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Clementine doesn’t speak when she meets Pete and Luke.
The purpling bruises aren’t the most troubling thing that Luke sees on the girl’s body. She’s scratched around her cheeks and bleeding from her arm – and when he scoops her up from the earth, she’s light as a feather. Clementine’s in too much of a panic and a daze to even refuse the man’s touch; there isn’t much to be done about that, other than to hold on tight and not fall from his arms.
“What’re you doin’ out here?” Pete is the first one to speak after they flee the oncoming horde of walkers that inevitably crowd around them. His eyes are wide, but he doesn’t seem angry. He doesn’t seem annoyed. His words suggest concern – either that, or he’s asking a rhetorical question that he isn’t looking for an answer to.
Luke’s arms around her aren’t comfortable. It doesn’t even feel secure, but Clementine grips his orange shirt even tighter. She curls her fingers into the soft fabric and holds it as tightly as she can in an attempt to avoid falling from his arms.
With her head up against the bottom of his chest, she can hear each little noise he makes with great intensity surrounding the now silent forest.
Her heart jolts when his voice booms with a great intensity. Head pounding, she pushes down an urge to hit him and instead tries to pull her aching arms up to cover her ears. Pressed against Luke, her bloody arm is trapped; the other refuses to cooperate.
“Where are the, uh, the people you’re with?” Clementine can’t force herself to speak. Her head pounds. Her chest pounds. Her stomach is in shambles; trying to speak may just make it worse. “Are you all right?”
When she doesn’t answer, focusing on trying to hide her emotions, Luke simply responds, “Right – I’ll take that as a no.”
And they continue to ask. They continue to ask where she came from; what she’s doing out here by herself; why she’s out here by herself. And all Clementine wants to do is scream that, one, she doesn’t know, relatively speaking; two, that she doesn’t know, logically speaking; and three, she doesn’t know, generally speaking.
Everything hurts.
“I’m an expert at talkin’ to girls who don’t wanna talk to me, y’know.” Luke suddenly says, grinning.
Clementine cocks her head to the side and squints. It’s unclear if he’s meant to be joking or if he’s trying to legitimately tell her that he makes people talk – to her, at least. She thinks he’s joking, because Pete suddenly snarks, “Well, you have had a lot ‘o experience with that, haven’t you?”
When Luke sees the dog bite on her arm, he nearly throws her to the ground. Nearly. Clementine still hits the ground with some force, but it isn’t anywhere near as hard as she knows it could have been. Her arm is trapped underneath her chest as she struggles to push herself up, and Luke’s voice, now painfully loud, almost hurts more than the bite.
“She’s bit, man! Fuck – what’re we gonna do here?”
“It was a dog!”
Those are the first words out of her mouth to either of them, and already she can feel pressure building up in her chest. They don’t believe her. She knows they don’t believe her. They don’t believe her. They’re going to – what? Are they going to kill her? Leave her?
She wants to scream.
Pete shakes his head and looks down at her with his eyes widened. “I didn’t see a dog back there.” He speaks in a firm voice and tries to make eye contact that Clementine avoids by looking down at the ground she’s currently situated on.
“Come on, kid – we just saw you with the lurkers back there!” It’s Luke’s turn for disbelief now, while Pete’s gaze slides from to him from Clementine. “Honestly, the first damn words you say to us and it’s this bullshit?”
“It was a dog!” repeats Clementine, repressing the urge to cover her ears. She feels her hand make hard contact with her temple, feeling even more frustration building up.
There’s a pause between the three of them as Luke paces back and forth, his hands tangled in his brown fringe. Pete stares ahead of them, arms crossed. Clementine, her left arm aching, presses her fingers against her temples, wanting nothing more than to lower them to her ears.
The pause can’t mean anything good. They’re about to get louder. Much louder. Especially Luke – she knows he doesn’t believe her, and when people get like that, they get loud. Too loud. Too quick. Too obstinate.
Pete clears his throat and looks down to Clementine; he kneels down to her level and holds out his hands with a, “Let’s see this ‘dog’ bite.”
She’s hesitant at first. Luke’s remark of, “Pete. Watch yourself.” does nothing to take the edge off between the three of them – and especially between himself and Clementine. But she slowly offers up her blood-soaked sleeve.
The wound stinging, Pete pushes it up delicately. The pain is almost overwhelming; the blood smells something like… metal, of all things. Nothing like a walker; but definitely something. And the smell is all over her arm, her face, her skinned and scraped and bloody knees, and her clothes.
“I didn’t catch your name, young lady.” Pete says very suddenly, pushing the fabric over the last bit of the dog bite. “You already know ours. I think it would only be right for us to know yours.”
Another pause. She looks anywhere but to Pete’s eyes; his nose is a good place to focus. Slowly, she mumbles, “Cl-Clementine.”
Laughter at the name isn’t something that she wouldn’t be expecting. Sure, in the time since the beginning of the outbreak, there haven’t been more than a small handful of survivors she has met that have made fun of it, but the days of when she had classmates calling her Orange-Girl aren’t forgotten.
For a moment, the two men exchange looks – expressions that she can’t see.
Clementine looks back to anywhere on Pete’s face except for his eyes and stammers rather quickly, “My mom liked oranges a lot. She craved them when she was pregnant with me.” Peering down, she adds, “Please don’t make fun of my name.”
Pete is smiling slightly when he looks back up. He answers back, “Well, I don’t know what the hell to do with that information, but I guess I’m glad I have it.”
Clementine simply shrugs, looking away. It could be sarcasm, but at the same time, no one should really be sarcastic at a time like this.
“I won’t make fun of yer name.” continues Pete. “I promise.”
“Can we get back to… y’know, the shit we actually stopped for?” asks Luke, crossing his arms. His eyes are wide, eyebrows raised as – seemingly – humanly possible. His face softens slowly; he sighs and looks down. “Look, I don’t know a dog bite from a mosquito bite from a lurker bite, Pete.”
Clementine lifts an eyebrow slightly, looking past Pete’s nose to Luke’s shirt. “Have… you ever seen a mosquito bite?”
Another pause, as Luke slowly turns.
“I was… joking.” He clears his throat, then looks to Pete. “Yeah, I was exaggeratin’.”
Slowly, Clementine nods. Her cheeks feel hot suddenly. Of course she would miss that. Of course she would say something that came out that… rude… to someone who’s supposed to be helping her. And it’s the moment that Pete declares that he isn’t willing to leave a “little girl” in the woods to die when they have a doctor. And Luke doesn’t like it. Luke wants no part of it.
That moment is exactly when she can almost feel her words dry up.
Clementine hangs her head, now feeling too shaky and tired to argue. All energy is completely gone. She makes it a few feet before Pete’s voice comes again, this time seeming a bit louder than previously.
“Are you okay?”
She doesn’t answer. She stumbles straight into a tree right before she loses consciousness, hitting the ground with a hard thump.
When Clementine wakes up, the tinnitus hits her right away. Her ears ring and ring and ring until she shifts slightly in the space she’s lying in. There’s voices everywhere – one female, several male. She covers her eyes just as the light comes back to her vision; it feels more like she’s just been stabbed in the eyes.
One of the males has a rifle.
Sitting up, Clementine tries to push herself off of the ground to run – maybe they won’t notice. Maybe they won’t say anything. Maybe they’ll just let her go.
The dirt next to her explodes as the sound of a gunshot and the sight of a muzzle fire explode through the air. Her balance falters and she lands on her knees, her hands flying up to her ears as her gaze snaps back to the man with a rifle.
The woman yells at him. Pete yells at him. The third man backs up and widens his eyes.
Clementine tries to push up again, but her left arm gives out this time. Her entire being feels like a heavy weight that she can’t pick up.
“WOAH, WHAT THE FUCK?”
Turning, Clementine’s hands fly to her ears again. Her heart thumps fast as she looks up to see Luke running out of the house in front of them, his expression the textbook definition of the word ‘livid’. Another man tears out of the house after Luke, thankfully not as loudly.
“She tried to run, man!” says the man with the rifle still in his hands. Without a word, Pete yanks the rifle from the man’s hands and glares.
“Well, Nick!” Luke shouts, throwing his hands up. “Can you really fuckin’ blame her?”
They converse. They yell. They scream at each. The man named Nick expresses his discontent for having Clementine there.
Clementine doesn’t look up. A sick feeling rises in the pit of her stomach as the arguing continues. Nick yells. Luke tries to calm him. The woman, Rebecca, yells. Pete and the tallest of the men try to calm her.
“Clementine, are you okay?”
She does not look up, nor does she talk back to him. Too much is telling her that something isn’t right and that she needs to run. Luke continues to ask her if she’s all right; nothing comes out of her. Slowly, Clementine yanks on the fringe closest to her temples and keeps her eye contact towards the ground, still on her knees.
Her knees hurt. There’s no doubt in her mind that there are cuts and scrapes and bruises all over them; trying to think any differently does nothing. She can feel too much of it to deny the pain, but she stays on her knees anyway.
Luke’s eyebrows scrunch up. Softly, he says, “Hey, kid, we gotta doctor here, okay? He’s gonna have a look at your arm.”
Her answer comes in the form of a small nod. Luke gestures to the fifth man, whom Clementine hardly acknowledges. The thoughts of doubt already buzz – maybe a doctor can tell a dog bite from a walker bite. Maybe. Maybe this doctor won’t advocate for her death. Maybe. Maybe he won’t believe that the bite is from a dog.
“Let me take a look.” says the doctor, making his way towards Clementine.
Her skin crawls just thinking about being touched. Sure, hugs are nice… from people she knows. And being tapped on the shoulder is okay… from people she knows. But having a wound touched and poked and prodded is… not okay, or nice, or any other synonym that she can possibly think of.
The doctor kneels down to her level and holds his hands out for her arm. Part of Clementine is screaming internally to not let any little bit of anyone’s flesh touch her own. Another part wonders if she can trust him.
Luke encourages her to trust the doctor, who he refers to as Carlos. Clementine looks up to both of them, trying to focus on anything but their eyes. Anything but that. Just thinking about it makes her feel exposed – like she’s completely vulnerable and naked.
Slowly, Clementine peels her sleeve away from the dried blood on her skin to expose a messy, bloody, and bruised bite. The bite is an almost perfect imprint of the teeth on the left side of the dog’s mouth. Despite the fighting she did against him, there’s no apparent stretching of the skin in her wound. Even then, the only thing Clementine wants to do is get sick when she sees the wound for the first time since… well, however long it’s been since she met Pete and Luke.
Clementine doesn’t speak the entire time Carlos looks at her arm.
“Hey, I brought ya somethin’ to eat. You hungry?”
In Luke’s hands is a plastic bowl of oatmeal dotted with soggy blueberries. A metal spoon sticks out, leaning against the side in a way that Clementine can already tell is going to cause it to fall into the oats. A small amount of anxiety worms its way into her chest at the thought of the food. The smell is nice, but the thought of the texture isn’t, and though she’s never had much of an issue with plain, cooked oats on their own, she imagines the mushiness of the probably-previously-dehydrated blueberries.
Clementine moves her gaze up slightly. She opens her mouth to say that she really doesn’t even know if she’s hungry or if she can pass on the food, but the newly found courage quickly disappears. Instead, she looks back down to her arm and shrugs.
They wanted to lock her in the shed. Pete insisted that Clementine couldn’t weigh more than – in his words – a sack of flour, and instead managed to convince the rest of this group (no matter how obviously mad they both were and are) to bring her inside.
I can’t be sure what that is exactly, Carlos said earlier, but it wasn’t a lurker. A dog? Possibly. It could be a dog.
Luke sets the bowl onto the table in front of Clementine, then takes a seat across from her with a frown on his face.
“Look, I get it. You’re pissed at us ‘cause we wanted to lock you in the shed.”
Clementine shakes her head.
“Okay, well, then why won’t you talk to me? I know you can talk. I was right next to you earlier.”
She doesn’t answer and she doesn’t eat. Instead, Clementine stares down at the soggy oats and watches as the clumps of blueberry leak juice into the liquid and mix into some sort of light purple color. Despite her hunger, the thought of eating them is nauseating.
Luke gives her a peculiar look and cocks his head slightly. He holds his mouth open for a moment, as his eyes dart to the side, then says in a quiet voice, “Is everythin’… okay with you?” A second passes before Clementine can react; Luke suddenly adds, “I mean that in… well, the nicest possible way.” A sigh escapes his lips and he rubs underneath his eye. “You won’t talk to me. You ain’t eatin’ anything. You look like you’ve been through complete hell, Clementine.”
She looks to Luke’s nose, just as she did with Pete earlier, but still says nothing. Luke will get the wrong idea. If he wants to, he can assume completely wrong things about her. But there is absolutely no part of Clementine that wants to speak. Not him. Not to Pete. Not to any of them.
She has to struggle to keep tears from filling up her eyes. Clementine slowly takes a hold of the spoon in the bowl, feeling small amounts of annoyance tugging at her that it’s already submerged in the oatmeal, and that pieces of disgustingly rushed blueberries are already stuck to it.
At least with Christa, Clementine didn’t have a choice in what she ate. It was either eat a weasel or go hungry for only God knows how long. Granted, that was no better, but it did narrow down the choices a bit. It didn’t stop Clementine from nearly gagging on every piece of burned – and sometimes undercooked – meat from said weasel, but it narrowed down her choices.
“Is someone… after you?”
Slowly, she finds herself nodding. She thinks of the three men who attacked her and Christa. Two of them are missing – the other was walker food. Maybe they’re still out there looking for her, willing to do who knows what to Christa or Clementine. Clementine isn’t stupid; she knows what men like that do to girls and women.
Luke nods back, his eyes widening. In a quiet voice, he continues, “You wanna tell me why?”
Clementine shrugs.
“You don’t wanna tell me, or you don’t know?”
The air is heavy between them. Clementine avoids eye contact, her arm still throbbing. She lets go of the spoon and lets it fall back against the rim of the bowl. Luke cocks his head again, like he’s expecting that to get Clementine to answer his question.
It works.
“I dunno.” she mutters quietly.
Luke’s eyes widen even more. Clementine wonders to herself if that’s something she should have expected or not, though she really isn’t sure. Her gaze remains down, already feeling tired of talking. Even just those two words are taxing.
“I – uh… is this guy… is his name Carver?”
Clementine shrugs again, her voice quiet and unsteady as she answers, “I… I don’t know any of their names.”
“How many guys?”
She holds up two finger, counting out the one who chased her. He’s walker food now, and the other two men seemed to have been on their own without him. They didn’t seem to have the kind of dynamics to keep a larger group together; granted, Clementine doesn’t know what exactly that would consist of, but she’s seen enough of larger groups to know that it isn’t that.
And soon enough, Luke excuses himself and leans out of the kitchen. Clementine listens carefully and hears his voice and Carlos’, suddenly speaking in hushed and concerned tones.
“She’s talkin’ to me, but she’s kinda… I dunno, she’s hesitant.”
“What did she tell you?”
“There’s two guys after her. That’s about it.”
“Did she say if –?”
“Nah. Said she didn’t know their names.” Luke hesitates for a moment before stepping completely out of the kitchen and lowering his voice to one of a quieter volume. Even with the door closed, his whisper isn’t completely a whisper. “I thought she was just scared – but… I dunno, she kind of reminds me of…”
He trails off, and there’s a pause in their conversation.
“You know, I’ll tell ya later.”
“Tell me what, Luke?”
Clementine listens intently, feeling even more irritation rising up in her chest than before.
“I… don’t worry about it.”
For a moment, Clementine reigns in her thoughts. It’s as if Luke has said the magic words and they completely dissociate her from the conversation and her eavesdropping. She looks around the dim kitchen, then down at her oatmeal. Her stomach turns as she stares down at the sloppy meal, then she slowly finds her gaze wandering back to the fabric around her arm.
It’s blood soaked by now. The stain spreads in a way comparable to the spreading of the juice from the crushed blueberries, and that comparison only makes her thoughts worse.
Clementine pulls her cap from her head and crushes it across her chest with her left arm, then lays her head down on her right arm.
Sleep doesn’t solve every problem, but she isn’t willing to face this group much longer. Sleep is a fine solution right now, at least.