AN: Just a filler, more to come.
He was driving fast down the US1. Sometimes swirling around abandoned cars and always with an eye on the walkers here and there. There were quite a lot of them and he wanted to get out of the suburbs as fast as he could. When he saw the exit to Quantico his interest piqued but he thought better of it. If the survivors around here had been looking for security and a safe place to stay, the Marine Corps Base must have been the first place to go. And he had seen the devastation of the CDC… So he drove on, passing several places where he could have found food and weapons but there was just too many walkers, too many threats. No, the safest place nowadays was the countryside and it was also where he felt most at home. So when he got down to Falmouth, he decided to avoid Fredericksburg altogether and took the 218 east. East was the ocean and east was where he was going.
It turned out to be a good choice. After just a few miles the landscape around him turned from suburban to rural and in White Oak he found a store that looked virtually untouched since the outbreak. There were two extremely decayed walkers inside which he took out easily with his hunting knife. They must have been the owners because one of them still had an old revolver attached to the hip. Sweet! Four bullets were left but it was better than nothing. The Kingdom had only given him a machete for security as he left so the gun was a welcoming sight. He picked what edible food he could find, mostly jerky and some granola bars, a couple of water bottles and in the back room he even discovered a half-full gas can. When he had refueled the Harley he continued down the dwindling country road, passing farm after farm, fields mixed with forest areas, enjoying every curve of the road, the stillness and fresh smells around him. Was this what vacation felt like?
In all his life before the world went to shit, he had never been outside Georgia, and now he had travelled through three states. He had wandered through the Blue Ridge Mountains with his friends, suffered the drought in Shenandoah National Park and he had seen the goddamn Washington Memorial in the distance through a bus window. And now he was on his way to the Atlantic Ocean. Who would have thought? The memories of everything he had seen made him slightly dizzy. He wondered if Carol ever felt the same. He wasn't sure how much she had travelled before but something told him she hadn't seen much in her previous life either, because of that mean bastard of a husband. Just thinking of Ed made Daryl shudder. No, there had been good outcomes from this new harsh world too. Daryl had never felt as free as he felt now. He stretched out his legs before putting his feet back on the pedals and gave the throttle a real twist. The bike sped away and he felt damn good.
Going as fast as he was he almost missed the sign in the middle of a sweet curve that said Northern Virginia Gun Club. Hold up, that was something that needed checking out. He hit the brakes and turned the bike around and drove down a small dirt road into the forest. After a couple of hundred yards there was an opening in the forest and a small gun range lay before him with a couple of club houses and not a soul, living or dead was in sight. He did see some rotten corpses laying around though but thinking of whatever had gone down here was worthless. He just wanted to find some weapons and ammo.
He parked the bike outside one of the more fortified barracks with steel bars on the windows. But when looked closer at the door he saw it was slightly open. Shit, bad sign. Readying himself with the knife he flipped the door fully open and waited. No sound. He peaked in and was hit by the overpowering smell of death and decay. Something was in there alright. His back-pocket pug came to good use as he stepped in and looked around. It was a large room with a big table and chairs and further in there was a smaller room. The smell got worse as he got closer to the door to said room, and yep, inside was a severely mummified body, half-sitting against the wall with a bullet hole in its head. But no guns, the walls were stripped clean. Damn. Someone had already been here. Well, it figured. But wait a minute, there was something laying on top of a high shelf, something that looked awfully familiar. He reached up and grabbed the tip of the black curve of wood. A bow! Not a crossbow but a compound. He cracked a smile as he held it gently in his hands, felt the weight and balance of it. Sweet! Maybe there someone up there watching over him. And when he jumped up to see if there was more on that shelf he spotted a quiver further in on the shelf. He grabbed a chair, stepped up and nicked it.
Strapping the bow on his bike made him feel oddly complete, like all the missing pieces in his life slowly was being put together again. This could be the end on this little road trip, he could go back to Alexandria now with the satisfaction of having gained what he wanted, but there was that ocean thing in the back of his mind. He had only been gone a day, and who takes a one-day vacation? No one, that's for sure. So went he got back to the 218 again, he continued driving east.