━━━━━━ CHAPTER NINE ━━━━━━
The Inevitable Point of No Return
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          THIS WAS AS GOOD A TIME AS SHE WAS going to get for leaving. Morning shed a warm light over the prison walls, over the yard itself and the quiet horizon surrounding it all. Somehow, she has always imagined the end of times to be something inexplicably loud, a sort of Hell unleashed on Earth in a terrible roar, something other than this looming silence, a merciless but slow herald to an endless solitude turned to extinction of humanity.

Mallory didn't get any sleep whatsoever waiting for this very sunrise. The night had been dark and full of hushed voices that, whether she liked it or not, she listened to the problems and the debates of until it was time to take herself, empty handed save for Daryl's spare knife, outside. Oh, how ridiculous it was to miss having things of her own.

From what she unintentionally had to listen to the previous night, she gathered facts that ended up supporting her endeavor of leaving the prison and this group. First, there was the matter of the four people Carl and her have saved from certain death while Rick was out. They were sent on their way, being refused refuge within the prison. Second came the news that the prison was not entirely safe anymore, on two fronts already: on one side, the Walkers had a way to crawl into the building that none of them had seen coming, and reach through the tunnels that none of them knew how to close, and on the other side there was this "Governor" from some town they've apparently pissed off, a man with odd antics but enough guns and men to be dangerous.

Man will kill man before the dead get the chance.

Indeed, this was perhaps the best time for her to get going, down the main road, as far as she could go without getting into trouble. She wasn't an experienced hunter and had not even the slightest clue how Daryl could track so well, but Mallory had no other choice but to rely on her faith and hope that she will find him. The alternative of staying with a bunch of strangers that could at any point find out what she was only to then turn on her didn't sound too good. Today they may be waging a war with others, but tomorrow they might point their guns at her. She was no stranger to the untrustworthy wavering of human nature.

Truth was, she preferred her odds out there, than in this prison. Here each day would have been spent praying some great disaster did not reveal to everyone that she's not like them — being different and unable to merge in a group has never been more deadly than it was in the end of times. Out there, at least she had no one to trouble with her existence, for as long as she stayed quiet. 

"Any second thoughts?" Michonne inquired, breaking thus Mallory from her trance that had stopped her before the gates to look once more upon everything she was leaving. Mallory noticed that unlike her, this woman seemed to have a goal in staying, in catching roots; there was a strain of jealousy amongst the fragrant melancholy Mallory felt when looking at someone so tethered in humanity as Michonne.

"No," she shook her head. She wanted to pass on a wish, some last words that she didn't bother sparing anyone else.

Who would she say goodbye to anyway? Carol? A good woman, who Mallory knew to recognize had a distinct care for Daryl. Perhaps Carl? A kid who reminded her too closely of the good days, before the madness and the pain. Hershel? Just because he tended to her wounds once. Or Rick? For trying to keep her there, for a reason that alluded her completely and she had no patience and trust in humanity left to try to understand.

Truth was, Mallory wasn't about to go looking for all of them, as they were all about their own business already, given all their troubles. While they may have been a chapter in her life, she knew she was barely a footnote in theirs.

So the chance to have some final words, even if with someone she knew even less than the others, was greeted by her with an ever calming smile, "Good luck-!"

Good luck?

There is no such thing as good luck.

Mallory was interrupted by the loud sound of a gunshot being fired, the first in a rain to follow, cumulatively resulting in such a ruckus that her ears' ringing spun the wheels to a vertigo taking over every sense left in her body and hurling it far out of her reach.

In response to being stripped of senses, her hands shot upward, planted themselves over her ears and cemented themselves put regardless of what would happened next.

Mallory hadn't a clue what was happening around her after that. Everything morphed into something of a blur that she didn't understand much of between short blinks into the haze of dizziness, nor could she properly assess past the fact that it was a shoot-out. Had she been more coherent in the moment, it would have been rather easy to tell this was that trouble the group had with the Governor, coming back to bite them in the ass. She missed her window to leave.

With her head spinning, Mallory ended up scrunched down behind the fallen over bus at the entrance of the prison, paralyzed besides Michonne's foot. She caught an unclear glimpse at a gun in the woman's hands.

More noise turned everything incomprehensible. Was Michonne calling her name? Was she talking to her? Mallory couldn't tell much of anything until long after the shooting stopped.

As soon as the ringing in her ears faded though, the surrounding sounds left behind were just as troubling: groans and moans dragged out from the doorstep of death itself. She opened her eyes and the clean field was suddenly littered with Walkers, roaming towards any source of life they could spot. Sporadic gunshots came from the inner prison yard still, making Mallory flinch, but they were growing more and more scarce, giving her just about enough time of coherence to spot Michonne was no longer by her side, but instead cutting her way through the dead towards Hershel. With a squint, Mallory noticed Rick outside the fence too, unloading his pistol in the face of a Walker.

From all the chaos surrounding her, she caught a glimpse, before she had the chance to look back at the inner yard of the prison, of one walking corpse approaching Michonne from her blind spot. Strutting downhill, that damned thing caught some speed. Her heart clenched and before Mallory could filter any thought whatsoever past a good wall of reason, she wasn't just standing up but dashing in a run right for the Walker.

I can't die, but they can.

It wasn't the best tactic to tackle one of those things to the ground, but it was the only approach Mallory could take given how much the noise had tampered with her discernment of the happenings around herself. However good she thought her plan would be, as soon as she was there, arms around the corpse and ready to bring it to the ground, she slipped on the grass painted with blood from one of Michonne's kills and the plan went to shit in deplorable fashion.

To slip on a ramp is a dooming situation.

Though she brought the Walker down, she fell right down with it too, rolling to the base of that half-hill and feeling each bruise and stinging cut from the endeavor. Before she could even have a more coherent instinct than that of standing up — realizing that she had landed on top of the Walker and its rotten mouth was only short and uncomfortable inches form her face —, a bolt shot right in the top of the groaning corpse's head.

Mallory's eyes shot up and met, much to her surprise, Daryl's. Time took a dive into a frozen lake to her perception and she had a whole wave of thoughts swarm her at once, half of them wishing to scold him for leaving in the first place, but most of them agreeing to a relieved conclusion echoing thus omnipresent in her mind: You came back.

Not even as much as the grace of finishing that thought of joy properly was allowed onto her. Michonne grasped Mallory's left wrist and pulled it up and to the side. The latter looked over her shoulder right in time to see the ascension of the woman's sword, sharp blade stained but still shining in the light of day. Realizing what she was trying to do and hearing Daryl's shout behind her in a puerile hope of stopping Michonne without having to fire another bolt, Mallory grasped back Michonne's wrist and pulled her down once, with all the strength she could muster.

Throwing her off balance and delaying her from cutting off her arm was all Mallory needed at first. Because once Michonne was bent over, she managed to get up and struggle her arm away.

"You were bit!" Michonne pleaded.

Only when prompted by her words did Mallory finally look down at the arm she attempted to cut off and saw the bloody stamp mark of those putrid teeth. Shit, was the extent of all she could think then, before having to hug her arm to her chest and step aside. "Michonne, please," she retorted to a beg, "I am fine."

What sane person would listen to that plea?

"It's going to be a clean cut," Michonne reassured her.

Mallory opened her mouth to answer, backing up, but the sound of tires coming to a stop somewhere behind her heralded Glenn's shout, interrupting their argument he had close to no chance of ever understanding what it was all about, "Get in, now."

Daryl may have beaten himself up internally for leaving with Merle without even for a second considering to leave at least a message for Mallory, but now, after that display in the yard that she had with Michonne, he was restless, aching all over — God, what the hell was I thinking leaving her here alone?

Much to his fear, the atmosphere inside the prison where everyone regrouped eventually wasn't in any way whatsoever warm. It took him no more than a fearful look around the room at mostly adults standing by and doing nothing while Mallory hastily and rather messily bandaged her bleeding forearm, to understand instantly why she's been so reluctant, so fearful to tell him about her immunity too. Riled up at the sight of Michonne's sword still being unsheathed, directioned towards her, Daryl pushed right past everyone and into that perimeter around Mallory none wanted to enter but him.

"Hey," he called and his voice lifted her gaze. It took no genius to be able to tell that she was holding back tears and he could almost bet it wasn't for the pain that she was on the verge of crying. The bite mark looked painful, but furious as he was of this truth, he knew for a fact that she's been through worse pains still. "Let me see that," he kept his tone low, perhaps a little too aware that his brother was somewhere in the small crowd behind, about to launch comments unfitting for the rapid heartbeat Daryl was holding in his chest and he was certain Mallory held in her own as well.

"Well, well, well," almost on cue, Merle's voice sounded, as he too made his way through the crowd, sticking right behind Rick. The latter stopped to be caught up with everything by Michonne, but Merle advanced still. "I thought my brother lost his darn mind saying you two have found each other again, like two snuggly peas in a pot. Ain't the world small?"

Mallory looked up over Daryl's shoulder, as he had lowered down besides her to properly bandage her arm, something that, in order to do properly, he had to engage into by first undoing the panicked mess of a bandaging that she did before he got there.

Merle met her gaze, "Good to see you, sweetheart." Then, hardly able to contain a smile when a tear finally escaped her doe eyes, he nodded, "Got a little problem there, it seems?"

Daryl swallowed the need to clench his jaw until his teeth creaked down on each other or he turned around to bark at his brother to shut up. Instead, to make up for a decision he was regretting more by the second, he focused only on Mallory, looked up at her. "Talk to me, please," he sought her eyes. It occurred to him just then, when she took her time, slowly lowering her exhausted gaze that she may have been upset with him too. There was no way to tell. He's known her for so long on such a personal level and never once had Daryl been able to look into her eyes and see something else other than a kind glaze, sometimes joyous, sometimes exhausted or disappointed, but never furious, never menacing; one look in her eyes, he was certain, would calm even the most horrifying storms, but just then, one look at her fatigue and sadness had him worried.

He was part responsible for this.

For the sake of being efficient with what little time they had left, Daryl added before she could have the chance to say anything at all and before guilt overtook his ability to think coherently, "I need to know if you'll be okay after this bite."

At least to that demand, her answer could be simple and restricted to the same silent treatment he thought he deserved and she was too scared to otherwise prove him different. She nodded for him and that was all Daryl needed. When Rick called his name, he could stand up, turn around and block him from getting to her.

"You ain't touching her, man," Daryl eyed Rick's feet, climbing his gaze back only once the man stopped from advancing. "None of you are," he warned, stopping his stare on Michonne, to let her know that samurai sword of hers won't be coming any closer.

"I know this must be difficult for you to comprehend right now, given your past with Mallory," Rick spoke slow, careful, as if he was sooner walking around landmines than talking to Daryl. "But she's been bit. You know how that goes. There's nothing you can do. Nothing any of us can do."

"I say you take a step back, little brother," Merle was not fighting that morbid smile from showing on his lips parted ever so slightly with the same thick accent that Daryl too sported, "and let me put your lady here out of her misery, since we both know you won't."

There it is again, Mallory couldn't help but see the reassembly. My fate getting decided by others.

Rick wasn't happy with Merle interrupting his speech, but he took over from that blunt picture painted by the older Dixon. "Do you want to see her turn-?"

"She won't turn," Daryl responded, unmoving from Rick's path.

"She's immune," an unexpected voice gasped rather softly, running out of breath while that word rolled off his tongue. Carl jumped from his seat, behind everyone else and approached with wide eyes looking right at Mallory. His statement had drawn silence from the entire room. "That's why they didn't bite you in the hallway, isn't it?" Mallory may have averted her gaze, but Carl continued, "They were saying on the radio, back when this whole thing started that if this virus was like all others, then we'd have a chance at achieving an immunity to it. To no longer be affected by the symptoms."

Smart kid, both Daryl and Mallory thought, albeit on different nuances of emotion, on the spectrum between annoyance and fear, rather than with admiration.

"You're immune, aren't you?" Carl asked directly now and though Mallory felt all eyes were on her she only looked back up at him when she gave them all the answer that will complicate absolutely everything: a gulp and a short nod.

AUTHOR'S NOTE :  
      Mallory jinxed it at the beginning of the chapter with saying some disaster will force her to reveal what she is to everyone. 😭😭😭 Now they know. What do you think: will her and Daryl be allowed to leave after this reveal anymore?