My Damaged Protector

Chapter Eight~Secrets

Voices are what pulled me from my sleep the next morning, Andrea talking to Daryl to be exact. I slowly cracked my eyes open to see her handing Daryl a book, one he flipped through quickly. "What? No pictures?" He joked.

"I'm so sorry. I feel like shit." Andrea apologized for shooting Daryl yesterday.

"You and me both. But hey, if you shoot me again, best pray I'm dead." His voice held a joking tone, but if you could see his eyes, you'd know he wasn't kidding around.

I sat up from the sleeping bag and sat cross legged beside Daryl. "How you feelin?"

"Better, I guess." He shrugged and proceeded to poke holes in the tent window with one of his bolts.

"Good. I'm gonna go change. You hungry?" I asked, sliding my boots back onto my feet. He merely shrugged his shoulders again as I left, going down to my tent and changing out of my dirty shirt and into a clean blue one.

Breakfast was being cooked over a fire in the middle of our camp set up, Carol being the chef yet again. "Good morning Carol, how are you?" I greeted the woman as I approached her.

"Just fine. How about you?" She handed me a plate with a smile.

"I'm good. Can I get two plates? One for Daryl?" She handed me another plate of food, biding me a good morning as I wondered back to Daryl's tent. He was still laid in his sleeping bag, but there were a few more holes in the window. I guess boredom had already creeped up on him. "Here ya go." I handed him his plate as I sat beside him.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, eating our food, when Rick's voice broke the silence. "Skyler. You comin' to target practice?" He shouted from the cars.

My eyes glanced to Daryl and I took his now empty plate. "Yea, I'll be there in a minute." I called back. "I'll see you later?" I made quick work of getting out of the tent, dropping the dirty plates in the bin to be washed and grabbing my weapons belt before going over to join Shane, Rick, Lori and Carl in one of the cars.

The drive to the shooting range was short and quiet. There were three cars with people from our group as well as Beth, Hershel's youngest, Patricia, his wife, and Jimmy, Beth's boyfriend. When we stopped, I got out with Carl, following behind the young boy to see him watching how his dad moved around the guns. "You dad teaching you, bud?"

"Nah. Shane is." He said, running off to Shane with a large smile. We were all sent to carefully set up some glass bottles on a fence before lining up to take aim.

Rick came over to me and handed my gun back to me. "Keep your feet shoulder with apart and your shoulders lined up with them." He instructed, motioning to my feet. I nodded and followed his directions. "Raise your gun with both hands and breath out when you fire." Yet again, I followed his instructions and took a deep breath, releasing it as I squeezed the trigger, shattering a fairly close blue bottle. "Good. Now aim for something a bit farther away." He had began to move down the line, taking his time to properly show Hershel's people how to hold and fire a gun.

I moved to a further bottle and mimicked my earlier movements. The bottle shattered like the first one and I moved to another. Bottle after bottle shattered as more and more of us got used to the feeling of shooting, and within the day, we were all able to hit bottles with near perfection.

On the ride back, I opted to sit in the bed of the truck T had brought Carol and Andrea in, watching the farm as we drove through. Birds flew overhead as we drove, and I couldn't help but think of how free those animals were. They didn't have to worry about things like food or water, things like shelter were everywhere, and they didn't need to worry about the dead that roamed the earth.