Rodeo doesn't even get one moment of mourning before the dead arrive, snarling and foaming like rabid dogs. Bodies are her business but not like these; they move like something out of the darkest trenches of your unholiest nightmares. Backwards limbs, bones jutting out of putrid, jaundiced skin at all wrong angles, eyes that are dead, eyes are are missing. Lita hasn't been out in the trenches like some, she hasn't had the experience in destroying one on her own. Christ, she's only had someone take her out to shoot twice. She only knows you have to destroy the brain and by the time her own sluggish noggin gets round to that fact, Rodeo already has her covered, shoving a knife that Crocodile Dundee would covet straight through the zombie's cranium.
She's stunned for a moment but recovers quickly, accepting her gun from Rodeo. She watches him struggle to lug the (literal) dead weight of his fat friend over his shoulder and listens to him when he starts giving the orders. She hikes her kit up over her shoulder and holds the gun the way the Chuy the orderly showed her on the roof of the hospital. She knows she's going to have to get out ahead of Rodeo and run interference and it's so much scarier than she can even fathom. But then, she thinks, is it scarier than her first solo surgery? No. Scarier than when she was bitten? No. Scarier than the car crash? Not even close. So, she takes a deep breath and when she takes off the gun's safety, her eyes are dry and her hands are steady.
"Is now a good time to tell you I'm a terrible shot?" Lita says with strangled laugh. It's so inappropriate, the laughter, but it spills out unbidden. When he instructs her to get in the car so he can load up her cache, she stops, her eyes wide.
"Did you get some of that walker blood in your mouth?" she asks incredulously. "Or are you just naturally braindead? There's no time. I'm going to cover you while you load him in the truck. Get him home. Mourn him. Bury him. Forget about the stash for now, we'll square up for it later. Something tell me you're good...for it."
The innuendo, like the laughter, comes out like word vomit, almost of its own volition. If she doesn't joke, the fear she's she's choking on will almost certainly become a scream. The horde from the kitchen is almost upon them and she doesn't wait for Rodeo to confirm her amendment to his plan. He's going to burst through the door any second but before he does she grabs his wrist with the hand not wrapped around her gun. She squeezes, just for a second, and she's not sure if she means to reassure him or herself.
"You got this," she says with a resolute nod. Lita's job is over now; Rodeo's has already begun.