Chapter Text
Chapter Twenty-Four: Mid to Late September, Year 2
Is anyone among you sick? Let them call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise them up. James, 5:14-15.
Daryl and Merle didn't so much set a trap as they simply spent a few nights hanging around the chicken coop and the garden. It meant Beth and Glenn ended up duty partners in the meantime, which wasn't unpleasant at all. Glenn told her stories about wild things he saw as a pizza delivery boy before Atlanta fell. Beth told him childhood stories about Maggie, intentionally picking the ones she thought might be most incriminating in any way.
Nothing came from those nights. The Dixon brothers decided to pull back and create a false sense of safety. Clearly, whoever this thief was, they were carefully watching the farm.
Or maybe they just didn't have any needs at the time.
Either way, Beth knew one thing: she hoped the thief hadn't perished. Not because she was afraid of her theory being wrong, but because she had come to have a soft spot for this imagined person.
The ingenuity to bypass the fence, the bravery to breach the farm, the desperation that drove them to steal.
If she was right, and this was a person in need, she would rather they were identified and assisted rather than taken out of this world.
Beth crossed September 18th off her calendar with no small trepidation. Today was the day she and T-Dog would collect the fall flow from the beehives. Carl reassured her upwards of one hundred times that she would be fine while they saw to the morning chores. Though she smiled at him in appreciation, the truth was that it did little to calm her nerves.
"Ready?" T-Dog asked as he handed her a pair of thick gloves. There was only one protective jumpsuit, which fit neither of them. They made do with wearing long pants tucked snugly into boots and long sleeves. The gloves, at least, seemed pretty universal. Beth's were roomy but T-Dog's seemed to fit well.
"Absolutely not." Beth tucked her gloves into her back pocket and tied a bandana firmly in place at the back of her head. It was tight over the bridge of her nose and, just to be safe, she tucked the tail into the crew neck of her long sleeve t-shirt. "Let's get it over with."
The smoking was the easy part. It didn't take long at all to get the bees eased into the fugue state a good smoke brought them. T-Dog pulled a frame out of the closest hive and held it at arm's length over the massive soup pot they were using to collect the honeycomb. Thankfully, no sleepy bees lingered on the comb, and Beth was able to scrape the frame with the capping knife immediately.
They worked in tandem this way, pulling frames, dislodging bees when needed, cutting the comb free of the mesh. A few bees, drunk and bumbling on smoke, flew in dizzying circles around them. These bees posed no threat, though, just trying to get home to their hives. They left Beth and T-Dog be and the two honey collectors returned the favor.
Soon enough, they had a full pot of honeycomb, and the bee frames were clean and ready for the winter stock to be made.
Grinning behind her bandana, Beth lifted both her hands for a double high-five. T-Dog's gloves smacked against hers in victory. "See? Not half as bad as you thought," he told her, smiling wide.
God, but it felt nice to be good at something in this world. She would be riding the high of this success for days, she knew.
After the honey was strained and the comb set aside to be used in candle making, Beth went to bed that night feeling better about the world and her place in it since the apocalypse started. She pulled on one of Jimmy's old shirts, blew out the candle sitting on her desk, and slipped into bed feeling... hopeful.
It was so foreign that she had to sit with it a moment.
Things had gone wrong, and they had lost people, yes, but things had gone right, too. She had done things right.
Beth was the one who pulled Carl from the lake. She was the first to act when Dale's walker was set on the farm. Daddy got the most credit for Judith, of course, but Beth knew she played a part in the baby's safe arrival, too. And when Rick passed Carl to her, bleeding and pale, there hadn't been a second thought about taking him.
There were smaller things, too. The animals. Helping cook. Washing dishes. Night shifts with Judith, patrol with Daryl. And now, the honey.
I can do things, she realized. I can.
Even if people—meaning Daddy and Maggie—didn't always listen to her. Rick trusted her with his children. Patricia and Carol called her name first to help with things. Glenn didn't question her joining the last scouting mission. T-Dog thought she was capable. Merle thought she was funny.
Daryl listened to her.
For someone who had spent much of her life inside the constraints of a box labeled 'sensitive youngest daughter' and 'annoying little sister', it was quite the revelation. Beth was fairly buzzing with it as she laid in her bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Maybe she wasn't made for this world, not the way the Dixons clearly were. And maybe it had taken her longer to adapt to it, longer than it had taken Maggie, certainly.
She was still here, regardless. There was a proper cemetery in her backyard but Beth's name wasn't on any of those grave markers. That had to speak for something.
It was that idea, that she was still around for a reason, wove itself through her mind as she drifted to sleep.
For the first time in a long time, she slept through the night with no nightmares. She opened her eyes just before sun up, her internal clock still as true as ever, and rose unburdened.
Beth pulled on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, wrapping her old chore jacket around her, and hastily braided her hair. By the time she descended the stairs, she found Carl dressed and waiting for her at the base.
"Ready for the day?" She asked, flicking the brim of his hat playfully. He batted her hand away and nodded.
"I never thought much about living on a farm before," he told her as they stepped out into the rosy, dawn light, "but I like it here."
"Yeah," Beth agreed with an easy smile. "Me, too."
When another handful of days passed with no sign of their elusive thief, Daryl and Merle decided to take the hunt outside the fence. Both were skilled animal trackers; wouldn't a human be much the same?
"Easier," Merle insisted, all confidence, arms crossed carefully over his chest so as not to cut himself with his knife. "People make more dumb mistakes than animals."
"I would prefer they come back alive, unlike the animals you bring us," Daddy cautioned gently. "I'd like to talk to this person. They're obviously hurting for resources, and we have an empty camper."
Leaving the farm had its own sort of ritual. They tended to group together in the living room, a pre-emptive vigil should the adventurers not return. Beth stood behind the armchair, leaning on her elbows. She was making faces at Judith while Carl held her. At three months old, Judith smiled often, but no one had yet gotten a laugh out of the baby. It had become a competition among the farm residents to see who could win the title.
“Yeah,” Merle agreed while Beth widened her eyes as far as they could go for Judith’s entertainment, “not a lot of real estate left in the farmhouse, huh? Nobody else got kids and there’s only one farmer’s daughter left to snatch up.”
He was teasing, but Beth still raised her head to send him a sharp glare and her hand to flip him off. Quickly, though, before Daddy noticed or before Carl could see. Merle saw, though, and annoyingly, he grinned. She shouldn’t have expected anything less.
“Sorry,” Daddy said, though he didn’t sound it at all, “Beth’s the youngest, she doesn’t know how to share a room.”
The thing with Merle Dixon, she was learning, is that he was the textbook definition of a pest. Beth could imagine he had once been a schoolyard bully, those traits never maturing in a positive manner, so that he became an adult who found entertainment in getting emotional rises out of people. If you didn’t give Merle the rise he was seeking, he moved on.
T-Dog handled the man in much the same way. He never rose to the discriminatory undertones of Merle’s jokes. As a result, he quickly moved on to another target.
“Be safe out there,” Rick said from where he leaned in the doorway to the kitchen. Those had become the magic words that ended one of these little rituals. The group began dispersing. Rick moved to join his children, Beth headed for the stairs, Maggie and Glenn began walking toward the back of the house while holding hands, Patricia and Carol ducked back into the kitchen. Daddy went through the front door with the Dixon brothers to complete the final aspect of the ritual: walking those venturing out to the gate.
Upstairs, in her bedroom, Beth grabbed her guitar and maneuvered herself, the instrument, and Arnie’s old chords book out the window. She nearly had Jolene down, but she wanted to be able to play it perfectly before she moved on to another song.
There was a soft, mild breeze blowing. It tugged at the loose tendrils of her braid so that Beth had to tuck them behind her ears. She had to put a foot on the chord book, too, to keep it from flying off the roof. Once settled, she fitted the guitar under her arm and began to strum at the strings. A few tuning adjustments had to be made and then she was ready to play.
Beth must have improved since first picking up the guitar. Below her, Glenn paused in his work weeding the garden and helping Maggie ready autumn seeds to croon, off-tune, “Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jooooooleeeeeeene!”
Maggie placed her gloved hands over her heart and picked up the song from him, “I’m beggin’ of you, please don’t take my maaaaaan.”
She could play and sing at the same time when her instrument was the piano. Beth wasn’t quite there with the guitar yet, still having to think about the chords as she played them. She smiled instead at Maggie and Glenn’s antics as they continued crooning the song to each other as they worked in the garden.
Shane Walsh was dead and buried and, for the moment, Philip Blake was far away and nonconsequential. The farm felt bright as the early fall sunshine. Even the thief, whoever they might be, couldn’t cast a shadow.
“Did y’all find anything out there?” Beth asked the same evening. She held three lengths of cord in her hand, keeping them still while Daryl braided them into rope. The cords were strung between their lawn chairs like powerlines.
“Just walkers.” He had his head bent over his work. The sun was setting earlier, now, and they had only the light thrown by the little firepit to work by. Beth watched the firelight burnish the dark tones of his brown hair bronze and gold.
“A lot?” She asked, tamping down the sudden wave of anxiety that crested within her. Aside from Dale, Beth had yet to confront a walker. The idea of them grouping together into a single-minded, killing horde, as Glenn had described them doing in the city, was something that Beth feared greatly.
“Nah, just two.” His fingers were nimble and quick—Jack jumped over the candlestick, her mind interrupted—as they went about their plaiting. When the brothers returned from their tracking efforts, Daryl had been coated in dirt. They were only clean now because Carol refused to give him a plate at supper until he scrubbed the grime away. “They were tied to a tree.”
“Like, they died there? How awful.” The flash of pity she felt for these nameless, faceless, dead things reminded Beth that Dale had been the exception, not the rule. Walkers and people were still very much interchangeable in her mind. Only instinct had spurred her to shoot Dale.
Sentimentality would have allowed him to continue roaming the earth in that form.
“They didn’t die there.” Daryl reached the end of the cord. While Beth still held her side, he brought his close enough to the flames to seal his end. “Someone tied ’em there the same way you would tie a horse. They were missin’ their arms and bottom jaws. Merle walked clear up to one of ’em and looked it in the eye.”
He held his hand out for Beth’s end of the cord. She laid it there as she asked, “They didn’t try to attack y’all?”
Daryl shook his head. “Reckon they were as tame as you can make a walker be.”
“Did y’all kill them?”
There was a pause during which Daryl sealed the other side of the cord rope and looked up to meet her eye before answering. “No. Merle wanted to. I talked him out of it.”
“Really?” Daryl wagged the end of the rope at her. Beth took hold and braced her arm. She knew he would tug on the rope, already wrapped around his forearm, to see if the sealing held. “Why?”
“Them walkers meant somethin’ to someone. Maybe like the barn y’all had.” Daryl shrugged as if he hadn’t said something incredibly considerate. “If they belong to our thief, no reason to stir up bad blood before we even meet the guy.”
There had been apologies from the others, of course. Regret that Shane would never offer for the desecration of the walker barn. Really, the only sincere condolences had been attached to Jimmy, the sole person lost that day who had been alive at the time of the barn falling. Carol was the most understanding, but then, her daughter had been in the barn with the others.
This, though. This was true understanding of the reason why the barn existed in the first place. It touched Beth’s heart more than she ever could have put into words, so she didn’t use any. She simply leaned over and wrapped her arms around Daryl’s neck, hugging him tight for a moment.
The evidence of his surprise at her affection came in the form of tense shoulders. Her embrace was too quick for him to even begin raising his own arms, not that Beth expected him to, considering she sprung it on him. Daryl looked just a little flustered when she withdrew, which only made Beth’s smile widen.
Had one of the young pigs not slipped between their legs and escaped the pen, they never would have found her.
"Dammit," Beth swore when she failed to keep the animal contained with her foot like she usually did.
"I'll get him," Carl said immediately, turning on his heel. Though she was sure he would feel that sprint later, she didn't stop him. He was becoming more and more frustrated when anyone coddled him post-gunshot.
"The rest of you are getting a treat later," she told the other pigs with their curly, wagging tails and excited grunts. They followed her like ducklings follow their mother to the trough. Grunts became squeals as they crowded one another and the slops began to flow.
"Beth!" Carl was shouting from somewhere to the left of her. "Come here! Hurry!"
Figuring the pig was giving him more trouble than he anticipated, Beth slung the handle of the slop bucket on a fence post and jogged toward the sound of his voice. The pig, however, was in Carl's arms, and he was standing at the shoulder of a stranger lying prone on the ground.
The stranger was a woman and, even in this compromising position, she was beautiful. Her lashes were dark and naturally curled upward, her full, parted lips had the most perfect Cupid's bow Beth had ever seen, and though her skin was currently tinged a concerning gray, it wasn't a stretch of the imagination at all to imagine the warmth and glow the deep tone must carry in health. All around her head, her dreadlocks fanned around her. The stained pink and purple striped bandana she wore tied around her head was dark with sweat.
And she was wearing Maggie's clothes.
Beth looked over her shoulder. This far out on the farm, the big house was quite the stretch. The little neighborhood of campers was much, much closer. "Go put the pig up and then go get T-Dog or Daryl, whoever opens their door first. I'll stay with her, but she's too big for the two of us to carry."
Which was only half-true. Beth thought she could handle holding half the woman’s weight—she was taller, yes, but a touch too thin. She didn’t want to overburden Carl, who, despite his best efforts to argue otherwise, was very much still healing.
"Okay," Carl agreed, too-big hat bobbing when he nodded his head. While he set off on his task, Beth continued to study the stranger.
Despite the pallor in her face, Beth didn't think she was dead. Or, if she was, it was recent and they were lucky she hadn't turned. Crouching beside her, Beth set a tentative hand against the woman's soft cheek and found it burning with fever. This close, she could see the faint rise and fall of her chest.
Beth moved her hand lower, pressing her fingertips into the side of her neck. There was a pulse, but faint. The handle of a sword was visible over her shoulder. Beth didn't imagine that would feel good against her spine, but the woman was clearly unaware of it.
"She dead?" Daryl asked from above and behind her.
"No, but she's not very alive, either. Could you carry her to the house?"
"Yeah." He came around to the woman's other side. Daryl worked the strap that cut across her torso free, leaving the sword on the ground after he slid his arms beneath her and lifted her. "Could you get that? Carl and T-Dog are gettin' your father and Rick."
The sheath was narrow, the sword much lighter than she would have thought. Beth imagined the sword inside was thin and wickedly sharp. It must be, for this woman to have been surviving for who knew how long presumably on her own.
They walked together, Beth with the sword and Daryl with the stranger, across the farm and up the porch steps. She opened the door for him and followed him inside the sunny living room.
Carl was absent, likely in his bedroom with Judith, but Daddy and Rick were waiting. "Lay her on the couch," Daddy instructed her.
"She's got a really high fever," Beth told her father, fiddling with the woman's sword. "And her pulse is faint, her breathing is shallow."
He smiled his thanks at her frontloading of the situation before doing his own assessment. Daddy prodded at the woman’s neck, too, though his lingered, pressed further, obviously checking for more than the weak pulse Beth found. Gently, Daddy placed a thumb on the woman’s closed left eye and lifted the lid. The iris was so dark that Daddy had to lean close to check her pupil.
There was no need of proximity to see the broken blood vessels staining the whites of her eye red. “Beth, honey, go get my kit, please.”
If anyone still had it in them to argue that humans weren’t animals, too, Beth would point them to her daddy’s medical kit. Some pieces were specific for the human anatomy, scavenged from the rural clinic some thirty or so miles from the farm. Most of the pieces, though, were from his veterinary practice.
The stethoscope he removed from the kit once Beth returned to the living room, for example. How many times had she seen it pressed to the chests and bellies of horses, cows, pigs? Now it was pressed to the woman’s sternum as Daddy listened intently to heart and lungs. That she was sick was no question, but the silent with what? hung over all of them. Daddy lingered, listening, before commenting, “She’s got some fluid in her lungs.”
“How bad is it?” Rick asked. He stood behind the couch, arms crossed over his chest, gazing down at the woman.
“I can’t tell without an x-ray, which we don’t have.” Beth watched as Daddy took the woman’s hand in his and carefully pinched the skin on the back. It stayed peaked, speaking to dehydration on top of everything else. “Beth, go see if the nebulizer’s batteries still work. If they do, I need five milligrams of nitroglycerine.”
“Okay.” She was the only one given direction. With no way to contribute, Daryl and Rick drifted toward one another. They began talking in low tones while Beth headed to the hall closet. Shawn used to get the worst, hacking coughs any time he was sick; the nebulizer was the only comfort he had during such spells. For that reason, it was always loaded with batteries, and to Beth’s relief, there was still life in them. The machine hummed to life in her hands when she flicked the button.
All the medication was kept in Daddy’s office. She knew which shelf held the liquid medication and she quickly found the nitroglycerine. The vial came with her and she set about loading the liquid. “Think this will help?”
“I hope so. I didn’t want to risk giving her a diuretic when she’s already dehydrated. A vasodilator should help just fine, if the pulmonary edema isn’t too advanced. I wish she could take it orally, but we’ll have to take our chances with nebulizing it.” Daddy gently lifted the woman’s head while Beth slipped the straps for the nebulizer mask into place.
Beth kept time for Daddy on the clock while he wrote down what vitals he could: the woman’s heartrate, the temperature read from an old, mercury thermometer. When fifteen minutes had passed, they removed the nebulizer mask. It was hard to tell, but Beth liked to think she was breathing more easily afterward.
Rick and Daryl were still in the room, their attention split between the events occurring in the living room and watching the farm through the front windows. Addressing Rick, Daddy asked, “Is there anything in that camper you or the kids need?”
“No, it’s all been cleared out,” Rick answered, eyes sliding back to the prone woman.
“Good. I want her moved there, if you don’t mind carrying her again, Daryl. Could you get the windows open and sanitize this room, baby?” Daddy asked, to which Beth nodded. “I can’t say for certain what she’s sick with, or even make an educated guess, without her conscious. We’ll get her set up in the camper to minimize risk of Judith contracting whatever it is.”
So, a new member of the hodge-podge farm community was added to the number. This one had no name and wore Maggie’s clothes, but her boots were her own. At least, they were unfamiliar to Beth as she loosened the laces and slipped them from her feet. She set the boots beside the bed that had once been Rick and Lori’s, where the woman now rested. Then she balanced the sword in the corner, in clear sight of the bed.
“Think that’s a good idea?” Daryl asked, nodding to the corner. Beth shrugged.
“If she wanted to kill us, she would have already. That’s Maggie’s missing shirt and pants she’s wearing. She’s known where we are and she’s been breaching the fence for at least a month.” Beth didn’t have to accompany Daryl to the camper, she knew that, but she was beginning to feel a responsibility for the woman. Maybe it was because Carl found her. Maybe it was because she had already been feeling sympathetic toward the cunning stranger before she ever saw her face.
“Reckon you’re right,” Daryl conceded. Now when he nodded, it was toward the door. He waited for Beth to leave the bedroom first, shutting the door behind them. Outside, the September sky was that unique, intense blue of an autumn day. No clouds marred the azure expanse and the trees that lined the horizon were just beginning to turn red and gold.
“Do you think those walkers were hers?” Beth asked, eyeing those trees and their shifting leaves. Daryl made a noise of agreement, something between a hum and a grunt, which left her smirking to herself. Man of few words. So unlike his gregarious brother, who had already crafted nonsense backstories for the walkers in the woods. According to Merle, they were the dead lovers of the thief. ‘They were more successful juggling two guys than Lori was’. “I wonder who they were… before.”
“Maybe she’ll tell us if she lives.”
“Maybe.”
Their new patient was quiet, manageable. A surprise, sure, but not enough of one to disrupt the rhythm of the farm for long. Beth broke off from Daryl to finish the chores she and Carl had abandoned after discovering the woman. The chickens needed fed, and once they were, she returned to the house to help Daddy gather the supplies for the woman’s care.
“Patricia offered to nurse the poor lady,” Daddy told her as she set the nebulizer and nitroglycerine in an old, plastic tub along with various other supplies. Acetaminophen and ibuprofen, for the fever, along with one of the mortar and pestle sets from the kitchen. Until she was conscious, Patricia would need to crush the medication and combine it with water to pour down the woman’s throat. Beth added in a jar of honey, one of Otis’ rather than the newer stuff she and T-Dog managed to harvest, and a jar of bone broth.
“That was nice of her,” Beth commented, checking over her collection with the list Daddy wrote out for her. The backside of the paper had care instructions for Patricia.
“I think she needs this as much as our guest does,” Daddy admitted. “She’s been trying to fill her days as much as possible since Otis passed.”
“Still, I hope she doesn’t have to play nurse for too long.” With her haul completed, Beth lifted the tub and tucked it under her arm. “It would be nice to have another face around the farm, if our guest wants to stay.”
Whoever they were, the walkers found themselves—not of their own volition—outside the gate. They were tied there, as they once were to the tree, waiting for their keeper to wake from her fugue. Rick only agreed when Daddy proposed that Daryl and Merle retrieve the walkers because he thought they would be a good deterrent. Now that she had the opportunity to see them up close, Beth wasn’t so sure.
“I guess they don’t have to eat, then, huh?” She asked Glenn, who was as curious as she was. They stood together inside the gate, watching the tethered walkers shuffle their feet and bump off one another. Daryl and Merle had tied their ropes so that they only had a very short range of motion and couldn’t bounce off the electric fence.
“I don’t think they could if they wanted to, missing their bottom jaws like that. She was smart to take their arms off, too.” Glenn curved his hands into menacing claws and swiped playfully at Beth. She giggled and batted his hand away. “Scratches from walkers are just as bad as the bites.”
For three days now, their guest had laid burning in her sickbed. The fever was persistent, yes, but her swallow reflex remained in place. Honeyed water and bone broth sustained her well enough. She was so dehydrated that, though Daddy had managed to piece the supplies together for a catheter while she remained unconscious, it hadn’t yet been filled. Daddy remained concerned about that, of course, but he was taking heart in the fact the nitroglycerine was taking effect. When he checked her lungs, Daddy said her breathing was improving, the liquid in her lungs dissipating.
“How awful that would have been, to drown in your own lungs while being that dehydrated.”
“I’d like to see Blake try to visit again with our new guards.” Not that Blake had tried, but still. There had been radio silence from Woodbury since Blake announced his presence and the existence of his community. Beth was thankful for this peace, but she put no stock in it continuing. It would end, eventually. It always would. That was the way of the world now.
“I don’t know, they’re not very vicious. Daryl and Merle swat them away like flies when they go out to hunt.” The walkers became tangled in one another. Had they had their lower jaws, perhaps they would have been taking bites out of each other’s faces. As it was, they were in a sort of stalemate, each trying to walk int the opposite direction and neither having the wherewithal to think of moving out of the other’s way.
“Unstoppable wind, immovable mountain,” Beth murmured with a wave of her hand, recalling an old paradox one of her English teachers had once posed to her class.
“Hey, Wind!” Glenn shouted at the walkers, drawing the attention of the nearest one enough for him to alter his path. He began continuously walking into the gate instead of into his companion. “You gotta pay attention. It’s rude to block Mountain’s way.”
Beth laughed, which only served to catch Mountain’s attention. The walkers ended up tangled once more, slamming into each other and the gate in turn. These walkers hardly seemed as if they were ever human, dismembered and decayed as they were. Though Beth felt a little guilty teasing them, though neither the walkers nor their ill keeper would ever know, she didn’t see them in the same light she had her reanimated family or even Dale.
She wasn’t sure if that could be chalked up to unfamiliarity or their degraded state, and, to be honest, she didn’t much want to think of it. Either way, the result was the same: she viewed the walkers before her as more creature than person.
She really didn’t want to know that Daddy would think of that.
There wasn’t much time to mull over the notion. Just as their voices had captured the notice of Wind and Mountain, a sudden shriek had Glenn and Beth turning on their heels.
“Oh, shit!” Glenn cussed, reaching for the gun holstered on his thigh. Beth’s mind took a moment to catch up, to make sense of the horrific scene before her. Patricia, mild and motherly, was attacking Carol, her friend. As Patricia’s hands scrambled for purchase, grabbing at Carol’s clothes and skin alike, Glenn sprinted forward.
Beth watched, stricken to immobility with Wind and Mountain grunting at her back, as Glenn took hold of Patricia’s shoulder and yanked her away from Carol. T-Dog had materialized from somewhere, pausing for only a moment to assess Carol’s state before moving to put himself between her and Glenn and Patricia.
Or, more accurately, Glenn and the walker Patricia had become. Blood streamed from every orifice on Patricia’s face. Gore streamed down her cheeks like tears, from her nose and into her mouth and falling over the ridge of her chin like a bright red waterfall. And her eyes… the jaundiced, unfocused yellow, unnatural and awful, latching onto Glenn as T-Dog drew a sobbing Carol away.
Glenn was backtracking, trying to get space between him and Patricia. When he had just enough, he angled his gun under her stained chin and pulled the trigger. More ichor shot skyward as Patricia’s short, second life was ended.
Only when the aftereffect of the gunshot was ringing in her ears and Patricia was truly dead on the ground did Beth remember how to make her legs work. She walked forward until she was just beside Glenn, peering down at the bloody, pale body at their feet. “What the hell happened?!”
The answer to Glenn’s incredulous question wouldn’t come for more than an hour. Not until after Daddy had come to assess Patricia’s corpse and Glenn, thinking of their sick patient before any of the others, went inside the camper to confirm she still lived.
“It’s the illness,” Daddy surmised, still crouched over Patricia’s body. “It’s not common, of course, but exceedingly high fevers can cause hemorrhaging. I warned Patricia that she might get sick, but I never imagined this…”
No one could have.
When Carol noticed that Patricia hadn’t been out of the camper since the day before, she went to check on her. Patricia had been sleeping on the little couch inside the camper, close to the woman’s bedroom, with the door shut between them. That had been a precaution to keep Patricia safe, not the other way around, should the woman pass and turn while Patricia slept.
Only, the opposite happened. It was easy to see that through the close proximity of treatment, Patricia contracted whatever sickness had brought down their guest, and quickly succumbed to it. “That fluid in her lungs,” Daddy continued, nodding toward the camper, “must have been blood.”
“How could it have happened so fast?” Beth asked, unable to tear her eyes away from the ragged, gaping hole in the crown of Patricia’s head. Blood pooled beneath and around her head like a macabre pillow.
“Well, Patricia was a bit older than our guest,” Daddy began explaining, though Beth was only half-listening. She kept thinking, was that what Jimmy’s head looked like after I shot him? It was a persistent question, circling her head as she tucked a hand under the sleeve of her sweatshirt to run her fingers over the scars hidden there. “That could be one factor. With no one to stop the fever from spiking…”
There were more pressing matters than either their dead friend or their patient, still held in the limbo of the sickness she carried. “Hey, Mr. Greene, sorry to interrupt,” T-Dog was apologizing, stopping just on the other side of Patricia, his voice soft, “but when Carol was trying to get Patty off her, she ended up getting scratched on the arm.”
That certainly took precedence over Patricia, who was beyond help. Daddy was rising instantly, telling T-Dog to bring Carol to the house so he could sanitize her wounds. Scratches were not necessarily the death sentence a bite could be, not if you cleaned it well and avoided infection, but there was no guarantee to it.
Beth found herself standing vigil, still worrying at her scars, when Glenn returned with a teary-eyed Maggie in tow. “We’ll bury her beside Otis,” he said, by way of comfort.
“No,” Maggie said at the same time Beth argued, “We can’t.”
“What do you mean?” Glenn asked, brow furrowed beneath the brim of his baseball cap. “We bury our own.”
“We can’t bury Patricia. We don’t know what she’s sick with.”
Beth nodded along with Maggie. “We wouldn’t butcher a sick animal.”
“She’s not an animal, she’s a person,” Glenn asserted, cheeks reddening.
“She was sick,” Beth insisted, “and we don’t know if it will stay in the ground with her. We’re already all infected with one virus, we don’t need another.”
“She would understand,” Maggie continued. She crouched beside Patricia as she said it, gently closing her sightless eyes for her.
“What are we supposed to do, just toss her in the woods?”
“No, because then animals would get at her, which is both awful and an infection risk. What good would that do if it ends with Daryl and Merle bringing back tainted meat?”
Glenn shook his head, though Beth thought it was more in denial of the facts of the matter than at her explanation.
“We’ll have to burn her,” Maggie said, sounding none too pleased with the prospect herself. “That’s the only thing that would kill the virus, too.”
“We burn walkers, not people.” The fight had gone out of Glenn’s voice and left behind petulance.
“We’ll be burying a lot more if we don’t burn her. Daddy will agree.”
“I’m gonna go talk to Rick.” Usually, the farm residents and the survivor camp members felt entirely blended. Daddy and Rick made decisions together. But Patricia had wedged a crack in this collaboration with her death. Beth and Maggie watched Glenn jog toward the house.
“We can take her ring,” Beth said, “ and bury it in Otis’s grave. They can still be together.”
“Sweet of you.” Maggie was still crouched. She took Patricia’s hand and wriggled her wedding band, gold and glinting in the sunlight, from her finger. It was passed from sister to sister and was tucked away safely in Beth’s pocket.
While Glenn went into the house, T-Dog returned, a sheet in his hands. He walked solemnly to the three of them. “We should give her the decency of cover, at least, while things are settling.”
An old, faded floral bedsheet became Patricia’s shroud. “Either of you know when our hunting crew will be back?”
Maggie looked at the sky. The sun was nearly to its midpoint. “Should be soon. They usually bring game back around noon, to give themselves time to skin it, and Carol time to cook it for supper.”
“Alright. Come on, then, your father wants the two of you inside.” Beth didn’t like leaving Patricia out there alone, dead or not, but she followed Maggie all the same. Her stomach was in knots as they climbed the porch steps. God, but she hoped it wouldn’t come to an argument. Things had been working so smoothly since Shane was gone.
In the living room, Carol sat in one of the armchairs, her bandaged forearm cradled in her lap. Daddy and Rick were standing, listening to Glenn as he pled his case for entombing Patricia in the ever-growing graveyard. Carl and Judith were nowhere to be seen. Only Beth knew how frustrated Carl was to be continually barred from these discussions under the illusion of caring for Judith.
Beth made a mental note to fill him in when she could.
“I hear you, and I get it, but we can’t,” Rick said when Glenn finished his spiel. “Sentimentality doesn’t trump science, and we can’t be too careful. The risk is too big.”
Glenn’s shoulders slumped as he deflated under Rick’s siding with logic. She wished it could be different, but then, she had felt that way a lot within the past two-ish years, and wishing hadn’t done her any good yet. It certainly wasn’t going to help Patricia any.
“Alright,” Glenn conceded, his voice gone small. Rick reached out and squeezed his shoulder in consolation.
“I’m sorry, son,” Hershel tacked on. “Patricia used to help out with the veterinary work. She would understand, I promise.”
There was hardly time to waste, either. Glenn and T-Dog set right to work collecting enough wood to feed the fire that would become Patricia’s funeral pyre. They didn’t take her far, only out to the gravel road that ran in front of the farm. Fire couldn’t be risked, either.
Though she couldn’t be buried, the same funeral rites that the others had gotten stood for Patricia, too. Daddy still read aloud from the Bible. Ecclesiastes 3:1-22, to be exact. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven…
Daryl and Merle returned around line seven: a time to rend and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. The Dixon brothers were silent as they sidled up to the little congregation of mourners watching the flames lick at Patricia’s shrouded body.
But the business wasn’t done even as the fire caught and blazed. Burning bodies stunk. Rick offered to stay with the fire, feeding it logs as it did its job. Daddy led the rest of them back inside the gate, past the grumbling but harmless forms of Wind and Mountain, but not into the house. Carl and Judith were sent back inside but all others were congregated on the porch.
“I know no one’s going to like this much,” Daddy began, gaze flicking around the group, pausing on a few in particular, “but I think it would be best if a quarantine was put in place for a few days to make sure no one else has contracted the illness.”
“All of us?” Maggie asked, always ready to be the first voice to argue.
“Those who have had direct contact,” Daddy amended. “Myself, Beth, Daryl, Glenn, Carol. We’ve all either touched our patient or Patricia. Carl didn’t touch her when y’all found her the other morning, did he?”
“No,” Beth confirmed, heart sinking. She couldn’t argue with this precaution, either, though she didn’t like it. Confinement in her room was not something she was looking forward to, especially when thoughts of Jimmy and his death were still gnawing at the edges of her mind.
“If you’re all quarantined, who’s going to take care of the mystery woman?” T-Dog asked. Before Daddy could say he would, Maggie cut him off.
“I’ll do it. If Glenn’s in quarantine, I’ll have to be somewhere else, anyway. Besides, God forbid, but if Judith comes down with it, she’ll need you.”
Out in the open air, they worked out the details. Maggie would stay in the camper until either Glenn was cleared or the woman woke up. T-Dog gamely offered to take over the cooking and kitchen chores. Beth vouched for Carl’s ability to tend the animals in her absence. A pause was put on patrols given that most members of the farm wouldn’t be able to fulfill their duty for the time being.
“Don’t think I’m gonna start playing nurse if you catch fever,” Merle warned his brother. Daryl only shrugged.
“You’ll get some practice with your knife if I turn.”
Beth didn’t like that joke. The whole situation had her biting the inside of her cheek to stave off tears, but that exchange nearly did her in. When ways were parted on the porch, Beth went upstairs with her heart hung. The speed with which Patricia waned, died, and turned had her spooked. She turned the lock on her bedroom door behind her, thinking, surely I wouldn’t remember how to work a lock.
Shawn used to tug at the padlock on the chicken wire in the early days after his turning. Sometimes Beth still wondered if, had they put the key in his hand, he would have attempted to use it.
But she didn’t think to lock the bathroom door. A knock came from it, distracting her from her morose thoughts. “Sorry for arguing earlier,” Glenn’s voice said from the other side.
“It’s okay,” she said, drawing near to the door. They left it closed between them, neither wanting to defy Daddy’s quarantine orders. Beth walked up to it, splaying her hand on the wood. “Do you feel anything?”
“I kind of have a headache,” Glenn admitted. “But I don’t know if that’s because I’m sick or because today sucked. You?”
“Today did suck,” Beth agreed. “Just tired, but like you said. I could be sick, or I could be sick of the day.”
“I’ll check in tomorrow, okay? Every morning until we’re able to get out of here.”
“Okay,” Beth agreed, leaning her cheek on the door for just a moment. “See you tomorrow? Or, well, hear you, I guess?”
“Yeah, hear you tomorrow, Beth. I’m gonna go lay down.”
“Me, too.” But she lingered by the door, listening through the wood for the soft sound of the other bathroom door shutting. Only when she was certain Glenn was back in Maggie’s room and couldn’t hear did she take her desk chair and wedge it beneath the doorknob. She didn’t want a turned Glenn to come into her room anymore than she wanted her reanimated self to be able to wander out.
Beth didn’t lay down, though. She sat heavily on the edge of her bed and scrubbed her hands hard over her face. That old feeling of something’s gotta give washed over her.
It was only mid-afternoon but Beth pulled her boots off and curled herself under her grandmother’s blanket, just as she did after a nightmare. Only now it was the waking hours she sought to shield herself from. She closed her eyes tight and watched the play of light behind her closed lids, willing herself to keep her mind blank, not to think of snow and blood and gunshots.
Quarantine, she said to herself, sounds a lot like hell right now.