Chapter 4

"IS THAT A COW?!" Carrot shouted at the top of her lungs, pointing across the beach-Whoa! Sorry, I got ahead of myself there, let's go back a bit.

Ace was the first of the new recruits to get stuck on morning guard duty. The way the original system worked was on a six hour shift basis. Three people on the gates for six hours equaled out to everyone working a shift a day, which was neat and orderly but also exceedingly boring. Having six new people to cover shifts was a huge relief on everyone in Little Garden. Shifts were long, not much happened, and during the night shift people kept falling asleep anyway.

The system was designed by Franky and Robin to prevent incidents like Krieg, but constant vigilance could only last for so long. As the mind-numbing routine days and nights pressed on, the crew became more and more lax with the actual schedule. Eventually the midnight-to-6:00am shift was reduced to two people, on the logic being that too much activity up top would actually draw more attention. Then further caveats were made in case the weather was bad. If the rain was coming down, then visibility was bad, so no reason to have a full guard shift. Or if it was too hot, passing out due to heat exhaustion wouldn't be helpful. Eventually, their vigilance whittled down to "If you don't have anything else going on for the day, you might as well chill out on the balcony and keep an eye out". The exception being on delivery days, on which they had a full 24 hour shift running. To create the illusion of productivity, you see.

All of this to say that Ace was not enjoying his time patrolling the wall. He was with Luffy and Robin, so he appreciated getting to hang out with his little brother, and Robin seemed cool enough, but after walking slow circles around the balcony, he was starting to get a little fidgety.

"So… Little bro," he muttered to Luffy, whose attention had been caught by a zombie a few houses down trying to aimlessly claw its way through a wooden privacy fence. "Is this, uh… it for you guys? You just kinda hang out here all day?"

"Pretty much!" He grinned widely, which seemed to be his default expression whenever he looked at his older brother. "Sometimes we do target practice or Franky builds something that explodes or Zoro and Sanji get in a fight, and sometimes we'll go on an adventure. But usually it's just sittin' around here."

Ace snapped his fingers, "See, now that's what I'm talking about!"

"It's usually not that big a deal, they argue a lot but they're pretty good friends," Luffy said.

"No no no, the adventure part! Man, I'll bet there's tons of cool shit around here to explore! Houses and stuff, and we're right near the beach? You ever go and see if there are any boats tied up?"

"Oh yeah! We have a boat! I think…" Luffy scratched at his head. "I thought we did… We've never used it though…"

"YES! Yes!" Ace clapped his hands on Luffy's shoulders. "That's what I'm talking about! Fishing trip, you and me! Alright? You gotta get me caught up on everything that's happened, bro! We gotta make up for lost time, right?!"

Luffy shined like a diamond. "YEAH! I WANNA GO! I WANNA GO RIGHT NOW!"

Ace looked out onto the outpost suspiciously. "Man, if only we could just sneak away now… If there were more people here it'd be easier to duck out of guard duty…" he muttered to Luffy.

"Oh just go, don't worry about it." Ace and Luffy had no idea how long Robin had been listening in, or when she had actually snuck up on them, but both of them nearly jumped in surprise. Ace whirled around and waved his hands in defense.

"Ahaha, no, no, we were just joking! I'm not gonna bail or anything! This is important work, right?"

Robin rolled her eyes bemusedly. "If you want to stay and guard, I won't try to convince you otherwise. But believe me, I've long since given up on getting this group to stick to a schedule. I'll find someone else to cover for me if you want to go exploring the neighborhood. If you'd prefer, you can say it's a scouting mission. Be proactive, clear out any threats before they get to our perimeter."

Ace still looked hesitant, wanting to make a good impression, but Robin just shook her head. "The only people who will judge you for leaving are myself and Franky, and Franky will forgive you if you bring him back something cool. Which could literally be anything, he's very easy to impress."

"And how do I get back into your good graces?"

Robin waved a hand dismissively. "Ohhhh don't worry about that. I'll forgive you. Eventually."

Ace wasn't sure what to make of Robin, but after silently trying to discern her true motives, if she had any, he decided to scale the ladder down to see if anyone else wanted to head out. Luffy followed right on his heels, shaking with excitement.

It didn't take long for Carrot to zip in front of them, blocking the way. "I WANNA GO!" she squealed.

Ace recoiled back. "H-how did you-?! Who told you we're going anywhere?"

"I could tell! I just knew you were setting off on an adventure! I wanna come with you! Oh please oh pleasepleasepleasepleeeeaaaaaaaaase, Ace!" She was about to collapse to her knees, hands clasped pleadingly.

"Alright, alright, easy, killer rabbit! You can come with us!" Ace put his hands on her shoulders to keep her still. "We're going fishing though, which requires a lot of being quiet and sitting still. You up for that?"

She nodded enthusiastically. "Oh yeah! I can sit still! I can be quiet! Here, watch!" She then proceeded to become a statue. Silent and immobile, barely even breathing. Her pupils expanded like she was in some kind of trance state and Ace leaned over to whisper to Luffy.

"Go get the gear and the keys to a car, I'm gonna see how long she can keep this up."

Luffy bounded towards his house, flinging the door open and dashing down the stairs to the basement. He quickly scanned the boxes and shelves that had been haphazardly placed down there to be sorted "At A Later Date", but couldn't find anything resembling fishing gear. He tapped his foot impatiently, tilting his head to the side while trying to think. He was positive they had fishing poles, he just couldn't remember where…

He bounded back up the stairs like an excitable dog and headed for the house's back porch. There, Nami was sunbathing, as per usual at this time of year. She twisted her face up behind her sunglasses when the sun was suddenly eclipsed by her boyfriend's head leaning over her.

"Hey. What are you doing down here?" She asked up at his grinning silhouette.

"Where are the fishing poles?" He said, not answering her question at all.

Her eyebrow raised in curiosity. "Fishing…?" She slowly raised her hands and placed them on his cheeks, squishing his face. "Didn't we talk about this? Hooking a zombie from over the wall and reeling it in like a fish is hilarious as an idea, but in practice it's just a good way to lose hooks, or bring a zombie into our walls. Remember?"

"Oh yeah, I remember! But we're gonna go actual for real fishing!" A thought emerged from the depths of his mind. "Oh! Do you wanna come with us?!"

"Did you get someone to cover you on the wall or not?" She asked, ignoring his other question for now.

"Robin has it covered. So you wanna come with us? It's gonna be me and Ace and Carrot!"

She pondered that situation for a moment. She hadn't had a chance to talk to Ace for real yet, and she was itching to know more about him. What were the odds that someone from Luffy's past would show up at their doorstep like that? Maybe this would be her chance to learn a bit more about him. And on top of that, having Carrot around was bound to be hilarious. The girl was like Luffy on a permanent caffeine high. "Alright, I'm in. Lemme go change and we can head out."

Luffy leaned down and kissed her before bounding off to tell the others. She sat up from the lawn chair to watch him off, but instead he stopped, pivoted around, and stared at her blankly. "So… where's the fishing stuff?"

Nami pointed in the direction of the storage house. "Somewhere in the basement there, I think." As Luffy bounded off again, she called out "AND DON'T FORGET TO GET THE BOAT KEYS FROM FRANKY!"

By this point, the storage house had become a walk-in nightmare. The original intent of the seventh house had been to hold the general supplies and trading goods, to keep them easily stocked and in order. However, it had now become a house-sized junk drawer. Anything that wasn't immediately needed got shoved in the basement or in some room of the house. In their defense, the food and medical supplies were kept neat and easily accessible. But anything else? You're on your own, kid.

It took Luffy a while to find and gather everything they'd need. Fishing rods, a box of colorful lures. He thought that was all he'd need until Nami appeared at the top of the stairs reminding him that they would also need a big cooler to keep the fish in, and Ace appeared to remind Luffy that they'd need another cooler so they wouldn't starve while they were out there. The impromptu fishing trip was turning into a whole event that would've rendered sneaking out impossible, even if the rest of Little Garden cared.

By the time they had loaded up the pickup truck, pretty much everyone else knew what was going on. Ace still felt a little sheepish about up and bailing on his duties, but the general apathy at shirking responsibility from the others helped dissuade that. He felt better once they were on the road.

"So the boat should still be tied up there… It was attached to a dock, I guess? We'll know it when we see it," Nami said from the passenger side of the truck. "None of us have actually been on it, Hancock's people just told us it was there."

Ace was driving, keeping an eye out for zombies shambling in the street. "You've been here for months and you never took the boat out?!"

Nami shrugged. "We haven't had a chance." She was holding the keys up in front of her. Attached to them was a keychain tag with the boat's name handwritten on a laminated strip of paper. "It's called the…" She suddenly frowned. "The SS Oceanfucker. God damn it, can no one name things normally around here?!"

Carrot gasped in a completely scandalized way. "You said a bad word!"

Nami slapped her hand over her mouth in shock. "Oh shit-! Ah-! I mean crap! I'm sorry, you-..." she turned around in her seat to look at Carrot, squinting her eyes in suspicion. "A bad word? How… old are you?"

"I'm fifteen!" Carrot fumed. "But no matter how old I am, you shouldn't swear! It's rude!"

"Yeah, Nami! It's rude!" Luffy parroted, matching Carrot's indignation.

She turned around further to glare at Luffy. "Oh you swear all the time!"

"I do not!"

"Yes you do!"

The only one experiencing any amount of zen was Ace, who was oddly content hearing his little brother bicker with his friends about absolutely nothing. It was probably the happiest he'd been in a long time. That happy feeling soured when he pulled up to the beach where the boat was docked. "Ahhhh hell," he muttered. The other three broke away from their argument to see what caught his attention.

Beaches are poor options when you are looking for refuge in a zombie apocalypse. There is no shelter, sand is difficult to run in, and the lines at the concession stands will STILL be long. That's the immediate problem with beaches. There's another problem that occurs when you go back to a beach that had been unoccupied for quite some time.

Do you know what happens to a corpse that's left in saltwater for years at a time? And were you also aware that the vast majority of beachgoers tend to wear swimsuits that reveal a lot of skin? These two elements combined to create a menagerie of bloated, rotting corpses strewn across the sand. Hancock's people had been there to drop off the boat, and they had cleared out the area, but that was months ago. The bodies were all still there, some burst open, organs and muscle rotted far past the point where even seagulls wouldn't bother with them.

As soon as the foursome left the safety of the truck, the smell hit them like a cinderblock to a plastic bag full of stew. They all gagged and coughed, trying to cover their noses immediately, but there was no getting around that.

"Nope. Nope, this isn't happening," Ace sputtered, his voice muffled by the hand over his mouth and nose. "We're not walking through that."

"Aw, come on!" Luffy groaned. "It's right there! We can cross this!" But he didn't sound so sure himself.

Nami put a comforting hand on Luffy's shoulder. "Sorry, babe. We're gonna need to clean this up before we come back. Even if we made it to the boat, we'd still have to prep it and everything and I'm not breathing that in the whole time."

Regretfully, Luffy started to climb back into the truck with the others. "Don't get so down, bro. You and me can come back and clean this place up ourselves if we have to. We'll find some cool WWII gas masks and stuff to wear and everything!" Ace told him. That seemed to raise Luffy's spirits a little.

They were about to drive off when they suddenly heard a low moaning sound somewhere nearby. At first, they feared a swarm of zombies, but they couldn't see anything besides the corpses on the beach. Eventually, one of them saw the source of the noise.

"IS THAT A COW?!" Carrot shouted at the top of her lungs, pointing across the beach. She lunged forward, halfway leaning into the front half of the truck to make sure everyone else could see where she was pointing.

It was a cow. Moving clumsily through the sand, completely unaware of any of its surroundings. It mooed, tail swishing behind it. The group stared blankly at it from the truck. Eventually Carrot broke the silence. "Right there! See?! A cow!"

"We see it, Carrot," Ace said. "We're just… what's it doing there? Are there any farms nearby?"

Nami shrugged. "I'm more wondering how it didn't immediately become zombie chow."

Luffy was the one to ask the obvious question. "We're gonna take it with us, right?" Which made everyone else in the car turn to stare at him, prompting him to continue. "Well, we can't just leave it out there! And besides, how cool would that be?! We'd have a cow at the outpost!"

Nami and Ace, being the responsible pair of this quad, looked at each other and then shrugged simultaneously. Nami bit her thumbnail and looked back towards the farm animal. "I do feel kinda bad for it. It's gonna get eaten if it stays out here."

"Yeah, but… How do we get it to come with us?" Ace asked.

Answering his question, Carrot hopped out of the truck and cupped her hands around her mouth like a megaphone. "HEY! COW! COME OVER HERE!" she shouted as loud as she could. The cow huffed and shook its head, glancing over in her direction, and then turning away again. "C'MON COOOOWWW! LOOK AT MEEEE!" When that failed to draw its attention, she instead turned to mooing loudly.

The cow responded with its own moo, which caught the others by surprise. "You've offended her!" Ace teased. It seemed to work, though. The cow turned more towards the source of the noise and started lumbering across the sand towards Carrot and the others.

Carrot gasped in amazement and, in a flash of quick thinking, bounced into the bed of the pickup truck, where the snack cooler was sitting. She flung the lid open and fished out an apple, bounding back where she started and held it out for the approaching cow.

When it got close enough, it sniffed at the apple and took it from Carrot's hand. The others looked on in amazement. "You're the cow whisperer…" Luffy gasped. Carrot didn't hear it. She was too focused on the giant creature in front of her. She squealed, petting the cow's head while she ate the snack.

"We have to keep her now. We have to. I already love her," she said. There wasn't really any arguing with that.

"If you think you can lead her back, then we'll take her, I guess," Ace mused. He started the truck back up and turned around to head back towards the outpost. It was a five minute drive in the car. On foot would be an entirely different issue, especially with a barely-trained cow in tow.

Escorting the cow was a test on everyone's patience. She would get distracted and attempt to wander away from Carrot. Or sometimes she would just randomly stop in the middle of the road, forcing Carrot to coax her into moving again. Ace had to make sure he didn't drive too fast or else he'd put too much distance between them, and every so often, Luffy and Nami would have to climb out of the truck to help take care of zombies who, for whatever reason, had only decided to show up on the way back home, and were conspicuously absent earlier in the day.

"THIS IS GETTING RIDICULOUS!" Carrot shrieked, throwing a zombie to the ground before it could take big bite of beef tenderloin. She punted it football-style in the jaw, shattering the rotted jawbone immediately. "IT'S LIKE SHE DELIBERATELY WANDERS INTO DANGER! Doesn't she know she can't defend herself?! We have to do it for her!"

Nami stabbed a zombie in the head from behind. "I thought you'd love this kind of thing! It's a perfect excuse to bump up your score!"

Carrot looked around, making sure the coast was clear before giving the cow a gentle shove to keep her going in the right direction. "I like just killing zombies. It's too stressful when I have to watch over some little helpless thing!" She sighed, looked pityingly at the cow, then hugged it. "You're lucky you're so cute."

Nami gave a pointed look towards Luffy. "How often do I say that to you?"

"Like… five times a week."

A five minute drive to the shore took them almost two hours to walk back from, when all was said and done. Luffy, Nami, and Carrot were covered in blood by the end, but the cow looked like she had just gotten a bath. They stood in front of the gate and Luffy called out to whoever was up there, "OPEN UP AND LOOK WHAT WE FOOOUUUND!"