Black rust cakes the bronze bell of the old Episcopalian church, freezing it in a half-rung position. The once white paint of the rain-battered steeple has peeled away to expose a gray-brown underbelly. The wood threatens to split, and yet the tower holds. A bird has made its nest above the bell and chirps loudly to its offspring. Daryl looks away when Carol calls to him: "The cemetery is here!"
He joins her at the left side of the church and sees the old gray stones and dirt-streaked crosses rising above the rocky dirt, which sprouts only the occasional dark green weed here or there. They walk among the dead, a foot apart, trying to make out the names etched on the memorials. Here and there Carol crouches and rubs away the grime of years to try to read what lies beneath. Among these old-timey names, they find an Abraham, a Theodore, a Margaret, a Noah, and a Richard.
Daryl watches Carol out of the corner of his eye as she swallows at the roll call of the dead. "I'll go to the back," she says softly. "You keep looking toward the front. We'll make this quick."
They split ways and Daryl reads the names until his feet still before a flat memorial stone. Peeking out mockingly from the dirt are the letters that spell Sophia. His heart catches, and he looks up anxiously to see how far away Carol is.
She stands before a stone angel. "Did you find it?" she calls.
"Nah!" He walks hurriedly away, his eyes on the stones. At last, he spies it. Mercer. Daryl unsheathes his knife, crouches, and then, holding the blade flat, uses it to scrape off a coat of dried mud to reveal the names George Aaron. "Found it!" he shouts, and Carol hastens over.
He finishes cleaning off the stone for her, until they can make it out fully:
Fr. George Aaron Mercer
beloved husband and father
friend of God
1892 - 1925
"Father? Yer great granddaddy was a priest?" Daryl asks.
She laughs. "I guess so. An Episcopal one, I suppose. Since he had a wife and kids. And he's buried here." Her eyes rake over the stone. "He sure died young. 33."
"Same as Jesus." Her brow knits in confusion, and he realizes she thinks he's talking about Hilltop's Jesus. "Christ."
"Yeah." She runs her fingertips over the lettering on the upright, misshapen stone, "I can't take this with me, like I did that page from the book, but thank you. Thank you for indulging me."
Daryl swings his backpack off his shoulder. "Can bring it with ya."
"What? No. We're not defacing a grave and hauling a heavy tombstone."
He digs in his pack to draw out two sheets of legal-size paper. He often carries paper for making maps when he discovers good hunting grounds or walker-infested areas to be avoided.
She takes the paper when he hands it to her, but looks puzzled.
"Hold on." He unzips the front pouch and draws out a pack of colored chalk he picked up from the elementary school to bring back to the Hilltop's one-room school house. He opens it and slides out a dark purple stick. "'Member doin' this as a kid?"
"A grave rubbing?" she asks, and the way her eyes light up with excitement make his heart beat a little faster.
They kneel together before the grave. Daryl holds the two sheets together on the upright stone while Carol leans forward to start rubbing with the colored chalk. It's too light at first, so she rubs harder, and he has to force himself not to look down at her breasts as they bounce lightly with her vigorous effort, but his eyes do flit down once. Or twice.
A gust of wind rustles the corners of the paper, and Carol has to pause in her efforts until the flapping stills. Above, the clouds are graying. The horses whinny impatiently where they were left tied to a parking meter in front of the church, and Daryl glances back to make sure they aren't warning of approaching walkers on the street, but they only seem bothered by the sudden drop in temperature and the unexpected gale. "Storm's comin'. Better make this quick."
Carol starts rubbing again. Daryl has to move his hands around to accommodate her, and it gets to be a bit like a game of Twister, with her leaning around his arms to keep rubbing. She breathes a little harder as she throws her elbows into the work. His eyes flit to her chest again, for just a moment, and it feels wrong, so very wrong, to be thinking about sex in a graveyard.
He's relieved when she's done and falls back on her bottom in the dirt, rests her elbows on her drawn up knees, and surveys her handiwork. "Shoot," she mutters. "I missed the last line."
She's getting ready to kneel again when there's a growl from her right. Daryl checked the street, but he didn't check the back of the church.
Carol scurries to her feet, drops the chalk, and draws her knife. Daryl holds the paper in place with one hand while seizing the rolling chalk in the other.
"Forget it!" she shouts as she strides forward several feet and sinks her knife into the head of an approaching walker, but Daryl continues the rubbing.
Carol yanks her knife out, runs forward, and stabs a second walker. Now finished with the rubbing, Daryl drops the paper and chalk, stands, swivels his bow off his shoulder, and shoots a third walker stumbling from behind the church and toward the graveyard. As he reloads, Carol runs forward with her bloody knife, but she stops suddenly.
She turns and runs back, flying past him while shouting, "Let's go! Let's go!"
Daryl looks up from his freshly loaded bow to see a small herd of walkers streaming from around the edge of the church toward them. They must have been bumbling around inside the church and spilled out an open back doorway in response to the sound of the horses and human voices.
An arrow whizes from Daryl's crossbow and thunks into the closet walker, which slumps to the ground as Daryl swings his backpack on. The two sheets of paper are caught up in the wind and drift toward the herd. He chases after the floating papers, dodging first one walker and then another. He seizes one sheet in mid-air and scoops the other from the ground. His hands full with the papers, he has to kick back a walker before running for the horses.
Carol has untied them both and it mounting hers. Daryl shoves the papers in his mouth and holds them between his pressed lips to free his hands to vault himself up on the animal.
Carol draws her side arm and shoots the walker that is now reaching for the tail of Daryl's horse. It's the first bullet they've used on their journey. She yells a hi-ya to her horse and spurs it down the street. With a rough kick to the animal's side, Daryl thunders after her.
[*]
When they've put a mile between themselves and the herd, they slow the horses to a walk. Daryl still holds the papers in his mouth. He yanks back on the reins to stop his horse and then take the papers out. "Sorry I slobbered all over your grave rubbin'."
"You didn't have to risk your life for it, you know."
"Pfft. Didn't. Had plenty of time." He slides off his horse and brings the rubbing over to Carol, who has stilled her mare.
"Thank you," she says as he folds the paper and slides it into the saddle bag with the pixie sticks and medicines.
Thunder rumbles across the darkening sky.
"Need to put some more distance 'tween us 'n that herd," Daryl says, "'n find shelter."
They veer off down a windy country road, because the herd has lost their scent by now and will likely just keep going straight. Unfortunately, there isn't much in the way of houses, but at last Carol spies a farm and points to it just as thunder booms across the sky.
The clouds open to pour down a torrent of rain. Carol flips up the hood on her light jacket, but Daryl doesn't have one, and together they ride toward the farm house, through tall wet grasses.
When they're two yards from the house, a mighty crack echoes across the field, and an immense tree plummets onto the farmhouse, bringing the roof down with it. "Shit!" Daryl mutters as the horses rear back.
"There's a barn!" Carol's yells. Daryl can barely hear her over the howling wind and wooshing rain. They ride quickly for the shelter, and when they dismount inside, and slide shut and secure the flapping door with the iron hook lock, they're soaked to the bone.
A stream of water pours down from one section of the barn's worn roof, pitter-pattering into a muddy puddle on the dirt ground, but otherwise the place seems secure.
They stable the horses in stalls as far away from the leak as possible, unburden the animals from their saddle bags, wipe them down, and leave them pans of water.
"Gonna clear the loft," Daryl says.
"I'm going to change out of these wet clothes. No peeking."
"Pffft."
But he does peek, over the rail of the loft, when he sees there's nothing up there but some aged, brittle, and crumbling straw. When he glances over the rail, he catches a flash of her bare breasts just as she lowers over them a dark green sweatshirt with a picture of Monticello on it. He turns at the sound of scurrying and shoots a squirrel. Two more disappear beneath the planks.
"Walker?" Carol calls up.
"Nah. Dinner."
When Daryl comes back down, she hands him a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt from the giftshop at Monticello. "I snagged some for you, too, so you don't have to sleep in your work pants anymore."
"Like sleepin' 'n my work pants. What if I got to get up 'n fight?"
"Then you can fight in comfy pants."
He doesn't argue. He's cold and wet and the temperature must have dropped another ten degrees with this rain. It feels more like late winter than early spring. Some soft, dry sweats sound pretty good right about now.
He turns his back to her while he changes and has a sense that she's watching him, but when he turns around again, she's busying herself with the horses.
"How long do you think this storm will last?"
"While," he mutters. "'N by then the sun'll've set. Might as well camp here. Caught a squirrel for super." He nods to the animal he's left on the ground by his abandoned pack.
"Do you think there's enough ventilation to light a fire in here?"
All these walkers in the world, and yet most of them who have made it this long will likely die from smoke pollution.
"'S a damn hole in the roof."
"True enough. But we best not burn it long."
Daryl's not sure how Carol seasons the squirrel, but it tastes better than the bland stuff he ate over his campfire in the woods for years. She remembered to snag a corkscrew from the winery, but they have no crystal glasses, so tonight they just pass a bottle of wine back and forth beside the fire, while the barn creaks from the wind, rain batters the wood, thunder rumbles, the horses huff, and brief flashes of lightening illuminate the barn through an upper window like a strobe.
"I think I'm getting a buzz," Carol observes.
"Well, we ain't ate much today."
Carol doesn't say anything more as they drink, but that doesn't bother him. When the bottle is drained, he dampens the fire. Carol lights an oil lamp and sets it near her. She sits Indian style on her unzipped sleeping bag – his is still rolled - and by the low light of the wick smooths out the rubbing and tapes the two papers together in back with medical tape. She flips them over and studies the final product.
Daryl's sits on his bedroll sharpening one of his knives. The light of the oil lamp paints shadows on the soft skin of Carol's face, and for a brief moment, it illuminates the tears glistening inside the light blue pools of her eyes. "Hell's the matter?" he asks with alarm.
"I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm so emotional looking at this."
He doesn't know either. It's just the rubbing from the grave of some long dead ancestor, someone she never met in her life, in a state she never even went to before the Turn. "Ya didn't even know 'em."
"I'm not crying because of him." She swipes at the tears in the corner of her eyes.
"'N why?" Daryl runs his sharpening stone up his blade, and then back.
"I think I'm crying because you're so good to me."
Daryl's hand freezes for a moment on the sharpening stone.
She smiles gently and folds up the rubbing where it's taped. "You're such an idiot. You ran toward the herd to get this for me. Because you thought it was important to me."
He tosses the stone back into his open backpack. "It ain't?"
"Certainly not as important as you."
Daryl slowly sheaths his knife and lays it aside on the ground. His chest tightens, and he tries to think what to say to that, how to interpret it, how to feel about it, but he already feels something. It's not the first time she's said something like that. Even as far back as the farm, she told him, I can't lose you, too. But there's something different in the way she says it tonight.
She uncrosses her legs, puts her feet flat on her stretched out sleeping bag, and hugs her knees while looking at him over the ashes of the dead fire. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Mhmhm."
"Why did you kiss me the other night?"