━━━━━━ CHAPTER THREE ━━━━━━
The Hopeless vs The Hope
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          IT WAS INEVITABLE FOR THE SIDE GLANCES and unfiltered doubts to arise when the two convicts were locked in their own prison block, planning on having them sent on their way on the road, yet Mallory, thanks to Daryl's relentless vouching and the way she had opened up about where she's been since the world ended, was welcomed in with them. T-Dog wasn't happy of neither the stigma against the convicts, nor the remaining inclination of man to listen to good references on reputation, rather than the goodness of their own heart. The only bright side to that slow cooking conflict was that currently everyone was too busy to have the time to care or think of such things.

Lori, Beth and Carl have been by Hershel's side and the old man started finally walking with the help of the crutches. Everyone else was mostly outside that morning anyway, moving their cars through the prison yard, piling the bodies of the Walkers they cleared out, preparing to burn them. Mallory heard Rick say he wanted the terrain clean for crops and to be fair, she was astonished: from all the people she's met in the end of times, none seemed to have an actual plan, not like this.

There was also the matter of 'Walkers' that amused her. She's never had a name for the dead before, and the one Daryl's friends used Mallory was certain it would stick with her too.

One thing she couldn't deny was that she still felt estranged to everyone, perhaps even Daryl himself. His theory was that she's spent too much time as the prisoner of others and that integrating into a group will take time. The true curse was that she agreed whilst also being bound to quietly ask herself, Should she really wish to integrate?

The wish was there: to pretend like the world hasn't gone mad, that she wasn't just then cooking soup in a prison kitchen, but in a normal home instead, that kindness was still possible and she belonged with other humans. However against each of those wishful strands appeared arguments in shape of thorns, painted red by her experience. These were good people, Daryl seemed at peace with them, did she want to risk ruining it all?

"Shit," Mallory cursed, the dull knife sliding a thin cut across her finger. "Don't lose another finger, please." The dull knives of the kitchen were all she was allowed around for now, being trusted yet with no other weapon. She didn't mind it. Given her bleeding was persistent and there were no kitchen towels around, Mallory stuck the bleeding finger in her mouth and sighed. After all, she couldn't have anticipated the sudden gunshots being fired outside, making her flinch and come dangerously close to biting way too hard on her finger.

Her skin covered in goosebumps instantly and with dull knife in hand Mallory left the kitchen in a hurried lightheaded-ness. The gunshots kept being fired outside, background sound that raised her pulse until it deafened her.

It's happening, the choir of worries sang in her mind over the ringing of her ears. Bad stuff is already happening.

By the time she reached for the main exit to the yard, the door already flung open from the outside and she saw Maggie, sight that otherwise froze her put. Immediately after her, Carl and Lori ran inside, then the door was slammed shut.

"What's going on?" Mallory muttered. Though less of a rapid fire, gunshots kept being fired outside, as a mocking tease to the lack of answer she was going to receive. Surely the groans of Walkers coming out of the prison's tunnels behind Mallory was not going to count as a proper answer.

"This way!" Maggie took charge, leading them into a closer tunnel entrance. It didn't take much thought — as there was little time for such endeavors anyway — for Mallory to put two and two together and realize that if Walkers got inside, they sure were outside too, hence the gunshots. So she hesitated going after Carl, instead looking back at the exit. "Is Daryl outside?"

"He's fine," the boy's hand stuck out from besides her, nudging her aside so he had room to fire at the nearing Walker's head. "Come on," he motioned for Mallory to follow them quicker. The shut the barred gate behind them and hurried into the darkness, but it was only a couple turns in that all four of them had to realize, they didn't know where they were headed, just that they needed someplace to hide.

Mallory was on the verge of turning her tendency of sticking at the back of the group into an attempt to go a different direction. A plan formed in her mind, but before she could execute it, the alarms of the prison started blasting all around them — Mallory's hands bolted up to cover her ears, a part of herself that had grown, much to her dislike, way too sensitive since the world got overrun with Walkers. Lori fell to a stop with a groan way ahead and it was for stuff like this that Mallory needn't even hear properly to know bad stuff was continuing to pile one over the other: Lori was definitely going to give birth soon.

The sound of Walkers approaching from further down the hallway came as almost no surprise to someone expecting bad situations to only get worse. And damn that alarm! Mallory's ears hurt unlike ever before, making it basically just inertia how she followed Carl's lead, behind Lori and Maggie, through the maze these unmapped tunnels of the prison really were.

Walkers started appearing at every turn they took, forcing them to try doors. The boiler room door was spotted by Carl to already be open so he opened it up for the women. Mallory trailed a little further back trying to hurry her step despite the pain, but the fact that she stayed back allowed her to notice in the shadows casted on the walls that Walkers were about to surround that door from both corners flanking it.

With little time to explain herself, Mallory rushed forward and pushed Carl inside, then slammed the door. With a creak alerting the Walkers, the door refused to close completely.

"What are you doing?" Carl asked, a little too loud for her liking, so Mallory was quick to bring a finger to her lips and shush him.

Instead of trying to close the door shut and make more noise, Mallory turned around and press her back against the crack left between the heavy door and its frame. The nearest Walker dragged its steps right in front of her, and it was then that Mallory inhaled sharply in order to completely hold her breath. The Walker sniffed into her face, cackled its putrid teeth reeking blackened blood but moved away, searching the source of the sound, the source of that distant-growing scent of something to eat. Mallory was not it, on neither of those goals the monsters had in their mind, if whatever happened behind their hallowed eyes could even be called that.

One after the other, the Walkers passed her dismissively, moving in disarray, thrown off by the same alarms that grew her dizziness. Eventually, when the cost was clear enough, Mallory slowly exhaled and turned around to gesture through the crack at Carl again that he kept quiet. Carl didn't understand what he just saw: there were Walkers around Mallory yet no sound of her being torn apart by them.

His confusion was not going to get any answers, not just yet it seemed. Mallory moved away from the door and with a slow, controlled pace, she moved through the Walkers coming down the hallway, trying her best to not bump into any of them for a while. Fact was, Walkers never took any interest in her unprovoked, perhaps the single real perk she could count to her condition, that she was blessed with not having to worry about the dead too while the living hunted her. Once far away from the boiler room door, Mallory sighed and turned around. Time to provoke them.

"Hey!" She clapped her hands. "This way you, fuckers. Come and get me." She hit the handle of her knife on the wall and started backing up.

Within mere seconds, all the Walkers that could have paused any trouble to that cracked boiler room door were following Mallory and all her deliberate noise. Her plan has always been to draw as many of them away from the prison, seeing as there was little they could do to her — Walkers never really bit her before, no matter how close to them or how loud she really got, so she had no reason to believe now would have been any different. All she had to do was find the way out and keep leading them there.

The hallways she winded up on started smelling humid, the lights, greener in tint, started flickering in such a manner that her vertigo from ear pain strengthened. But even as she stumbled her way forward, Mallory distinguished the gruesome scene waiting for her ahead. What grain of luck she had missed in everyone else who came face to face with Walkers: T-Dog was holding off a group of Walkers and their rotten teeth tore through his skin.

Mallory bumped into Carol and wrapped her arm around her to nudge her forward. The warm light coming through the window glass of the exit door gave her the full picture quickly; T-Dog had sacrificed himself to give Carol a chance.

"Come on," Mallory made sure she got on moving fast, before the Walkers behind that she lured there would catch up. "There's more on the way here, come on." She didn't even think she remembered correctly the name of the woman she was stirring forward, but Mallory would hate having the blood of one of the good people that have helped her — a rare breed to begin with — on her hands.

They made it to the other cell block, circling around in a direction that Mallory didn't quite like the thought of leading Walkers towards, but had to in order to make sure Carol has a chance to hide. Things have gotten worse still. The prison was crowded with the dead, backing both of them up until they were surrounded on a narrow hallway where doors didn't open. When Carol's shivering hand finally earned a click and a creak from one of the doors, Mallory, much to her shock, pushed her inside and placed her hand on the back of the door to get it closed.

"No," Carol let out a desperate shout that irked the Walkers the wrong way to make their way more viciously towards them. "There's room for both," she placed a hand on the door and the other on Mallory's shirt, one that she borrowed from her in the first place.

"Let go, Carol," Mallory struggled to get the door closed still. "I'll be okay-!" Her reassuring words turned into a scream. One Walker lunged over her to reach Carol and in the process, the nails of the monster ripped a cut on her back.

Fear. Fear is what made Carol let go and stumble back.

Shrugging the Walker off, Mallory managed to push the door closed. "Son of a bitch," she cursed at the pain, turning around and digging the blunt kitchen knife into its eye socket. She didn't bother pulling it out. After all, her plan could still work: she could lead as many of them as possible out. She heard Daryl mention a wing of the prison that has a collapsed wall. Through there she could get them out, away from these people.

Mallory just hoped she won't bleed too much before she managed to do just that.

Long hours blended into days before stuff had finally gotten better in the prison. In the face of hopelessness, Daryl did what he knew best: he became of service. He couldn't afford crying that Mallory and Carol were both counted amongst the dead simply because they were missing, so he got busy, making supply runs for the newborn added to their group, clearing out as many Walkers as possible from the tunnels, anything but remaining alone with his thoughts, anything but letting himself come to the realization that he might have just lost everything. Hopelessness was the true disease of these times, not the virus, because once hopelessness takes root, life is lost forever.

However, when he found Carol alive and breathing, when he found out what she had to say once she recovered, Daryl's hope returned him to a characteristic restlessness.

"She was scratched," Carol repeated defeated, pity in her eyes as she recognized Daryl's state of denial about the fact. "I saw it."

"You don't know what you saw," Daryl shook his head firmly. "If she turned, she would have been on those corridors, I would have seen her. I cleared those corridors down to the last Walker. Clearly, she must have made it out. Didn't have a trail to follow before to find her, but now I do."

"And if Carol's right?" Hershel looked up, apologetic that he had to be pragmatic, as harsh as it may be.

"I won't let her suffer," Daryl reassured him after a moment's hesitation, tone diffused. "I'll be back before nightfall."

AUTHOR'S NOTE: 
   My heart breaks a little every time I have to write Mallory blaming herself for stuff that she clearly didn't do. She's the sort of person that "craves touch, but flinches away from it" — she wants to be around people again, but she's more scared of the living than of the dead.

Frankly, she's 100% sure she wouldn't survive hurting Daryl or having him react to her being immune the same way others did in the past year. I am weeping over this.