A Broken World

Sixty-Nine

The field rolled under us in lumpy green humps, the van bucking like it hated us and the idea both. Mud slapped the wheel wells. Tall grass clawed at the undercarriage with dry little fingers. Michonne kept the speed steady and the tires just below panic. Every rut was an argument. Every argument she won.

“Fence line in two minutes,” Daryl said, scanning ahead, the way his eyes measure distance like it owes him money.

“Gate?” I asked.

“Busted,” he said, already picking a gap that wasn’t there until he pointed to it.

We took the break in the fence at an angle that should’ve ripped the bumper off but didn’t. The van’s back end fishtailed once in the low ditch beyond, caught, jerked straight. On the far side, a gravel service road remembered it wanted to be a road and we let it. Trees tightened to the right, corn stubble to the left. The herd’s sound slid sideways behind us and didn’t let go, the low freight hum of a thousand throats with one idea.

“Next crossing takes us south,” Michonne said, reading the ruts, the hedgerows, that strange country map she keeps in the muscles of her forearms.

“Do it,” Daryl said.

Tyreese sat forward on the side bench. His hands were open on his knees, the skin across his knuckles glazed from how hard he’d held the hammer earlier. Every so often his fingers trembled like a small aftershock. He stared out the side window at the world like it might confess if he stared long enough.

“We’re getting back,” I said. It wasn’t comfort. It was math.

“I know,” he said. There wasn’t anything like belief in it. There wasn’t anything like disbelief either. Just a man in a room he didn’t like saying the door would open because doors do that.

Bob had both arms around the duffel with the meds, the straps looped through and around so many ways you’d need bolt cutters to separate them. Sweat tracked dust lines along his temples. He caught me looking. He didn’t drop his eyes.

“You did good,” I said. “We all saw it.”

His throat moved. “Thanks.”

The radio crackled again, coy and awful. “—ctuary… those who arrive—vive…”

Michonne twitched a corner of her mouth that might, on a good day, be mistaken for a smile. “Persistent.”

“It’s bait,” Daryl said.

“Everything is,” I said.

We cut back to asphalt that had once been a county road and now was just a suggestion with potholes. A line of maples arched over it, throwing a green tunnel ahead that made the air cooler and the world smaller. For a few seconds, if you ignored the dead volume humming off to our right like a generator you can’t find, it felt like some version of a Sunday drive. That hurt in a way I didn’t have a container for, so I set it down and didn’t touch it.

“We keep off seventy-five,” Daryl said. “Herd likes the big roads.”

“Copy.”

We crested a small rise. On the other side, parked catty-cornered into the ditch, a sedan with the hood up and its headlights still faintly, impossibly on.

“Gonna stop?” Bob asked.

“No,” Daryl and Michonne said together, and that was that.

A mile later, we slid past a billboard that had peeled down to an abstract of a smiling woman and the word “HOPE” under it in letters big enough to drown in. I did not look at Tyreese on purpose.