Panacea - {Daryl Dixon Fanfiction}

Day 180+ - A Walking Shadow

She held the baby boy close to her beating heart, hoping it might ease the pain in her chest. Her tears left streaks down her dirty face, but not one sob left her throat. She couldn't make a sound, or else he would start crying, too and that would attract them.

"This is the rapture." Richard had said to her. "This is judgement day."

The earth had given birth to the dead, as the Bible had said, but this was something different. She had seen it with her own eyes; her mother was taken by a heart attack when this all began, and no matter how hard her sister had beat on her chest, her heart would not restart. 

Not until she became one of them... 

She lurched forward and bit Hannah on the neck, ripping out her jugular. At first the sisters had sat there in shock. Hannah hadn't made a noise, because she couldn't. She just stared wide-eyed at her sister before aimlessly groping at the part of her neck that was missing. Richard had taken a kitchen knife and drove it through his wife's skull, watching his eldest step-daughter choke, a splutter before falling flat against the floor.

"Gabry." He said, seeing how the youngest was turning pale, her eyes still wides and locked on the dead bodies of her mother and sister. "Gabry, look at me." Her eyes flicked up at him. "That was not your mother."

She didn't utter a word, nor shed a tear as they buried them by the roadside as best they could. 

They had traveled all the way to West Virginia to meet up with Hannah's in-laws. Their trip had been in vain; her husband had never made it out of Atlanta, but still they wanted to pursue north, and now Gabry alone in unfamiliar territory. 

"Take this," Richard had put the pistol in her hand and left her no choice but to do so. "I'm not coming back out of those woods."

"Richard...Dad..." 

"I'll draw them off. You head back south. Highway eighty-one will take you as far as Knoxville, from there take forty until you see southbound seventy-five. That'll get you back to Georgia."

"But Richard-" Gabry had never driven that far by herself let alone walked. With no car and no atlas, and no parent to guide her any further, she was practically doomed. "Don't do this to me..."

"I can't make it back and you know that." His ankles were swollen, one of them more so from a sprain. He grabbed the back of her neck so that she would look him in the eyes. "You get down there and you find that Dixon boy. And don't you lose him, now, ya hear?" His eyes were welling with tears, and tears were already running down her chin. There was so much he wanted to say, but he couldn't find the words. "I'm sorry. I love you. Take care of Chaney."

That baby tried to suckle anything he put in his mouth. He was hungry. All Gabry had was solid food in her backpack, and if she didn't find him food soon, he'd begin to cry.

She was lucky a storm had rolled in that night, because the thunder drowned out the sound of Chaney's wailing. She had found herself a house on the side of the road, one that had already been ransacked, and locked herself in. She huddled in one of the bedrooms, pulling a book from the shelf to soothe the baby.

"Macbeth." She muttered through his crying. "If this doesn't put you to sleep, nothing will."

She flipped through the pages, finding one of the longer monologues: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day. To the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterdays have lighted fools a way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle! Life is but a walking shadow. A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound a fury, signifying nothing..." She read through it aloud once more, and then she read it silently to herself, and then she did not read it again. Perhaps Shakespeare had been a prophet. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow would come by, caring not if Gabry made it to see them. But for the time being, Chaney had stopped crying.

* * *

Tomorrow did come, and when it did Gabry was in for a rude start. Chaney was sprawled out next to her on a blanket, but there was no rise or fall in his chest that she could see. His head was lolled to one side, his spittle drying around his mouth.

"Chaney..." She coaxed him with a rub of his belly. "Chaney?" She began to panic. Not to mention the banging that had begun on the front door. "Chaney, please wake up."

 There was a crash downstairs, sounding like whomever was banging had finally broken through. "Hello?" It was a man's voice, followed by slow footsteps. More than just one had entered.

She didn't respond. Instead she continued to prod little Chaney until his little eyes scrunched together and his mouth opened and let out a blood curdling wail. She heard the thumping of boots coming down the hall, and she pulled out her gun. Her hands were shaking, her heart was racing, and all she wanted was for Chaney to be quiet. 

The door opened, and bursting through were- as she suspected- two men. They lowered their weapons upon seeing her curled up in the corner on a raggedy mattress with a baby crying at her side. She, however, held her weapon up and remembered what Daryl told her about exhaling as you shoot.

"You can lower that, now." The first said. He had a scruffy beard, peppered with gray. Gabry could picture him throwing back a few beers in a bar. The second was not so manly, only have the size of the burly man before her.

"Why would I do that?"

Sound tough, like Merle Dixon.

"We aren't here to harm you." He holstered his gun and held his hand up. "That your baby?" Chaney's wail had now turned into a pathetic squeak.

"He's with me and that's all that matters." Her voice was beginning to loose it's pitch. These men were not intimidated by the quivering of her gun, either.

"What's your name?"

"Dixon." She said hastily. "Hannah Dixon." 

"Well, Miss Dixon, there's plenty of food for the both of you across the road. We have a camp just off in the woods."

"You've got baby formula?"

"I sure we could find you some." 

She wanted to believe that good men still existed, but there was something about this character that made her feel like prey and he wasn't even trying to eat her brains out. He looked at her the way a cat may look at a mouse, playfully, and then it would be devoured. 

"What's your name?" She asked him, lowering the pistol to her side.

He held a hand out for her; "Call me Negan."