Chapter 8: The All Blacks


His cheek was hot and inflamed where I had kissed him, and his hand calloused and cracked under my own. Arrow Man was different from Denise and Handsome Guy in that he seemed to be the type of person who was rugged by design, rather than someone who had become so by chance or necessity. Rough around the edges and a little unkempt, his dirty blonde hair was dusted over his eyes, and the infamous leather vest that I recalled from our ice-fishing adventure still smelled faintly of gasoline and Marlboro Reds. The roguish way he had about him was something I considered one of his most defining attributes. Not only did that kind of thing endear him to me slightly, but it also highlighted the contrast between him, a Robin Hood of sorts with this bold and full-bodied southern drawl, and the pristine, nouveau riche commune we were standing in the middle of.

There was something unmistakably kindred about him.

Something like our apparent mutual love of bread, which was a fine place to start.

"Thank you," the serene murmur floated over my tongue. It didn't even sound like my own voice; the tone was so saccharine and naive. Between the intravenous cocktail of drugs Denise had so generously given me and the elation of being alive, I must have sounded like a schoolgirl on mushrooms.

Didn't care much, though. Her shots were some of the best stuff around, and later until the end of time was long enough to have to remain completely sober. I would relish this opportunity to be sheltered and blissfully dazed for as long as my final dose would last.

So, like, three more hours-ish.

'Fate giveth. Fate taketh away.'

Sashaying into the recesses of the room, I searched for something (anything?) suitable to display Arrow Man's bouquet in. The native flora were small and vibrant; their petals had hues of purple and pink and orange with delicate square edges and broad, dark leaves underneath. My heart rose happily at the sight of them. There weren't many flowers in the middle of the Atlantic. In fact, most of the scenery was canvas, steel, or hemp, with the occasional dirty shipmate regaling you with the same story he told both yesterday and the day before that. There were also waves. Rising, falling, and endlessly dark and brooding.

Flowers were a welcome change.

To hold something from the earth in my hands made me feel like I was walking down the aisle. Though I might have been in a questionably fashioned muumuu that floated around my silhouette in a way that would make MC Hammer proud, and though my hair was untamed at best, the sentiment was still there. This was probably the closest I would ever come to being married, but, oddly enough, the thought didn't bother me very much at all. It never had, in fact. Somewhere, my mother was having chest pains at the realization of my being eternally promiscuous and unwed, living a life of sin and peril (sorry, Mom), but that was neither here nor there.

Arrow Man was kind.

"Ain't nothin'," he grumbled inaudibly. He had a voice that was gentle, if not reticent. It always sounded like that when he spoke to me, I noticed. Tender.

I glanced back toward him. He had slumped into a chair at the small dinette next to the window, with an expression as motionless as the Farnese statue of Atlas. Tank was laying eagerly at his feet, but my favorite Dystopian Robin Hood didn't pay it any mind. Instead, his weathered fingers deliberately fiddled with the beveled edge of his casserole dish, chasing droplets of condensation while he intently stared out the window. He kept the banter polite and brief.

'Yes, I am starving, thank you for asking.'
'Yes, I am planning to get very, very fat. Huge, actually.'

For me, it had always been easy to forget that affection from strangers wasn't a universally appreciated and welcome gesture. As the cool running water splashed over my hands and into the glass cup between them, I ruminated over how uncomfortable that kind of thing might make someone in modern day Apocalyptica. Someone like the rugged Arrow Man, who didn't look particularly excited to have been harassed with a kiss, however graciously intended it might have been.

But that was just too bad.

He would have to get used to being liked.

I sat right across from him at the dinette. For at least two thousand miles in any direction, our dashing anti-hero was the only person I knew. Although it sounds insensitive to say that I didn't care how he felt about being considered a friend to me, the strange, tree-dwelling woman he called Jungle Jane, it was pretty much the stone cold truth. Potential friend, anyway. A large part of our camaraderie was going to hinge upon whether or not he was as equitable a partner in feasting as he was in combat.

After all, Grandma always said never to trust someone who doesn't eat, and nobody fucked with old Gran.

It was that simple life philosophy of hers that, over two decades later, remained etched somewhere deep in the analytical drift of my subconscious. Men without an appetite had no place at my table, but not for reasons that were especially frivolous or vain. Her breed of old-school wisdom was more profound than it sounded at first. It was meant to be a testament of character and an indicator of intention.

New people could always be measured by two very distinct and different virtues, from what I found over the years. The first was the way they treated others; you could determine almost everything about someone's personality by the way they interacted with a variety of other people under a range of circumstances. What they did when you were looking, and what they did when they thought nobody was around. How they treated someone less fortunate, and how they treated those with power. Those kinds of things meant more than most people gave them credit for.

So when Arrow Man propositioned me for my name, you see, I was inclined to give it to him. He clearly treated others very well. Here I was a living, breathing proof.

But not without something in return.

No. He would have to eat, and he would have to drink, because the second virtue of measure would be the way he was inclined to treat himself.

Getting a decent gauge of who he was seemed like the smart thing to do; something that Gran would do. He was an unusual man in the middle of a bizarrely perfect town, that happened to thrive a-okay, right in the beating heart of unadulterated chaos for however long it had been since the Apocalypse hit the mainland. Before I bled my life story out to him and jeopardized the only thing left for me in this shit show, I would have to know what was up.

So we struck a deal.

We would drink and eat; question for question, answer for answer, and plate for plate. With the grace of a thousand leather-vested, arrow-throwing swans, he tossed me a woefully unfortunate looking backpack. I soon recognized it as my own, and reminded myself to clean it some time after the bi-monthly ritual of shaving my legs was to commence later. Priorities were a wonderful thing.

"Y'don't tell me your name, I'mma just keep callin' you Jungle Jane." He threatened, looking my way. Robin Hood set a plate of something steaming and cheesy-smelling in front of me before sitting down again. Pasta, meat, and cheese, along with some fresh green things. There were vegetables here?

Laughing a little, I dispensed some of the small-batch evenly into two short and stocky glasses. "Hopefully, I don't forget it by the time you ask again." We clinked what sounded like crystal wares, his eyes fixed on mine. I don't remember if he was smiling; I think he had been.

I knew that I was.

The rye soothed my soul a little on the way down. It was as sweet and smoky and pithy as it had been before the end of the world. The casserole was next. Though it may not have looked like anything special, what with it all being mashed together and cemented by flecks of some kind of rich and funky Velveeta kind of stuff, it was delicious. Like, really, really good.

I also hadn't eaten anything for a few days, but that didn't swing my bias one way or the other. Even if I wasn't totally famished and sick to death of gnawing on cured fish and stale crackers, this shit would still rock my world. Food was one of my favorite languages to speak, and the warm bake Arrow Man brought was comfort food at its Midwestern USA best. Nothing quite coasted my joy the way eating and drinking and being merry did, so it looked like casserole with a side of barrel-aged rye was about to become my New World caviar and champagne. Hopefully he penciled me in for lunch on repeat tomorrow.

"Can't believe I've never had a casserole before." I admitted sheepishly. That may have sounded dumb, but it was true.

Arrow Man snickered, wiping his mouth and taking another sip of whiskey. "You can't be serious," he gaffed, shaking his head in a way that was almost playful before looking back down at his plate. "Even I know how t'make one'a these things."

He seemed to be loosening up a little bit, which was something I could dig. Without the pending threat of dead-eyed types and marauders abound, it was a little easier to relax. I hadn't spoken this much, or this intimately, to anyone except for Ry in a long while myself, and it was genuinely an awesome feeling. To find good company in life was rare enough. To find it here was something near impossible.

"Oh, yeah?" I teased. "Did you make this one?"

Another bite.

Another laugh. "Na. I'm just here to catch the bunnies we skin'm for." He was a hunter.

Another glance.

The amber liquid curled seductively as it filled the bottom of two empty glasses, glistening in the early afternoon sun. Arrow Man's pour was heavy.

Another refill.

Another toast.

The question that burned through me finally made it into the room. "How did you find me?"

I had to know.

His gaze digressed to his fork. It made that succinct scraping sound against the porcelain dish as he coaxed the last bit of rabbit and pasta onto steel tines. You know, the kind that could almost send a shiver down your back if it was a little louder. His tone, that had before been jovial and lighthearted, became grave and soft. "I's huntin'," he began, "when I heard you make that call."

A pause.

"Ain't never heard no bird like that b'fore." He shrugged, hesitant eyes looking up at me. "Then again, I'd never been outta Georgia, neither."

They were blue. Not just any blue, but a dusky, tumultuous blue; a blue like the ocean during a storm. All at once, that primitive part of my big, fancy human brain (the same one as before) remembered the sensation of his arms around me while we were surrounded by slick contours of white ceramic lines and a cold, wet abyss. My body had been racking violently and rhythmically, shudder after shudder, protesting against the frigid temperature. He held me fast to his chest and still, and he called me Jungle Jane in that gentle rasp of his.

"When I finally closed in on the sound, well, that's when I seen y'up there in the trees like some wild woman." The memory was gone as quickly as it came, but the feeling of him lingered wistfully there in my bones.

That was how I got the name.

"Jungle Jane?" I asked.

He chuckled. It was something almost shy, but uncertain. "Yeah. Jungle Jane." One more scoop of casserole landed on my plate, and one more went to his. "But that ain't all..."

Another taste of the drink.

Another bite.

Arrow Man explained everything he knew about the town. About how they were searching for new recruits after having arrived no more than three or four weeks ago themselves. How Handsome Man, or Aaron, as he was called, found him and his group after a particularly unsavory stretch out in the wilderness, where they had been holed up in a barn and yearning for some stability. I could gather from the context of their 'acceptance,' as he called it, into Alexandria that it hadn't been an easy ride for them out through the Badlands, but the priors weren't mentioned in any explicit detail.

They had followed Ryan and I for a few days, trying to determine if we were good or bad. If we could be trusted or if we were trouble. In all of the supply runs our crew, the All Blacks, had made from the Isle of Dominica to the mainland, nobody had ever spotted us traversing the canopy before. He must have been exceptionally keen, and very capable. It made me feel a little less vulnerable to know that the first man to find us was a brilliant tracker and hunter with a noble heart. But only marginally less careless for getting caught.

'Us.'

The word had me staring down my glass like maybe it had crossed me in a previous life.

Siiip.

If self-loathing had a place and time, this most definitely wasn't it. Gingerly homing the rye back onto the distressed wooden surface of the table, I rose to my feet. Arrow Man had earned my true and honest name. He had earned it more than once, mind you, but it was around right now that I was indelibly thirsty to know his. A fleeting look of horror sprinted across his face when he stood alongside me. With a touch of encouragement from the Virginian autumn breeze, my hideous Alexandria standard-issue hospital muumuu had billowed open, again.

Luckily for him, everything from shoulders to navel was wrapped tightly in itchy cotton bandages. The gown also came with equally flattering drawstring shorts directly out of a Rocky training montage. If the human physique in and of itself was harmless, it was doubly so when mummified. I couldn't be bothered to mess with the thing anymore. I would set this damn dress ablaze in a bonfire on my way out of town, anyway.

Extending my right arm towards his, I shot him a grin that was somewhat coy. "Remington Black."

He took my hand and he shook it, very, very slowly. "Rem-" He stopped. "What?" The expression he bore was puzzled and seemed a little betrayed. "That's?"

I got the feeling he didn't believe me.

This happened literally every time introductions rolled around a room.

My brow furrowed.

"Pfft!" Arrow Man hoarsely laughed and took a step into the void between us. "No it ain't." At least he was equipped with a reasonably good, if not misplaced, sense of humor. His manners were top-notch, too. My hand was quite respectfully still held in his, even though he must have thought I was either fucking around or completely daft. "Wit'cha comic book soundin' ass."

That was the first time I'd heard someone use that particularly colorful way to describe my name. The earnestness of it almost made me laugh. Almost.

I bit back my smile and bid myself to make an excessively serious face. The kind of face that you would make at your annoying little brother when he broke something important. My nose was wrinkled, and my lips were pursed to one side. "It is, too!" The words might have been pouted, slightly juvenile and a little annoyed, but they were insistent.

He watched me in disbelief with one of his eyebrows in the clouds. I secretly wished it would get stuck like that for at least a day to teach him a lesson about doubting strange tree-dwelling women from the Caribbean. With resignation, I carefully returned his hand to his side for the time being. At least there was proof swimming somewhere around in this parachute of a garment. I searched for it thoroughly under scrutiny.

The merchant mariner credential booklet appeared almost identical to an international passport in every aspect of size and shape. It was one of the very few personal items I kept with me, sealed in dense plastic, at all times. You know, just in case civilization and I were to ever cross paths again. Or in the event that I wanted to win a bet for munitions or quick, useless cash. From the front pocket of the smock, I produced a little red booklet between middle and forefinger.

Then, pressed it right against his leather vest.

This was always the coolest part of the introduction, if we're being completely honest. Anticipation of imminent triumph spread my grin like butter from one side of the room to the other. "Captain," I corrected with a dulcet and restrained sense of conquest in the title, "Remington Black."

Boom.

He snatched the credential from me with narrowed eyes. There was an opportunity to be seized while he thumbed through its pages with skeptic-face. His glass of whiskey found my mouth in a manner that I was powerless to stop. Arrow Man glanced up from what an educated person could only presume was the name and identification page, inspecting me briefly before he looked back down to the photo. And then back up at me. Then to the dinette.

He returned the booklet and took my barren cup from the table.

Another refill.

Another toast.

"Daryl Dixon," Arrow Man nodded. "Much obliged." The pressure of his fingers was warm and hospitable.

Another glance.

Another sip.

Another smile.


AN: Now that the holidays are over and I am filled with cookies, regularly scheduled posting will resume. Welcome back!