A Broken World

Sixty-Seven

The night never really ended. It just thinned until the dark looked like watered ink and the concrete remembered it was gray. I didn’t sleep. Too much rattled in the walls—fence wire humming, pipes ticking, a cough that kept trying to be quiet and failed.

When the hallway bulbs shivered awake, I swung down from the bunk and pulled my boots on without lacing them. Habit. If you have to run, you don’t gift the world your ankles. I checked the knife on my belt, the one Daryl pressed into my hand last night like a secret he wanted me to keep for myself. Weight matched memory. Good.

Carol was already up. She was always up. She had a calm I didn’t trust and needed anyway, a stillness that said she’d learned how to package fear and store it on a high shelf.

“Patrick?” I asked.

She nodded toward D-Block. “Hershel’s with him.”

“How bad?”

“Bad,” she said. No sparkle added, no comfort tacked on with a pin. “Fever’s chewing on him. He says his chest feels like someone’s sitting on it.”

I thought about the dripping I heard, the way his breath gurgled like the drain had decided to be lungs instead. “Rick?”

“In the office. Pretending to read.” She wiped the blade she’d set on the table and slid it into a pocket. “Kids eat in ten. I’ll take first watch at the fence after.”

“Swap with you at noon,” I said.

“Take care of your feet,” she said. “You try to act tough on torn heels and you’ll cry like a toddler.”

“I don’t cry.”

“Everyone does.” She watched my face. “We just ration it.”

The cafeteria smelled like oatmeal and bleach. Judith hiccupped against Beth’s shoulder and then decided life was tolerable again. Beth smiled without anything reaching her eyes. The flip calendar on her wall had read 0 when I left her last night. I didn’t know if she’d touched it again. She moved like she’d put herself on a setting—rock, feed, nod—and anything that exceeded the script would get dealt with later.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning,” she answered, and that was it. She ladled oatmeal for Lizzie and Mikey and a boy whose name I kept forgetting and hating myself for forgetting. Rick stood near the end of the line, hands in his pockets like if he touched the table he’d have to keep it from falling over.

He caught my eye. “Fence?”

“Singing again,” I said. “Southwest corner’s bowing more.”

“Daryl says the braces won’t hold if the dead keep stacking.”

“He’s right.”

Rick looked like a man who used to know what right bought you. He gave me a short nod. “We’ll pull them away. Truck’s ready. After the first sweep, we’ll put a crew on patching. Hershel says we need to think about quarantine.”

“Think about it or do it?”

“Do it,” he said, the word tasting like something old in his mouth.

I carried my bowl to a corner. Daryl slid onto the bench across from me a few seconds later with a cup of coffee so dark it looked like an experiment. His eyes did their once-over scan—me, the room, the exits, back to me. The cataloging never stopped. I used to think it meant he didn’t trust anyone. Now I think it means he trusts us enough to keep checking we’re still alive.

“You should eat more than that,” he said.

“You should sleep.”

“Yeah, well.” He blew on the coffee and frowned at it like it had insulted him. “Patrick?”