hellkitty

“You know what we’re looking for?” Michonne said, as Carol turned down onto the sun-bleached pavement.  They’d driven twenty minutes in silence, each woman not knowing what to say to each other, nothing coming up that could break the wall of silence between them.  There wasn’t anything worth mentioning in the view: a few walkers, shambling in the far distance, so far away they couldn’t even register the sound of the truck’s coughy engine; the rusted road signs; one or two spotty stains on the road where someone, living, dead, or both, had been struck at high speed.  Things you could find on any stretch of road as far as Michonne could remember. The only thing that had stuck out to her was a kid’s shoe, a girl’s sneaker, white with some pink glittery thing Michonne couldn’t make the shape out of. 

Carol had seen it, too, her breath sucking through her teeth, hands tight on the steering wheel, as she swerved wide around it. 

Everyone had their own ghosts, Michonne thought, and said nothing. 

It was Georgia August, the air wet and still, and when Carol rolled the truck to a gentle stop, the high uzzuzzuzz of cicadas filling the gap in sound.  Michonne tossed her braids behind her shoulder, sliding her blade from its sheath as she slipped out of the passenger door, narrowed eyes scanning for danger.

Carol stepped out of the driver’s seat, giving one last check that she’d left the keys in the ignition. Walkers couldn’t drive and in a heat of panic, fumbling for keys could be deadly.  She nodded over the truck’s battered hood, and the two moved toward their target, the station wagon in the breakdown lane. The windows were all rolled up tight, opaque from a year’s worth of Georgia red clay dust and rain. 

Carol moved to the station wagon’s driver’s side, flexing her hand nervously, building nerve to jerk open the door.  Michonne moved to her right, ready to slice anything that moved inside.  Carol swiped her left hand back over her head, through the iron-grey fringe of her hair, and pulled the handle, almost leaping back.

A weight fell, thick but dry, a dessicated mass of what had once been human, in remains of jeans, a flower-printed peasant top, and a little silver chain with a still-shiny pendant, the amber plastic of a pill bottle rolling out between their feet telling a too common story: despairing, no way out but one. 

An exhalation, from both of the living women, as much relief as sorrow. Every suicide made you question, Michonne thought, how long you could keep going on, if maybe they were right, they’d spared themselves…so much of what Michonne had seen and had to do. 

“More medicine,” she said, hopefully. “And we could use clean clothes back at the prison.” 

Carol nodded, slowly, at first, borrowing confidence from Michonne, and pulled the body gently aside: it, at least, was still human, somehow, was one of them. 

Michonne understood, but she didn’t have time for sentiment. She’d been telling herself that ever since the televisions had gone dead, that emotion was for later, some other time, a time she was beginning to think would never come.  And she hated the thought, as Carol tugged the dead woman’s shirt down modestly over her belly, and up to smooth her hair, that she was as blonde as Andrea had been. And Andrea had made a similar choice, only not alone and…

…and Michonne didn’t want to think about it anymore.  She jammed her sword back in its sheath, stepping in, reaching across the driver’s seat to the duffel bag in the passenger seat, mastering her nausea over the smell, the rotted driver’s seat.  Water.  Aspirin.  Tampons. All good, all things you didn’t realize you needed till the world ended. 

“Books,” she heard Carol say, and looked up, ducking out from the car. Carol had moved to the back, hatch open, staring at some cardboard boxes, stuffed with books: paperbacks, hardcovers with sun-faded dustjackets. “Dale would have liked these.”

Michonne was about to tell her to be practical, that Dale, whoever he was, wasn’t here, wasn’t in the prison, and didn’t matter.  But you learned too quick the things you shouldn’t say, so instead she nodded. “Bring some back. We got the room.”  Maybe she’d even read again herself. 

They moved faster now, that silent awareness that the longer you stayed exposed, the greater your risk of discovery. The truck bed got loaded—books, the suitcases of clothes, a few bags of groceries with the fruit and lettuce thrown out, but boxes of granola bars, bags of dried fruit.  Good things.  Michonne finally moved to the last task: the purse, sitting on the floor of the passenger side, one of those things barely bigger than a clutch.  It was always the worst, the most intimate, even worse than rifling through a dead woman’s satiny panties. Here was her name, her favorite color lipstick, scored by the lines of her lips, her phone. 

And here was a bottle of oxycontin: good. They could use that. And a gun, a small Beretta, smaller than Michonne’s palm. She wondered why this woman—Tara—hadn’t gone out that way and then hated that she’d wondered. Asking those questions made the other person real to you. Made it hurt more, even though you never exchanged a word with them. And here….

“What?” Carol came up behind her, where she’d dumped the handbag’s contents on the car’s hood.  “…oh.” 

“Yeah.”

A photograph, a family group, taken at a restaurant—white cloth, red napkins, the cheap wicker basket filled with fluffy gold-skinned rolls—and above that, a gaggle of smiling faces, sharing some bond: family? Coworkers? College friends?  Impossible to tell. Must have meant something to Tara, though. That was for sure.

“I hate those,” Carol said, quietly, turning aside.

“Photographs?”

“Forced pictures like that. Look happy for the camera.” 

Michonne looked over at her: it was a surprisingly sharp tone from Carol, who had her own strength, but it had always been quiet, gentle, before.  Like Carol had some old wound, way before the walkers came. 

Carol shrugged off the look, gathering the lipsticks before they rolled off the hood, handing them back. “Everyone in them’s dead. They’re like pictures of ghosts.”

“Least they look happy,” Michonne said.  She folded the picture, faces to faces, almost superstitiously, stuffing it back in the purse.  Maybe happiness was a ghost. 

Carol shifted on her feet, looking off into the trees, where the cicadas had stopped and a silence seemed to fall among them. Time to move on. Definitely.  “There’s the thing about pictures like that.  There’s all of those…then there’s all those moments you don’t have pictures of. Good and bad.”

Michonne thought of Andrea, how already, even after a few weeks, she as losing the precision of her memory of Andrea’s face. What would she give for a picture of Andrea? What would she give of an image of her that would erase the final one she had of her friend, blond hair stuck to her neck with the sweat of fear, warm toned skin mottled with clotty blood.  “Yeah,” she said—all she trusted herself to say. And she found herself tossing the purse back in the car almost angrily, and they turned back to the dusty truck to take them back to the others, other people they might lose soon, and forget what they looked like, forget their names…or be forgotten themselves.