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She shuddered off the zombie and climbed off the ghost of Charlie behind her eyes to vomit her guts out. Bile burning worse with the homemade bourbon the bartender poured her, tipped ten times again as she stretched his death. For a minute she didn't know where everything ended and began, vomit and tears and dried blood rehydrated in it all, the corpse on the ground and their bodies in a soft bed, warm and uncaring. Hopeful.
Hope. She grit her teeth while the worm swam through her thoughts like a Z taunting her. If she hadn't been caught off guard, reeling from putting faith in the idyllic little raft they'd found themselves on (errant thoughts of solar panel electricity while her blood flowed downwards), and rewiring herself to not have threads of her heart in her old home (the feeling of Charlie's lips against her temple), and the sickening relief of laying what remained of her husband's closest friends out in a line and saying their names like checking them off a list (pounding at the door and begging her to come to safety), she would have heard the footsteps of the goddamn preacher before it was too late. She wouldn't have spent the time tracing the familiar lines of his body, making sure he wasn't bit, skin and posture that still had the time to blend into the background vertigo.
She wouldn't have struggled to give him mercy before he turned.
She couldn't even be gifted her last memory of him as he was, the sick fuck he was, brave and gentle and holding her, covering her until his heart stopped. Roberta spit one last time, saw him snarling and felt the recoil of putting him down, and the borders of her anguish and anger seemed yawning as a black hole, as a horde the radio would spit out for her to chew.
Then she sat back, became the woman she had to be again. Warren, guns blazing and coolly drawing blood, getting high on it with her partner in crime. She wiped at her face, under her eyes and across her brow, mending some kind of gentleness for all that hurt. Something to live for.