C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Man, I was really a piece of work. Thor deserved better. I either had to break up with him or get over Morrison. Or get murdered by a cauldron, if the first two choices were too hard. And all that thinking about other things gave my mouth the opportunity to say, “I came to say goodbye,” without checking in with my brain first. “Just in case.”

The captain turned purple. “Y—”

“Morrison. You asked, okay? I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. I personally think it’s going to involve banishing the living dead, retrieving a stolen cauldron and hopefully solving a murder. But Suzanne’s having visions about my death, so there’s a non-zero possibility that I might not survive. I’m hard to kill. You know that. You’ve seen the tapes. But you wanted to know why I came to talk to you, and I’m telling you.” I looked away, suddenly tired. “There aren’t very many people I’d want to say goodbye to, in the event of. You’re one of the few. So I’m saying it. You can give me shit later when I come through just fine.”

“Walker…”

I sighed and got up. “Next time there’s a death warrant on my head, we’ll just let this stand as writ, okay? I’ve said my melodramatic little goodbye. No more fuss after this. Just me, getting out of your hair.” I managed a tired little smile. “Your weird-colored hair.”

If it’d been me, I’d have at least put a hand to my head. Morrison didn’t. “Could I talk you out of going, if I tried?”

“Do you want to?”

“You’re an officer under my command. I don’t want you walking into a death trap.”

I ducked my head and let go a soft breath of laughter. Somehow Morrison dancing around his own evident impulse to protect me made my own inability to face certain truths a little more palatable. I looked up, still smiling. “That didn’t answer the question, boss.”

Chagrin deepened the lines of his face. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to call him on avoiding the topic, so instead of making him actually answer, I said, “You can’t order me not to go, because I won’t listen, and asking me not to go will just make it harder. Don’t make it harder, okay?”

Morrison gave me a hard look that ended in an over-blown sigh. “You’re a pain in the ass, Walker.”

I’m almost certain that in no way should that have made an idiotic grin bloom across my face. I snapped a jaunty salute, said, “Yes, sir,” with genuine cheer, and strutted off to face the next demon on my list.

The next demon didn’t go over so well.

Thor was bigger than me, which I knew on an intellectual level. I also appreciated it on a sort of frothy-girl-likes-big-guy level which, prior to Thor—well, really prior to Mark Bragg, but never mind that—I’d never really considered, and which now kind of made me cringe with girl cooties if I thought too much about it. I mean, I knew other guys who were taller than me; Billy and Gary both were, for example, but I was still accustomed to being one of the tallest people in any given room. Taller than me got its own quirky mental box in my mind, and not many people fit in it.

It turned out that when Thor got his temper up, he didn’t so much fit into it himself. He more popped out of it, à la the Incredible Hulk, albeit without the green and with a considerably better vocabulary. At least, it’d been better while I explained Suzy’s premonition. After that it reduced to “No way are you—you are not going out there to—” interspersed with my “Yeah, I am, Edward. Edward, yes, I am—”

We were on round three, and the entire motor-pool crew had gathered around to watch. Even my old boss, Nick, who hadn’t looked at me comfortably since things went wonky in January, was sitting on the hood of Rodridgez’s patrol car—the axle was probably out of alignment again—watching us like we were the last match at Wimbledon. I felt strongly that someone should be selling popcorn and hot dogs.

“Look,” I finally hissed. Don’t tell me you can’t hiss a word without an S. There’s not a better name for that particular pitch, full of emotion and sharper than a whisper, but much too quiet to be a full voice. Besides, I had plenty of esses in the words that followed. “I appreciate you don’t want me doing something dangerous, but this is my job. You don’t get to tell me I can’t do it.”

“I—” He finally noticed our audience, and didn’t quite catch my arm to haul me away from the gawkers. Just as well, too, because if he had I’d have been obliged to hit him. Instead, he clenched his fists and jerked his head toward the stairs, where we could continue our discussion with a modicum of privacy. Someone’d finally replaced the fluorescent light in the stairwell, so there was no longer a patch of semidarkness to hide in, but at least the crew couldn’t see us without coming around the foot of the stairs, which I thought might be a little too obvious, even for them.

Once we were half hidden, some of Thor’s puffed-upedness ran out of him in a sigh. “What am I supposed to do, Joanie? I want to protect you.”

“You can’t.” Man. I hadn’t known so many emotions could fit into two small words. Regret, sorrow, resignation, and maybe most of all, implacability. “Thor— Edward —you can’t protect me. God knows people’ve helped me out, and I’ve needed it. I’ll no doubt need it again. But you can’t actually protect me. When we’re talking about the kind of thing I’ve been dealing with, there’s literally nobody else who can do what I have to do. I might not get out of this thing alive tonight, but I’ve got a better shot at surviving than anyone else.”

His hands turned into fists. “I can’t accept that. I can’t just let you go off—”

My heart tightened up as much as his hands had. “You have to. I need you to trust me. Trust that I’ll be okay.”

“I can’t. I have to be able to do something, Joanie. I have to be able to help. I can’t just stand back and wait to pick up the pieces. I can’t be—”

“The soldier’s partner? The one she comes home to?” I closed my eyes and tried to breathe around an ache so big it overflowed my chest. “Then this isn’t going to work. Because I signed up to be a soldier, and I need a partner. Not a protector.”

“Holliday’s your partner. How the hell do I fit in to that?”

“Billy’s my partner on the job. He’s got the skill set to deal with at least some of what I deal with. I’m not talking about on the job, Edward. I’m talking about the rest of my life. I need somebody who trusts me to do my job and come home.”

A bitter, crackling edge came into Thor’s voice: “Would this conversation be different if you were talking to the captain?”

The ache in my chest burst, sending phantom pain through my whole body. My hands curled against emotional misery turned physical, and my calves cramped from trying to stay steady when all I wanted to do was curl up. “It was different when I talked to Morrison, Thor. He didn’t tell me not to go.” I was a big girl, and big girls weren’t supposed to cry, but my throat was tight and my eyes hot as I whispered, “I’m sorry.”

Thor didn’t say anything else. He just stood there and looked at me, and after a minute I turned and ran from the garage.

A Joanne who really had her shit together would’ve breezed back into Homicide all calm, cool and collected, ready for action. Me, I bounced off the half-open door on my way through it, and kept my gaze locked on the floor, like that would keep everybody from noticing my face was red and puffy and blotched with tears. It obviously didn’t: a cone of silence rippled around me as I made my way toward my desk. I grabbed a tissue, tried to blow my nose discreetly, and instead sounded like a beacon for every Canadian goose on the planet.