CHAPTER TWELVE
     mother's mercy

⠀Whatever cowardice had left any residue in my bones, it was slowly creeping it's way up my spine. In that moment Lori needed me, and yet I was hesitating to run.

⠀But when we descended further into the cell block, I had to force down the fear like bad tasting medicine. But, luckily for me, Rick had a tendency to keep weapons near the door leading outside. I found purchase with a small Glock, squeezing it tightly between my fingers as I followed behind Lori.

⠀It was almost silent, an eery kind. Our heartbeats rattled against the greying walls. Licking up our skin with danger, crawling at our feet like shadows. Telling us something was wrong.

⠀And when we found our way walking to the safety of our cells, where most of our livelihood was resided against in the night, we found it was everything but, as ugly, chewed skin reeled its head towards us.

⠀Walkers stormed towards us, and my initial instinct made me lurch backwards and more towards the gated corridors from whence I came just yesterday.

⠀The last time I stepped from those obscurities, I was drenched in blood.

⠀Lori, Carl, and Maggie followed my lead as I shakingly raised the mouth of my gun upwards, keeping my stance balanced in preparation for trouble.

⠀Lori gripped her rounded stomach as she jogged, and a sudden sense of dread nearly made me throw up. My eyes had an unrelenting grip on her body, and it was only filled with worry.

⠀The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, even as we remained orderly as we tracked through the hallways.

⠀Carl kept his arms upwards, senses on high alert in front of his mother. And I couldn't imagine what was going through his head, whilst mine was brimming with dread.

⠀I absolutely wracked my brain for a solution this problem. For a plan. I wasn't ever good at making them, I was always the soldier in these chapters.

⠀I had to keep Lori alive... for Rick... for Carl.

⠀That's his mother.

⠀I didn't want to fall downwards and drag his parent with me.

⠀Then there was Maggie, constantly backing me up despite what she had witnessed from me. She was here, alive, and I was determined to keep it that way.

⠀So with that I almost hurled myself forwards to the front of our small formation. With loose trust thread between us, we checked each and every corner for a danger we hadn't for seen.

⠀But it wasn't something we saw, it was something we heard.

⠀An oncoming storm of flaring alarms lit up the hallways with their sounds, like repetitive lightning strikes.

⠀It stopped the movement of my legs for a moment, as I looked to the ceiling. An exhausted sigh rushed through my lungs.

⠀Whilst in this stance, Maggie and Carl payed no attention to the sounds, instead sticking to persistence, and rushing past my body. My eyes lingered on each corner of the walls beside me, somehow praying in some way for a break in this river of misfortunes.

⠀"Fucking..." I cried, teeth clamping together. "Come on!" I made sure to keep my voice down, and to myself. An angry yell kept itself entirely on the inside.

⠀And it seemed I realised there wasn't much I could do to help it, and found myself mirroring the two people in front of me, placing myself in tandem to Lori.

⠀But the noises still lurked up my skin, they still made my teeth vibrate. They put me on edge to put it lightly. The familiarity of the white arrows, and the ever-changing states of light made me feel like we had just stepped into a warzone, and that we were not prepared for that in the long run.

⠀As I turned right, skimming my hand across the stone wall, someone else's limb reached out to it, as she hunched over into her stomach, groaning in pain.

⠀I spun on my heel, eyes widening as I looked Lori up and down. My right hand clenched tightly around the handle of the gun, whilst my left rushingly stretched out to the mother. "What's wrong, Lori?"

⠀Maggie stopped her pursuit of a safe place, and leaned over to support the other woman. "Can you keep up?" She asks worriedly, glancing over her shoulder and towards me with furrowed brows. Lori groans in pain more, and it almost sends my stomach spiralling into an incurable sickness. The foreshadowing sounds and sights sent my brain into overdrive.

⠀I didn't want to venture into the reasoning for her pain, because I didn't want to feel it too ― but the overbearing sense of responsibility and worry wound round my tongue. "Is it...?" My chest constricted before I could finish my sentence.

⠀"Something's not right," she answered quickly. Her son came up beside my in a rush.

⠀"Are you bit?"

⠀I grab his shoulder carefully as we both watch his mother turn to brace her elbows against the wall. Her lips shake, and so do her muscles. Eyes wide with surprise and fear, she looks between the three of us as if to signal that we know exactly what's happening. But I didn't want to admit it, or believe it. It was too soon, but I also found it to be just in time.

⠀My mouth opened to say something direct, and worthy of leadership. All I found my lips doing, was letting a small breath turn into a pathetic, "No."

⠀"No, no, no," Lori cried. "I think the baby's coming." She glanced down to her stomach, he palms sliding across the wall behind her in a frantic motion.

⠀That weird feeling I had been experiencing whenever I was around the heavily pregnant woman, rose in my stomach like boiling water. It was a dangerous cocktail of anger, dread, and extreme loss of identity. Dissociated from the little girl I used to be, just because the day I didn't have my own child, set apart the life I used to have, and the nightmare I was living.

⠀Children changed who you were, by small part choice, and large part instinct.

⠀"Mom?" Carl's call for his parent echoed, but didn't fully catch my attention as the sudden roar of walker moans filled the atmosphere once more. It drowned out our own words, and thoughts. Whilst they fully caught my train of thought.

⠀I looked towards the condensed horde, pushing Carl behind my body and taking half a step closer to the dark parts of this corridor, squeezing my gun once more, and brushing the underside of my digit over the trigger.

⠀Even though I made it clear that I didn't want him near the danger, Carl mirrored my stance as he rose his own weapon up in line to the creatures.

⠀"No!" Maggie yelped. "There's no time!" She starts to pull one of Lori's arms over her shoulder, preparing to make an escapade somewhere it's possible to keep her safe, or even do the worst in this situation.

⠀But even with the view of Lori's pained face, and my need to help her, I didn't want to be around for this.

⠀I looked away, clicking the safety of my gun in preparation. "I can make you time." I wouldn't even have heard myself if I wasn't paying attention. The steady beat of uneven breaths, paired with the ache of my ribs as my heart rattled in want for escape against my ribs.

⠀"No, don't try," Maggie warned with her tone that she wasn't going to let me risk my life in that way, and the darkness of that made me scuttle to her words. "We need to stick together." It was clear in those moments that what Lori needed, and what Maggie wanted of us, went. There was no arguing, as these long thoughts were squeezed tightly into small parts of each second we wasted just standing around.

⠀So instead of swimming in the sea of dark shadows, and age-old blood, I put myself on the other side of a curled up Lori, and swung her free arm over my shoulder.

⠀Carl took the lead as we retreated from the shadows, and into the light of this fairly unknown place.

⠀Lori tried to stifle her sobs of pain, and the tight grip she had on my body only turned vice-like as her nails unknowingly dug into my shoulder.

⠀With her son taking point, he turned each corner in disappointment. All until he found a door, and as I looked I noted the slither of light shooting itself from the slightly ajar part at the top of the door.

⠀"In here!" He yells, reaching for the handle and leading us inwards.

⠀I let Maggie take Lori from my arms, and she squeezed through the archway. Carl and I hang back to make sure they make it through, before turning our bodies to close the creaking door behind us.

⠀But with our luck, it simply refused to latch itself shut. The bent structure of the metal stopped it from doing as we pleaded. We found ourselves repeatedly slamming it against the frame, sweat dripping from our hair from stress.

⠀Carl uttered small a small "No." He repeated it over and over again, as if it were a prayer for this situation. I pushed his upper body from the problem, eyeing the walkway towards his mother.

⠀His hands curl together under mine, and I hold them tightly in reassurance as I eye him directly. "I got it. Go to your mom."

⠀He doesn't hesitate to descend upon the walkway, and to the lighter part of this room we had found. And I was left to the seemingly impossible task of closing a door that was too malformed to perform its function.

⠀I pulled, I heaved, I frantically learned it taught. It wouldn't go, it wouldn't even budge.

⠀"Marley?!" Maggie called up to me, obviously too preoccupied with a woman in labour to come see what I was struggling with.

⠀"The door won't―" I threw my upper body back and forth, surely injuring myself in some way, but feeling too rushed with worry to care. "Fucking close!" And just as I was about to throw myself again, the sounds that haunted our steps started to pass by.

⠀I held my breath, and I closed my eyes. Pulling my lower lip into my mouth, my palm tightened over the cold metal of the door handle. It reminded me of then... the time I walked through them like we belonged together, on the same soil, as a heard. Running away from my crimes in a slow walk, burns licking the back of my neck as the scene of all wrong I ever did was pulled into flames.

⠀With eyes closed, it seemed I was in sync with them once more.

⠀And then I remembered...

⠀Stepping backwards, eyes snapping open, with all the strength that worry had fueled into my brain, and my muscles, I pulled myself backward from the door, sending a shudder to my bones as my shoulders strung as if they let out a high pitched strum. A sharp, final sound reached my ears as my tired body slid down it in pain, feeling the closed status of the door.

⠀It was closed.

⠀... Lori...

⠀I grab my arms, crossing them over one another as I took the same path the other three did, but I did it with a slow anticipation, as arrived on the scene of Lori grappling the pipes on the walls as she screamed.

⠀"Lori, stop! Something's wrong!"

⠀Maggie pulled her hand away... drenched in blood.

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⠀The only solice I sometimes had was water, and it dripped from my skin thickly. Descending from my naked, brusied flesh and down the drain. It spiralled, as if it pulled, stretched, branching out like the roots of a tree. I'd wish it had pulled my mind down with it, to be taken somewhere dark, and quiet.

⠀The dark was my friend.

⠀It hid me. It protected me. It was the same colour as my bruises. It provided a canvas for my madness.

⠀I was slowly going to turn sick from the inside out, if I let the darkness hide me.

⠀This baby needed my body. As it was dented from abrasions... some madness that had licked its way up my legs. A much more sinister darkness.

⠀I wanted to hide from the inside out.

⠀Pulling the lever for the water, I turned it hotter, sending my hair under the shower to drench myself in heat. Opening my eyes for a moment to witness red.

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⠀I loomed awkwardly over the scene in front of me, as Maggie helped Lori lay on her back. Her head lolled back and forth, eyes closed. And all I could do was wrap my arm around myself as I hooked my free hand against the caged area beside me. My eyes stayed locked to her body, her protruding stomach, her shaking legs and the way her hair stuck to her neck. There was nothing I could do. I kept a fair distance, in fear I would do something wrong.

⠀"Mom? Mom," Carl pleaded. "Look at me, look at me, keep your eyes open!"

⠀Maggie hunched over her shuddering body. "We have to get you back to Dad." The young woman looked to me in confusion for a second, before deciding to leave me alone. With no orders, no question.

⠀"I won't make it," She breathed.

⠀There was still time for me to do something, to get help. I could fight my way outwards, get hurt in the process if it meant Lori could make it. She could make it. For there to be a possibility... didn't I have to do something?

⠀Lori's expression was opened up by some opportune light that fell on her features, and she looked to her son with seemingly no fear.

⠀"Lori, with all this blood, I don't even think you're fully dilated yet, no amount of pushing is gonna help." Maggie's voice was strung with what Lori's wasn't.

⠀Someone to be hurt wasn't afraid, at least not anymore.

⠀"I know what it means," her eyes closed for a moment, as I watched one of her hands grip the edge of her shirt, knuckles grazing her stomach. I pulled my own hand from up my jeans, under my clothes, to my stomach. The bumps there, and the tenderness.

⠀"And I'm not losing my baby. You've gotta cut me open."

⠀My jaw hung slack.

⠀Maggie shook her head defiantly. "No, I can't."

⠀"You don't have a choice."

⠀Carl started to get up from his stance, but being quickly stopped my the weak grip of his mother. "I'll go for help." To which she replied a stern, "no."

⠀"Look," Maggie started, tears in her voice. Her vocal cords seemed raw with an inner pain you simply can't dig out. "Carol's the one that practiced that, Dad only taught me the steps Lori, if I..."

⠀Even if she tries, she fails. If she takes on inch in the direction we were all thinking of, Lori dies.

⠀Lori can't die.

⠀And then an accusation that sent my abdomen spiralling into guilt, in the voice of the woman on the ground. "You said you saved her."

⠀I looked up, and all eyes were on me.

⠀"You told me time and time again... that you saved your own baby!"

⠀I shattered. My knees buckled under my small weight, my hand rattling across the wire, and falling to my eyes. They screwed shut, becoming damp, my cheeks slick, my cries silent and I curled tightly into myself.

⠀"I didn't."

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⠀I brought my stinging palms to the curve of my face, searching for the source of the blood that was currently swirling downwards into the drain. My hair hung over my gaze, and I pushed the slick tendrils over my shoulder, following the action my placing the stretch of my hand on my bony shoulders.

⠀My eyes trailed after my fingertips, going downwards, over the swell of my ribs, then to the paleness of my thighs. My fingertips graced the edge of my skin.

⠀Then the sight of more blood made me blink feverishly.

⠀A hurtling grapple that tightened around my stomach made me keel over, stifling my sounds, but only to be drowned out by the steady rhythm of the ventilation.

⠀My jaw quivered as I suddenly realised where the blood had been coming from. It flowed thickly from between my legs, in a river of false promises and false beginnings. As if it were pulling my happiness right from my inside.

⠀A stabbing pain shot through my muscles, and it was so familiar it made me feel sick, and it somehow made me an expert on how to deal with it.

⠀... Not this... Not now.

⠀Not ever.

⠀I knelt to the bottom of the tub, water and red gathering over my knees.

⠀I never feared something so unimaginable... but here my body was taking the company of brightness straight from my biology.

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⠀"Please, Maggie. Please!"

⠀Whilst being tuck-tailed and on the ground, my hands found purchase on the sides of my head, covering my ears tightly as I listened to Lori's desperate pleas.

⠀"Please."

⠀I pressed my fingernails over the underside of my eyes, pulling maddeningly at the skin, scraping and tugging. They shook without my permission, and even though I had turned myself away from the scene, there was no escaping the atmosphere of it, sucking me in like an inescapable fog. The mercy of a laid out woman, haunted me before she had even said goodbye.

⠀Maggie seemed to have agreed, as her small whimpers filled the air, accompanying Lori's heavy breathing.

⠀"See my old c-section scar." With her command to look, in that soft voice she always used for me, I turned my eyes over my shoulder and to the mother and the scared woman accompanying the one currently residing in my head.

⠀"Do you have scars?"

⠀Maggie started to let her own tears fall. "I can't." I wouldn't have been able to even stare for long enough to get through what she was currently being ordered to do. Her hands shook over the thing material of Lori's shirt, as she hesitated to pull it from her stomach.

⠀"You can," Lori encouraged. "You have to."

⠀Nothing about this was right in my head and yet I kept on watching, behind a pane of past memories, and slow descending vision. The light from the windows gave it a quality of being not real. I wish I wasn't.

⠀I would give up what good had happened to me for this to be over now. I wanted this to end. Nightmarish. Sick. Wrong. I don't want it.

⠀"I don't want you to be scared, okay?" Lori reached for her son as best she could from her painful position. He knelt down to her, eyes glistening as they fell upon his mother. "This is what I want. This is right. Now you-you take care of your daddy for me, all right? And your little brother or sister, you take care..."

⠀As Carl's chest heaved even more, the grip on his mother's hand tightened. I could almost feel the blood rushing from my own hand just at the sight of it. "You don't have to do this."

⠀"You're gonna be fine... You are gonna beat this world, I know you will. You are smart, and you are strong, and you are so brave! And I love you." She had been slowly rising into a hysteric cry, mouth opening into a proud smile. Arms circling her son. Not concerned with her own pain, but a nurturing grip on the little boy hanging over her body.

⠀"I love you too."

⠀... Love.

⠀I clenched my teeth.

⠀"You gotta do what's right, baby." Her eyes sharpened on his face. "You promise me, you'll always do what's right. It's so easy to do the wrong thing in this world." Her cheeks were wet. "So don't... so if it feels wrong, don't do it, all right? If it feels easy don't do it. Don't let the world spoil you."

⠀I wouldn't let the world spoil. I just wished I could have told her that.

⠀"You're so good! You're my sweet boy! The best thing I ever did!"

⠀Carl finally leaned into her embrace, as her forearms circled over his upper body, pressing her lips firmly into the side of his head. Taking one last experience in the confines of her son's company.

⠀No anaesthetic. No equipment. Just Lori.

⠀"I love you! I love you. You're my sweet, sweet boy, I love you."

⠀And I found in those moments that I'd wished she had said she loved me too. Like I was a piece of her family to her. Because she was dying, right in front of me, my voice refused to rise and tell her I was grateful. For using my real name in soft whispers, for forgiving my soul, for witnessing my cracked body and not turning her gaze.

⠀For seeing my structure and seeing something worth being around.

⠀By this moment, time was rushing from me.

⠀I didn't pay much attention to what was happening, but all I knew was that Lori spent her last syllables, clearly, to her husband. The man so tragically disconnected from this moment, I could almost see his face. How we'd have to confront him on what we were experiencing now.

⠀Loss of limb, life, and someone who cared.

⠀I missed her already.

⠀"Goodnight, love."

⠀My lips opened to tell her a goodbye, but I'm not quite sure what I said as all sounds were dissolved by her screams that followed Maggie's apology. Digging the knife into her flesh, my pupils changed direction every half second as I analysed what I could have done to stop this situation.

⠀The blood represented the bleed of all good that had left me. It poured onto Maggie's hands. Lori was leaving in an explosion of desperate sounds. Like long lost nightmares at the back of my mind, she mirrored what I feared would happen as soon as she told me she scared of giving birth. All those months ago, and I barely listened because I was scared.

⠀Her son begged for Maggie to stop.

⠀Her scream faded, and now all I could focus on was the work Maggie was doing on getting the baby to a safe place.

⠀My eyes dulled under the image, like watching paint dry, but inside the scream still echoed back and forth in my skull.

⠀Why didn't I try to save her better?

⠀The seconds ticking were nothing to me, but when I was Maggie pull a form from the now quiet Lori, I suddenly remembered that Lori was dying for a purpose that she chose.

⠀I hurriedly crawled over to it, watching as the woman beside me gently tapped the baby's skin in hope of a response. Her breath fanned over the now drying blood on it's skin, and then I familiarised that it was a girl.

⠀She gave a beautiful cry to us, and in reply to that, her older brother quickly unwrapped the jacket from his shoulders, passing it over to me. I folded it over my gathered arms, and motioned for Maggie to pass the baby to me.

⠀I noticed her hesitate.

⠀But as I felt the slightly warm, and tiny body descend into my arms. The high wails became music to my ears, turning the screams sinking into my spine, soft. Taking a moment to push my nose closer to hers, she had earthy, brown eyes.

⠀Her arms flailed, reaching for her mother, but all she had was me.

⠀Readjusting her in my arms, I pushed my hand over my forehead to wipe the accumulating sweat there, before trailing it down my neck and back to the baby. I smelt iron.

⠀I smelt blood, and my lips curled.

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⠀Rick's once frantic nature, as he held his python tightly between his fingers, was halted like a sudden encasement of ice by a small sound. Accompanied by the slow dragging of shoes over concrete.

⠀He slowly spun on his heel, blue eyes looking over towards the three figures that came from the shadows of a place they all called home.

⠀Everyone is unable to say a word as they witnessed the dishevelled red head lead the other two outwards. Her eyes scarily wide, lips pulled together in concentration. But she paid no mind to them.

⠀She looked to be holding a baby as if it were made of the most valuable glass. Because that's what it meant to her. Something tangible, breakable, and suddenly the most important thing she could see until the horizon.

⠀Nothing mattered but that, and Daryl recognised the expression on her face from many times seeing it before. That focused madness. That gentle, dangerous care.

⠀The sounds hollowed at the leader of their group, and Daryl took half a step forward just as Rick quickly approached her.

⠀Maggie and Carl stood close to each other, the brunette's sobs spilled into the air. She swallowed the lump in her throat, looking over to Marley in concern, but having to turn away due to that stabbing guilt pressed into her chest.

⠀The panic of the moment was stilled, and no one said a word but Rick. Questions spilling from his mouth. All after seeing the loosely wrapped child in Marley's arms, covered in her mother's blood that seeped onto Marley's arms and had stained Maggie's.

⠀Rick's eyes scanned to the space behind her. And she had yet to fully acknowledge that there were people around her. And the man waited for his wife to descend the stone steps, proudly to embrace their new daughter.

⠀But she never came.

⠀"Where is... where is she?"

⠀Daryl's shoulders slumped as he kept a steady gaze on Marley. It washed over her shaken figure. Gaging her reaction, as her darkness had clearly come back again in the form of a dissociated girl.

⠀Sometimes he didn't know who she was in these moments.

⠀Rick rushes to go into the prison, only to be stopped my Maggie as she halfheartedly pushes him away from the door. Her exhaustion clear.

⠀His eyes became fixed on his son, clearly ignoring the now still standing woman with his child in her arms.

⠀Daryl's eyes almost tear up as Rick's wail sends a chill down, even the hardened prisoner's spines. The man hesitantly drops his axe he had been holding, harshly rubbing the sockets of his eyes. That slow, patient darkness that riddled Marley had murdered his own soul.

⠀Carl kept his eyes away from his father, as he had just lost the first woman he would love to someone he would have to care for. He didn't know who to blame, and that made him withdraw completely. He carried that loss on his shoulders.

⠀Daryl stood in the middle of it all, letting some relief come to him in the form of more steps to the small girl. And the sudden drop of his crossbow, narrowly missing the ground as it stayed hooked to his fingers.

⠀His eyes always seemed to stay down, but in this moment, they slowly craned upwards to her.

⠀Behind her was the shadow of a man dropping his sanity to the floor, curling, clawing... crying.

⠀Marley's lips quivered, pink from biting harshly down on them. Her eyes finally looked upwards, and she looked like a thin sheet of glass being pushed to its limit. From being bent, twisted, and stabbed so repeatedly that shards started to descend from her tear ducts.

⠀Daryl almost wanted to grab a hold of her. To let her cry into him from the cause of such a small thing, and such a harrowing thing.

⠀But when her lips turned upwards, and her eyes lit up with happiness, he could understand who broken she was.

⠀Her mouth opened as she looked to him, grinning widely, happily. Her words were always, still, going to be choked. A ghost that said "It's a girl," coming from her mouth like she belonged in some other universe.

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note ⛈

so marley's birthday was yesterday and i am very proud of her. she's still here. she would be twenty-eight.

so let's give our appreciation to marley in the comments shall we.

and i'l explain a little what basically marley is going through.

marley has done this before, she focuses on things so harshly because it's all her brain sees as important. in this moment, it's judith. this happens and then eventually she snaps out of it and the realisation of what she hasn't acknowledged comes crashing down.

this chapter is dedicated to lori. thank you for looking after marley.

( also this is pretty trash and unedited )

words : 4707
2017 / 26 / 12
unedited ×

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