my tears ricochet

Chapter Twenty One

Ivy gazed at Maggie's blood covered hands, her hair starting to pull free of the braid Lori had done for her that morning. If she closed her eyes she was still in the cell block, the woman's fingers combing through her curls, gently shifting strands back and forth until it was a tidy rope.

The prison was compromised. She had known it, recognized that something unseen and hungry lurked in the shadows. Ivy should have run the moment she had seen barbed wire on the horizon.

Their grief bunched together tight as they listened to the baby cry. Maggie had wrapped it up tight in a button up shirt and Ivy could see bits of blood clinging to the newborn's face, a small hand trying to shift free from the swaddle.

"Let me see the baby," Hershel called, shifting his hands on his crutches.

"What are we gonna feed it?" Daryl asked, swinging his attention from Carl to Hershel. He stepped around a body left on the ground and Ivy felt an ache in her chest for whatever had happened to Carol and T-Dog. For Lori's body, left somewhere hollowed out to rot. "We got anything a baby can eat?"

They had been depending on Lori for that part. Ivy had never spent much time around children and even less with babies.

"The good news is that she looks healthy. But she needs formula and soon or she won't survive."

"Nope, no way. Not her," Daryl muttered as he pulled back. She had a vague recall to seeing him sketching out patterns on a map, marking his pathways out in red ink as he combed woods and hillside for the sake of a little girl lost. "We ain't losing nobody else. I'm going for a run."

Ivy wanted to go with him but Maggie stepped forward with her bloodied hands flashing in the pale sun. "I'll back you up."

Her face was shuttered with grief. Ivy stayed rooted to the ground and kept quiet, letting Maggie set off. She felt a hot lash of envy that she couldn't truly deny when Daryl pulled Beth to the side and muttered something into her ear low enough she couldn't hear it. Ivy's ears were still ringing from the alarms and hadn't stopped. Gun shooting often made her hearing turn muffled and she had concealed that fact from the group but hadn't been prepared for the relentless wave of sirens screaming, echoed all over the prison in frantic bursts of sound.

It was a mistake looking around the group and picking where the missing would have been standing. Lori had a habit of shuffling close to Rick when he wasn't looking as if wary of being pushed away and it made Ivy's eyes prick with tears as she forced herself away from that empty patch of ground.

Lori was dead and there wasn't anything that could be done about it. She resolved herself to bury that grief down deep and never touch it again.

Ivy caught side of Rick's eyes and saw unsteadiness pass over him. He wasn't that man sitting with a romance book about cowboys anymore. She wasn't even sure what had happened to that book but Rick was different now, strung out tight with a new loss.

"You three gets the fence. Too many pile up, we got ourselves a problem," Daryl called out. In her mind she wondered what was the point of it all. If the fences weren't strong enough to hold themselves up, what was the point of dying for a cage? Ivy pulled out her switch blade and dutifully flipped the knife out, catching light on the metal. Daryl had shown her how to sharpen it carefully herself but usually she would find it already done when she wasn't looking.

He had given her a tool for survival but seemed to like the process of sharpening blades, in giving her a knife ready for use from his own hand.

Rick's face had gone white, and his eyes were wide. Maggie called out for him to stop when he grabbed up an axe and took off into one of the entrances of the prison.