*Quick thank yous and then on with the show.
To Leyshla Gisel- Great! Thank you. I'm glad you are enjoying the story. I am terrible at reading infliction and I have a tendency to think the worst. I also tend to be my own harshest critic. I hope you know that reviews are life-blood to ff writers, and you are doing a great service by leaving a comment. So everything is appreciated, thank you.
To Nanami Yatsumaki- I'm pleased I have your interest. Thanks for commenting. Enjoy.
I'm not going to beg or anything, but every review I get is the absolute best part of my day. And everyone needs love. X.
Carrie woke to a pitch black room. It was so dark she couldn't tell if her eyes were open or closed. She felt the bed around her, searching for his small body. Her hands found nothing but the cool blankets and pillow. Panic, in the form of a sickening heat, rose in the back of her throat. Rolling quickly to her other side, she misjudged the edge of the bed and fell to the floor with a dull thud. She scrambled to her hands and knees, as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Disorientated, she was able to discern a soft light from the door way. Light from another room. Carrie staggered to her feet and scurried for the door's open frame.
Daryl was sitting on the couch, with a single candle in front of him on the coffee table, and her son tucked up against him asleep. He had been looking at the door way waiting for her appearance after hearing her crash to the floorboards. When she appeared suddenly, looking like a wild cat, Daryl tensed knowing that he had frightened her by taking her son from the bed.
Carrie closed her eyes as relief swept through her, followed quickly by anger. And a little bit of relief again as she realised her thoughts were moving partway in a cohesive manner again. Her fury ebbed away as she processed the situation. Her son was ok. She had slept for the first time in months, not counting the times she had blacked out and woken up on the floor or slumped over in her chair.
Daryl watched from his seat on the couch as the woman wiped tears from her cheeks and staggered towards the lounge. He felt bad that he had unintentionally scared her.
The small boy had woken shortly after Daryl had put Carrie to bed. She had been so out that she didn't even stir when the kid had been sitting up on the bed beside her, babbling away in his baby language. Daryl got the kid from the bed, without disturbing Carrie, and had taken him to the kitchen. He changed and fed the kid, like he had done a hundred times with Lil' Asskicker and entertained the boy, leaving his mom to sleep.
"Go back to sleep Momma. I got this." Daryl mumbled, gesturing to the kid under his arm.
Her heart was thudding hard in her chest, as she moved into the living room, sitting down in an armchair opposite the couch. She lay sideways on the wide chair, her head down on the arm rest. She pulled her feet up and tucked them under her. Her large, wet, green eyes only on the little boy who always slept so peacefully, unaware of the horror-filled world he had been born into.
It was only another few minutes before she was asleep again too. Carrie had her hands tucked up to her jaw and her face drawn down slightly towards her chest. Daryl watched over both mother and child as they slept, deep in thought as he bit at the inside of his mouth.
…...
They sat around the small round dining table in the kitchen. The little boy sat on Carrie's knee, smiling at Daryl as he made a damn mess of his oats. Only about half of each spoonful he scooped up with the sideways spoon actually made it to his mouth. Carrie let him eat his own way, knowing that he was learning, as Daryl watched with a slight grimace.
"How old 's the kid anyway?" He asked, pushing his own empty bowl of oats to the side.
"I don't know." Carrie replied, embarrassed. "How long has it been since the world turned to shit?"
"mm… probly 'bout a year and three months." Daryl said aloud, thinking over the seasons in his head.
"Then he is one year, two months and 28 days." She said plainly, planting a small kiss on the boy's soft brown hair. Daryl lifted an eyebrow, not speaking, encouraging her to continue. With a slight sigh, she went on. "When I first heard about it all, I was in the hospital maternity rooms because my waters had broke. I don't know if you heard, but the military went crazy and started shooting everybody in the hospitals. 'Containment' I had heard one soldier say to another."
She mindlessly stroked Jack's arms, recalling a difficult memory. "I managed to get out of there with the help of a male nurse. He took me out some basement exit that the military guys didn't know about. When we got far enough away, he said he had to go find his family, and he left me. People were evacuating to the city refugee centre but I didn't go. I couldn't really travel as I started getting bad cramps. I tried to stop, but it's not like you have any control or anything. I eventually found myself in some family's home. The place was empty when I broke in through the glass sliding door at the back of the house." Her voice cut off suddenly, causing Daryl and the little boy to both turn their eyes to her, waiting for her to proceed. She smiled down at the child in her lap and continued. "I did it alone. Gave birth in an upstairs bedroom." She looked up to Daryl and caught him with her green depths. "I'm damn lucky it was all straight forward. If something had gone wrong, I don't know what would have happened."
She stood up with the boy, in her arms and carried him to the sink. Carrie rinsed the loose fallen oats from his clothes and face as Daryl sat back in his chair.
"So how did ya know how to do everythin'?" He asked the question that first popped into his head.
"I don't know really." She shrugged, turning around and setting the boy down on his feet. He toddled off to the lounge as she continued. "I have always just sort of absorbed information and a lot of it just came to me, or maybe it was instinct or something, I don't really know."
"Well what if a walker found ya?" He said a little angrier than he meant.
"Then I would have been fucked!" She shot back, tempered. "It was not like I had a lot of options available to me."
"Pff…" Daryl looked away to the back window, caught off-guard by her quick-tempered reply. "How'd ya end up here?" He watched a random walker brush along the chain link out the back.
"Well it wasn't our first stop." She looked away to the floor, trying to calm her anger. "We got out of town." She recalled in her head how she had slid the torn apart corpses from an SUV and removed the bloodied child seat, replacing it with a clean one she had found in a garage. "We drove until we came upon a group of people camping in the state forest. They took us in. It was fine for a little while, except the self-appointed leader of the group was some ex-marine, with a bad case of PTSD. The whole thing didn't last long, maybe a few weeks." Her eyes drifted back up to meet Daryl's. "Some bad stuff happened." Carrie's words hung in the air for a moment before she started slowly nodding her head and tightened her lips. She sighed a small huff and continued. "So I left one night. Snuck away, pushing my car down the hill before I jumped in and drove off. Wasn't long before I found some more people. They had it together much better." She smirked. "Led by a trauma surgeon. The man was smart, and a doctor. It was good." She nodded to herself. "My son finally had his first check up. And everything was going well." Carrie's eyes turned a little harsher as she continued. "We were using a basketball stadium that had been set up for emergency shelter but had been abandoned. We had cots, food, water, everything. There were about twenty five of us in the beginning, but our numbers began to grow. It wasn't long, maybe a month, before there were fifty or so. Families and good people.'
"We had limited guns but our main strength was we kept the doors barricaded and boarded up with the timber from the bleachers." Carrie sighed heavily. "Our weakness was trust. We trusted people too much and that was our undoing." She stood and walked to the bench beside Daryl, looking at her feet. "A kid, about 6 years old, died. He had some sort of meningitis or virus or something. The family hid it thinking they would be kicked out if people thought he was a biter. Problem is, once he died, he was a biter. The panic started in the middle of the night. People were screaming and running everywhere, searching in the darkness for their family and the way out. More people got bit, others got hurt or killed or trampled in the confusion, and the whole place fell apart in a matter of minutes." She paused with bated breath before continuing. "I don't really know how, but I got out with Jack. We got in the closest car I could find. I just put him on the floor, still wrapped up in his blankets and drove." Carrie pushed away from the bench and went to the sink, washing Jack's stray oats around the sink down the drain.
Daryl, who had been silently listening to her, moved from his place at the bench and stood beside her, looking out the back window with his arms tightly folded over his chest. Carrie continued. "So no more groups. I took off and drove for a long time. For weeks, we lived in our car, searching for anywhere and anything to eat. One day I foolishly let the tank run dry. No fuel. We were stranded." Carrie thought back to that day when she had cried for hours on end, until nothing more could come from her, before finally picking herself up and getting it together. She had made a sling for Jack from a blanket and taken off into the woods around her, avoiding the roads as that was where the biters seemed to be in larger packs. "I had a knife and a small handgun I found in the glove compartment of the car. Not that I really knew what to do with either. And I took off with Jack, walking through the woods hoping to find a farm or something. I eventually found this place." With that she rubbed at her forehead and turned away from the sink. She began to walk out of the kitchen and, with a tilt of her head to the doorway, Daryl followed. "It belonged to a drug dealer. After I got under the fence, I found him wandering around, dead of course. He still had a needle hanging from his arm when I shot him. Idiot must have OD'd or something. It felt like I won the lottery. Guns, drugs, not just illegal drugs but antibiotics and painkillers. We had clean tank rain water, and food stores. Rice, pasta, …canned food. This house was our salvation. I cleaned it out and made it our home. More or less, been here ever since."
They had walked to the front room, opposite the bedroom, a door that was locked. Carrie took the keys from her pocket and unlocked the door as Daryl watched with piqued curiosity at the room he had not yet been in. Carrie opened the door and stepped into the room. Daryl looked around with an incredulous gaze. The room was larger than the main living area and kitchen combined. It was kitted out with a full hydroponics set up, large open skylights and a drip-fed water system from a dedicated water tank outside the window. The room was bountiful with vegetables of different varieties.
"I converted it to an indoor veggie garden and we have been pretty much self-sufficient ever since." Carrie said with a half-smile.
"Not bad." Daryl replied, looking the room up and down. His eyes soon caught on the wooden crates in the corner, opposite the door. "What's in there?" He nodded to the three large boxes.
Carrie walked over to the crates and lifted the lid to show Daryl the contents. "Well this one has two full garbage bags of marijuana." She said with a little laugh. "I didn't know what to do with it. So I just boxed it up." Daryl pulled a strange face, a mix of disbelief and absurdity. Carrie continued. "These two," She tapped the lid of the top crate and lifted it open to reveal it's contents, "Gun and lots of ammo."
Daryl stepped forward and looked in to the box with anticipation. Rifle, automatics, shot guns, hand guns and many small boxes of ammunition. It was like a Merle Dixon Christmas. Drugs and guns.
The quick thought of his brother brought a small pain to the back of Daryl's throat, but he ignored it. "Won the lottery alright." He said with a small chuff to the straight-forward woman beside him.
"I know." She smiled softly and walked out of the room. Daryl followed her, locking the door and pulling it shut behind him. They walked into the lounge and Carrie sat on the floor, next to her son. "And I've been here raising Jack pretty much ever since. We don't really leave unless we have to. I was only in the town the other day, because I needed a few personal items. It was only the second time I had ever actually been there. And I don't think I'm likely to return again any time soon." She said with a mumble.
Daryl sat quietly on the arm of the chair opposite the couch. He bit mindlessly at the inside of his mouth, considering his next words. "I think ya might have a false sense of security about this place." He said with a slight sigh.
"What do you mean?" She asked, looking up at him from the floor.
"I mean. Sure, yer safe from walkers but there's more'n that out there now. Like those men who shot me." Daryl said standing up and looking out the window, not wanting to see the bewildered, and almost betrayed, look on her face. "They'll tear this place down in a heartbeat ta get at those crates you got in that room there." He gestured with his thumb to the room they just left. "Not to mention you yourself even said you don't know how to use any of it."
Carrie started to anger on the floor, looking up disbelievingly at Daryl. She would never blow up in front of her son, but she was damn near close to boiling point. She stood up quickly and walked over to Daryl, shoving him so that he faced her. His face contorted into an angry sneer, but he stoped the words in his mouth that he was about to shout because he caught sight of the small boy on the ground.
Daryl's glance over her shoulder, made Carrie reconsider her rage and she breathed heavily, trying to pull herself back from the edge. "Pff…" Daryl shook his head at her closed green eyes. 'Damn, she had a quick temper' He thought to himself. He turned back to the window as she stood silently beside him.
"Well I'm not leaving." She finally spoke in a shaky voice.
"Well you ain't stayin'." He retorted.
She furrowed her brow and scrutinised his words. "No. You're not staying." She turned away from him and walked to the kitchen as he looked away from the window to her hunched shoulders.
Daryl followed her resentfully to the kitchen. "You want me to go? Fine. I never said I was stayin'. I didn't ask for this. You did. Y'all want me gone? I'm gone. Adios." He said with a wave over his shoulder as he turned and stomped down the front hall, glancing briefly at the kid with the soft, brown hair on the floor.
Carrie had sat down at the table, but she quickly stood back up again, knocking her chair over backwards as she got to her feet. Daryl looked back over his shoulder at the clatter. He took in only a momentary fleeting look of Carrie's regretful face before he pulled open the front door and marched outside.
Daryl slammed the door behind him and stalked over to his bike. Hating every foot step he took away from the house. He climbed on his bike and hung his crossbow on the forks at the front. Daryl was about to start the loud motorcycle when he looked up and realised he couldn't just storm off. The gate was locked. And he didn't really want to leave anyway. Not like that.
Daryl put his hands over his eyes and rubbed hard at the sockets. When he took them away again, Carrie had appeared from the house, standing in the doorway. She looked at him with dark, wet eyes. Her green iris' seemed to shine behind her slightly pink-flushed pale skin. Her hair was a loose mess, pulled back from her face. Her slim body, shuddering almost unnoticeably. Carrie's arms were folded across her abdomen, holding herself. She had a glint of alloy in her hands, the keys.
Daryl got off the bike slowly. Not knowing exactly what was about to come out of his own mouth. He didn't know if he was going to rage at her, soothe her or something else. So he walked slowly, giving himself time to account for all his emotions. She avoided his eye and just held open her hand, revealing the keys.
Carrie didn't want him to leave. Not really. But she opened her hand anyway.
He saw the gesture and sneered slightly at the handful of metal. Daryl walked up the step of the porch and stopped directly in front of Carrie. He pushed the hand of keys aside as he spoke. "You really want me to go or are ya jus' being stubborn?"
"I don't want you to go." She whispered back. When he didn't reply, Carrie added. "Please."
Daryl breathed a heavy sigh as the tightness in his stomach loosened at her words. "I'll be back."
Carrie looked up into his face, her cheeks wet, and nodded her head, softly and wordlessly. Her mouth was a tight little line as she stopped herself from begging. Begging him not to go.
Daryl picked up her wrist and went to take the keys from her palm. Carrie tightened her hands on the metal and turned slightly, brushing Daryl's shoulder as she walked past him to the fence's chain link gate. He watched her walk away as he turned towards his bike.
Shaking his head a little at the situation he was now in as he climbed on, he started the motorcycle with a short rev and pushed forward towards the yard exit.
As he approached, Carrie said something he didn't quite catch.
"Whadya say?" He asked loudly.
"I said, how many people are in your group?" She shouted back.
"Dunno, maybe 'bout forty." She frowned at his words and stepped back. She unlocked the heavy chain and held the gate open for him. Daryl gave her a slight nod, which she replied to with a tight lipped smile, as he put his feet to the foot pegs and took off with a grumble from the lumpy engine.