A Broken World

Seventy-One

Dawn came thin and dull, the kind of light that turns the prison yard the color of a bruise. The fence made its tired, metal-throat sound. Out beyond the tree line, the dead worked the air with their permanent patience. Inside, the world smelled like bleach and boiled coffee and fear that had learned to sit down.

I was on the catwalk when Rick crossed the yard, hatless, coat zipped, that quiet on him he wears when he’s decided a thing and hates it. Carol walked beside him with a canvas bag on her shoulder—rope coiled neat, a pair of work gloves hooked through a belt loop, knife sheathed flat along her thigh. No waffle, no wobble. She looked like what she is: a woman who has lived past several versions of herself and learned to be okay with the one that can get people through.

They stopped below me. Rick looked up. The bruise on his cheek had gone green around the edges. “You hold the line,” he said.

“We will,” I said.

Carol squinted against the gray. “If D-Block needs more hands—”

“Hershel says fewer hands,” I cut in. “Less air shared. We pass what he asks for. No more.”

Carol’s mouth ticked—approval or solidarity, hard to tell. She glanced toward the laundry corridor like she could see through cinderblock. “Keep the kids away from that room,” she said.

“We found it,” I said. “We stopped it.”

Her eyes came back to mine and held. Whatever sharp thing she’d been carrying behind them softened for a heartbeat. “Good.”

She turned like she was about to walk, then paused and fished something small from her pocket—an elastic hair band, sun-bleached and thin. She pressed it into my palm. “For Lizzie,” she said. “She’ll lose it and cry. Give it back to her anyway.”

I closed my fingers around a piece of nothing that suddenly felt like a promise. “I will.”

Rick didn’t say goodbyes. He did that thing where he lifts his chin and the rest of him settles around it like a decision. They crossed to the wagon. The engine coughed awake, tired but game. The gate rolled. They went out.

Daryl came up from the angle iron pile as the tailgate rattled over the trench. He watched the truck go with his face blanked down to weathered wood. “Where’s she headed?” he asked without asking.

“Black Ridge,” I said. “Food. Water.”

He looked at me. He didn’t need me to say the part where it wasn’t about cans or hose bibs. He saw it anyway.

“You shoulda told me,” he said at last. Not accusation. Not a wound. Just the simple want of a man who isn’t used to being kept on the other side of a wall anymore.

“I was asked not to,” I said. “And you have a fence to keep up.”

He breathed in like he wanted to argue and didn’t. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a fence.”

We went to our jobs because the day demanded it louder than our feelings did.

Hershel was already masked and goggled when I checked the quarantine row. He didn’t look like anyone I knew from the beans and books; he looked like a man who’d decided to outwait a storm by standing in it. Glenn’s chest moved under the cut-plastic respirator with a rhythm I didn’t trust, but it moved. Maggie held his hand and counted to herself the way people do when they can’t count on much. Sasha’s color had shifted a half tone away from chalk; small, stupid victories felt like trophies.

“You have two hours before the next doses,” Hershel said, his voice muffled. “Use them buying us more than two.”

“I’ll try,” I said.