Author's Notes at the end.
Walt Longmire cut the strangers' trail well south of Durant – long past noon, and with the north sky gone cold and tall with grey, snow heavy clouds. The sun was westerly and already painting the Bighorns with rose and gold. Even the slighter humps and ridges of the thin snow blanket cast blue shadows.
It was the twentieth of November, by Ruby's careful count, and twenty seven months since the world had tried to come to an end.
He pulled up the black mare off the ridgeline and let her blow. Dog swung wide and made his own way down the rise, tail up and ears pricked. Walt hissed a whistle through his teeth and Dog stopped long enough to look back quizzically. When he saw Walt and the horse weren't moving, Dog kept moving downhill, but with more caution.
The black mare was willing to stand where she was, a bit out of the wind, and let Walt get a lay of the land.
Old 87 lay to the west, towards the Bighorns rising to meet the setting sun. Southerly, the Sussex cut-off ran east, connecting 87 to the interstate, and then (Walt knew, from Before, when he could cover 150 miles in a day, not fifteen) becoming Trabing road, and angling further south.
All of that was nice, but not quite relevant to the moment, which was a pair of wrecked vehicles, a wide tangle of dark mud interrupting the broad sweep of snow, and – well off the road – a tiny patch of red.
The mare grew tired of standing still and tossed her head, snorting. The landscape before him remained still and quiet. Walt pulled the 30-30 from the scabbard and let the reins slack. He sat back in the saddle as the mare picked her way down the slope to the roadway. Dog wuffed from where he stood nearly hock deep in a drift but bounded out to take the flank.
Walt was not Henry Standing Bear, who could track the flight of a buzzard on a cloudless summer day, but it didn't take an expert tracker to suss the bones of the tale. Ten minutes brought him down to the road but changed little of what the snow and the shadows had told him from the hill.
A pair of vehicles had come up from the south on 87 and met the roadblock that Walt, Branch, and the rest of Durant's able-bodied population had drug into the roadway two summers before. Forced to turn around or head east, they had chosen the latter. And had met the Jasper crew in their barely-functional Tacoma. The little pickup had come up from behind the billboard and attempted to force the second vehicle off the road, only to hit the slick edge of the spill and spin out of control.
Abandoning purposeful motion had evidently let Todd and Abigail Looks Far accomplish what Walt would have sworn they couldn't have done deliberately, and shoved the Bronco II into the ditch. The Bronco was still there, canted over on its side, and the Tacoma a fire-gutted wreck beside it.
The travelers, whoever they were, had evidently taken exception to the interruption in their travel plans.
Dog circled the trampled dirt around the Bronco II, nose to the ground and his ruff up. Walt reined in the black mare and let her stand a minute on the tracks that the second vehicle had made, heading east. He scanned the edges of the horizon, and swung down, cursing an old man's diminishing eyesight. He kept a firm hold on the reins – the mare was a solid sort, but the storm was still bearing down, and Walt had no intention of ending up afoot so far from home and supper.
There was quite a lot of foot tracks, and something Walt figured was a motorcycle. A few bits of fresh debris – scraps of paper, a rag or two, but no more than a handful of shells. One red 12 gauge casing, two or three bits of brass from something like a 45. The tracks were a mixed lot – boots, mostly, worn and newer, larger and smaller. At least one pair that hadn't been sold together, in the Before. One smaller pair that had gone over the whole mess – Walt's mind kept going back to crime scene, but ambush site was probably closer. There were marks in the snow of smaller hands to go with those tracks, and Walt figured that was the person collecting the brass.
A couple red smears in the mud, which would account for the scraps of paper and gauze bandages. The Bronco was empty, even to the gas tank. The factory gas cap had gone the way of the rest of the world, but there was a filthy rag dropped on the gravel, still stinking of fuel.
None of this was all that unusual, or frankly unexpected. The Looks Far pair had been eating off the leavings of the northward road for the whole of the summer for two years now – never yet bold enough to touch one of Walt's own, nor brazen enough to be caught hitting travelers where either Durant nor the Cheyenne could execute them for it. Walt had seen half-a-dozen similar scenes, and heard of more from Mathias, police chief of the North Cheyenne.
What was strange, though, was the pair of graves beside the road. Shallow graves, little more than scraped together gravel and filthy mud, and without more marker than a handful of paler stones arranged in a cross shape. But they were graves, with markers.
Just to be sure, Walt kicked aside enough dirt to ID both Todd and Abigail Looks Far. It was Todd, sure enough, with a set of bullet holes in his chest and a deep mark on his temple. The bloody mess that was left of the face of the other corpse defied Walt's memory. He paused, then dug further down the gravel, the melting snow clinging to his gloves.
The right hand still held an even dozen gold rings. Walt stared at the withered flesh for a long moment – blood crusting on the wrinkled fingers, dirt under the broken nails.
Dog came over, his nose working furiously.
"No," Walt said. "Not people. Not where I can see you."
He let the hand drop back into the grave and gathered up the rifle before he grunted back to his feet. Dog laid his ears back and sulked. Walt ignored him and turned around where he stood, looking at the snow-dusted mud again.
The Bronco II was empty. The east-running lane of the cut-off was trampled with a multitude of tracks – one wide bodied vehicle on light tires, a heavy-loaded motorcycle, and seven or nine sets of boots. Walt frowned at the monochrome snow and sank to his heels, trying to figure the tracks.
Two vehicles, plus a motorscooter. All well loaded. The Bronco here, a loss. Two bandit graves.
No traveler graves.
Two vehicles headed east. Seven walking people, also walking east.
Walt passed a hand over his mouth. He twisted around to look north over his shoulder, at the building storm. Looked again at the graves.
He sighed, tucked the rifle away, and swung back in the saddle.
"Come on, Dog," he said, as he turned the black mare east and north. "If this don't work out, we better hope it kills us." He'd never hear the end of it from Henry, Cady, or Vic, otherwise.
Two miles north of the turn off, Rick raised a hand.
More felt than seen, the group – half the group – shifted off the road, splitting roughly up the middle and transforming from a narrow snake to a prickly snapping turtle, facing in all directions and willing to do damage. Abraham was in the rear, with Sasha to back him up, and with Morgan right and Carl left, they weren't going to be taken by surprise.
Footsteps crunched through the snow, light and quick. Tara, hustling up to support the point man, and find out what he had seen.
Point man being Rick, and as for what he had seen…
"Hey," Tara said, "What is it?"
Rick shook his head even as he said, "Not sure. Too quiet." Tara, being Tara, gave him a look and an eye-roll.
"Can't be the Abominable Snowman, then. I heard you can always tell them, a mile off." She was laughing under her breath, but that was Tara. In spite of himself, Rick felt a grin spreading across his face.
"Well, it might be Yeti, you ever think of that?" Rick asked, checking the safety on his rifle, and then drawing the Python. Four rounds. He checked over his shoulder at the group – four pairs of bodies down off the road. "You hear anything?"
Tara shook her head, then jerked her cap off her head and listened. Shaking her head again, she cuddled the AR close and pulled the knit fabric back over her tangled hair. "Not a thing. Not even…" she trailed off, and Rick could see when the realization hit her.
"Not even Daryl's bike," Rick said. He twisted again, whistled through his teeth and waved for the rest of the group to rally up.
They came up in a purposeful rush – the wings first, Carl and Noah, both slim and fast despite their layers, meeting Morgan and Eugene as they came. Eugene would never be the killer that the rest of them were, but the man had lost much of his weight and some of his clumsy terror on the road. Now, the Texan kept pace with Morgan as the smaller man slid into the huddle, and mostly – mostly – avoided fanning anyone with his sidearm. Last of all were Abraham – a massive bear of fur coat and size 13 boots – and Sasha, her rifle ready in her arms and her outer glove off her trigger hand. Together they collapsed to the ground around Rick in a clatter of packs and rifle butts.
Predictably, Abraham Ford was the first to speak. "Grimes, what the hell? My balls are about to drop off from all the icecubes hanging off my short hairs!"
Rick waved off the former sergeant's protest. "Can't hear Daryl's bike. Eugene, what's the time?"
Eugene fumbled at his coat. Automatically, both Abraham and Morgan pushed the muzzle of Eugene's weapon upwards.
"Sorry," Eugene mumbled, and slid the nine-mil back into its holster. "Fifteen-ten, boss. By my count, that would make the Suburban –"
"Six minutes late. Yeah."
A breath ran around the group – part profanity, part grief, part resolute fury. Rick turned away from their eyes, sucking in cold air from a hands-breath over the snow. Both sides of the horizon were clear – the road behind them a mess of footprints, ahead three dark lines of tire tracks in a field of white.
"We could fall back now," Eugene said. "The wrecked vehicles are little more than an hour away, on foot, and there was a culvert much closer than that…"
"No," Sasha said, dark finger curling over the trigger grip on the rifle. "No," echoed Carl.
Rick met Abraham's eyes. The big man's jaw clenched beneath his ruddy beard, but what he said was, "Your call, officer."
It always was. Go forward into the teeth of the black cat of uncertainty, which held the rest of their party in its claws. Fall back to a more defensible position, with nothing more than the scant supplies on their backs and what looked like a frozen hell bearing down on them. If there was ever a choice between a rock and a hard place…
Rick gathered his feet under him, ready to rise, and stopped. The low-key rumble of an off-road motorbike rose in volume, gaining an eerie whine, until it was nearly upon them. Over the slight rise, a cobbled-together mongrel of a motorcycle came into view, the rider scanning left and right. Rick rose to his feet and scrambled back up to the roadway. The bike slid passed him and abruptly cut velocity, skidding under the doubled weight of the rider, dual loaded saddle bags and a passenger riding pillion.
Rick came up on the pavement as Daryl Dixon righted the bike and jerked the scarves off his face. "Rick! Get your ass up here!" He turned back to speak to his rider, but the narrow-boned woman behind him was already scrambling off the bike, rifle in her hands. Daryl faced Rick as Carol slipped past him to the group on the roadside. Uncharacteristically, Daryl had not cut the bike off. Whatever it was, it needed the nine seconds that the bike took to crank from a cold start.
"C'mon! Get on, you gotta see this!"
Rick threw a glance at the group – at Carol Pelletier, a tiny shadow next to Abraham's hulking presence, pointing back east, the way she and Daryl had come, and at his son, as Carl split his attention between Carol's tumbling words and his father. Rick raised a hand – Carl shifted his shotgun to the other fist and raised a hand in response – and then Rick threw himself awkwardly on Daryl's bike, finding his place as the other man gunned the engine and headed back east.
/to be continued/
Author's Notes: Cross-over between Longmire and The Walking Dead. Canon divergence at S2.5- ish for Longmire, S5.5 - ish for The Walking Dead. Includes elements for the A&E/Netflicks show, Craig Johnson novels, and The Walking Dead tv show. Thanks, as always, for the world's greatest beta plus cheering section.
On-going multipart story. Rated T for canon-typical violence, plus a warning for Dixon mouth and Moretti mouth.
