This is what happens when you let your guard down, Daryl thought, his hazel eyes scanning the path in front of him half-heartedly. He knew the signs of walkers by heart now, muscle memory, gut instinct, without having to concentrate. He’d always been able to read the ground for the story it told.

If only he’d read books half as good.

Yeah, then what? Dale read books. Hershel was always reading that Bible of his. And you see what good it done them, huh, boy? You seen how it helped them, where it got them? They’re dead. Book learning don’t matter in this world. Fancy stories about stuff that probably never even happened—no one had time for that anymore. It was enough to read the earth itself, which continued to spin on its wheel through the seasons, the springs just as green and blooming, the summers just as heavy with sunlight and cicada buzz, even though all of humans have gone to shit, their school-smart brains just a black stinking pudding.

You got a skill, Daryl, he told himself. One they need. Or you thought they needed. You thought you was getting something, too, out of it, when all you was getting was getting soft. 

Face it, boy, you’re the only asshole here who’s had a better life since the goddam walkers came than before.  Everyone else lost stuff, lives, people that mattered.

All you lost was Merle. Everything you lost is something you just gained, like the world never meant you to have nothin' and so every time you try, it yanks it away harder.

“Daryl?” Beth’s voice, a soft, cautious whisper, cut through his thoughts and he realized he’d been standing still, one finger idly on the trigger of his crossbow.  “Somethin’ out there?”

“Always is,” he said, with a frustrated sigh, taking his hand off the bow for a second, to wipe his brow.  Not ‘cause it was sweaty, but trying to wipe the thoughts from his head.  He used to love nature, as much as he loved anything, sitting out, away from the ramshackle house reeking with mama’s Virginia Slims and old socks and cigarettes put out in stale beer, high up in a tree, just letting it all fill him, like he was an empty thing, and nature was pouring in through all his senses. He’d felt like to disappear, sometimes, as though he’d gone invisible or dissolved into the bark, the air, the leaves, filled with it all, and homework and not having money for the school lunches and wearing Merle’s old busted up broken down jeans and all that stuff was just washed away, the way flash floods tore up cars and trees and other stuff you thought were fixed in place. 

Now, he felt too full of his own thoughts and it was like the earth couldn’t get more than a foothold in him, like his mind couldn't catch its breath.

He looked back at Beth, with her dogwood-pale angel’s face creased in worry, and he wished he could shove her aside, tell her she was on her own and he didn’t have time for none of that no more.  He wished he could tell her he was better off by himself, without her draggin’ him down. He wished he could tell her she was better off without him, that everything he tries to care for dies or gets tore up.  He wished he could tell her a lot of things, but Merle always said he wasn’t a talking kind of boy and no one gave a half a diarrhea shit what thoughts floated to the top of his cesspool brain. 

“Let’s move on,” he said, instead, half goading himself with the words, hearing the roughness of his voice, like hackberry bark, grating over a lump of some kind of loss swelling in his throat.  “Ain’t nothing to do but keep movin’.”

And the afternoon sky above was bland as butter above them, taking and holding up his words like they were some kind of new philosophy.