A Week

He had allowed the CD to be put on under very strict instruction. By no means was I allowed to sing along. If he ever for a moment believed I would stick to that he doesn't show his surprise. I get that familiar, crooked little grin and an even more familiar shake of his head. It's his way of expressing some sort of disapproval with me, it varies immensely depending on the situation, in this case it's purely horseplay.

By the next song he's singing too, and there's such a burst of fun, the almost unfamiliar joy that comes in short segments. I don't even complain when he cuts me off, and leans over to twist the volume down to a far lower level.

“Look at that.” I do, leaning over him. My smile breaks, “I mean, that says...” he slows the car right down, “that's a video store.”

“Stop the car Glenn.” He debates it, I can hear the argument running through his mind. We'd been gone three days, a run for supplies desperately needed back at the Prison. It had been very successful and we have one stop left, some high school in a backwards-shit town called Coalville. But the longer we dawdled the later we would get home. “Maggie won't be pissed about another hour.”

“Not with you.” He mutters, although there's no conviction and the car stops.

“You think they'll have it?” I slip my jacket on and a pistol back into my holster. Grip tight on a hunting knife stolen from Daryl's stash. “Yeah,” He says confidently, “Why wouldn't they? It's a big hit...was a big hit.”

“And knowing we'll never know the real ending doesn't upset you too much?” I get the head shake again, “I think my ending makes more sense than yours.” He can't resist and I follow him to the dirty door, hitting my fist against it several times. Fish out anything still lingering inside. “It doesn't at all. I'm telling you, the Island is purgatory or something. They're all dead.”

“I'm not arguing about that. I think they're dead. But I think the Island is a real place. Otherwise, how do they escape, and more importantly how do they go back!”

“How could it be real?”

“The Dharma initiative, that's real – the Charles Whitmore side story, Penny!”

“Yes, they're real but they're not real at the island. They're elements of people's lives and fears and fantasies that the island, purgatory uses to test them.”

“You're impossible.” He says dismissively. There's been no sign from inside the store so he moved aside and lets me try to pop the lock. “Well, when we catch Beth and Zach up we'll see what they think.” I snort at him, grinning when the lock gives. Even fairly sure the shop is safe we hesitate when the door opens, there's a decent layer of dust across everything. “I don't think Beth and Zach actually watch it much.” His nose wrinkles, “You live closer to Beth than I do.” He seems to think about this before the disgusted look catches him again. “Do not say anything to Maggie.”

“Like she doesn't know. Beth isn't a baby anywa-” His face has brightened, “Is that it, you found it?”

“I found the bit, season one, two, three four and...aw, shit there's another copy of four.”

“No,” I whinge, “We need five! We have four.” He looks at me like I'm the stupidest damn person he's ever met. “Keep looking, this is important!” A laugh is all the answer I get, but after ten minutes of scouring the store we've had no luck. “Well, if you just admit my theory is right we can leave it.” He doesn't falter at my expression. “It's not like we have any way of knowing. Season six isn't gunna come out is it.”

When I don't respond he saunters over to me, “I'm taking your silence as a yes.” His arm flings around my shoulder, “What's that?”

“Biffy Clyro.” I wonder if he notices how my hands are trembling. “Came out a few months before everything.” He doesn't say anything, just gently pulls it away and wipes the dust off it. I'd brought the CD for my brother, after he'd forced me to listen to their previous album until I was as much a fan as he. I'd never listened to it with him, they'd gone away on their whirlwind trip of Europe, and then the world had ended. It made it harder, I often thought. Not knowing, I could guess, sure enough, what had become of my eldest sibling, but there was always a chance. The possibility he was surviving and had found something that reminded me of him. The possibility made it all harder some days.

“For the car then.” Glenn says gently, his grip around me tightening, thumb rubbing over my collar bone. I have to clear my throat, but even so my response is still a bit croaky. “Yes... but we should...since we're here we should grab some others bits for people. What's that band Tyreese was on about the other day, you remember?”

Glenn doesn't insist, but also doesn't stop me when I place the Biffy Clyro CD in. There's a few seconds but the guitars start. Unlike us we listen to two songs in silence, “Different to what I thought.” He says lowly, carefully as if I may be offended, “I find it really hard to imagine you listening to that before...”

“That's because of all the crap Tee used to say,” I remind him, “I really am not as bad as he makes out.” I don't correct myself to the past tense.

There's a pause, and I can tell what he's going to do before he even does. The impression is basic, awful, probably touching on offensive but the way he holds his smile, scrunches up his eyes is so T-dog it makes me laugh, “Nah, there ain't no way your Dad had a plane, come on Man!”

We laugh until my stomach aches, and tears have crept into the corner of our eyes. “Alright, stop.” I say in between wheezes, imagining my face must be as red as his, “You're gunna crash the car!” He breathes, deep and slow, but within two seconds he's crumbling again. I can only imagine how many memories he's running through, how many times T-dog had come through for us, how many times his deterministic optimism has made mine look weak.

I wait for it though, and see it when his skin pales back to its normal tome. There's a year of memories for me of Tee, and the last is the worst. The skin tearing from his shoulder, worse still, the mostly eaten corpse we discovered. The laughter stops, and for once I don't make some joke, change the subject. I let Glenn have his time, and let him speak when he wants.

“We're about twenty minutes out I think.” He mumbles eventually, and I lean, link my hand with one of his and shuffle so I can half hug him. He relaxes a little, “I'm fine, I'm alright.”

“You don't need to do that, it's only me.”

“I know, I am...okay though. We'll be done soon and heading home.”

“Yeah, just this last stop. Won't be too long until you're back in Maggie's big strong arms.” I allow a joke now, and I know he appreciates the shift in tone. “Want me to drive the last bit?”

“No, I'm good. Can you just double check the list, make sure this will definitely our last stop.”

“No problem.” I run my fingers over the paper, “I think we got the majority of what we wanted, plenty of canned stuff, fuel, wash stuff, baby food and the just the usual crap.” By that I meant clothes, shampoo, thread, and any other little bits to make the prison more home-like. The car was stuffed full, the back seats piled high and stuff in my foot well. “This the school? It's pretty small.”

“Yup.” He pops the word, and pulls the car to a stop in front of a mesh wire fence. There are several green tents set up in what must have been the playground, “Army were here then.”

“Good, means there may be some more medical stuff, you know Dr.S' opinion on that.”

“Can never have too much.” He mutters and the car stops again. There are four walkers in the closed off area but I can't see any more. “Check that bit out first before we go in?”

“Yep.” When we're on runs, planning or actually in a dangerous situation much of our conversation is built of single syllabelle words and looks. It's been that way since the start, since Rick's ridiculous, and yes brilliant – as he tends to be, plan to cover ourselves in walker guts in Atlanta. It's why it works, why we're good for runs.

That, and there's the fact we have an agreement and this is a strict one. We will not die for each other, that sounds stupid, I know. It's not an agreement I imagine would ever happen, we all put ourselves in danger for each other all the time, it's how we survive now. But Glenn was serious when he first brought it up, if it's truly going shit, if it's obvious one of us isn't walking away from something the other will run.

Better one of us live then neither.

I don't think he realises just how hard it would be to let him go, to lose him. Every single loss is hard, heart breaking and there's been so many. But, a world without Glenn, there's wider than that, a world without Rick, Maggie, Beth, Hershel...there's plenty of people I can't imagine being without. And then there's Glenn, and it's a whole new ball game. I don't mind that it's different for him, that Maggie reigns supreme, as she should. That's just how it is.

He catches me spacing out and shoots me a questioning look. I stick out my tongue, and put my game face on. I slip on a backpack with extra ammo, lock picks and most important my axe hanging from one side. The typical gear follows, pistols, knives. I fiddle with the knee and elbow protection form the prisons riot gear but decide against it.

This should be straight forward. We can handle it.

“Okay.” He’s panting, cheeks flushed a deep red. I’m the same, my fringe is sticking to my forehead, my chest heaving painfully. Both of our hands are coated in blood and the stinging sensation continues up to the splinters protruding from my forearms. “This may be the worst situation we’ve been in.”

I don’t bother with a reply, my eyes are scouring frantically around the small space. It’s narrow and either side of us there are high shelves covered in supplies. Unfortunately they’re far from the normal supplies we go after, it’s all stationary, pencils for art class and rulers for math.

“I’m not seeing any other way out.” Whilst I’ve been moving he’s been perfectly still, watching the rumbling door, crimson on the handle with one of the shelving units covering the juddering lower half. I kick away a bunch of folders mimicking his pose and sitting down heavily.

It takes a few long minutes until I can regulate my breathing and I smear my bloody hands over my jeans, adding to the grime. “You bleeding bad Lil?” I shake my head at him, starting to clutch at the largest pieces of wood in my wrists.

“We lost my axe didn’t we?"

“Kinda.”

I swear loudly, inspecting the small cuts and grazes scouring over my fingers. “We might be able to wait them out.” I don’t respond to start with, I merely scoff and he twists to me. His eyebrows lift and I clear my throat realising he's waiting for me; “How long do you think that door would hold? Without some other distraction they wouldn’t leave and…”

As ever he has the innate sense of knowing exactly what I’m thinking, “The alarm will be drawing any within a few miles here.”

“Plus,” I shoot one last miserable fact at him, “We’re both bleeding still and there’s blood smeared all over the outside of the door.”

“Brilliant.” I can see the cogs turning behind his dark eyes, looking for some resolution. “We need to get out of this storage cupboard then, don’t we?”

Even utterly terrified he has the ability to raise a tiny smile.

Our first move is to properly block the door, it’s amateur – obvious.

We drag one of the wide shelving units over, dodging the packs of books that fall and threaten to crush our toes. The racket and moaning of the dead don’t decrease but at least now there are two heavy wooden barriers between us and them. Blocking the door is the right move, however it’s also a desperate one. It makes it clear that neither of us think we have any chance of getting out that way for a long time.

“Right,” His breathing is strained again, and my hands are really stinging. I chew on the inside of my cheek and try to ignore it, I’ve got far bigger problems than some splinters right now. Glenn and I have been stuck in some awful situations before, and maybe we’d gotten cocky and brought this one upon ourselves. “You see anything that looks at all weapon-like?”

“Nope.” I breathe, although I take a step away and start scouring through the visible boxes and bits of stationary. Unless we can fashion something deadly out of pens and rubbers we’re out of luck. “Nothing that’s any good.”

“Thought as much.”

“You have a plan though, right?” I’m stretching here, and the look on his face is all the answer I need. We have barricaded ourselves in little more than a wardrobe. “You’re the idea guru.” He forces that strained smile over his face again, but his lips are so pale they’re barely visible.

“Yeah,” I scoff, “Because coming to this fucking school was my idea, and it’s all gone sowell so far.” He lets me wallow in my self-pity, he doesn’t even tell me to lower my voice as it raises to a yell and I kick at the magnolia coloured wall.

It’s not making any difference as it is, I could scream and shout all I wanted and it wouldn’t change a thing. The fire alarm is still blaring, and although it’s muted in this tiny hell we’ve locked ourselves in it’s loud enough, and it will still be drawing in every walker for a good mile radius. The more I’m thinking about it, the more I’m convinced we’ve run out of options.

If Glenn feels the same he isn’t saying it, he’s deep in thought, his forehead crinkled into familiar lines. “This is…” He laughs bitterly, and runs his hand through his hair, as if to push his long forgotten baseball cap back. “Shit, isn’t it? Really shit.”

“It’s not the best.” I say dryly although my stomach is knotting and I don’t feel far off feeling sick. I’m terrified, Glenn is terrified. “What’s the likeliness of waiting them out?”

“With the alarm?”

“It can’t ring forever though, cant it?”

“I don’t know Lily I’m not exactly a bell expert.”

“I wasn’t…” I hate arguing with Glenn, and that’s exactly where this will be heading, it’s bad enough without fighting. “Whatever,” there’s no threat, no vindictiveness in my words. “I didn’t mean…” I trail off, he doesn’t respond and I start looking around again, letting him try and think of something better. “We'll get out, you know that, we just need to brainstorm.”

There is a small box full of those tiny packaged milks for coffee, and I pick them up, moving them to the cleanest corner on the off chance they may come in useful. If anything, and our only option is to wait both the alarm and the walkers out, we won’t completely dehydrate.

I don’t even have my backpack, in the mad scramble to practically hack ourselves through a doorway I had tossed it aside, the bulkiness had been making it even harder. I express this in yet another whine, which Glenn reciprocates. “Wait, so what do we have?”

We did a tally up, and it was disappointing. We had two pistols, two hunting knifes and a pen knife. That was it, all our water, extra ammo and other supplies were in my abandoned bag. “At least Lost is safe.” I say, although the joke comes out flatly, he doesn't bother to fake a laugh. Our outlook was getting dimmer by the second and the mood was fitting. We scoured through every box and bag, I wasn’t even sure what we were looking for any more, but with the alarm and dead still blaring we had to be doing something.

That was when our luck changed, “Let’s try that one, on the top.”

“Can you give me a hand up?” Glenn bent over a little and let me stand on his sore, linked hands, thrusting me upwards so I could clasp the final untouched box. The moment I grabbed it I could feel it was empty and shoved it aside, ready for some other exclamation about how shitty this all was when I spotted what had been hidden behind it.

“Come on, you’re heavier than you lo-“

“There’s a vent!”

“What kind of vent?” There’s a familiar lift of excitement in his words.

“Big one, like in the Simpsons' or something. Must be because the building is old, right?”

“Can you fit?” I lean a little, feeling the strain on his arms and try to pull the metal cover off, it doesn’t budge but is held on by several screws. “I think so.” It doesn’t look inviting and it would be a lovely, claustrophobic squeeze, but I’m sure I could fit.

“Yeah, I reckon I could. Need to open it though. Put me down.” I use the wall to jump off his hands, and grab the two knives. “I need to undo the screws and take the cover off, then we can see. What’s the plan?”