Carol and Daryl cope with their forced separation as the search for the girls begins.
AN: Sorry that this has taken so long to update, but I had some thinking to do about where I wanted to go with it. I think it will be about three more chapters.
The Searchers
"She up there again?" Martinez asked, looking towards the watch tower above the main gate.
"Yeah—traded with Rosita for another shift." Abe replied, nodding his head in disgust.
"She's gonna wear herself out." Sam said, coming to stand beside the other men assigned to guarding the main gate.
Caesar Martinez had quickly proven himself a valuable asset to the community, stepping up to take over many of Daryl's duties and responsibilities such as patrols, hunting and scavenging missions. His adopted daughter Meghan was a great help with Rose, keeping her occupied, (but begging for a kitten of her own), and his woman, Lily, a nurse, was hard at work helping Carol at the Fort medical center. She was also pregnant and having the same fears that every woman did during this time after the Turn.
"I know—tried to get her to come down and take a break, but she said she'd be fine." Caesar said, shifting his rifle onto his shoulder while he continued to gaze up at the woman in the tower.
"How long are they overdue now? Two weeks?" Sam asked.
"Almost three...she must be losing her mind." Martinez replied.
"At least she let Sara move in and help her with the boys and Rose. She wasn't getting hardly any sleep that first month, started to look like a walker herself..." Abe added.
"You think they're dead?" Sam asked with a sigh.
"Fuck no. Daryl wouldn't dare." Caesar laughed ruefully, and the other men chuckled at the truth of it.
It had been almost seven months since Daryl, Michonne, Rick, and Carl had set out from Fort Dixon on their search for Beth, Judith and Lizzie. The plan had been that they search for six months and then rendezvous back here and reexamine their strategy if they hadn't found the girls by then. If possible they would send word back on their progress with any other travelers and traders heading north, but no such world had come in the whole time they had been gone and it was seriously testing Carol's resolve.
Standing with her sharpshooter's rifle atop the tower, Carol thought back on how many hours she had done the same at the prison, alone or with one of the others, making sure there was no build up at the fences, that the water hook up to the narrow river that passed in front of the prison was running, that the front gate was clear when Michonne came galloping up on her horse or Daryl returned from a hunt on foot or on the bike.
She'd been jealous of how often they'd been able to escape the sometimes stultifying confines of the place, her latent claustrophobia sometimes getting the best of her. When Rick had taken her on that last run, even though she'd harbored the very real fear that he was taking her out to kill her, just as he'd done Shane, with a swift knife to the heart or bullet to the head; even then part of her was actually happy just to get outside the fences.
Now days she was all about the safety to be had by staying within her tall wooden walls behind the spiked moat. Her babies were safe, thriving, Charlie almost caught up to Teddy in size. At almost three, Rose was a joy, but ran them all ragged keeping her out of trouble. It wasn't that she was bad or even mischievous; she was just almost three and missed her father terribly.
Sam had caught her arguing with Mark at the gate at the crack of dawn three days ago, wearing her little Hello Kitty back pack full of what she had deemed necessary supplies, including her toy crossbow slung across the top, telling him she was heading out to bring her papa back because her mama cried at night. Carol had shown up, frantic with worry because Rose's bed had been empty when she'd gone to wake her that morning, and after a terrible argument, both of them had tearfully hugged and then Carol had carried her determined daughter home.
With each passing day that went beyond the time they'd planned to return to check in, Carol's chest felt a little tighter, as if someone's fist was closing over her heart, squeezing the life out of her.
Looking through the scope Carol saw movement at the edge of the forest and focused in on it. Her finger was on the trigger, ready to pick off a walker if that's what revealed itself. What she saw almost made her drop her gun. It was a tank.
The gun turret came through the tree line first and she could head the clacking clank of the tracks as they rolled the massive armored vehicle inexorably towards the stockade. Cold icy dread held Carol stock still. Everything they had built here, everyone she cared about who resided within its walls could be lost; if it fired its big gun they had no defense against a weapon like this. The strong pine logs would split and break, splinters would explode out like daggers impaling anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the onslaught. Walkers they could defend against, but bad men, men with dynamite or heavy weaponry could be the end of them all.
Their only hope was escape or negotiation...
Someone farther down the line set off the alarm, the clanging of the big bell ringing out to assemble the people to red alert, the jarring sound finally shocking Carol out of her reverie and in her fury, her absolute fury at the tank's presence; she took careful aim at the turret and fired off a round, which pinged out loudly off of the metal surface.
To Carol's surprise the tank stopped cold, but then her stomach flipped as the gun swiveled and seemed to aim towards her location above the gates.
Shit.
A barrage of gun fire went off then, banging and pinging against the tank's skin ineffectually until Carol called a cease fire.
Why weren't they firing back?
Then they all heard a strange clank clunk sound and the top hatch on the turret slowly swung open and an arm holding a dingy white t-shirt was raised up into the air.
"Hold your fire!" a loud voice yelled out from the interior and a second leather clad arm appeared, held up in surrender, followed by a shaggy mess of dark hair and then wonderfully familiar pointed face gazing up at her with a sheepish grin.
"Hi, honey, I'm home." Daryl Dixon drawled.
Six months earlier
Huddled together around the small fire as the snow blew around the outside of the small lean-to shelter they had made out of the tarps they carried on the bikes, Michonne, Carl and Rick shivered against the bitter wind. They had been on the road for three weeks, and if Carl's count was correct, tonight was Christmas Eve. Daryl had gone hunting; with their stock of supplies stretched as thin as possible, his squirrels and rabbits were their main source of protein.
They had hoped that by heading south as quickly as possible they would escape the worst of the winter weather, but this storm had whipped up starting at around noon and had grown steadily worse. The only good thing about the cold and snow was that the walkers they'd encountered had been so sluggish and partially frozen that they were easy to hear coming in the crunch of their feet over the icy snow and even easier to dispatch.
The search had begun by looking for the community that Sara had described to them, where the raiders had a more or less permanent base, but they had found it abandoned, and worse, filled with walkers who were mainly women and children. It was obvious that something very bad had gone down there. Michonne and Daryl had gone in alone, leaving Carl and Rick on watch outside the city limits, in case any raiders' patrols showed up.
As they failed to find any living, the tracker and warrior woman realized that they would have to undertake the sad task of ending the town's dead, hoping that they wouldn't find any of the girls for whom they searched amongst them.
"If they're there it will kill Rick." Michonne intoned, pulling out her katana and nodding at Daryl.
"Best we do these ourselves." Daryl had nodded in agreement and readied his bow.
It had taken them the rest of the day, working silently, sickened by what they found. Someone had almost gleefully engaged in sick acts of slaughter and torture, signing the kills by spray painting on the walls of the houses and buildings where most of the dead were trapped or bound.
"Have you noticed? How many of them..." Michonne's eyes filled with unaccustomed tears as she put the end of her blade through the head of what had been a young Asian woman bound to a bed, her head bloody, and her skull partially visible.
"Scalped." Daryl said with disgust. "Some sick fuck's takin' trophies." he pointed at the wall, to a name painted in red, saying the word printed there, "El Cicatriz."
"Yeah, I saw that a couple of other times—what the hell is it?" Michonne asked.
"Spanish... it means scar..." Daryl said with a grimace, recognizing the signature for what it was.
"What?" Michonne asked, frowning at him disbelievingly.
"Old John Wayne movie—bad guy in it, Apache maybe?—the one that took girls and women, took the Duke's niece; took scalps as trophies—name a' Scar, the Mexicans called him "El Cicatriz."
"What happened—did he find his niece?" Michonne asked, curious that Daryl would like old westerns, though if she thought about it, he did fit the strong silent cowboy type to a 't'.
"Yeah, he did, but it took him five years..." Daryl growled sadly, thinking of how much of his children's lives he was already missing, their first Christmas coming up in a couple of weeks.
"What was the name of it—the movie?"
"The Searchers." Daryl told her.
"Guess that's us all right." Michonne nodded sagely and swept out of the room in search of more victims.
"Merry Christmas everybody!" Daryl said with more gusto than any of them had felt since leaving the terrible scene of the town massacre almost two weeks ago. He dumped out his game bag onto the tarp that they had laid out below them to protect them from the damp ground. Eight small dead birds fell out, their heads lolling on their necks, most pierced through the eye as the kill shot, showing off Daryl's precision with a bolt.
"Hey—lil' tiny turkeys!" Carl cried happily.
"Them's bob white quail, kiddo. Official game bird of Georgia and Tennessee—I can see your nature education's been neglected since I saw you last." Daryl kidded, but looked pointedly at Rick. He'd been trying to take Carl out hunting with him before the sickness had hit, but since it meant giving the boy access to a fire arm his father had been resistant, preferring to teach him animal husbandry instead.
Daryl hunkered down next to the fire, grabbed up one of the small birds and started pulling out feathers, motioning to the others.
"Ain't gonna pluck themselves, you want a couple, you get the pins off 'em." Daryl said, and the others all picked up one of the quail and followed Daryl's example. Soon all eight birds were split, seasoned with the herbs Carol had packed and set to roasting over the fire while water heated in a pan to use on dried potato flakes. Rummaging in his back pack, Daryl pulled out several small packages wrapped in red tissue paper, which he had been instructed to hand out on Christmas if they were still out on the road.
"Might as well do this while we wait." Daryl said, carefully checking the name labels written in Carol's flowing script. Two went to Carl, two to Michonne and one to Daryl. Rick busied himself adding more wood to the fire, knowing Santa Daryl would have nothing for him in his bag. When he closed his eyes he still saw Carol's stoic face, tears running silently down her cheeks as she hugged each of the other travelers goodbye...he knew that look intimately. It was the same one she'd had on her face when she'd pleaded with him not to leave her that day, wiping her eyes, angry at herself for letting him see her raw emotions.
"Here," Daryl said, coming up beside Rick and nudging him with a small square package. Rick looked down and saw his name written on a small white label taped to its surface. Shocked, Rick gave Daryl a confused questioning look, but Daryl just shrugged.
"She said you'd understand." Daryl said.
"Open them all at once or one at a time?" Carl asked excitedly, Christmas and gifts making him a kid again.
"Make it last longer, do one at a time." Michonne pronounced, so they all sat around the fire as each person in turn unwrapped.
Michonne received a new head scarf, bold paisley in reds and greens, as well as a drawing of her, katana swiping through the head of a walker, signed by the artist, Miss Cherokee Rose Dixon. It was childish, but remarkably accurate, even down to the way the black and red blood arced up and away from the blade.
Carl's drawing depicted him as a true pirate on his ship, with what appeared to be a crew made up of others from the fort, including Daryl, Carol, Abe, Sara and Michonne, all dressed in pirate garb. In addition there was a beautifully rendered small oval framed painting of the photograph of Beth and Judith that he had shown them, signed by the artist, Rosita.
"That's amazing, Carl," Michonne said as she looked at it. Carl nodded and then after thinking for a minute, reached inside his coat and took the original photo out of the zippered pocket and handed it to his father.
"Merry Christmas, dad." Carl said, watching his father's eyes fill with tears as he examined the photo. He looked at Carl and just nodded his head up and down a couple of time before swiping at his eyes in embarrassment.
"You're next, Daryl." Michonne said, drawing their attention away from Rick.
Daryl pulled the tightly folded paper apart and found that Rosita had used the photo Rick had carried of him and Carol to use as the center of a family portrait, adding Rose and the babies, drawn from life, to it as well. There was also a small note attached, but he wanted to wait until he was alone to read it, so he palmed it before the others could ask about it.
"Looks like it's your turn." Michonne said to Rick, motioning at the box shaped package he still held. Looking up at Daryl, who gave him a look that said he had no idea what it could be, Rick tore open one end and let the square green box slide out into his hand. A stylized gold crown was embossed into the box's surface and under it was the word, also printed in gold: "Rolex." When he opened up the lid, he found a beautiful chrome silver watch with a diamond inlaid above the Rolex logo on the dial under the crystal.
Rick's hands shook at the not so subtle reminder of the day he'd lent his own watch to the hapless boy they'd never seen again; the day he thought he'd fixed it so he never saw Carol again. A small note fluttered out from beneath, between the box and the wrapping paper, and Rick almost dropped the watch as he grabbed at the feather light slip of paper. Written in the same handwriting as the label was a brief, direct message: "Bring him back to me Rick, or don't come back." Rick crumpled the slip of paper in his fist and stared at the watch.
"Huh," Michonne grunted, looking down at her scarf and then at the watch and raising an eyebrow, "Know it don't mean anything now, but that's a thirty thousand dollar watch," clearly comparing their relative dollar values. She removed her old sweat stained and frayed head band and tied on the new one and then carefully folded up the drawing and placed it inside a sandwich size zip loc bag in which she put all of her important mementoes, including a lock of blonde hair tied with a black ribbon, tucking the bag back inside her vest.
"Guess you got the short end of the stick," Daryl said to Rick without looking at him, touching Carol's face protected behind the plastic protective covering of the frame. The extremely personal handmade nature of the three others' gifts was not lost on any of them. Carol had known exactly what she was doing.
"Dinner's ready." Daryl announced, adding a bit of the boiling water to the drippings from the fat little birds to make thin gravy and then stirring the dried potatoes into the rest of the water. They were almost finished with the meal when a walker, drawn by either the fire or the smell of the meat cooking stumbled into the clearing, blue and pathetic, taken out by Daryl's thrown buck knife's hard thunk through the center of his forehead, reminding them all of the sad reality of their situation.
Present day
Carol almost broke her neck running down the stairs from the ramparts, stopped only by Martinez actually catching her as she fell down the last three steps.
"Whoa there!" Caesar said, setting Carol back up on her feet.
"Open the gates!" she yelled impatiently, but Abraham stopped her, reminding her that they still had protocols they had to follow.
"Don't know who all's in there with him—could be Trojan Horse situation—no one gets in without an inspection—your rules darlin." the big man with the long side burns said earnestly.
"Shit," Carol said, rolling her eyes, "Do you always do everything I tell you?" she asked impatiently; Daryl was so close she could taste him.
"I'd die for you, sweetheart, but I won't be stupid," he laughed and motioned for Caesar to open the peephole through the gate.
"Howdy Daryl." Abe said in his gruff good natured voice. "Need to see who all you got in there."
"Way ahead a' you, Abe." Daryl said, smiling as he lifted a small thin girl, her long brown hair matted into dreads, a bright paisley scarf holding them off of her face, up and out of the tank's turret and hugged her to him. The little girl clung to him like a barnacle, burying her head in his shoulder. Watching from the slightly lower second peephole, Carol gasped.
"Oh my god, Judith..."
So who else is in the tank? What did Carol write on Daryl's note? Where else have they been the last six months?
Carol's still not letting Rick off the hook so easily, is she? On the surface the gift of the watch is thoughtful-she knows he lost his-but it is also fraught with symbolic meaning. He has taken Daryl away from her and she is counting every second of that time they are apart, adding it to her list of grievances against the man she used to count as family.
The plot just as Daryl described it, The Searchers is a 1956 classic western directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne. The psychopath who made the raiders' town his own private abattoir is obviously quite familiar with the film as well.
I like to think portrait painting will make a comeback after photographic technology falls by the wayside in the ZA. In previous centuries it was commonplace to have a tiny self portrait painted to send off with your sweetheart into battle or on a long journey.
Thanks to all favorites, followers and reviewers-let me know what you think! Happy New Year; )
DD1
