Ethan screamed and strained to reach his crossbow, his fingertips centimeters from it. He continued to try to jerk free of the gnashing walker, who had managed to bite the thick heel of his boot, but not him. Giving up on the crossbow, Ethan struggled to unfasten the small hunting knife in a sheath on his belt, but it seemed stuck. With her one good hand, Carol drew out the knife she always kept on her belt and then looked at the small hole in the lattice of the porch.
"You're too big!" Sofie cried. "Give it here." She reached for the knife. Carol shook her head. The girl wasn't ready. She'd been sheltered and hidden by her brother too long. She'd never killed a walker. But there was also no way Carol was squeezing in through that hole in the lattice. "Give it here!" Sofie screamed. "You're too big!"
Carol handed her the knife, and the girl scurried under the porch face first, crawling on her hand, knees, and stub. Sofie stabbed the walker in the hand where it was holding Ethan, crying as she thrust the knife into its dead flesh.
"It's head, Sofie!" Carol shouted. "You know it has to be the head!"
Startled, the walker growled and let go of Ethan's ankle, thrashed its jowls, and turned to Sofie. Free of the walker's grip, Ethan was finally able to concentrate enough to work his hunting knife out, but in the process he flung it onto the ground by accident. The walker seized him again, with Carol's knife still shallowly lodged in its hand.
Through some small grace, Ethan's knife had fallen near Sofie's good hand. She grabbed it and thrust it into the walker's head, before it was able to chomp down on her stub. The one weak stab from the hunting knife was not sufficient, and the dead thing continued to thrash, but at least it let go of Ethan again. The boy scurried for his crossbow, crying, "Get back, Sofie! Get back!" The girl crawled backward on her elbows and knees, and when she was clear, Ethan shot the creature in the head.
On the other side of the lattice, Carol released a heavy sigh of relief. Sofie crawled out from under the porch and into Carol's one-armed embrace, where the girl let herself break down into a flood of tears. Ethan followed. Sofie, gasping for breath between her sobs, turned to him and cried, "What were you doing under there?"
His little chest rising and falling with his hard breaths, he said, "Lookin' for a coon. I saw it run down in there." He nodded back under the porch where the half devoured carcass lay. "Found it."
[*]
In the passenger seat of the pick-up, Michonne flipped a page of the teeny bopper magazine she'd picked up from one of the cars. She clicked open a ballpoint pen. Daryl steadied the truck after it dipped into a large pothole in the dirt road. In the backseat, Brother Lawrence stirred from his unplanned nap and sat up.
"Quiz time," Michonne said. "Discover Your Relationship Style."
Daryl glanced at the magazine on her lap, shook his head, and looked back at the road.
"How many people have you kissed in your lifetime?" She turned her eyes, with a smile, to Daryl. "A. One or two. B. Three of four. C. Five or six. D. Seven or eight. E. I'm starting to lose count." She put the pen against the magazine. "What can I put you down for, Daryl?"
"Ya wanna drive?" he asked her.
"I'm an A," the monk said. "Unless you're counting the kiss of peace. In that case, E."
Michonne circled A. "Question 2: How many of those people were you in a relationship with at the time?"
"Define relationship," the monk said.
"Dating."
"Define dating."
"We'll skip that one," Michonne ran her pen down to the next question. "Have you ever kissed more than one person in the same night?" She turned her eyes, and her smile, on the driver. "Daryl? Hmmmm?"
Daryl gritted his teeth and adjusted the rearview mirror.
"Not I," said the monk. "Again, if we aren't counting the kiss of peace."
"You're not really the appropriate subject for this quiz," Michonne told him. "Although, you've had about as much experience as your average tween girl, so...maybe you are." She flipped the magazine shut. "I'm bored. I'm taking a nap. No one wake me unless I have to kill something." Her seat flung back with a creek, right in the monk's lap.
Brother Lawrence looked down at her and smirked. "I promise I won't tell Rick."
[*]
After examining the walker under the porch, Rick called an emergency Council meeting at Carol's house. "That walker looked like it was stabbed before it turned," he told the members of the council who were not on the scouting mission. "Three times, in the chest. The man probably bled to death and then was buried under the porch to hide the body. He didn't have any I.D. on him."
"Like some kind of murder or something?" Glenn asked.
"Yes, Glenn," Rick said slowly. "Like some kind of murder or something." He looked around at the Council as he spoke. "The man had to have been killed after the Outbreak, if he turned. But maybe he was buried right away and his killer didn't know you didn't have to be bit to turn. And it's been under there this whole time, just...slowly digging its way out."
Father Gabriel tugged at his collar. "Who was living in that house when we arrived?"
"Tobin," Carol answered. "But I'm sure he wasn't a murderer."
"Wouldn't somebody have noticed," Abraham asked, "a man just disappearing?"
"Maybe not," Rick replied, "with all the commotion Deanna told us about when they had to banish that one group. It could be that everyone just thought this man left with them. And maybe the killer buried the body down there because he could get under that particular porch."
"Maybe the killer is still among us," Abraham suggested.
Rick nodded. "I think I'm going to have to do some old-fashioned police work."
"Everyone buried in that cemetery," Glenn said nervously, "was shot in the head first, right?"
"Certainly since we've been here," Rick answered. "But we should check with one of the original Alexandrians. We need one on the Council, now that Spencer's dead. We should hold an emergency town meeting tonight, get nominations, have an election. I motion we do that."
"I second the motion," Abraham said.
"Shouldn't we wait until Daryl, Michonne, and Brother Lawrence are back?" Glenn asked. "So they have a vote?"
"I think this is a matter of some urgency," Rick replied, "and their votes alone wouldn't sway an election. Besides, it's only a temporary position, until the next formal election. All in favor?"
A chorus of ayes followed Rick's question,
"Should we warn people?" Glenn asked. "That there might be walkers under porches?"
"That will cause a panic," Carol told him.
"Yeah, I guess so," Glenn agreed. "And how likely is it that anything like this will happen again? I mean, how many murdered people can there be buried under porches?"
"Well, thank God the boy is all right," Rick said. "Though I don't guess his mother is going to let him go hunting with Daryl for awhile."
"We didn't actually tell his mother," Carol admitted. "Ethan asked me not to." The boy was afraid of that very thing - that his mother would put a tighter leash on him if she knew he'd gone hunting raccoons at Daryl's suggestion, only to nearly get killed.
Rick shook his head. "Carol..."
"What?" she asked.
"I'm going to have to tell her."
She shook her head but didn't contradict him.
Rick nodded to her sling. "Are you getting enough rest?"
"I'm fine," she insisted. "But I should be getting back to Sofie. She's in her room, and she's a little rattled."
"I imagine," Abraham said.
"Stay as long as you want," Carol told them as she rose and headed off to Sofie's room.
[*]
"Oh shiiiiit..." Daryl slowed the pick-up to a stop. They'd made their way back to the highway and had enjoyed about fifteen miles of smooth sailing. "You know another side road?"
Michonne stirred from her nap and righted her seat.
Brother Lawrence looked at the sea of cars turned every which way on the highway and shoulders before them. "Can't we just drive around them through that cornfield?" The stalks were black and brown and bent against the ground.
"Those cars go on as far as the eye can see," Michonne said.
"Don't think we wanna call attention to that herd neither." Daryl looked at the dozens of walkers that were wandering listlessly through the wreckage.
"They won't be able to keep up with the pick-up," the monk argued. "They're mostly on the road. We might have to run over a few in the cornfield, but they aren't catching us."
"So yer sayin' ya don't know another country road?" Daryl asked.
"I know several off-highway routes that will get us to Waynesboro," the monk insisted, "but they're beyond that wreckage."
"A'right then. Could of just said that to start."
"Can I drive?" Michonne asked. "You've been at the wheel this whole time. And I want to do some serious off-roading."
"Suit yourself." Daryl put the truck in park. They crossed over one another, and Daryl settled into the passenger's seat.
When Michonne gunned the engine, Daryl reached up and gripped the handle that hung from the ceiling of the pick-up. Michonne had her fun tearing through the dead corn field, sarcastically shouting, "Yee haw!" and plowing down one walker she couldn't steer around. They made it through the field and back on the highway, and eventually they ended up about thirty miles north of Waynesboro after two more road blockages and workarounds. By then, the sun was setting in soothing pastels against the Blue Ridge Mountains.
"Almost makes you believe in God." Michonne glanced back at the monk. "I mean, if you didn't already."
"Right pretty," Daryl agreed. He wasn't often struck by beauty, and even more rarely did he admit it when he was, but he had trouble taking his eyes off the sunset.
"Better make camp," Michonne suggested. "Press on in the morning."
Brother Lawrence tapped the back of her seat and then pointed forward. "The sign's gone, but there used to be a winery a few miles up that dirt road there."
"Boozer," Daryl muttered.
"I just mean that we might be able to make camp in the tasting room." He sat back against his seat. "And if there happens to be any wine left...who are we to refuse to enjoy the fruit of God's glorious earth?"
They made their way up a gravely road and parked before a large, cabin-like, two-story wooden structure that was built on a landing partyway up a hill. They slid out of the pick-up and walked closer, weapons readied. The two flight of stairs leading to the deck of the building had been chopped off midway, so that there was no way to reach the balcony, and there was a semi-circle of slanted pikes erected at the base of the hill. Four walkers had been caught on those pikes, and a few more lay outside the semi-circle, neat holes in their heads.
"Someone's livin' here," Daryl said, and all three looked warily up at the structure above.
