A Broken World

Seventy-Two

By afternoon the bruise-colored light had sharpened into something clearer, honest and cold. The fence had stopped sounding like a throat about to cough; it just hummed the way metal hums when it’s tired and trying. Inside, the air kept that hospital heat—bleach and bodies and boiled coffee.

Hershel’s hands didn’t shake.

That was the thing my brain kept circling back to every time I stepped into D-Block. His hands didn’t shake. His shoulders slumped when he thought no one was looking, and the grooves around his eyes had deepened into little canyons, and there was an angry red stripe where the elastic on his mask had chewed him, but when he set a dose on his tongue depressor and slid it into a mouth too dry to swallow on its own—steady. When he squeezed the bulb on Glenn’s makeshift respirator—steady. When he pressed two fingers to the hollow under a jaw and counted—steady.

“Two more hours,” he murmured without looking up, as if my footsteps could be measured the way he measured pulses. “Then we try again.”

“What do you need?”

“Quiet,” he said. Then, softer, because he remembered I was a person and not a tray, “Water.”

I brought him both. I also brought him a chair. He looked at it like a challenge and then sat anyway, because grace is knowing when to accept a kindness.

Outside, the yard looked like it always did when it remembered to be a yard—patchy grass, hard light, too many shadows cast by the bars. Daryl had a strip of shirt knotted around his palm where the wrench bit him. He wasn’t bothering to tape it. He was bothering to walk the line like he could walk the tired out of it.

“Rick back?” I asked.

“Yeah.” He didn’t say the other part out loud—already done. He didn’t have to. The way his jaw set told me he’d gone past the first swing of anger and found the place where you put it down because bolts won’t turn themselves. “You talk to him?”

“Council.”

“Tyreese?”

“Didn’t hit anyone,” I said.

“Hell of a day when that’s a win.”

We worked until my arms turned to wire and my brain got small and useful. We kept the dead off the patched corner, and when the weight built too fast, Rick took the truck and pulled them into a slow, stupid parade toward the far trees. Carl posted with the .223 and made the kind of shots you aren’t supposed to be able to make when you have a face like his. Beth brought water and kept the kids in the admin wing with stories that were equal parts lullaby and lie. Sasha coughed in the doorway and refused to sit. Maggie didn’t leave Glenn except to fetch exactly what Hershel said, exactly when he said it.

Gears meshed. That’s how it felt for a few hours. Not peace. Just function.

It never holds.

The first wrong sound was tile. The thin, mean clatter of a tray hitting the floor too hard, skittering metal. Then a voice from the row—one of the nameless men we’d taken in late—punched with panic. “Help!”

I ran. So did Rick. So did Daryl until the math of inside vs. fence pinned him to the yard with his own oath.

At the quarantine door, the small window gave me a fast postcard—steam, motion, the messy ballet of people trying to be gentle while the world wasn’t. Hershel had his hand on a shoulder, pressing someone back onto a bunk. On the floor, a man I knew only by his cough stopped being a cough and became something else—arched, eyes blown, a rattle that choked itself and then dropped into the long, hungry quiet we all know too well.