"If Darlene trusts Roscoe, I trust him," Glenn said. They were conferring in the living room of the big cabin while Darlene kept the newcomers and kids busy outside. "Besides, he's related to Daryl."

"I don't think Roscoe's being related to Daryl is necessarily a point in his favor," Andrea said. "Has everyone forgotten Merle?"

"Roscoe doesn't seem volatile and violent like Merle," T-Dog admitted. "We might have to keep an eye on him around the women, though."

"I think we can manage to keep an eye on ourselves," Carol told him.

"So where are we going to put them?" Glenn asked. "I mean assuming they're staying? All in favor of letting them stay?" He raised his hand. So did everyone else.

"I think we should put them in the cabin below this one," Carol said. "And then move the line of vehicles down. Enlarge our camp. That cabin is small and will be easier to heat. It only has two bedrooms, but the sofa pulls out into a bed."

"That's the cabin with the piano, too," Beth said. "Roscoe will like that. Maybe he can teach me to play."

Maggie eyed her warily. "You know, he's not actually a country music star."

"He recorded an album," Beth said. "In Nashville."

"Guys, that cabin stinks. I mean..." Glenn pinched his nose. "Literally. More than usual."

"We'll have to air it out," Carol said. "All in agreement?"

"Well, as long as Roscoe's not in our cabin," T-Dog muttered as he raised his hand in agreement with the others.

"Don't be so jealous of Roscoe," Beth told him. "Just because he's good-looking and plays four instruments and has known Darlene since she was a girl doesn't mean he's going to be any competition for you."

T-Dog turned his head slowly to glare at her.

Beth giggled.

[*]

The woman, who called herself Michonne, led them a quarter of a mile to a ditch at the side of the road. A white sedan was overturned inside it, and shattered glass coated the grass. The decapitated dead men were lying half on the road and half on the shoulder.

Rick pointed to one of the swastika tattoos on the muscular forearm of a fallen body. "Skinheads, probably," he said. "They likely would have robbed, raped, and killed if they'd gotten hold of them."

Daryl glared at him. "Every man with a swastika ain't a murderer and rapist."

"You disagree?" Michonne asked. "With what I did?"

"Nah. Don't disagree ya got to kill men who run ya off the road. Don't care if they's got rainbow and unicorn tattoos. They ain't up to nothin' good."

The slain men's heads, which had rolled down to settle against one another in the ditch, had turned. The dead mouths snapped at the air. It reminded Daryl of that Hungry Hippos game he'd seen at garage sale once. He'd wanted it, but he hadn't had even the quarter they were asking.

Zach grimaced. "Their heads can turn?"

"If you don't get the brain." Michonne, holding her son Andre in the crook of one arm, unsheathed her katana, walked cautiously into the ditch, and drove the point into each of the snapping heads. The little boy watched the whole process as if he was watching her squish a couple of ants on a kitchen counter.

The men followed her down. "Two steps to permanently kill," Rick said. "Seems a little inefficient."

"Beheading is safer," Michonne told him. "You can keep your distance, unlike with a knife. And there's little sound, unlike with a gun. I was just a little too busy worrying about my bleeding son to finish them off before they turned."

Daryl kicked one of the loose heads. "Damn ankle biters."

Rick looked around the scene. "Where's their car then?"

"It was still running, so I took it," Michonne told him. "I used it when I went scavenging. When I spied your man with my son, I parked it a little ways back and snuck in on foot."

Rick looked at Zach with disbelief. "You didn't hear the car? You didn't see her coming?"

Zach shrugged apologetically. "I was playing patty cake."

[*]

Carol kept a hand on the butt of her holstered gun while she waited for Roscoe to open the hatch of his SUV. Meanwhile, Darlene was taking Sasha and Tyreese on a tour of the firing range. Apparently Tyreese was an awful shot and Sasha wanted him to improve.

The rear of Roscoe's SUV was scattered with sheet music, guitar picks, instruments, and fresh strings in plastic packages. It looked like he'd looted a music store, except that several of the instruments had the name Roscoe engraved in black cursive on the wood. He drew out a backpack, which he slung over one shoulder, a guitar, which he slung over the other, another guitar, which he held by the neck, and a fiddle and bow.

"You kept all of your instruments through this?" Carol asked as they headed for the porch stairs.

"Not all of 'em. Didn't have a weapon when it started, so I had to brain a couple blood-lickers with my Fender. Took this gun -" he nodded down to his holster " - off the blood-licker I killed with the broken neck of my Yamaha. And Sasha decided to bust up my Gibson for firewood one night."

As she opened the cabin door, Carol said, "I just assumed any Dixon would already have at least one gun at the start of this."

"Well, Will Dixon was my daddy, no doubt 'bout that. Got the birthmark to prove it." Roscoe pulled up the bottom of his button-down shirt to reveal a dark brown splotch shaped like a deformed butterfly just above his waistband. "Merle's got it, too."

Carol didn't remember seeing anything like that on Daryl, and she probably would have noticed this morning when she was caressing every inch of his bare chest and stomach. Maybe Darlene was right. Maybe Daryl's Uncle Clevus was his real father.

"But I'm a Perkins," Roscoe continued as he stepped inside the cabin. "Took my mama's daddy's last name. Grandpa was a good man, but he got shot when I's five. Wrote a song 'bout it. One of my top ten if I do say so myself. Anyhow, on account of his getting shot dead in front of her, my grandmama took a dislike to firearms, and she wouldn't allow them in the trailer."

"But you do know how to shoot?" Carol led him to the living room where he would sleep.

"I'm better than Tyreese."

"I get the impression that's not saying a great deal."

"It ain't." Roscoe set his fiddle and bow in the rocking chair and leaned his guitars against the couch. He plopped his backpack on the floor, took off his cowboy hat, and ran a hand through the thick, dark curls. "Well look at that." He walked over to a coat rack that was standing to the left of the fireplace. "You know what they say." He set his hat on the gold ball atop one of the arms. "Home is where you hang your hat."

Carol showed him the kitchen next, and he "Woooh-wheeed" when he saw the contents of the pantry. "Yer givin' us all that?"

"Breakfast and lunch is on your own, but we eat communal dinners in the big cabin."

"And do you cook those communal dinners, ma'am?"

"I do."

"Well that is going to be both a pleasure and a delight."

Carol chuckled. Next she showed him the bathroom and explained they used the toilet only when absolutely necessary, "Basically, in the middle of the night and for emergencies, otherwise, use nature's bathroom. You can wash up in the sink every day, but you'll need to add hot water from the kettle to the cold. Don't run the shower. We try to conserve water. We have to run generators to run the pumps to refill the water tanks. We don't like to waste gasoline doing that."

"Be more efficient if you used electricity," he said.

"Well we don't have electricity, obviously."

"I can make it."

She laughed. "You can make electricity?"

"Well, not make it per se. I just mean, there's lots of vehicles on this mountain that y'all ain't usin'."

"Some were too complicated for Darlene to wire," she said, "and we couldn't find the keys, so we just siphoned off the gas."

"But they all got batteries. Hook those batteries up to each other and then to the water pump…reckon I can get somethin' goin'."

"So you're a musician and an electrician?" Carol asked.

"I started my apprenticeship my last year of high school. But then Grandmama died and I just didn't see the point of stickin' 'round them backwoods. Took off for Nashville when I was eighteen."

"Like Merle for the Army."

"I s'pose," Roscoe said as he followed her back toward the front door. "Although Merle was in and out of juvie years before that. Always felt bad for Daryl. Both his parents were checked out. I at least had my grandmama."

He gestured for Carol to go through the open door first. She was leaving it propped open to continue the airing out. Roscoe followed her onto the porch. "With Merle gone so much, I thought of tryin' to take Daryl under my wing, so to speak, but Will Dixon didn't want his bastard son around. Wouldn't admit I was his, even after the court ordered child support. And Daryl was hard to find anyhow. I think he lived in the woods half the time." Roscoe clattered down the stairs beside her, his cowboy boots clicking against the wood planks. Carl was riding a bike on the dirt road outside the big cabin while Sophia directed him in circles and zig zags with her cane like a conductor. "I can see the resemblance."

"What resemblance?" Carol asked.

"'Tween Daryl and Sophia."

Carol smiled. "Oh. She's not his. Daryl and I met after all this started."

"Ah. That explains it."

"Explains what?" she asked.

"I reckon women become less choosy in the end times."

"I became more choosy," Carol assured him.

When Sophia spied them, she walked quickly down the hill with the aid of her cane. "Ms. Sasha said you have sheet music?"

"I do," Roscoe told her. "And I'd have even more if she hadn't burned half of it stokin' campfires."

"Can I borrow some and try playing on the piano in there?"

"Sure can. And I can teach you a thing or two, if you like. I mean, if it's a'right with your mama."

"Can he, Mom?"

Sophia looked so excited that Carol didn't want to turn her down, but she accompanied them back to the cabin. There was no way she was going to leave her daughter alone with a man she hardly knew. Roscoe brought in a messy stack full of sheet music and set it on top of the piano for Sophia to rifle through. She picked something, opened it up, and started playing. Roscoe sat down next to her on the bench and corrected her here and there while Carol watched from the couch.

When Sophia was done with that song, Roscoe asked, "Mind if I play somethin'?"

Sophia shook her head and then scooted to the very edge of the bench to give him some more room.

Roscoe's fingers flew across the piano in a complicated, rockabilly tune for two minutes, and then he snatched them from the keys, looked at Sophia, and said, "Your turn, little darlin'."

Sophia laughed. "I can't do anything like that!"

"Ain't as hard as it looks. We'll start with the first few notes."

He instructed Sophia for awhile and then just started playing again on his own, something slow this time. Beth, who had wandered in through the open door of the cabin, stopped by the piano and looked over Roscoe's shoulder at the lyrics. She began to sing along to his playing:

Those backwoods roots will hold you down
And blood of kin can make you drown
But there's freedom in the love we found
So wrap your tender arms around me...

Carol couldn't help but think of Daryl while she listened.

Darlin', we have travelled far
Chasin' down some distant star
But I can't feel a single scar
With your arms around me...

At this point, Maggie inched inside the open cabin door and stopped next to the end table in the living room. She looked suspiciously from Roscoe to Beth and back to Roscoe.

Once I was a little boy
Shattered like a broken toy
But you have turned my grief to joy
With your arms around me…

"Damn, girl!" Roscoe said when the song was over. "You got some pipes. And you picked that right up."

"I've never seen it before," Beth said. "It's a nice song, though. Who wrote it?"

"Well...I did."

Beth peered a little closer at the sheet music and read, "Roscoe William Perkins."

"That's my name. Don't wear it out."

Beth giggled.

"Beth," Maggie said, a little sternly, "I need you for something."

"What?" Beth asked.

"Something."

Beth sighed but followed her big sister out the door.

Roscoe slid off the bench, removed his fiddle from the rocking chair, and sat down, while Sophia attempted the next piece of sheet music she'd selected. "So you and Daryl's married?" he asked Carol.

"No, no," Carol said. "Not married."

"Shackin' up?"

"We're living together," she said, and the words sounded weird in her own ears. Living together didn't mean what it used to mean, not in a world where people had to survive in close-knit communities. She wondered what, exactly, it meant to Daryl. But rather than worry about that, she asked, "What was Daryl like as a boy?"

"Couldn't say really. Saw him once every three weeks or so. Always had the urge to hose him down when I did."

Carol chuckled.

"Mostly he just avoided other folks. That's why I was surprised to see he had himself such a lovely woman. Curious how he managed to woo you."

"Well, he saved my daughter's life at great risk to himself. And he brought me venison and flowers."

"Damn," Roscoe said. "That's romance movie shit right there. Excuse my French, ma'am. Romance movie content."

Sophia stopped playing and asked, "You want to play, Mama?"

Carol hadn't touched a piano in a long while, but she decided to take the bench. She knew that the sounds she produced weren't even as good as Sophia's playing, but it still felt freeing to be moving her fingers across that ivory.

She'd chosen "When the Saints Go Marching In" because it was simple enough to play and it was upbeat, and she was feeling happy.

Halfway through the second stanza, a fiddle come in on the tune, and Sophia started singing. Singing. Carol couldn't remember the last time she'd heard her little girl sing. It occurred to her, with a sense of mixed guilt and joy, that Sophia was going to grow up to be a completely different woman now that Ed was dead and Daryl was in their lives.

[*]

Michonne sat on the steel kitchen counter next to Andre, who was sipping orange juice from a real glass. No sippy cups in the apocalypse. Zach had kept the little boy entertained while Michonne did the grim work of dragging out and burning the remnants of Mike and Terry. She had done the deed in angry silence, refusing any help. Then they'd all come to the kitchen to load up.

"This breakfast diner is like a diabetic coma waiting to happen," Rick said as he looked over the shelves full of orange juice, apple juice, just-add-water pancake mix, chocolate chips, brown sugar, white sugar, powdered sugar, jarred baked apples, syrup, apple sauce, canned whip cream, jelly, canned peaches and pears, raisins, cereal, granola, and apple butter.

"We'll burn it off by living like they did in the 18th century," Zach said. "Look at Daryl. He's probably lived on pop tarts his whole life and he's in great shape."

"Least I ain't been livin' on beer for the past three months."

"Touche." Zach grabbed a cardboard box and started packing.

In addition to the sugary goods, they were also able to gather ketchup, salt, pepper, coffee, hot sauce, salsa, flour, baking soda, chopped nuts, peanut butter, and canisters full of dry grits and oatmeal.

"Any tea in here?" Daryl asked.

Michonne eyed him curiously. "Wouldn't have taken you for a tea drinker."

[*]

Carol was preparing for dinner and trying not to be nervous about the fact that the men weren't back yet. Checking three different places took time, she assured herself, and maybe they'd had to kill a few walkers or work around some wreckage.

"Can I help?" Maggie asked, and Carol jumped a little because she hadn't heard the woman enter the kitchen.

"Sure." Carol put her to work tenderizing the venison. "This is the last of it."

"Maybe Daryl will catch another deer tomorrow. Tyreese, Sasha, Glenn, and T-Dog are out there working on the smoke house. It should be ready tomorrow afternoon." Maggie stopped tenderizing the meat. "What do you think of Roscoe?"

"He seems harmless enough," Carol said as she opened a can of olives.

"You don't think he's paying a little too much attention to Beth?"

"Honestly? I think that might be going the other way around. Teenage girls need a celebrity crush. And there are no celebrities anymore. Maybe Roscoe will have to do."

"If he lays a finger on her..." Maggie shook her head.

"Roscoe doesn't strike me as lecherous," Carol said. "I think he's just friendly. And everyone's looking out for Beth here. Just like everyone's looking out for Sophia and Carl."

"We have a good thing going here," Maggie agreed as she went back to work on the venison. "I hope it lasts."

[*]

Little Andre slept with his head on his mother's lap in the back seat of the pick-up. Rick drove while Daryl chewed on one of the Snickers bars they'd snagged from the mechanic's office. Zach was following them in the battered sedan Michonne had taken from the men who ran her off the road.

"Michonne," Rick asked. "Is that French?"

"I don't know." Her voice was tight and so were her muscles. She still looked tense and angry, but, even so, she stroked her boy's hair softly. "My parents were originally from New York. There was a local artist they liked. They took the name from her."

"Named after an artist," Rick said. "Interesting. Well, I'm named after a king."

"King Rick?" Daryl asked skeptically.

"King Richard."

"The homo or the one with the lion heart?"

"A tea drinker and an English historian," Rick said. "Who would have guessed?"

"I got layers. Like a MoonPie." Daryl glanced at Michonne in the rear view mirror. "How come ya ain't cried none 'bout yer boyfriend?" He still didn't fully trust this woman.

"Maybe because he was getting high while he was supposed to be watching our son."

"And ya ain't had no idea he's gonna do that?"

Michonne looked out the window. Her nostrils flared. "Mike and I used it on occasion before the collapse. I haven't touched it since. I didn't know he had any left, and I certainly didn't think he'd be that irresponsible. But maybe I should have seen it coming. This world changes people." She turned her head back. Her eyes were cool in the mirror. "I've killed dozens of those things. But I'd never killed a human being before last night. Have you?"

"Yeah," Daryl answered, thinking of what had happened back on the Greene family farm. "Sometimes people need killin'."

"Sometimes," Michonne agreed. She closed her eyes, breathed in like she was meditating, and sighed out. She didn't speak another word for most of the rest of the drive, until they turned onto the dirt road that wound its slow way up the mountain. Then she said, "Thank you. Thank you for saving my son."