They wait.
Jesus peeled off in the truck and abandoned them at the sound of gun shots, not that Carol blames him. He has the baby to protect and only the handgun Daryl leant him – with one magazine of eight rounds. He'll probably wait for them up the road a way…assuming they survive.
Carol is tense behind the tire, her muscles tight, her breath sounding too loud in her own ears.
Eventually, the door opens, and a young man – somewhere in his late teens or early twenties - steps out. His skin is a milky brown, like a coffee with one cream, and his head sports a thick mane of curly black hair. There's a pronounced cleft in the chin of his handsome face, and his light brown eyes scan the area, but he overlooks Carol and Daryl's hidey holes. In his hands, he clutches a wooden, semi-automatic Ruger rifle.
Carol whistles, and when they young man looks toward her, Daryl rushes from the opposite direction, slams him against the bus, and disarms him. The barrel of the young man's own gun now points in his face.
"Enid!" the young man yells. "Run!"
Carol's heart thumps at the name. How many Enid's can there be in this world?
The exit door of the bus, on the other side of them, slams open, and a teenage girl with long, brown hair takes off toward the guard rail in a running limp. She vaults over it and disappears down the embankment.
"That our Enid?" Daryl asks.
"I think it was," Carol says. "I'll go get her."
"Your Enid?" the young man asks.
[*]
"Enid!" Carol yells over the guardrail. "It's me! Carol!" Enid suddenly stops running down the embankment toward the woods, turns, and looks up. Sobbing with relief, she falls to her knees and then winces in pain. A blue bandage trails out from beneath her pants leg and tangles itself in the overgrown, dark green grass.
Carol jumps over the guardrail and slip slides down the hill toward the girl who shared her trailer at the Hilltop, the girl who over the past few months has become something of a daughter to her – an annoying, frustrating, endearing teenage daughter, the girl Sophia never had a chance to grow up to be.
Carol embraces her with joy.
[*]
When Enid and Carol get back inside the bus, Daryl is snooping around in the cabinets. The young man's rifle dangles from his shoulder, while the young man himself, wrists bound tightly with blue bands, is sitting on one of the reclined chairs where people used to lie to give blood. Two of the three other chairs have been turned into beds and are covered with blankets and pillows.
When Enid walks in, Daryl turns to her and growls, "This sonabitch hurt you?"
"No," Enid answers, "Elijah saved me."
"Then why'd he try to kill us?"
"He didn't know who you were," Enid answers. "We were asleep when we heard a pounding, and then there was a gun shot. Why did you shoot at us?"
"We didn't shoot at you," Carol explains. "I was shooting off the lock. We thought the bus was abandoned. We were just going to loot it."
"Ain't no more guns in here," Daryl tells Carol. "Just those." He nods to the countertop where he's laid three hunting knives next to a wooden block of kitchen knives, a bloody axe, and a sheathed cleaver. "Kid's got a shitload of canned and bagged food. Few dozen bottles of water. Twenty gallons of gas. Case of ammo for this rifle. Medicines. Six damn drawers full of batteries. Fuck, he's even got a Gameboy." Daryl holds up the handheld video game system and then sets it back on the counter. "Dozen games, too. Got Ms. Pac-Man, if'n ya want it."
Carol smiles. "I'm not taking his Gameboy, Daryl." Still, she appreciates the thought.
"Enid's bandage came unraveled," Elijah says. "I need to fix it. I should apply more ointment." He raises his bound wrists. "If you could just cut me loose, sir."
Daryl looks him over. Carol doesn't know if he's suspicious of the boy or puzzled by being called sir.
"He's all right," Enid assures him, and Daryl takes one of the knives on the counter and cuts the young man loose.
Enid climbs up onto the chair Elijah vacates, while the young man grabs a medical bag and kneels to treat her. While he does, she tells her story.
"When I woke up, the trailer was on fire." Coughing and fighting smoke, Enid busted the back window and made her way out. The barn was ablaze. So was the porch and awnings of the mansion. Shots were being fired into the Hilltop from the distant trees. She saw Michonne, Rosita, and Tara firing back. "I tried to get my gun and join the fight, but it was in the burning trailer." Bodies lay strewn on the ground – some burned, some shot. Walkers lurched inside the Hilltop through the flames of the crumbling front fence. Maggie organized a bucket brigade and trying to douse the fire, but to no avail. Eventually, Maggie tossed her bucket to the ground and ordered an evacuation.
Enid was separated from Maggie by a crumbling watchtower, which crashed to the ground in flames. The fire ripped toward her and set her pant leg on fire.
"She's got second-degree burns," Elijah says as he returns the ointment to his bag. "This is antibiotic. It should prevent infection and keep it from getting worse. We soaked the wound as soon as I found her and applied lidocaine with aloe vera." He reaches for a roll of gauze.
"I dropped and rolled until the fire was out," Enid continues. Then she fled, limping through the pain. A saddled horse thundered up beside her, missing its rider. Someone had probably tried to escape and been shot off. She mounted the horse and galloped through the now open back gates of the Hilltop and tried to ride off after a departing pick-up truck, but the horse was spooked by a gunshot and turned and galloped in another direction.
"I just held on for dear life," Enid says.
The horse crashed through the woods for a good mile, fleeing the smoke of the growing fire, and emerged onto the road on the other side. But when it tried to leap the hood of an abandoned car, its hoof caught. Enid went flying several feet into a ditch. She heard the horse's leg snap just before her head hit the shoulder and she lost consciousness. "I came to when I heard Elijah firing."
"I was driving by," Elijah explains as he tapes down the fresh bandage on Enid's leg, "and I saw the horse lying in the road, still moving. Barely. A couple of the soulless were closing in. I took them down and put the horse out of its misery. It was untouched, and I was starting to cut it up for meat when I saw Enid trying to crawl away through the ditch."
Carol's eyes are drawn to the two medicine refrigerators beneath the counters. She opens one and finds paper-wrapped meat inside.
"Please shut that quickly," Elijah says. "I can only run the power a couple hours a day. I need to keep the cool trapped."
"Sorry." Carol slams the door shut.
"I thought Elijah was one of the attackers," Enid says, "so I tried to crawl away. I was in so much pain. I couldn't get far. He caught me, and I thought it was all over. But he helped me. He shot two more walkers that came out of the woods, brought me into the bus, treated my burns, gave me food and water. If not for him, it probably would have been walkers who woke me up. Eating me alive."
Elijah lowers Enid's pant leg over the fresh bandage, stands, and leans back against the opposite chair.
"'S yer story?" Daryl looks him over guardedly. "Where's yer camp?"
"This bus is my camp. My mom was a phlebotomist. In Fort Worth."
"Texas?" Carol asks, and she can't help but think of Rosita and Eugene, who along with Abraham made their way from Houston. She wonders if either Rosita or Eugene are among the ten alive, and if she's ever fully forgiven Eugene enough to want him to be. The man redeemed himself by making blanks of the Saviors bullets, by deceiving them into thinking they were well armed for war. He hasn't been much use since, except for reloading their spent brass, which a half a dozen other people know how to do just as well. Still, she'll be sad to lose Eugene, if he's dead. She'll mourn worse for Rosita. They've never been particularly close, Rosita and Carol, but Carol respects her, and Rosita has been a part of the family for longer than many. She reminds Carol of Daryl in some ways - the same aloof disdain for incompetence, the same false bravado masking a heart that cares.
"Yeah," Elijah answers. "My mom worked on this bus. When it all started, she just stole the thing. Grabbed me and my older brother and my sister and we fled north, hoping the soulless weren't everywhere. But they were. We ended up settling at a national park in Tennessee. We lived there for about six months with about thirty other people. Then everyone started dying. Some kind of flu or something. Our mother died. My sister died. My brother and I were afraid of getting sick. So we took the bus and we moved on. Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia…Virginia."
"And y'all just lived in this bus?" Daryl asks. "You an yer brother, almost two years?"
"Well, we settled in another camp in Ohio for a few months, but while my brother and I were on a supply run, it was attacked. We came back to find it empty, looted. The men dead, the women missing. So we took the bus and moved on again. We just kept moving."
"Yer brother," Daryl asks, "where's he at?"
"He got bit two months ago, when he was out hunting. He's gone."
Carol's heard a hundred of these stories by now. They should cease to move her. But they don't.
"And now ya just live alone?" Daryl asks. "Ever since your brother died, ya ain't got no people?"
Elijah nods. "Yeah. I go around scavenging. Siphon gas wherever I can. Gather canned food. Try to drive the bus forty miles a day, keep the battery charged, for the electricity." He points to the two small medicine refrigerators, to a hot pot on the counter, to an electric griddle, and to a battery recharger plugged into and outlet.
"Just you?" Daryl asks.
"Just me."
Daryl glances at Carol, who says, "Daryl and I are going to talk outside for a bit."
They walk some distance from the bus, back toward Daryl's motorcycle. Daryl's crossbow swings from his right shoulder, the young man's rifle from his left.
"On a scale of one to ten," Carol asks as Daryl sits sideways on the bike, his legs outstretched on the pavement, "How much do you trust Elijah?"
"Six."
"That high?" Daryl was shooting the kid a lot of suspicious looks for a six.
"Kid had Enid three nights," Daryl replies. "He's got a gun and she don't. And he ain't raped her."
"Mighty chivalrous of him."
"In this world?" Daryl reasons.
He's right, and Carol hates that he's right. "That's really worth a six?"
"It's worth a five. Him bein' a dumb ass and gettin' himself disarmed so easy, well, that's minus two. But him comin' out to deal with us and leavin' her safe inside? That's plus two."
"Five minus two plus two is five. Not six."
"Hell is this?" he grumbles. "First grade math class?"
She chuckles.
"Gave him one for treatin' her burns."
"So should we take him with us?" she asks. "Let him settle at the winery with whoever's left?"
Daryl glances back at the bus. "You're call, Councilwoman."
Carol was on the five-person Hilltop Council that was established after the War, along with Rick, Maggie, Ezekiel, and Siddiq, who gained the admiration of the Hilltop by serving as its doctor and saving many lives during the war. Daryl wasn't elected, a fact that puzzled Carol but didn't seem to bother him. The council terms were supposed to last six months, and they were planning to hold elections again soon, but Carol supposes all that will change now that they are a community of only fifteen. Sixteen, if they take Elijah with them.
"He's all alone out here," Carol says. "And he saved one of ours. He clearly has some medical knowledge that may prove useful." Especially if Siddiq is not one of the ten alive. "I'd say he's earned his place, and we should invite him to come with us. But we should also keep a careful eye on him for a while."
Daryl nods. "I'll go check if Jesus is waitin' up ahead, and then we'll tell the boy he can come with us."
[*]
Daryl doesn't have to go far. Jesus and Gracie are just a half mile up the road, pulled off behind some brush, Gracie locked and buckled inside, Jesus outside with his handgun drawn over the still warm hood of the truck, listening for gunfire, hoping for the best but ready for the worst.
When Daryl purrs the motorcycle to a stop, without turning it off, and steadies it with his booted-heels on the gravel shoulder, Jesus holsters the handgun and asks, "Carol?"
"'S fine. Graice?"
"Scared." Jesus opens the door of the pick-up and gathers the crying little girl into his arms to comfort her. She's clutching Carol's little blue teddy bear, and when she sees Daryl, she falls silent and shoves the bear's head in her mouth.
"'S Carol's," Daryl tells her. "Don't eat it." He jerks his head up the road back toward the bus. "Found Enid. C'mon." He puts his feet back on the bike, leans into a U-turn, and zooms off.
