AN: For the time being, this is a one-shot. However, it's also the start of the AU I'll be starting as soon as I wrap up another story that won't last much longer.
I own nothing from the Walking Dead.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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The rain had started suddenly and had come with such a vengeance that Carol could almost convince herself that it was some kind of precursor to another Great Flood of biblical proportions. It was coming down in a solid sheet that blurred Carol's view through the windshield enough that she was starting to lose the ability to distinguish the road from anything else in her surroundings. It washed across the road in hard waves and from time to time it sent the car surging off in one direction or another toward the ditches that lined either side of the back country highway. The tires on the old station wagon were bad and they'd been bad for half a decade. They were probably bald. Carol would be surprised if there was any tread left on them at all.
As far as safe and reliable vehicles went, the station wagon was neither. It certainly wouldn't have been Carol's first choice for neither a long road trip nor to use as a getaway car, but it was what she had. Right now it would have to do.
The car had belonged to an old man that once lived three or four houses down from the place that Carol had called home for a decade. He'd died and his wife had kept the car in the garage, but she'd never bothered renewing its tags. It was a junker and she was waiting for someone to come along and offer to haul it down to the junkyard for the few dollars that she might get for it in trade.
Carol had offered her three hundred dollars in folded bills for the car and she'd requested that the price pay for her silence on the matter as well. The woman had accepted and Carol had taken the keys to the old, brown station wagon. A green metal clover hung from the keys and Carol was hoping there was still a bit of good, old-fashioned Irish luck in the trinket because she was going to need all of it that she could get.
Without tags, Carol knew that she was travelling on borrowed time. Eventually her luck would run out. The cops would stop her and she'd have to offer them some sort of explanation. She didn't know how that would play out. She didn't know if they'd help her or if, in the name of pretending to help her, they'd just deliver her back to the hell she'd finally escaped. She hadn't had the best luck with cops in her life. They meant well enough, and she was sure of that, but they just didn't seem able to keep up with their promises.
Carol was tired of relying on their promises, too.
This time, she was doing this herself. And she'd drive the ratty old car until some cop stopped her or the bald tires rolled off—she wasn't sure which would come first, though. Not at the rate she was going.
When the car jerked, sometimes it woke Sophia and the small girl stirred around in the backseat. She offered a quiet question to her mother each time the rough ride woke her.
"Is everything OK? Where are we? What's happening?"
To soothe over her daughter's concerns, Carol sang every time the car jerked one way or another. She sang even though she felt like her throat was seizing up. She sang all the songs that Sophia liked most when she was going to sleep, even though those songs turned out to be more a tribute to the legacy of Neil Diamond than they were a long list of traditional lullabies.
The further that Carol got from where they started, though, the looser her throat felt. Her chest, too, lost some of its tightness. Even though she was white-knuckling the steering wheel, her heart pounding over the fact that they might go into a ditch at any moment, her anxiety seemed to be lessening instead of building.
They were fine and they were going to be fine. They were going on an adventure. It was going to be wonderful.
Carol didn't have a map because she didn't care where they were going. She didn't have a phone because she'd have nobody to call. She didn't have anything but a bag of Sophia's things and one of her own. It was all she could carry as she'd slipped down the backyard grass behind the houses in her neighborhood, Sophia clinging to the back of her pants as she walked along with her, just before the sun had gone down.
Ed hadn't been gone half an hour when Carol took the chance to run with her daughter, but she wasn't wasting anymore time. She'd already wasted enough.
Carol was as physically lost as she'd ever been, but that was her intention all along. She was ready to trade knowing her physical location in order to finally find herself. The farther away she was from everything she'd ever known before, the better off she was. The better off Sophia was, too, and Carol knew it.
When the water on the road snatched the car again, Sophia stirred once more in the backseat.
"What was that?" Sophia asked, her voice heavy with sleep.
"You're still all buckled up, aren't you, sweetheart?" Carol asked.
"Yes, Mama," Sophia responded.
"Good," Carol said smiling to herself. "Good—it's just some water on the road. Go back to sleep."
"Where are we?" Sophia asked.
"We're going on an adventure," Carol said.
"Are we almost there?" Sophia asked.
Carol laughed to herself.
"We're just getting started, sweetheart," Carol said. "Go back to sleep."
"Aren't you gonna sleep, Mama?" Sophia asked.
"When we get where we're going, Sophia," Carol said, "I'm going to sleep. And—I'm going to sleep as good as I've ever slept before."
"Where are we going?" Sophia asked.
"I don't know, sweetheart," Carol answered honestly. "But I'll know when we get there."
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Luckily the ditch that the car had finally decided to sink itself into hadn't been very deep and the impact of the somewhat-crash hadn't been very hard. Carol had managed to get out of the car and wade around in knee deep water for a while during her attempts to get Sophia safely out of the backseat.
She'd left their bags. She'd left the car. All she'd taken was her daughter and the key with the green metal clover.
It was still pouring rain in heavy sheets and Carol had no idea where they were any better than she had when she'd been watching the road go past her through the windshield. The car seemed to have chosen a location to finally slide off the road where there appeared to be no population to speak of. Half carrying Sophia and half dragging her miserable daughter along with her, Carol made her way down the highway in the rain and wondered exactly what they were going to do.
She had maybe five hundred dollars in her pocket, but that was it. If she didn't want to get back in touch with Ed, she was going to have to survive on that until she was able to find somewhere to get a job. She had the old station wagon and the few items they'd tucked in there, but it wasn't coming out of the ditch until the rain stopped at the very least.
All Carol really had was her daughter and the determination to keep going, no matter how much it seemed like something in the universe was trying to make her turn around and go back.
She'd gone back too many times before. There was only forward now.
As they trudged along, Carol did her best to make Sophia believe that this was all part of her plan. This was all part of the adventure. Wasn't it so much fun that they were soaking wet and walking down what seemed like an abandoned highway in the middle of the night? Wasn't Sophia having a great time?
Every place they passed that proved that there was a population of people inhabiting the area was dark. The windows of houses were dark and the houses were quiet as people slept. The few small businesses that seemed to dot the landscape were closed and dark.
There was nothing open and Carol hadn't even seen a single motel for as long as she could recall. She was beginning to wonder if her best bet was turning back with her daughter and passing the night simply sleeping in the station wagon in the ditch. In this ghost town, it seemed like there was nothing and nobody there that would bother them except, perhaps, the spirits of a few long-forgotten people who hadn't come out of accidents as lucky as Carol and Sophia had come out of their trip into the muddy ditch.
Before Carol could make up her mind to turn back, though, she saw something that got her hopes up. She saw the bright glow above the tree line that told her that somewhere, not too far away, there were electric lights burning. Somewhere, not too far away, someone existed and they were awake.
The excitement of the lights gave Carol a renewed strength and she carried Sophia the last leg of the journey despite the fact that her feet were killing her.
Just off the highway and a little tucked back into a cleared patch of woods, there was a bar. Carol's shoes crunched on the soaked gravel as she approached it.
There was nobody outside the bar, but Carol could hear the din of people inside even over the pouring sound of the rain as it splattered on the ground around her. The glowing sign on the bar advertised the name of the place as The Chambers. Outside of the bar and all lined up, there was a row of motorcycles. On the other side of the parking lot there were a few other vehicles, but the motorcycles far outweighed the number of vehicles that weren't bikes.
Carol wasn't certain that The Chambers was the best place to take her five year old daughter, but she was pretty sure that it was the only place that was open at that hour.
At the very least, there might be someone there that would be kind enough to direct her to a motel.
She'd simply have to pray for the kindness of strangers and the benevolence of possibly a quite unsavory crowd.
As soon as Carol pushed open the heavy door of the bar and stepped inside with Sophia slowly sliding down her hip, the girl was doing her best to sleep against Carol's shoulder, she had the strange desire to shake off the water like a dog. Soaked didn't begin to cover how wet she was. There was nothing dry on her body and she was somewhat conscious of the fact that she and her daughter both were dripping a steady stream of water onto the wooden floor.
For a moment, nobody in the bar seemed to notice her arrival at all. Despite the fact that she was soaking wet and holding a five year old, nobody noticed her standing there. It was as though she were invisible.
Everyone inside the bar was drinking and talking. Most of the men in the bar wore leather jackets or vests with some sort of emblem on the back that looked like the scales of justice. The few women who were in the bar were entertaining the men in a variety of ways, but none of them seemed to notice Carol any more than anyone else.
Nobody might have noticed her presence at all, in fact, if Sophia hadn't come out of her half-sleeping state to ask Carol again about their situation.
"Where are we?" Sophia asked.
Her daughter's voice drew the attention of nearly everyone in there. Even though Sophia hadn't spoken very loudly, it appeared that her voice had carried over the sound of the music that was playing and the happy conversations that were taking place.
At once, everyone in the bar turned and stared at Carol. She was suddenly aware that she was an outsider in a number of ways. Her first instinct was to turn around and simply leave the bar, but she'd come too far for that and there was nowhere to go outside except back into the rain and darkness.
Instead, Carol simply shifted her daughter's weight and hoisted her higher on her hip to get a better hold on the child.
"I don't know, sweetheart," Carol said softly to Sophia. "Be quiet. Go to sleep. It's OK." She started forward, making her way toward the bar where she hoped an employee might be able to help her. Aware of the attention that she had drawn, now, Carol stared straight ahead and pretended that she was blind to the presence of everyone there. As she closed in on the bar, she looked for an employee. If there was one there, though, they weren't behind the bar and their manner of dress didn't exactly make them stand out.
Sitting on a stool at the bar, reclining somewhat on the wooden surface in front of him, sat one of the men who was wearing one of the leather vests. Of the men that she'd passed in her silent and solitary parade from the door, the man sitting on the stool looked to be maybe the most harmless. He watched Carol, the same as the others did, but maybe there was something different in his eyes.
Maybe Carol was just imagining it.
Still, Carol turned to address the man and he beat her to it.
"Somethin' we can help you with?" He asked.
"I hope so," Carol said. "Where are we?"
The man laughed to himself like he doubted the sincerity of Carol's question. She raised her eyebrows at him and he swallowed down his laughter.
"This here's the Chambers," he said.
"The town?" Carol asked.
"No," he said. "It's Liberty. Well—just outside of it."
"Georgia?" Carol asked.
He nodded his head.
"Where were you tryin' to be?" He asked. "Because this is the last place on Earth you'd wanna be if you didn't have to be. Small ass town like this? There ain't nobody that's tryin' to be in Liberty if they weren't already here."
Carol smiled at him.
"Then this is exactly where I'm trying to be," Carol said. "Somewhere where nobody would ever want to be. Somewhere they'd never think to look."
The man laughed to himself.
"It the cops you runnin' from?" He asked. "Or somebody else?"
"Would you like it if I asked you that question?" Carol asked.
The man hummed. He licked his lips and brought the cigarette he was smoking back to his lips to take a drag from it.
"Askin' your name any better?" He asked. "Mine's Daryl—save you the time in askin' me back."
Carol swallowed.
"Carol," she said. "This is Sophia."
"You got a last name?" The man asked.
"Do you?" Carol asked.
He laughed to himself.
"Well, Carol with no last name," he said, "welcome to Liberty. Let me see what I can do about gettin' you a couple of towels."
Daryl got up from his stool and walked away from Carol. He disappeared around the bar and into the back where Carol couldn't see him any longer. She stood there, swaying her body and rocking Sophia, and stared straight ahead so as to not invite conversation from anyone who might be watching her. When Daryl reappeared, he was carrying some white towels that he held up to show her before he passed them over.
"Just bath towels," he said. "But they'll dry as good as anything else. You got a car? Broke down somewhere?"
"Ran off in a ditch," Carol said. "Maybe four or five miles down the highway. I was looking for a motel."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"You won't find one of them for another forty or fifty miles," Daryl said. "We had one, but it's been closed down a while. They said it was overrun with rats the size of German Shepherds."
Carol's stomach sunk.
"Then where do people stay?" Carol asked.
"Told you," Daryl responded, "this just ain't the place that nobody comes to stay. You were either born here or—most the time? Liberty's just somethin' you see in the rearview mirror. It ain't a bad town, don't get me wrong. You ain't gonna get hurt or nothin' just by bein' here. It's just that—it don't got a lot to offer."
"The only thing I wish it offered right now is a motel," Carol said.
Daryl sucked his teeth and nodded his head.
"Go on around the bar there," Daryl said. "There's a space back there where you can dry up a little. I'll call somebody. Get you a change of clothes—maybe somethin' she can wear in the meantime. Find you a place for the night and I got somebody that can get your car outta that ditch in the morning. Owes me a couple favors anyway."
Carol shook her head at him.
"That's nice of you," she said, "but we can't accept charity."
He shook his head back at her.
"Not charity," he said. "It's help. And—that's kinda what we do here. Besides—looks to me like you're in a position where you can't exactly not accept it."
Carol frowned at him. It was true. She was in a position where she had to accept the help offered to her, even if she didn't want to feel indebted to anyone. Still, she got the feeling that the man wasn't exactly trying to hold her in debt.
"I don't know how I'm going to pay you back," Carol said. "Or when I'll be able to."
Daryl shook his head.
"You don't owe me nothin'," he said. "I wouldn't want to know you was out there in this with her. It's a heavy rain. Came up on us pretty sudden. Caught us all by surprise. Go get dried off. Let me make a couple calls. We'll get you a place for the night. Get your car tomorrow. You don't owe me or nobody nothin'. You got my word on that, for what it's worth. Tomorrow you can be on your way to wherever you're goin'. "
Carol smiled at him. She rested the dry towels over the shoulder that Sophia wasn't sleeping against and shifted the weight of her daughter once more as the girl started to slide down her hip again.
"I think I might be there," she said. "Where I'm going. We might just—stick around. See what Liberty has to offer us."
Daryl smiled back, the corner of his mouth barely turning up. He nodded his head slightly.
"If you don't mind me sayin'," Daryl said, "I hope you do."