. To both of us, but it landed heavier on him.

“We brought batteries,” I said, because practical things are the raft when the water rises.