Chapter 10 - Daryl

I was back home for all of five days before Aaron and I were heading out on another recruiting mission. I had bitched and complained about not wanting to leave, but Aaron insisted. His tone, like it always was, had been firm, like he knew what was best even when I wasn't sure.

Out on the road again, all I could think about was Ella. She was there, in my head, filling every space and leaving no room for anything else. It wasn't like before, not exactly—there was progress. She had actually touched me, and when I reached out to her, she didn't flinch away. Her skin under my fingers felt like everything I'd been waiting for, like it had been too long, but it was finally something real.

The whole time, I kept wondering if she could feel how fast my heart was pounding in my chest. Could she hear the roar of my thoughts, the ones screaming at me to close the space between us? To reach out and take what was mine?

I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to kiss her until her breath was gone, until she was breathless in my arms, her lips swollen, bruised from the weight of it. I wanted to claim her, to take her in the way I always had, with that urgency, that need. But I couldn't. She wasn't ready for that, and hell, I didn't even know if I was either. I didn't know how to fix us, not yet.

So, I did what I knew how to do. I pushed it all aside and took to the road with Aaron. We drove all day, the miles between us stretching on endlessly, and by the time night fell, we found ourselves parked in the middle of a vast grass field. The world around us felt wide open, the kind of place where you could lose yourself if you weren't careful. We were looking for more possible recruits, hunting for survivors, but my mind kept circling back to her. To Ella.

Aaron parked the car in the tall grass, the headlights cutting through the dim night. I propped my bike up on its kickstand and moved to take out the walkers that had wandered too close. The crossbow felt like an extension of my body—smooth, precise, bolts flying from it with ease. Three down, just like that. The silence after the kill was always the same. Cold, still.

I stood, letting out a long breath, when I noticed Aaron moving around the front of the car, frowning down at the walker at my feet.

"There's more of 'em out here now than there used to be," he said, his voice low as he glanced around the darkening field. I pinched the bolt between my fingers, eyes shifting toward the treeline, something flickering in the distance. An orange glow, faint, but there. It was too steady to be a flash from a fire, not just the remnants of a flame dying out.

I froze, my instincts kicking in, and I held a finger to my lips, signaling for Aaron to stay quiet. My voice dropped to a whisper, tense with the shift in the air. "Someone's out here."

Aaron tilted his head, squinting at the flickering glow. "Think we should get closer?"

I shook my head, my voice low and deliberate. "Nah, let's wait until mornin'." I exhaled slowly, letting the air hang in the space between us. "Don't wanna tip 'em off if they ain't friendly. We'll track 'em from a distance. See what we can find."

Aaron nodded and turned, heading back to the car. His footsteps crunched quietly on the grass, and I stood still for a moment, my eyes trained on the firelight, watching it flicker through the trees. Every part of me wanted to move, to act, but I knew better. Sometimes patience was the hardest thing to practice in a world like this, but it was always the right choice.

I followed him back to the car, the sound of the grass swaying softly in the breeze filling the silence between us. We climbed inside—our humble abode for the night. Aaron slid into the driver's seat, leaning it back as far as it would go, settling in for the night. I did the same in the passenger seat, propping my arms behind my head, trying to relax.

"So, you're back to living at home?" Aaron asked, his tone casual but laced with curiosity.

"Yeah," I answered quietly, my gaze fixed on the roof of the car, but the silence between us felt heavier than it should.

"So are you two doing okay?" Aaron pressed, his voice softening slightly. "Have you talked things out? Or are you still avoiding her, just in closer proximity?"

I furrowed my brows in confusion, unsure of what he meant. "What?"

Aaron chuckled lightly, his voice warm. "Have you kissed and made up?"

I sighed heavily, sinking back into the worn seat, running a hand over my face. "We kinda made up. Turns out, she wasn't asking for space from me or from the marriage. She just needed me to stop hovering over her all the damn time. She just needed time to think."

Aaron didn't respond right away. The silence stretched on, and I felt the weight of it press down on me. When he finally spoke, his words carried the weight of experience—something I wasn't sure I was ready for.

"She said she wasn't scared of me," I continued, my voice tight. "She just felt dirty and used."

Aaron said nothing for a long moment. When he did speak, his voice was quieter, more deliberate, like he was weighing his words carefully. "I would imagine so," he said, his voice low and steady. "It was a horrible thing that happened to her. I would think it would be hard to let the person you love touch you after that."

His words hit harder than I expected. My stomach twisted, a pang of guilt settling deep in my gut. "I just don't understand, Aaron. She knows I wouldn't hold that shit against her. It wasn't her fault. She didn't ask for it." My fingers clenched at the edge of my seat as I turned to face him, frustration bubbling to the surface. "I just wanted to make it better. It just doesn't make sense to me that she couldn't let me help. Why couldn't I help her see that she wasn't dirty?"

Aaron shifted in his seat, propping himself up on his elbow, looking down at me with a kind of quiet understanding that I wasn't sure I was ready to hear. He sighed, long and deep, the kind of sigh that seemed to carry all the weight of everything he'd seen in his life.

"When someone uses your body like that," he began, his words slow and measured, "sees you as just a means to... I don't know how to say it. Get their rocks off, I guess—it breaks something inside you. It makes you feel like you can't trust your own body anymore. Like even your own body isn't safe. And when you start thinking like that, it's easier to just take care of yourself. To shut down."

His words cut deep, more than I expected. I didn't like how easily he seemed to understand Ella's pain. I didn't like that he could pinpoint exactly how she must have felt. My stomach churned, and I turned my head, staring out the window, trying to clear my mind. But the image of Ella, fragile and broken, kept floating to the surface.

I didn't know how to respond. Instead, I stared at the road, my mind spinning with the reality of it. The idea that she could have felt that way, that I couldn't fix it, wasn't something I was ready to face.

Aaron's voice broke the silence again, softer this time, like he knew I was struggling with the weight of what he said. "I told you I worked in Africa, right? Saw a lot of battered women. Some of them—hell, most of them—they needed more than someone to just tell them everything was going to be okay. Sometimes, all they needed was someone to listen. Someone who wasn't involved, someone who didn't know them."

I swallowed hard, the lump in my throat growing bigger. I stared at my hands, clenching and unclenching them, trying to force the words out. "I just wish she could've said it to me. I wish she would have told me... instead of making me guess."

"You love her," Aaron said, his voice a quiet smile. "Anyone with eyes can see that. Just talk to her, Daryl. Tell her how you felt when you were beyond the walls. Tell her how it felt when you were out there, waiting. Tell her what you thought. Nothing's going to change if you don't open your mouth and talk to her."

I narrowed my gaze at him, my thoughts still caught in the mess of it all.

Aaron glanced at me, amusement flickering in his eyes, but there was something deeper in the way he looked at me. He saw more than I wanted him to. "What?" He asked.

"Sometimes you say some shit, and it's... I don't know. I don't talk about this kinda stuff with Rick or anyone else."

Aaron let out a small laugh. "One of the perks of being gay," he said with a grin. "Women open up easier, and it's easier to listen to them, because I'm not thinking about getting in their pants."

I shook my head and closed my eyes, letting out a frustrated sigh. I wanted to shut the conversation down, but the truth was, I couldn't ignore what he said. There was something freeing in hearing it out loud, even if it stung.

"I'm gonna get some sleep," I muttered, pulling the jacket over my shoulders and relaxing back into the seat. My body was tired, but my mind was restless. The tension in my chest wouldn't let me forget about what Aaron had said. About Ella. About us.

Aaron had a tendency to annoy the hell out of me when we were out in the woods. He was learning, sure, but his steps were still too heavy, his movements too erratic. I could hear him snapping twigs, his boots crunching against the underbrush, still trailing too close behind me. Every now and then, he'd mess up the tracks, leaving me irritated and wishing for silence, for peace, just for a moment. But that was never the way it went when he was with me.

We were deep in the woods by the time we came to a break in the trees. The canopy above had thinned, the branches farther apart, and the sunlight that filtered through barely touched the ground, casting long shadows. My eyes swept across the clearing, and I stopped dead in my tracks, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

Lying in the dried grass was a heap of severed limbs—too many for comfort, too many to ignore. The blood was still bright, vivid, almost glowing in the dim light. It splattered across the pale yellowish-brown grass, staining the earth beneath it. The bodies, or what was left of them, had been carelessly discarded.

There were four arms—cut off at the biceps, the edges jagged, uneven like they'd been hacked at with something dull and jagged. The skin around the wounds was raw, torn, the flesh hanging in strips. The bright blood oozed from the severed ends, still dripping in steady rivulets that had yet to congeal, pooling beneath the limbs, staining the ground around them a deep crimson. The limbs were contorted at unnatural angles, twisted in ways that made my stomach churn.

Two sets of legs were scattered nearby, each set still attached to their pelvises. The thighs were mangled, the flesh torn, one of them almost unrecognizable, shredded beyond any human understanding. The bone beneath was jagged and exposed, darkened with coagulated blood. The feet were missing, as though they'd been torn off or pulled away for some sick purpose. The smell hit me next—the stench of freshly spilled blood mixed with something foul, the sickly-sweet scent of decay already beginning to take over.

But what made my stomach turn, what made the hairs on my arms bristle in revulsion, was the severed head. It was unrecognizable, beyond any hope of identifying. The skull had been battered, crushed like a watermelon under a boot. The face was swollen and grotesque, skin split open in jagged lines, eyes bulging from their sockets. The mouth was open, twisted in some final scream or plea, but no words could have come from it. Blood and bits of flesh clung to the broken skull, dripping down in a sickening mess of tissue and bone fragments.

I couldn't help but step back, my breath catching in my throat, my eyes locked on the horror before me. My stomach heaved, and I had to swallow hard to push the bile down. This wasn't just violence—it was something else. Something brutal.

"Whoever did this took the rest of the body with 'em," I said, my voice low, strained with the effort to stay calm. "This just happened."

"How can you tell?" Aaron's voice broke through the fog of my thoughts. His voice was too calm, too detached. He hadn't seen it like I had.

I crouched down beside the severed arm, the sleeve still attached. It was a white and black striped shirt, the fabric stiff with blood, now staining the fabric a deep maroon. My fingers hovered over the blood, still fresh, dripping down from the jagged edges of the stump.

I pointed to the shoulder joint, where the blood was still slowly dripping, the wound raw and unhealed. "See here?" I muttered, my breath shallow. "Blood's fresh. It's still dripping, hasn't started congealing yet. And it's bright red, so it ain't a walker. It's human."

Aaron's eyes followed my finger, then he nodded grimly, but didn't say anything. The silence between us stretched on, thick with the grim reality of what we were facing.

I stood slowly, feeling the weight of what we were standing over. My fingers itched for the crossbow slung over my shoulder. I gripped it, checking the bolts before raising it to my side, scanning the area with more urgency now.

I kept my head on a swivel, turning every which way, listening for the slightest sound in the stillness of the woods. The limbs, the blood, the brokenness of what we had found—there was something deliberate in it. Whoever had done this was methodical, leaving a message in the carnage.

I pushed forward, the tracks leading away from the grotesque pile of limbs. "Let's go," I said quietly, my voice steady, even though my stomach still twisted at what we had just discovered. "We need to see where they went."

Aaron followed, his footsteps quieter now, his presence more cautious. The air felt heavier, as though the woods themselves were holding their breath, waiting for the next move.

We didn't have to walk far, only a few yards, before Aaron stopped short, his body stiffening in front of a tree. My eyes followed his gaze, and a cold shiver ran through me as we came up on the scene—a woman's body, strung up and left to hang in the silent woods.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. My senses were on high alert, my instincts flaring as I scanned the surroundings, making sure no one was nearby. Whoever had done this wasn't around, but the feeling of being watched lingered. I couldn't shake the sense of dread creeping in.

Aaron's breathing was already uneven as he took a step back, his eyes wide. Sweat beaded on his forehead despite the chill in the air, his face paling. He swallowed hard, his hands trembling, and I could see the fear that gripped him.

"What the hell is this?" He whispered, his voice strained with disgust and confusion.

I didn't answer right away. I couldn't. My stomach was already in knots, my gut twisting with something dark. I approached the tree slowly, every step heavier than the last. There was something unnatural about this place, something wrong about what I was seeing.

The woman hung there, lifeless and limp, her long blonde hair matted with blood. The once-beautiful strands now hung in front of her face in clumps, tangled with dirt and dried blood. It was as if her hair had been soaked into the ground beneath her, the color of the blood so vivid, so fresh, that it hadn't yet darkened into the sickly brown of decay.

Her body was bound to the tree with thick wire, tight around her wrists and ankles, digging deep into her skin. The metal cut through her flesh, leaving raw, angry gashes. The wire was so tight that it seemed to have cut off circulation, making her limbs swollen and bruised, the skin pale and mottled.

But it was her stomach that made my insides twist and turn. Her abdomen was a grotesque mess, shredded open. The flesh around the wound was torn, as though someone had been trying to carve into her, slice her open with a blunt instrument. Her intestines spilled out, slick and bloody, dragging in long, wet ribbons down her legs. The blood had pooled beneath her, dripping onto the forest floor, painting the dry grass around her body in a dark, sickening red.

She was completely exposed, naked and vulnerable in a way that felt like a violation. Her body was stripped of dignity, left as a lifeless reminder of something monstrous. I could see her spine from the jagged edges of the gaping wound in her stomach, the bones gleaming white through the exposed muscle and tissue. It was as if someone had torn her apart from the inside out.

And it didn't end there. The walkers had gotten to her. I could see the bite marks, jagged and deep, trailing down her arms, down her legs. The flesh had been torn away, chunks of her body missing, her muscles exposed, shredded and chewed apart by the dead. The bites were fresh, the blood still leaking from them, still warm against her cold skin. The walkers hadn't just taken a few nibbles—they had devoured her, reduced her to something unrecognizable. Her body had become nothing but a feast, a plaything for the undead.

"She's tied up," Aaron whispered, his voice barely audible, choked with disbelief. I could hear the tremor in his words. He looked like he might collapse, his face drained of color, his stomach visibly turning. "And the walkers fed on her. Tore her apart." He glanced back at the fresh blood spilling down her broken body, his eyes wide with horror. "This just happened?"

I didn't need to say anything. The blood, the bite marks, the torn flesh—everything about this scene screamed that it was recent, a tragedy just unfolding. My heart clenched in my chest, the weight of it settling deep. I nodded grimly, stepping closer to the body, my eyes not leaving her mutilated form.

I didn't want to do this. But I had to. I reached out and grabbed a fistful of her tangled, bloodied hair, pulling her head back so I could see her face. The moment I did, my stomach lurched.

"How the hell did this happen?" Aaron whispered, almost to himself, his voice barely audible over the quiet rustling of the woods. His tone was shaky, but there was nothing he could say to make sense of what we were seeing.

I didn't respond immediately. My eyes stayed fixed on the woman's body. I stepped closer, the silence between us thickening with every second that passed. The woman was tied to the tree, her body hanging limply, but the image of her gruesome state didn't make me flinch. It just made me angry—angry at the cruelty of whoever had left her like this.

I grabbed a handful of her blood-matted blonde hair and jerked her head back to get a better look at her face. Her skin was torn and bruised, the flesh marred with deep cuts and bloodstains, dirt caked in patches on her cheeks. She was unrecognizable, her once-beautiful face now ravaged by the violence she'd endured.

But what really made my blood run cold was the mark carved into her forehead.

A W.

The letter was deep and jagged, as though whoever had done this had taken their time with the cut. The blood around it had dried into dark red crusts, but the wound was still fresh, the edges raw and ragged. It wasn't just a random slash—it was deliberate. A symbol. A message.

It was the same mark we'd seen before, the one we found on the walker in the woods near Alexandria. Back then, we hadn't understood the significance, but now, seeing it on a human body... it made my stomach twist in disgust. This wasn't just mindless violence. It was personal.

I felt a strange weight in my chest, the air thick with something dark. I glanced at Aaron, whose face was pale, his mouth tight with restrained nausea. I couldn't read his expression, but I didn't need to. He was shaken, just like me.

"We need to move," I muttered, barely able to tear my eyes away from her mutilated form. But before I could say more, something changed. The stillness of her body shifted, her chest giving an irregular rise and fall, as if she had caught a breath.

I froze.

Her lips twitched, just slightly, and then I saw it—her eyes. They flickered beneath the bruises, the milky blue irises clouded and glazed over at first, but then... they shifted. There was something in them. Something other. The light of life was gone, replaced by the unmistakable hunger of the infected.

Before I could react, her body shuddered. The transformation was slow at first, like a delayed reaction, but it was unmistakable. The skin of her face tightened, the blood flowing beneath it in a sickening rush. Her jaw clenched, and then her lips parted, revealing teeth—sharp, eager.

The sound of her breathing changed, deep, labored, ragged. The air shifted, filled with the unmistakable growl of the change taking effect. The blood still oozing from her open stomach seemed to slow, thickening around the bite marks.

I didn't think. My hand shot to my knife, and I jammed it straight into the top of her skull, right through the soft spot. Her body jerked violently, her head lurching back, but she didn't scream. The growl turned into a low, throaty gurgle as the life drained out of her once more, this time permanently.

The silence fell heavy again, but it wasn't the same. The change had left its mark on her.

"C'mon," I said, my voice low but firm. I had to break the tension, force myself to turn away from the horror we'd just witnessed. "We ain't gonna find nobody good here."

Aaron nodded wordlessly, his eyes wide as he stepped back, still visibly shaken. I could see the fight going on inside him—the urge to look away, to run, but he couldn't. None of us could. We had seen too much. Lived through too much.

We didn't need to linger, not with what we'd found. Without saying another word, we turned and began walking back to the car, the sound of our footsteps the only noise breaking the silence that had settled like a thick fog around us.

The woods felt even more oppressive on the way back. We moved in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I could feel Aaron's gaze on me, but I didn't look back. He was too shaken up, I knew that. But me? I'd seen enough to know that getting caught up in what we'd just found was dangerous. We couldn't afford to dwell on it. Not now.

By the time we reached the car, the sky had already darkened, the sun slipping behind the horizon. The fading light cast long, eerie shadows over the trees. We climbed into the car, both of us settling into our spots in the front seats, the familiar weight of exhaustion pressing down on us.

"Let's rest a night, then we'll go out again," I said, my voice flat, masking the fatigue that crept into my bones. I tried to sound like I wasn't bothered by what we'd just seen, like it didn't eat at me. But I knew it did. I could feel it gnawing at the back of my mind.

Aaron didn't respond, only nodded quietly, the silence between us palpable. He leaned back, closing his eyes for the first time since we found the body. He didn't speak, and I didn't push him to.

I laid back in my seat, staring up at the roof of the car. The world outside had fallen silent, but the image of that woman, her transformation, her suffering, lingered.

I closed my eyes, trying to push it all away, but I knew better. The image would be there, gnawing at me, even though I knew better than to dwell on it.