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They’re screaming and spitting at each other, rolling around in the snow while one tries to pin the other down. Kenny is ballistic, inconsolable, scraping at Jane with his dirty nails, and Jane looks back at her occasionally, eyes wide, as if to say ‘do you see this?’
She can’t move. She doesn’t know what to do, she can barely process what’s going on. It’s all white noise in the back of her head, pounding, blinding.
Do you see it, Clementine?
Jane gets the upper hand, elbows Kenny in the chest and he falls back, gasping. She pulls the blade from her side, spares Clementine one last glance, and moves.
He’s a monster, can you see it?
Desperately, Kenny grabs her wrist and twists, and she hisses in pain. The slight movement is enough for the man to sling her hand violently, knife skidding away in the snow.
Your friends don’t. Christa, and Lee, and Sarita, and-
His hand is shaking when he picks up the knife, holding Jane down by her shoulder. With rage or fear, Clementine can’t tell, maybe both. She takes in one shuddering breath, and forces herself to move.
But you can see it, can’t you? You’re smart, Clementine. Smarter than you think.
She moves, but she doesn’t know what to do.
Don’t let yourself get blinded by connections with people. People are monsters, like Kenny. They’ll only hurt you.
Her fists are tight around her gun, trembling. She can’t- she can’t let Kenny kill Jane, but he won’t listen. He doesn’t listen anymore. The only way she can stop him, the only way she can fix this is if she-
Do you see it, Clementine?
“What the FUCK are you doing?” A voice calls from behind Clementine. She doesn’t hear it until moments after it’s screamed, doesn’t process it as Christa until the woman is barreling past her and pulling Kenny and Jane apart, livid.
The gun in Clementine’s hands drops into the snow, and then so does she.
Kenny tries to push past her, knife still brandished, but Christa slaps him in the face. Pushes him back.
“Stop it!” She hisses. “You’re acting like wild animals. What the fuck is going on?”
“He’s insane,” Jane whispers, and Clementine’s head hurts so bad and she can’t breathe. “He’s going to kill all of you, don’t you fucking see it? He’s broken, and broken people don’t listen , and Kenny doesn’t fucking listen. ”
“Why the fuck would I listen to you, you psycho bitch!?” Kenny lunges, but Christa kicks him back down forcefully. Her arms are held out between the both of them, warning. Her jaw is tight, teeth clenched.
“He doesn’t care about anything,” Jane insists. “No one but himself and the fucking infant-”
“Just stop!” Christa shouts. “Enough of this shit! Did you not get it out of your system screaming at each other for two hours in the van? I don’t care if you don’t like each other, just get your shit together. For Clementine, and AJ, and… and…”
Christa trails off.
Her eyes meet Clementine’s, searching, and find only hot wet streams of tears.
“Where is AJ?” She asks, voice wavering.
“She killed him!” Kenny pants, and Christa goes rigid. “The evil fuckin' bitch left him to die!”
“Is that true?” Christa moves closer to Jane, and Clementine recognizes the dangerous look on her face too late. Grief and hatred and anger mixed together, like when Omid…
“Christa, don’t!” She screams, but the woman is unhearing, eyes boring down into Jane.
Jane hesitates, for just a second. Her eyes dart over to Clementine, wide with fear. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, then opens it again, like she doesn’t know what to say. She had been so uncaring, when she’d said it to Kenny, but now… she hesitates.
It’s enough time for Christa.
“I-” Jane starts.
And then her brains are splattered across the ground. The snow is painted red with her blood and melting into slush. Her eyes are wide, her jaw is slack, her fingers twitch one more time, and she is dead. Christa tosses the gun a few feet away.
Everyone you love is going to die, Clementine.
She can’t even bring herself to shout out for her. She presses her forehead into the snow and squeezes her eyes shut tightly but all she can see is her dead body in the snow. It’s her fault, it’s her fault, if she would’ve stepped in before Christa found them, Jane would still be alive.
She sobs into the ice, trembling with sadness and the cold.
The door to the rest stop swings open, and there’s more shouting. Everyone is shouting, and Clementine just wants to melt into the floor. There’s a hand on her shoulder briefly- Lee, she knows it, she doesn’t have to look to know it’s him, and then there’s more shouting.
And then, like the softest twinkling of church bells, a baby’s cry.
She looks up, alert, but nobody else has heard it. Kenny is still shouting and Sarita is trying to calm him down and Lee is yelling over him and Christa is sobbing into her hands and Jane is dead on the ground.
She hears it again, and she’s up on her feet. She’s running, and the others pause as she goes. She traces the sound to an old car, and he’s crying so loud now, he must be freezing. She scoops him up with trembling hands and holds him to her chest, desperately tries to warm him.
Lee’s at her side first, an “oh, thank god,” uttered scratchily. She carries AJ like he’s a glass ornament, like if she drops him he might shatter into a thousand little pieces, and it's probably true.
Sarita stops when she sees them, and Kenny keeps crying and shouting until Clementine tips AJ to him just enough that he can see that he’s blinking and breathing and whining and he’s alive, and Kenny’s eye goes so wide and then he slumps into the snow and cries.
Christa is… Christa isn’t looking, not just at them, but at anything. Her eyes are glazed over with tears, unfocused. Her hands are shaking and she isn’t moving, barely breathing, just staring at nothing. Clementine remembers this, from those days after she'd buried the too tiny body of her own baby at the base of a tree.
“Christa,” Clementine whispers, to no response. Lee sets a hand down on her shoulder and the woman gasps like she’s just been shaken awake from a nightmare.
She looks over to them, and she’s devastated. It takes her a moment to focus on the baby Clementine is holding so snugly in her arms, but then her eyes widen and there’s life back in her and she's sobbing again and reaching out.
She passes AJ to Christa, who holds him like he’s the most precious thing on earth, the way Rebecca did, and Clementine isn’t sure if that’s right or if it’s good but then Lee is hugging her and she doesn’t have to know anything but this.
“Why… why would she do something like this?” Sarita asks into the silence. The storm has calmed down, some, enough that Clementine can see more than ten feet away from herself. Against her will, her eyes find Jane’s body, and she holds back a sob.
“She wanted-” Clementine tries, but succumbs to her tears. Lee holds her as she sniffles into her arm. “She wanted to prove Kenny was a monster.”
And is that what she did?
“Of course,” Christa whispers, her voice hoarse. “Like none of us fucking know Kenny is unstable. Tell him the damn baby’s dead and see what happens.”
Clementine looks at her, alarmed. She wants to ask if she regrets it, she wants to ask if she feels the same pain she does for this dead girl. Christa meets her eyes.
“If she were alive,” she says slowly. “I’d shoot her in the head again for making me go through that.”
“ Christa -”
“She’s been through enough shit, Lee. I’m not lying to her anymore.”
And Jane was right. Her friends, her family- they’re monsters. But maybe that’s just what this world does to people, turns them into monsters. The living kind or the dead kind.
Clementine leaves Lee’s side to walk to Jane. She can feel their eyes on her, silent. She squats down next to the body of her friend, and closes her eyes with her fingertips, sets her jaw straight with the heel of her hand.
At least Jane never had to become the dead kind.
A small solace.
She knows what Jane had meant. She feels the words Kenny screamed at her when he thought Sarita was dead in her bones, sees the people he’s attacked and killed behind her eyes. And she remembers too, the way he’d torn down Lee when Duck and Katjaa had died. He’s not the type of person built to survive in this world, but he’d crawled through it anyway.
“She was right,” Kenny croaks, sounding like he hasn’t spoken in years. Sarita goes to say something, but Clementine frowns.
“Of course she was,” Clementine says, and everyone but Kenny looks to her in shock. “So fix it.”
“I can’t-” he chokes. “I’m not fit to raise that boy. Just leave me here, take him and go. You need one less mouth to feed.”
“You’ve been an asshole since the day I met you, Kenny,” Lee shakes his head defiantly, as Kenny covers his good eye with his palm. “And it’s been worse, steadily, but you can fix it. Like Clementine said. You’re right when you say you can’t raise that boy, and you won’t. That doesn’t mean we’ll leave you here alone. You’re family.”
“We already have one less mouth to feed,” Clementine says harshly, because Lee is right but it’s too nice, too nice for everything that’s happened in this last hour. “You’re saying you’re going to lie down and die? I guess I never knew you, then.”
Sarita looks hurt on his behalf, but Kenny looks at Clementine with one wet eye and slowly nods, at her, then at Lee.
“We’ll go to Wellington,” Christa states. “And if Wellington doesn’t work out we’ll go somewhere else, or we’ll go somewhere else.”
It’s easy enough to agree to. Sarita helps Kenny to his feet and Lee takes the baby from Christa, who leads them back to the re-fueled van. Kenny finds his way to her side, Lee at her other. They walk away, and they leave Jane behind them.
She’s not sure if she’s ready to forgive Kenny for everything he’s done, but standing here, between the two of them, she knows that this is how everything is meant to be.