Carol says she doesn't need the help dressing, but she soon finds she does. Her head is feeling light from the effort when she slides back under the covers in her soft clothes. "Why are these so warm?" she asks.
"They just came out of the dryer," Shannon replies. "One of the laundry ladies did them. Washing the clothes before inventorying them is part of the procedure."
"You have a dryer?" Carol asks in surprise.
"Two actually. Industrial ones. And two washers. They were for the museum to wash costumes for the employees. This used to be a living history sort of place."
Carol adjusts herself so she's sitting up in bed. "So you have running water and power?"
"Only in the museum. They renovated it a year before the Great Sickness, as part of that whole green energy craze. Good thing for us. The power comes from solar panels. The water comes from underground wells. There's even two shower stalls each in the men's and women's employee locker rooms. But Garand and I don't get to live in here."
"Who does?" Carol asks innocently.
"The orphans. The doctor and his wife." Dr. Ahmad has a wife? Carol never would have guessed from the way he responded to her attention. "The nannies – these two elderly women whose job it is to check in on the kids. The captain. And four naval families who were here at the start. But we all get a hot shower once a week. There's a schedule and a time limit, or we'd run out of water. The rest of the time we bathe in the river or use the washing troughs with hot water from a kettle."
"Do you have working toilets?" Because as soon as Carol can walk, she would much prefer that to the bed pan the doctor left her.
"In the bathrooms in the museum, yes. All on a septic system. But most of us just use the outhouses that are closer to the Settlement or Indian Village where the bulk of us live."
When Shannon falls silent, Carol tries to think of an in. She wants to establish a rapport with this woman the way she did with the doctor. As the sheriff's wife, Shannon's bound to know a lot, and she also probably has influence over him. "You have a little boy?" Carol asks, remembering Shannon's conversation with Garland as he left.
"He'll be two in two months. Garland, Junior. But we call him Gary."
"Does he look like his father?"
"Yes, very much as a matter of fact, but Garland's not his daddy, biologically speaking. My camp raided this place a couple years ago. I was pregnant, so I stayed behind. Not that I would have joined anyway. I begged my husband not to. I told him not to listen to Mark. But he stopped hearing anything I said years ago."
"Your people raided this camp?" Carol asks in genuine surprise.
Shannon nods and sits down in the chair Garland vacated, which is a good sign. It means she's going to stay and talk awhile. Maybe Carol will learn something.
"We were running out food at that point," Shannon explains. "Our gardens weren't growing, and there was less and less to scavenge. We had two hunters, but winter was coming, when game is scarce, and we had about two months before we knew we were going to be starving. One of ours, Mark, found this place one day, when he was out scavenging, and they brought him in. He didn't say a word about our camp because he wasn't sure what he was getting into. Jamestown told him he could stay permanently after a trial period. Well, he asked to leave after just a month, said he didn't want to join."
That's why they're suspicious of people who want to leave now.
"But by then he'd gotten the lay of the land," Shannon continues, "found out as much as he could, seduced some whore – pardon my French - and got himself an inside helper out of her. Mark told us his woman would let us in, and we could take the place by surprise at night."
"And everyone agreed to do it?" There's more curiosity than judgment in Carol's voice. She can't help but think of Alexandria's decision to slaughter those Saviors in their sleep because they needed the Hilltop's food. It's not the same, but it's not as different as she'd like it to be, either.
"I tried to talk them out of it. I thought there had to be a better way to survive. I said well, maybe we can just show up at their gates, hands up, and ask to join them, work for them in exchange for food. I said they took Mark in, maybe they'll take us all in. But Mark said the inhabitants of Jamestown were brutal people, and they made all the women sex slaves. He made up all sorts of lies about them. He made it seem like they were worth killing. But when it was all said and done, they took in the twenty of us who were left behind. Kids, mostly. Daryl says y'all did that, too? Took in some of the people in a camp you defeated?"
Carol opens her mouth and then closes it. Daryl warned her to be careful around this woman, and she can see why now. She doesn't answer Shannon's question, but instead changes the subject. "It must have been scary at first, when they found you and you realized your people had been defeated."
"It was Garland and his posse who found us. Only eight men, but I guess they'd spied our camp out from a distance enough to know we only had four women and a gaggle of kids. And there was only one shotgun between us. They rolled right on in. I thought it was the end for sure, that, after the lies Mark told, there was nothing but months of brutal gang rape in my future until I died. So I figured I'd go out in a blaze of gun smoke. I pumped that one shotgun, and before I could fire it, Garland thundered right by on his horse and plucked it straight out of my hands. Now that's a story to tell your kids one day when they ask you how you met. How did you and Daryl meet?"
She's fishing for information again, Carol sees, but it doesn't hurt to answer this one. That was in another, long-gone world. "At the start. I was in this camp in a quarry outside of Atlanta –"
"Georgia? You really came a long way to settle in D.C. You did settle in D.C., right?"
She already knows they did. Maybe Shannon's hoping Carol will get more specific. "More or less," Carol replies. "Anyway, there weren't many walkers – you call them cannibals – up there, not at first. They started coming up later when they ran out of food in the cities. So I was going off into the woods to use the restroom privately. I was starting to undo my pants where there was this voice behind me – I wouldn't piss there. Don't you see that diamondback? I screamed because there was a strange man behind me, and then this snake – which looked just like the forest floor - rattled right by my foot, and then there was this thunk, and an arrow went flying right into it."
"The crossbow was his weapon of choice even back then?" Shannon asks.
Shannon's been rummaging through their supplies, Carol sees, maybe with the sheriff, as part of the investigation. "Yes. I do hope he gets that back. It's his baby."
"Well that's a fine damsel in distress story," Shannon says, ignoring the question of if they will get their weapons back. "Did you fall in love with him right then and there?"
"No. Not by a long shot."
"Then when?"
"I can't say," Carol answers. "I've probably fallen in six different kinds of love with him over the years."
"I couldn't say when I fell in love with Garland either. It came on gradually, after we were married."
Carol's no longer sure who's trying to build a rapport with whom here. "After?"
"The captain was understandably reluctant to take us in, given what our people did. They corralled us under guard the first week, and the captain and Garland asked us a lot of questions. During one of those 'interviews,' I asked the captain what would reassure him that we meant to be a productive part of the community and cause it no harm, and he said if we were family of anyone at Jamestown, that would be one thing, but we weren't. We didn't have anyone to vouch for us or keep an eye on us. Anyway, later that evening, Garland shows up in the orphanage where we were all being kept and tells the guard he's taking me for a walk. And that's when he proposed. He said, give that baby in your womb my name, and I'll take care of it and you and your mother." Shannon laughs. "You know how those old alliances were formed through marriage? I guess we've been thrown back to that ancient world in more ways than one."
"So you had a forced marriage?" Carol asks.
"I wouldn't call it forced. Arranged, more like. I could have said no and taken my chances. Garland would have kept trying to convince the captain. But he thought this would be easier, and so did I. Besides, I was going to be out of commission for a while with the last month or two of pregnancy and the baby, and I wouldn't be able to work. I needed a husband who would earn my share of the rations. That's how we do it here - if someone can't work, someone else has to volunteer to step up and take on extra work on their behalf. I needed someone to lean on, and I think maybe Garland needed someone to lean. He'd always wanted a family, and it had just never worked out for him. And here a family was, ready to order, baby already in the womb, mother-in-law in tow. Who knew when another available woman would ever set foot in Jamestown. And, let's be honest, he was probably looking forward to having some sex for a change, too. He never was one to go to the whorehut."
Carol raises an eyebrow. "So there really is a brothel here?"
"I'm not a fan of it, but at least it's purely voluntary. The men here are mostly well behaved, though we had a terrible incident a month ago. We just convicted two men of rape. They were sentenced to hang, but they escaped, and one of them was the man who stabbed you."
Carol feigns surprise. She doesn't want Shannon to know she already knew that because she'd been talking in hushed whispers to Daryl while the doctor was gone. "Well, I feel better knowing I killed someone who was already condemned."
"Well, he was also trying to kill you," Shannon says.
"There is that," Carol agrees. "So it worked out? Your marriage?"
"I agreed because Garland seemed like a respectable and honest man to me, so I thought ours would be a tolerable marriage of convenience. It's turned out to be much more than that." Shannon smiles. "I don't think he expected me to talk so much, though. I was much quieter when I first got here. It wasn't just that I was scared of a new place. The brutal world out there beat me down. Once I was secure again, though, I guess my old personality came back."
"I know what that's like," Carol says. At the prison and in the Kingdom, during those stretches when things were settled, when she wasn't forced to kill other human beings to survive, she could be more herself. Some of the best parts of her old personality – the good humor, the affection, the maternal nature – came back without the old timidness, fear, and excessive deference also returning. In a way, she became like she was before Ed, but stronger.
They talk a little longer, and Shannon makes a few more innocent fishing attempts for information about their camps, but Carol doesn't give her anything she doesn't already know. They're interrupted when the door swings suddenly open. A massive man stands in the doorway, his belt buckle undone, and his shirt half tucked into his pants and half untucked. He sways slightly to and fro.
Shannon leans forward and whispers to Carol. "Looks like he hit the bad moonshine after he spent all that good whiskey in the whorehut." Pulling back Shannon says. "Hello, Captain."
The captain leans on the door frame, raises one black, bushy eyebrow, and points toward Carol. "It's time for me to interrogate the captive and get to the bottom of this caper!" His voice rises on the word caper, like a theatrical actor's. "Who? What? When? Where?" he barks toward Carol.
Shannon bites down on a smile. "I think it's time for you to get to bed, John."
"Are you taking me to bed, gorgeous?" the Captain wiggles his eyebrow up and down. "I don't think Gar would mind. He's a generous man. A very generous man."
"Not that generous."
"I should have volunteered to marry you instead of him," the captain says, slurring slightly. "Who knew after you dropped that baby you'd have such a lovely figure?"
"You damn me with faint praise, Captain." Shannon stands from her chair.
"I'd have made you a fantastic husband!" he booms. "I mean, maybe a little cheating." The captain holds his thumb and forefinger an inch a part. "Just a little. Solo un poco. You like that? I hear women love a man who speaks French."
"That's Spanish, Captain."
He starts laughing and has to slam his palm against the doorframe to hold himself up.
"Come on, Captain," Shannon tells him, and puts a hand on his shoulder to gently push him back from the doorway. He stumbles back a few steps, nearly falls, and the guard catches him – almost getting knocked over himself in the process by the bulk of the man.
"Get him to bed, will you?" Shannon asks crisply. It's the first time Carol's heard a hard edge to her voice, and it gives her a hint of how formidable this woman could be, perhaps, if she needed to be.
"Yes, ma'am," the guard replies.
Shannon turns around, her voice returning to sweetness. "Sorry about that display. The guard will get him settled, and I'm sure he'll pass out and leave you alone tonight. Once Garland talks to him, he probably won't bother to question you at all, or at least he won't without Garland present. I'll bring you some books in the morning. It's got to be boring in here. But tonight you should get some sleep. This door will be open. If you need anything, you just holler at the guard. He'll be in the hall all night."
Shannon flicks the overhead lights off on her way out. The infirmary is bathed in shadows, and in the hallway glows a single overhead light. Through the open doorway, Carol watches the guard return. He shakes his head, slumps into his blue plastic chair, and lays his rifle across his lap.