Rick Continued...

Rick got in the drivers seat and I took shotgun. Daryl and Andrea piled in the back and we took off. Rick wasn’t looking too well. I was afraid his lack of sleep plus the trauma of what had happened the night before would affect his driving. I didn’t want to bring up Shane again, but he was all I wanted to talk about. I decided to keep quiet for now; we needed to find out where the explosion took place.

The only time we spoke was when we were trying to figure out where to go. We had all seen the explosion, but from different angles. Andrea had seen it from upstairs; Rick saw it from downstairs, while Daryl saw it from the barn. I kept my input out of it, I was too focused on imagining what we were going to find there to try to help.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, we came to a large town. The buildings were pretty tall for not being a huge city like Atlanta. Of course, the roads were deserted except for a couple of wrecks along the road. The thing that creeped me out the most, however, was the absence of walkers. Where had they all gone?

Rick suddenly let out a sigh of frustration.

“We’re out of gas.” He announced.

“Guess that means we’ll have to go on foot.” Daryl didn’t seem to mind at all.

We all hopped out of the car; knowing that what we were doing was very, very precarious. If we had to run back into the car, there was no way for us to drive off to safety. I hoped my offer to volunteer was the right decision.

“There, you see that?” Rick pointed straight ahead, “Smoke.”

And sure enough, we saw clouds of black rising from the ground.

“Let’s get there slowly, I don’t want walkers to hear us running.” He said.

So we continued our task on foot. I kept close to Rick, hoping that I could find a reason to talk about Shane. Instead, Daryl came up to me.

“Stop tryin’ to nag him.” He grunted.

“What? I’m not tryin’ to nag him.” I bit my lip.

“Well then why’re you followin’ him like a hawk?”

“Maybe I just wanna feel protected.” I retorted.

“Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

I sighed, “Fine, I just wanna convince him that Shane was a good man. I can’t get the image of him dying out of my stupid mind.”

“I knew he was a good man.” Rick suddenly spoke up, “But he left you just like he left me and—”

“You gotta forgive him for that!” I said, a little too loudly, “He had a reason, you know!” And before Rick could argue, I began to explain…

Flashback

Rick was stone cold. I wasn’t sure if he had heard anything I said until he muttered,

“Right… he had to protect my family.”

“Yeah, aren’t you grateful for that? If it weren’t for him, they could be dead!”

Rick shuddered with anger, “Don’t even begin to tell me the ‘if it weren’t for him’ bullshit. He went over the line in the ‘favors’ he did for me.”

I laughed with disbelief, about to retort back, when we finally came to the cause of the smoke. It was a gas station and it was still in flames. Across the street from it was what looked to be the tallest building in the town; a giant white sheet hung off the side that said, “SOS”.

“Somebody must be in there.” Andrea stated.

“You think they’re the ones that did this?” Daryl motioned to the flaming gas station.

“Can’t see what else would.” She looked between the two structures.

“Well, let’s pair off then.” Rick went back to his usual leader role. “Daryl and Lin, where do you wanna head off to?” Rick turned to us, his eyes piercing into me.

I glanced at the smoke filled sky then at the SOS sign before picking…

-The Gas Station

-The Tall Building