A Broken World

Seventy-Six

The prison was quiet in the way a house gets quiet after someone slams a door and nobody knows if they’re allowed to speak again.

Night had fully settled. The towers were dark like Rick ordered. No lanterns in windows. No laughter. No noise that could travel. The only steady sound was the fence, a low metallic hum that never stopped. The dead pressed and drifted. Pressed and drifted. Their moans rose and fell like wind in a long pipe.

I should have been sleeping. Everyone should have.

But sleep didn’t come easy here, and lately it came with a price. You closed your eyes and your brain paid you back with blood. With screams. With faces you couldn’t fix.

I did another lap of the inside corridor out of habit. D-Block door. Laundry storage. Admin wing. Back again.

The quarantine door was shut. The small window showed movement in slices. Maggie’s silhouette. Glenn’s chest rising slow. Hershel’s shape in the adjoining cell, sitting upright like he didn’t know how to do anything else anymore. He shouldn’t have been on his feet at all, and still, he was.

I forced myself away from the glass.

I didn’t want to be the person who stood there watching while he coughed blood, unable to do anything but feel it.

So I went back toward the stairs and climbed to the tower.

Daryl was already up there.

He leaned on the rail, crossbow resting against the concrete, shoulders slightly rounded like he was holding in a whole day’s worth of words. The unlit cigarette was between his fingers again. He rolled it, stopped, rolled it again.

He didn’t look over when I stepped onto the platform. He didn’t need to.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he said.

“So are you.”

He huffed quietly. “Yeah.”

I took a spot beside him, close enough to share heat but not pressing. The night air was cold and damp. It cut through my shirt and found every sore muscle.

We stood in silence for a minute. The kind that didn’t feel awkward. The kind that felt like permission to breathe.

Below us, the yard was dark. The patchwork brace job on the southwest corner sat like a scar in the moonlight, angled steel and rebar lashed together with stubbornness. Beyond the fence, the woods were a wall. Somewhere out there, Michonne said people had been watching. Somewhere out there, Carol was walking alone with a pack and the memory of fire on her hands.

I kept my eyes on the tree line.

Daryl’s voice came low, rough. “You good?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m not falling apart.”

He nodded like that was the only answer he expected. “Same.”

I glanced at his hand. The cut in his palm had been wrapped earlier. The cloth was clean now. He must’ve re-done it himself, because of course he did. He didn’t like help unless it came disguised as something else.

“You rewrapped it,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“It still hurts.”

He looked over at me for the first time, eyes narrowed in mild annoyance. “You a doctor now?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m not blind.”

He rolled his cigarette between his fingers again. “Ain’t nothin’.”

“Everything hurts,” I said. “You just call it nothing so it doesn’t win.”