AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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The next week passed like a blur for Daryl and everyone else at the prison.

Through some miracle, Carol had managed to save Hershel's life. It had been touch-and-go for a while, and Daryl, in particular, had quickly come to realize how much he valued having the old man around when he'd been faced with the very possible reality that Hershel would simply cease to be a part of their family.

They'd worked to help the prisoners get what they needed—water to survive and some to clean their cell block, and food enough to keep them alive. During the time that they'd interacted with them, though, they'd found that the men maintained exactly what they claimed in the beginning—they wanted to help. They wanted to be part of the group. During the time when people passed in and out of their space, they never touched anyone in a non-helpful way, and they volunteered to do the backbreaking work that needed to be done to make the situation work.

By the end of the week, they were on trial. They slept and lived in their cell block, but they were allowed to share the yard, during the day—with the gate being locked at night, so long as they contributed to the running of the prison during their time in the yard.

It was more of a relief than Daryl wanted to admit to simply have another three pairs of strong hands to help keep things running smoothly.

They had plans. And one of those plans involved taking down portions of the chain-link fences inside the outer-fence to have more open space for farming and livestock—at least until they managed to expand the outer fences.

It was tedious work, but the prisoners were happy to do it to show their dedication to the prison. There were always daily chores to be done—water to be hauled, clothes and linens to be washed, and food to be prepared. And, this particular day, Hershel was getting out of the prison, for the first time, on his brand-new crutches.

Daryl was cleaning the third raccoon he'd trapped during the night, with Sophia dancing around near him and keeping him company while she gathered together any manner of "treasures" from the yard, when Hershel had made his debut in the yard.

"Lookin' good!" Daryl yelled out. As an afterthought, he realized he shouldn't have been so loud, but that was the only way that his voice would have carried the distance. When he cleaned meat, he tended to stay near the fences and near the bottom of the yard where the outer fences were the most reinforced. In addition to his shout, which might very well stir up any nearby Walkers, the smell of the blood would bring them to the fence.

Daryl had very little fear of the Walkers at that part of the fence. For Sophia, he'd created a "play line" on the ground. He'd found and laid out sticks, end-to-end, to make an imaginary line that Sophia could not cross. The first day that he'd done this, he'd spent a little time training her that he would get mad if she crossed the line to get too close to the fences. When she'd been devastated that he'd chosen to be on the other side of the line that she couldn't cross, and that he'd be very angry with her if she crossed the line, he'd taught her that he would come if she called out to him, and that had cost him at least an hour of walking, almost constantly, to her side of the line, since she would wait until he'd returned to his spot to call him back.

Still, a little bit of his time was a small price to pay for Sophia to learn that he would come when she called and, also, that she couldn't go where he told her not to go.

She accepted the lesson well, and now she sat and sang songs to him—all of which she was learning from Beth, and not all of which were entirely appropriate when she chose certain words to which she would gravitate—while she piled her treasures close to her stick line.

The laughter and conversations drifting through the yard, Sophia's renditions of the songs that Beth sang to her, and the sound of Daryl's own inner voice were all so engulfing that Daryl hardly understood what was happening when the other sound started.

For just a moment of hesitation—that he would later regret, as he regretted everything he'd ever done wrong in his entire life—he looked around to try to figure out what was happening. He wasn't even sure that he understood it.

Everything had been fine, and then, it wasn't.

Nothing was fine.

The yard had been happy and pleasant and buzzing with people who were going about their business and building toward a future. The yard had been full of life.

And then, suddenly, it was full of death.

The Walkers poured out of the upper part of the yard where they'd never fully cleaned out those that had gotten stuck back there. The trucks they'd parked there kept a great deal more from coming in—though surely a few found their way in—and they hadn't gotten around to fixing the fences. It hadn't mattered. It hadn't been dangerous.

Now it was absolutely dangerous.

Daryl snatched Sophia up. He was already wearing his crossbow, but it would do him little good in the moment. He didn't even know where to aim it if he wanted to use it. He kept his knife in his hand.

Sophia screamed and began to cry. It was entirely possible that she was reacting to his reaction—and the shock of things—as much as she was reacting to genuine fear. He hugged her tightly to him and shushed her as he started to make his way quickly up the yard—taking out Walkers as he encountered them, spreading out over the yard like water running down hill out of a pipe.

"Carol!" He called out.

He didn't see where she'd gone. He couldn't find her in the scramble.

In fact, he could hardly find a living soul in the scramble. All he could do was hold tightly to Sophia and work to keep the Walkers from getting either one of them. He headed toward the prison, hoping to take refuge there with the little girl. Somehow, he finally made it near the entrance door, and he saw Maggie half-hanging out of it.

"What happened?" Daryl asked, stabbing a Walker as he handed Sophia over to Maggie's outstretched arms. "Where'd the fuckin' alarm come from?"

"I don't know," Maggie yelled over the sound of growling Walkers.

"You seen Carol?" Daryl asked.

Maggie shook her head.

"I can't find Glenn," she said.

"Take Sophia! Get her inside. I'll try to find 'em."

Maggie accepted Daryl's suggestion that he'd do his best to find Carol and Glenn. She slipped back into the prison and let the heavy door close behind her. Walkers might rattle it, but they'd never get it open. It was too heavy and too complicated. She could lock it from the inside, but she wouldn't. She'd wait for the rest of them to make it inside.

Without the worry of what might happen to Sophia, Daryl was able to throw himself into fighting Walkers with a bit more purpose. As he dropped bodies and carefully stepped around downed corpses, he found the back gate. He expected the gate to be down. He expected it to be destroyed in some way. He expected to find that the Walkers that now filled the yard had plowed their way through the fence. What he found, instead, was that it had simply been opened. He fought his way through to the gate, and soon found that he wasn't alone.

"What the hell happened?" Rick asked, seeming to appear out of nowhere. He was as covered as Daryl was in Walker guts, but he was a welcomed pair of hands.

"Someone opened the damn thing," Daryl said.

Together they pushed back the Walkers and got the gate locked again. It didn't clear the yard, but it did stop the Walkers from continuing to flood in.

"We've got to stop that alarm," Rick said.

"It's stirrin' 'em up," Daryl agreed. "They'll bust down the fence soon if we don't stop it."

They both knew where the control area was, given their study of the patched together map of the prison that they'd used before. The closest entrance to it was near the cell block where the prisoners were living. They made their way quickly there, but none of the prisoners were anywhere to be seen. Like everyone else, they'd been working in the yard when chaos had broken out, and they'd gone wherever they could take cover.

From inside the cell block, Daryl and Rick made their way into the heart of the prison again. Rick had a small flashlight, but it was little more than a novelty light. With the alarm, though, had come some kind of generated power. Lights flickered and flashed in the corridors like carnival lights. Daryl was growing slightly dizzy and a little nauseated by the repeated flickering on and off of the overhead lights. They were so bright that, when they flashed on, that they blinded him temporarily.

The power was dangerous. Part of the prison had been destroyed. Caved in. They didn't know why or how. It could have been a grenade. It could have been something crashing into the building that was no longer there. It didn't matter.

The power could start a fire, and the last thing they needed—on top of the rest of this madness—was to be trying to escape a fire. That was especially true when the only place they had to go, at this point, was into a swamp of stirred up Walkers.

When they found the control room, killing the Walkers that came snarling toward them in the flashing lights of the corridor, they found that the door was unlocked and easy to open. They made their way inside, and they immediately went looking for the controls. It wasn't too difficult to find the generator controls. They killed them and the alarm stopped sounding and the lights stopped flashing.

It was so completely dark and quiet, for just a moment, that Daryl believed he'd been struck deaf and blind.

But then he heard the sound of someone moving around. He knew it was someone. It wasn't Rick, because he was close enough to Rick to identify the man's breathing in the darkness. He extended his hand, slightly, and brushed the arm of Rick's jacket.

It wasn't a Walker. It moved too quickly. Too cleanly. It wasn't coming toward them.

Daryl tracked it a moment with his ears, thankful for the silence. He reached out, carefully, and wrapped his hand around Rick's hand that held the flashlight. He moved it, in one quick jerk, to send the light cascading over the skinny ass little convict that they'd thrown to the Walkers. He was dirty and ragged. Panting in the light of the bulb. But he'd done this.

Their yard was overrun with Walkers again. Some of their people may be injured or dead. At the very least, their people were scattered.

Daryl didn't hesitate. He didn't even think about it. He was surprised, after he'd dispatched the bolt, to even hear—like something from a ghost—the words that left his mouth in a low growl.

"Son of a bitch."

The convict's body crumpled to the floor before he'd probably even known that the bolt was coming for him. It had gone cleanly through his eye socket and Daryl was surprised, when he walked over, to find that he'd aimed so well with actually very little effort to do so. He snatched the bolt loose, satisfied at how snugly the skull held it in place and how reluctantly it let it go.

"Asshole," he muttered. "We shoulda fuckin' killed him when we had the chance. Made sure he was dead."

"Yeah," Rick agreed, barely breathing out the sound. "But we didn't. So, let's go make sure everyone's OK. I didn't see where Lori went."

"Makes two of us," Daryl said. "And I didn't see where Carol went, neither."

Daryl hoped that everyone, by now, had made their way back inside the safety of the prison. Rick was likely hoping the same thing. They didn't discuss it any further, though, as they worked their way back through the prison with the little flashlight to light their way. Eventually, they came back out in the prisoners' cell block. They found it still empty, and they let themselves into the yard. It was still crawling with Walkers, but in the absence of living bodies, and following the silencing of the alarm, they were spread out. Many of them were focused on the area where Daryl had been cleaning what would have been their dinner. The raccoons weren't going to be much of a meal, but all the Walkers wanted their chance to try to eat them.

As soon as they got inside the prison and started toward their cell block, a sound filled the air. It was a sound that Daryl hadn't heard in a long time. It was a baby crying, but it was a much younger howl than Sophia's.

Rick double-timed his steps. He called out for Lori. Daryl followed closely behind him.

Beth practically met them as they burst into the cell block with the baby wrapped in a blanket.

"The baby's fine," Beth said, holding it out toward Rick as they approached. "Daddy and Maggie—they're doing their best with Lori. She's strong. She's going to survive."

Daryl realized that they must have had to take the baby—as they'd suspected they might all along. They must have been able to get Lori back in time—and Hershel, too—to help her. Carol had trained for that surgery, though. She'd practiced on Walkers and prepared to assist, at the very least, if not to perform it on her own. Beth hadn't mentioned her.

Daryl's heart dropped into his stomach.

"Where's Carol?" He asked. "Is she with Sophia…?" He offered her the answer as a way to beg the universe to tell him something that he already knew he wasn't going to hear. He still wasn't prepared for Beth's response, though.

"Sophia's in her pen," Beth said. "We can't find Carol."