Miles Behind || Shane & Andrea
In the first few hours after escaping the farm, nothing mattered but making it somewhere safe. Let the rest of them stand and defend the farm, if they were stupid enough to do it. The entire group had turned against him. Most of them wanted him off the farm already, and the ones that didn’t certainly would after they heard what he’d tried to do to Rick. Pleading his case wouldn’t work. After all, hadn’t he tried to do that with Lori the entire time, to no end? They had their proof now. Shane could have kept them safe, had they just pushed on to Fort Benning. But Rick had delayed that, gone off on some hopeless mission for a dead little girl, and now, there they were. There was Shane, sitting in the dirt alone, desperately trying to stitch himself shut with a straightened fishing hook and line out of the bag he’d stolen.
The first few days after were spent struggling to survive, and if Rick or the others crossed his mind, it was in hostility alone. Shane spent the first night huddled under a musty sleeping bag in the camper bed of a truck, delirious and shaking. It wasn’t until the next morning that he even considered climbing out in search of food. No sign of the others. No one had even come looking for him. They’d left him stranded, injured, nothing more than easy pickings out in the open. After everything he’d done for them, this was the end he got in return.
It took a week for Shane to wander back to the farmhouse. Call it morbid curiosity or sheer stupidity, but he had to know whether those gunshots echoing in the dark that night had done them any good, or if he’d walk up on a massacre. The latter made so much sense, became so expected, that when Shane eventually made it back to the farm and found every vehicle gone, he could only stand and stare. How? How was that even possible? There were so few of them, and so many in that herd. For that matter, how in the hell had he not heard the vehicles up on the interstate?
That last wasn’t much of a question. Even after finding leftover supplies and raiding that water truck one more time, he was still weak, still slept more than what was entirely safe in that truck bed. But so what? If he’d heard them and stepped out, tried to flag someone down, it was more likely they’d leave him there. Rick had them all fooled into thinking his way was best. He could put whatever spin he wanted on Shane's supposed ending.
Something rustled behind him, pulling Shane out of his thoughts while he stood staring at the charred remains of the barn and RV. There had been a few walkers shuffling along the property still, likely stragglers from the group, but he'd taken those out. Nearly exhausted himself working with the knife too, so when he jerked around to defend himself this time, it was with his gun raised. There were only a few bullets left, but wasting one was a better option than losing a physical fight with any walker.
