They gather in the front yard mid morning. It is there that she sees the majority of the group together – and it is the first time they see her. Most of them eye her warily, though a young boy pressed to Lori's side lights up at the sight of her, and watches her with avid curiosity. Lori smiles as she runs her fingers through his hair.
She watches them, noting their brief moments with one another. Carol, the shorter haired woman who had checked on her several times the day before, hangs back, eyes moist and lips thin. Glenn stares longingly after Hershel's daughter, Maggie. Dale gives Cal a wink from where he sits atop the RV.
"Cal."
Cal stops. She turns to greet Rick, trying to bite back the nausea that had been plaguing her for most of the morning. "Rick."
"You should hang back for this. Rest up and save your strength," Rick explains. "It's just target practise. We're gettin' our people used to using a gun. It'd do you right to rest. You'll be no use to anybody if you can't walk straight."
"Do you usually use guns out there?" She asks, trying to redirect his attention from her discomfort.
"Only when necessary," he says. "Some people in the group haven't shot a gun before – it'll be handy for them to know."
She nods, watching the way Carol hunches over herself, or how the young girl, Beth, quakes with uncertainty.
"We'll be back in a half hour," Rick says. "We'll go out looking for Sophia then."
She nods.
Rick moves past, his hand briefly patting her on the back.
"Alright. We're moving off property," Rick explains. "Don't want any noise we make bringin' anythin' back. The sound might draw a few walkers, and the further we are from town the better."
He doesn't embellish, she notices, and wonders if it's because he hasn't told his people about the other group. However, the way Carol freezes at her side makes her think that they may already know. She glances between several of the others, noting the quiet stillness they've adopted – like prey, she thinks, in the moment it realizes it will die.
"We'll be walking," Shane says, lifting a large black bag over one shoulder. "We don't want to waste any gas, and we're more likely to run into trouble on the road than in the trees and the fields."
Shane turns and leads the way, an excited Andrea at his side. The others move with solemn steps, almost as if they're half alive. She watches them go until they're beyond her line of sight, and she turns to move into the house.
"It's hard to accept help when you're not used to it," Dale's voice shatters the silence of the farm, and Cal stops on the stairs of the porch to glance at the older man atop his RV.
"Pardon me?" Cal squints up at him.
Dale shrugs and stares out across the field, refusing to meet her eye. "Nothing," he says.
"I'm taking Andrea," Shane says as they walk up to camp. "She's got a good eye on her."
Rick nods, "she's the best shot so far."
"But?"
"But she's temperamental – don't let her get you into trouble."
Shane lets out a bark of laughter. "Get me in trouble?"
"Get who in trouble?" Andrea asks as she approaches.
Rick shakes his head. "Just talking about this housing development."
Shane and Andrea go over the details of the housing development before Rick sees them off. The green SUV kicks up a cloud of dust as it races off down the farm road. As the vehicle disappears into the treeline he turns back to the map, eyeballing the creek and section of land Daryl had scouted the day before.
It's as he's tracing his finger along the suggestion of a service road that he hears the door of the house creak open. He glances up in time to see Cal slip from the house with that same cool expression on her face.
He folds the map and tucks it under his arm, hurriedly moving towards the strange woman swaying on the porch. Her discomfort is obvious, but he certainly isn't going to suggest she sit out a day of searching for Sophia. Cal was a stranger, and Sophia...- Sophia was one of their own.
"Hey, Rick!" T-Dog comes loping up to his side. "I'm coming with you, man."
Rick shakes his head, "I need you here. Make sure no one heads to town."
"Nah man, can't do that. See, I'm comin' with you. I'm backin' you up."
Rick sighs, "she had nothin' to do with Daryl-"
"If we run into that other group, you want someone at your back you can trust."
"T-Dog, you're injured, you only just finished up with your antibiotics-"
"I can't stay 'round here another minute. I need to be out there. Doin' something."
Rick is quiet for a moment. He would have preferred the other man staying behind.
"Let him go," Dale chimes up from the open hood of the RV. Glenn stands beside him, looking helpless. "We'll make sure nothing happens here."
Rick sighs, places an appreciative hand on T-Dog's shoulder, and nods for him to follow.
Cal moves off the porch to greet them, and Rick hands her her hunting knife. She blinks warily and accepts it before strapping it to her thigh. "You took it?"
"I couldn't be sure," he says.
She meets his eye, and nods. "I understand." And she means it.
"You know how to use that?" T-Dog asks.
Cal's lip twitches, her eyes narrowing with a dark mirth. "I know which end to put where, if that's what you mean."
He lets out a low chuckle, and nods at Rick, "I like her."
They move out through the fields, and towards the wood. The moment they hit the creek she leads them upstream, staying along the shoreline until it begins to climb into the familiar rock face. It isn't long before they're standing at the point she had found the doll, and it is there they find several walkers sprawled haphazardly around. Her eyes narrow when she realizes their ears are missing.
Rick and T-dog shuffle past, trying hard not to look. They take in the scuffed dirt and sand, marvelling at the fact that Daryl even managed to make it back to them. T-Dog prods at one of the bodies when they hear splashing, and turn in time to see Cal clambering over the sandy point bar and disappearing into the bushes. They follow carefully, Rick's fingers tightening around his Magnum.
"This is where the trail goes cold," her voice sounds from ahead, and they duck out from the bushes to see her standing over a faint suggestion of tracks.
"At least we know she went this way," T-Dog announces, glancing between Rick and Cal.
The three of them regard the shadowed wood stretching before them, vast and quiet and empty.
"Come on."
She had almost forgotten what it was like to be around living, breathing people – especially ones that weren't trying to kill her. She supposes that even if they weren't trying now, it certainly wouldn't stop them later. The brief bouts of dizziness that sweep over her remind her of Merle, and how he had been perfectly complacent until she had tried to leave.
There was a stark difference between Rick and Merle; one that would have been obvious in the old world, and was obvious well on into the new. Merle had been an abrasive son of a bitch from the moment she found him in the cube van. His fuse had been short and sparked; one wrong word and he would have left her a lot sooner than he had. In comparison, Rick was patience incarnate. He had a quiescence about him – a calm that depended solely on her decisions, her fuse.
"House ahead," T-Dog's voice is low.
The three of them pause.
The old house is washed out – greyed and dusty. It reminds her of Betty and Graham's home – a pleasant vacation cabin lost out in the woods -, but years gone bye. The white paint is crusted and falling away; the roof sags lethargically; and the windows have all been smashed away. There is an old rusted shell of a car parked a few metres away, the brambles and brush of the forest coiling possessively around the frame.
They approach it with tentative steps, moving up to and around the perimeter with careful steps. T-Dog flanks them while Rick moves quietly ahead to peek through the yawning windows. Cal peers past him, blinking wearily at the empty rooms and blank walls.
"This house has been dead a long time," Rick says from ahead, and Cal nods in agreement as they take the stairs of the porch up to the front door. The wood is old and wet, it sags underfoot, and is so saturated and rotten it hardly breathes a moan. The door itself is gone – dead leaves and animal droppings line the hallway. The dust of countless seasons is undisturbed and thick on the floor.
They search the house, but it yields nothing. What little remains is long dried up by the years, suggesting it had died long before the dead had risen. The three of them stand in what once was a kitchen, listening to the wind breathe through the vast and gutless house. It feels real. More real than Betty and Graham's untouched home. It's not the past, but the future, Cal thinks. A crumbling and weathered and dead future.
This is all that would remain of humanity in the years to come.
They leave and wander out into the woods, following the overgrown road that winds through the trees.
For a long while there is silence. Each of them stare ahead, refusing to look over their shoulders at the house shrinking back into the darkening wood. It's only when the house is gone that the tension bleeds away, and Cal releases a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"Cal. Cal. That stand for anything?" T-Dog glances at Cal, fighting to brighten his expression with a slurred smile.
She shakes her head.
He purses his lips, "What you do before all this?"
She shrugs, "a few things."
"Not very specific," he drones out.
"Not something I like to think about anymore."
He makes a sound in his throat, and Rick snorts lightly. T-Dog ignores him. "Alright. Where you from?"
She's staring off down the road, her lips twitching as she recalls a life gone bye. "Macon, actually."
"Never been."
"Not surprised. Not a lot to see in Macon."
"Wasn't that where that guy was from... - the one that killed a Senator?"
She nods, "his parents owned the local Pharmacy – nice people."
It's weird. Funny, even. To think of a time when something like murder wasn't an everyday inevitability. The normalcy of their conversation is enchanting – disillusioning them to the time and place and present. Each of them are wondering of a time when a newspaper wasn't something shrivelled and folded and pressed into a fire, but something planted on their table or into their hands.
"Any family in Macon?"
It's a treacherous question. One that causes Rick to inhale sharply, and T-Dog to wince and mumble an apology. Cal remembers a man and a woman and several years of awkward phone conversations. The last time she had seen her parents had been after a funeral; cold, stark, haunting. Her mother had cried; her father had simply said, he tried, Cal. Remember that he always tried.
It had been years since she spoke to them.
"Parents," she says, and T-Dog blinks in surprise. She had every right to not answer; it was simply the way of the world now. "Dad is ex-military."
"Better off than most."
"Maybe."
They turn to silence again. The only sound rising between the three of them is the crunch of gravel underfoot. They don't walk for much longer before Rick is murmuring something, and each of them look off into the trees towards a dark shape set off from the haggard saplings around it. They pause, and stand there in the middle of the old road – and they feel the sharp chill of trepidation creep along their spines and nestle firmly in their guts.
Rick moves into the trees, and Cal and T-Dog flank him with careful steps. Cal's fingers are coiled around her knife. Rick's hand is on his Magnum. T-Dog clutches his bat with a white knuckled grip.
The saplings – little more than seven feet tall - spit them into a campsite. They stand at the edge, breath still and heart pounding wildly in their ears. The dark tent – a plethora of greens and browns – broods a few meters away from the cold, wet firepit and a stack of soggy, old logs.
"Sophia?" Rick calls softly.
Cal winces.
T-Dog glances over their shoulders, ready for any stragglers to come stumbling from no where.
They move forward, Rick sliding his gun from his hip-holster. Cal's hand curls around his shoulder, and he glances at the buck knife in her hand.
Cal holds a finger to her lips. She stands off to the side of the flap, her fingers coiling around the edge. Rick takes a few steps back and gives a nod.
She pulls it open.
Nothing, but a dusty sleeping bag.
They move around the campsite, taking in the solitary life this person lived in their last weeks or days. One lawn chair set up beside the fire pit. One dirty plate tucked in an empty bucket of dried scum. One can of soup cracked open and rotting near the stones. One pair of leather shoes still tucked neatly at the tent entrance.
They find the truck tucked back in the trees, as brown and dusty as the tent. The door is unlocked. There are boxes in the back filled with rations, clothes, bottles of water – the kind of things someone would need to live. The three of them stand at the tailgate, the indecision a tangible thread they all grasp together.
"The truck's been here a while," Cal is the first to speak.
Rick nods in agreement, "whoever it was, they're probably long gone by now."
"Someone ain't just gonna leave this all behind," T-Dog reaches into the back and hefts one of the few boxes into his arms. "He didn't take his shoes – he's probably a walker by now."
There is a solemnness about his words, but Rick and Cal nod and begin searching through the boxes alongside him. While Rick and T-Dog attack the trunk, Cal moves to the cab and grabs a large pack slung behind the driver's seat. She empties the contents on the ground and sorts through the assortment of personal items the previous owner had stored away.
"We can put some stuff in the pack," she suggests before she turns back to pushing her hands through a series of old, musty clothes. Some of the items she places off to the side, knowing someone in Rick's group would find use for it. And then her hands still on a photo.
She blinks - once, twice. She looks away sharply, and turns the photo upside down. There had been a man and a child – smiling and laughing. She swallows a sudden thickness in her throat as she tucks it away in the front seat.
She doesn't want to know who they were. She doesn't want to know why there was only one goddamn sleeping bag and not two. She doesn't want to know why the boy, Ryan – signed on the back in chicken scratch -, wasn't with his father.
"What's that?" T-Dog motions.
"Someone else's memories."
She digs around in the cab. In the glove box, and behind the seats. Rick and T-Dog are piling as much as they can into the back pack when she find the crossbow bolts. A pack of them, broken and splintered and useless. She pulls the lot of them from the truck and shows them to her companions.
"Too bad," T-Dog grunts. "Daryl would of appreciated 'em. He's a devil with that bow of his."
She remembers the quiet, the moment in which she had realized she wasn't alone. She remembers the bolt pressed against her forehead; the acceptance as death washed over her. He had been calm and cool; ready to pull the trigger.
"Yeah," she says softly. She returns to the truck and continues to search the cab. As she digs under one of the seats her fingers catch on something sharp and cool; a single, unbroken bolt.
The sun is beginning to dip in the sky by the time they start making their way back. They leave the campsite, taking what they can in the pack. They alternate carrying the bag, though Rick nearly refuses Cal when he notices how pale she looks. The stubborn set of her jaw at his suggestion has him quickly retracting the offer to sit this one out.
They move out quickly, Cal refusing to slow them down. Rick can see the wear of the day in the pallor of her skin and lips, and the shaky steps she tries so carefully to hide.
Rick doesn't hear anything while he's carrying the bag. T-Dog wanders up ahead with careful steps, and Cal walks quietly at his side. He blinks and she's gone, and the next moment he feels the earth tilt as something falls on him from behind. When he scrambles away he realizes the walker is already dead, and Cal is standing there in its stead.
The sun blinks from behind her. Her knife is black in her hand.
For a long moment they are still. Rick stares up at her, and she down at him.
And then Cal offers him her hand.
"Thank you," he says.
"Wasn't your time, Rick Grimes."
When they arrive back at camp there is an intensity in the air. Lori is standing off in the tall grasses, staring into the distance; Carol is hovering over a pot of carrots; and Maggie and Glenn are staring vehemently at one another across the lawn.
T-Dog wanders away, Rick goes to deposit the pack beside the fire, and Cal trails after him.
He hardly realizes she is there until she moves up beside the fire, looking down at the charred logs that let off a wispy plume of smoke. Carol glances at them from her perch nearby, and Rick solemnly shakes his head.
She nods and excuses herself to the RV, clutching at her mouth as if it'll stay the tears threatening to spill from her eyes.
They stand there above the fire, staring down at the embers. Rick rubs at his neck and looks up towards his wife.
"I want to say thank you again. For helping look – and for today."
Cal nods.
"You're probably tired of hearin' how much it means to us, but it does."
She's not looking at him. She can't. It feels weird to be talking to someone – and to be talking to someone like this. She had let that side of the world go – she'd let the thought, the idea of gratitude fall away. It had become nothing more than a pipe dream – a legend; it had become something she never thought she'd see, or experience again.
"Where were you plannin' on headin' after this?"
She shrugs, "somewhere. I'll help you look for as long as I can, but then I'll be movin' on."
Rick glances at the empty camp. "You're welcome to stay with us," he says. She glances at him sharply. "If we move on, you're welcome to come."
"You don't even know me," the surprise is evident in her voice.
"No. I don't," his jaw works, and he lets out a soft scoff. "But if we're going to survive this, we need to come together to be strong – and we're stronger as a group."
He's taking a chance.
He knows it.
She knows it.
"We'll see," she says.
"You should get some rest. We have an extra tent. It's in the RV, if you'd like."
"Thank you."
"I'm hopin' my trust means something," despite the warning he holds out a hand.
She takes it, "it does."
T-Dog helps her set up her own tent nearer the edge of camp, yammering on about the queerness of wanting to be alone. He blubbers when he realizes what he'd said, but she gives him the barest smirk as she presses her laugh into her palm.
It's the first time she's laughed in an age.
Dale brings over a sleeping bag, apologizing that there are no more cots or spare sleeping pads.
"It'll be the ground, I'm afraid," he says.
It is the first time she's really spoken to the man – not including his moments of sage advice -, and she finds herself smiling tentatively as he bustles around her tent complaining to T-Dog about his lack of craftsmanship.
The two bicker quietly, though their words wash over Cal with a warmth that leaves her feeling uncomfortable. She promptly thanks both, and exits the tent; she still has something to do.
The tent isn't noticeably far from the group, but she can see how it is set back a few feet – as if it doesn't quite want to be there. For a long moment she stands there, staring at the flap hanging loosely from it's zipper. It's open enough to be inviting, but shut enough to not be. She contemplates turning and leaving when she hears a soft curse from behind her – she glances over her shoulder to see an angry Rick storming across the camp towards a wide eyed Glenn.
She ducks through the door - and comes face to face with Daryl.
"What're you doin' in here?"
She blinks at him for a long moment.
"You deaf or jus' stupid?"
She watches him as he watches her. He has a scowl on his face. A wound slithering down from his temple. His shirt is open. His side bandaged. His eyes are narrowed and he's biting at his lip like he isn't quite sure what's going on. He's opening his mouth – probably to grumble some more at her – when she reaches up and pulls the crossbow bolt from where she'd tucked it in her pony tail.
"Found this," she says. "Thought you might like another one."
He eyes it warily as she presents it to him. "Pro'lly not the right size," he grouses, taking the bolt into his hand with a tentative glance.
She waits as he eyes it, as he twirls it between his fingertips and runs his fingers along the orange and yellow feathers. He catches the tip on his thumbnail and squints down the shaft, appraising it carefully.
She nods, "right kind?"
"It'll do," he mutters.
She turns to leave when his voice rises up, making her freeze. "You find anything out there?"
She hesitates. She hesitates because there is something in his voice – the barest thread of hope. "Not what we were looking for," she says over her shoulder.
He nods slowly.
And looks away.
"Tell them assholes to quiet down out there. Some people are tryin' to sleep."