July 23, 2010
The irony of their new safe haven is that Shane never would have thought of this angle, not on his own. He's been to Tybee Island on vacation multiple times, considering it was a great favorite of Rick's parents when they were kids. The island was even high on the list of possibilities, because the usual population was already small and many would have evacuated to Jacksonville and its naval base's protection. No hospital on the island is also in its favor.
But it's a huge space, well known as a tourist spot, and they could never secure the whole island easily if it does have a significant walker population. The first night camped on the road, Daryl dragged Merle into the conversation, reminding Shane that Ellie mentioned the man was living in Savannah when Isaac died.
The burly redneck mulled it over, mentioning a few resorts or rentals that might be securable that he was familiar with from work. He joked about just taking over Fort Pulaski and them living like Civil War soldiers, but the laughter faded in what would have been a light bulb moment in a cartoon.
Cockspur Island's most famous structure might be the National Park Service maintained historical fort, but the western end is home to a United States Coast Guard Station.
Getting past Savannah's outskirts, which weren't as bad as Atlanta for walker population but still had concerning amounts, is a pain in the ass. They end up taking an extra day to backtrack through South Carolina, sending a group ahead to scout out downtown Savannah. The herds have moved outward from the desolate city center with nothing for them to cannibalize, so they cross at Hutchinson Island. Reconnecting with the interstate, they make it to the bridge onto Tybee and later Cockspur at damn near dusk on the third day since they left the Greene Farm.
"At least once we get settled in, we can start using boats," Shane observes idly to Rick as his partner parks at the visitor center at Fort Pulaski. "Then the herds won't matter as much unless we need to move inland."
"Hurricanes might," Rick says, waiting to shut off the engine until their entire caravan is parked.
It grew, with the addition of the Greenes. One big stock trailer carries all four horses, and another contains nearly two dozen chickens. He's really hoping the Coast Guard Station pans out, because those poor horses are a special kind of miserable in the hundred degree heat, and the chickens can't be much better.
Since it's too dark to tackle the Coast Guard Station safely tonight, they're going to camp out at the Fort, and Maggie's already indicated that if they can block off the entrance at the drawbridge, they can let the animals out for some exercise.
"Yeah, but we'll see hurricanes coming in time to head upriver." Shane opens his door and goes to join up the team checking the Fort for any unwanted residents.
Merle calls out to the gathering group. "Shouldn't be any inside, but the island's got gators. Keep that in mind."
Wouldn't that be a lot of fun to encounter inside the historic building, Shane thinks. It'll be an island resident they need to make sure all the kids stay aware of and probably means no livestock can just be left to roam. Even ridding the island of any they find wouldn't really work, besides being cruel to the animals. The river channels that keep walkers off the island are no barrier to wildlife that can swim.
Spotlighting the dim and unlit rooms and corridors of the Fort doesn't take long, and Merle's prediction that it would be free of people, living or dead, proves accurate. Even the small visitor's center is completely empty. Dividing everyone into teams, they get tents into the parade grounds of the Fort, setting them up to one side while Maggie, Otis, and Hershel stretch solar powered electric netting to cordon a section of the large space.
Transport cages of squawking chickens protest being jostled around, but once they're free of the narrow confines, the poultry seems enamored of their temporary quarters.
With the thick brick walls of the Fort preventing their camp from being seen, the ladies rig up lanterns, pitching the tents close to the walls to take advantage of the artificial light. The waxing moon will be full in a handful of days, which contributes to making the two-and-a-half acre parade ground circled by the Fort's walls and moat seem welcoming. No one really wants a campfire. The temperature is dropping with sunset, but it's still in the eighties.
MREs are passed around, with the kids still liking the quirky military food in the way only kids can enjoy unique meals. Andrea climbs to the top of the Fort wall to stand watch, since all their vehicles are in an area they can't truly call secure. The Dixon brothers blocked the bridge on the Tybee side with a couple of abandoned vehicles, but without a search of the entire island, extra caution is certainly necessary.
"Bet the park service people never thought of their cannons as safety gates," Shane remarks, finishing off his pouch of chicken whatever while he watches Merle, Otis, and Daryl maneuver one of the historic relics to block the doorway. "Why not raise the drawbridge? It just for show now?"
"Not sure," Merle replies. Despite it being a historic landmark for Georgia history, and several of their group having been to Tybee Island, he's the only one who actually toured Fort Pulaski before the outbreak. "But I remember from the tour literature that it took two men to haul it up and five to let it back down. Lot easier to get around the cannon if we need to leave in a hurry, but if a stray walker gets past the watch, it's gonna get bottlenecked."
"Same for the wildlife, mostly," Daryl adds, peering around the base of the cannon. "Bet they have wildcats here, like most of the less populated islands."
Considering about half of the barrier islands are park land or wildlife management areas, Shane thinks Daryl's probably right. "Had a buddy that used to get a gator permit, but he hunted further south. Swore they were good eating."
Daryl shrugs. "Good eating, yeah. Bit of a bitch to butcher though, and the bigger ones aren't really worth the trouble. Wouldn't waste the meat if I had to take one, but they put on a lot of fat, and the meat goes tough as hell after they get older."
"About like the difference in taking a young buck for venison versus the mythical thirty pointers?"
Shane's quip makes the other man snort in laughter, along with the others who overhear as they return to camp chairs circled up around the non-existent fire. He takes the chair next to Ellie, smiling as Merry readily reaches for him.
"Pretty much."
"Are y'all talking about eating alligator?" Andrea asks, frowning. "We're not that bad off, surely?"
"I don't hunt anything I can't eat," Daryl says, voice gruff. "Hunting for sport is a shit thing to do. There's a lot of critters that make for decent eating, especially since we aren't exactly going to have chicken and cattle farms serving meat to the supermarkets on the regular anymore."
"Could bring cattle to some of the islands," Hershel muses. The old man looks like he aged a decade after his fight with Maggie and bout with the bottle, but he's been lucid and quiet. Since his family seems unconcerned, Shane's letting it be for now. "Just let them roam, like the horses down on Cumberland. Think I remember that some rich fella ran Angus on one of the barrier islands back in the day."
"Wouldn't we lose them to predators?" Shane asks, thinking about Merle's gator warning.
"Cattle are bigger and meaner than most people give them credit for. Gators are about the only thing they might be at risk for, and they're honestly large enough that I don't think most gators would bother the adults," the vet explains.
"And the calves?"
"Those we might lose some of, but not enough to decimate them. It's not like the Florida swamps." Hershel takes a sip of his coffee. "I think that going forward, we'll be doing more hunting than husbandry for the proteins we eat."
Jacqui seems to be thinking that one over. "Think we could manage gardens here? It's late in the season, but I remember my mama planting stuff out in the garden in August. Seems like we ought to have a decent growing season, if we can secure the whole island, especially."
It's Patricia who answers, when Hershel glances to her. Shane supposes the woman did seem to be in charge of the large garden at the farm, probably leaving the cattle to her husband and Hershel. "I think so. Might have to bring in soil, depending on what's here. I imagine it's got a lot of salt content at times that might not work for more finicky plants."
"Greenhouses, maybe. Raised beds?" Otis suggests, smiling bashfully when it draws everyone's attention. "Be a bit of work to get started, but more sustainable, right?"
"Fewer pests, too, I bet," his wife adds, patting his hand and smiling sweetly. "Not like it'll cost us a king's ransom nowadays, just finding supplies and keeping safe fetching them."
Shane turns to Merle, since he knows the area best. "That possible? Places that might be out of the way of the worst of the walkers?"
"Hell, I'm not beyond dismantling some of the useless tourist trap places for lumber if we need it," the redneck says. "Might find the plant nurseries and make off with their buildings, too."
"We'll start making a priority list once we know for sure we aren't going to have to pack up and find something even more remote," Jacqui suggests, which turns most of the discussion toward the children's excitement since several of them have never seen the ocean before. They aren't quite that far yet, still in the Savannah River channel, but soon as everything's safe, Shane promises himself to take the kids all out to experience the vastness of the ocean.
The road trip saw Beth sticking under Ellie's guardianship for whatever reason made her lean on the nurse, so Shane's a little surprised when he sees Merry's playpen in his tent when he heads for bed, since he's got the dawn watch. Smiling to himself, he strips down for bed, even though he knows not much of anything is going to happen with his tent literally two feet from the ones on either side. If it were a longer term thing, these tents, he supposes it would end up shyness be damned, because he sure isn't sneaking off into the wilds with Ellie in a freaky recreation of his time with Lori.
"Girls with Carol tonight?" he asks when Ellie pops through the tent door. She zips it quickly as he did, not wanting the irritating Georgia insect life to join them.
"Yeah." Merry's asleep, that sweet boneless sprawl of the very young. Ellie settles her into the playpen before beginning to discard the day's sweaty clothing, too.
Something that's been discarded is the pretext that he and Ellie are married. Once the Greenes as hosts was no longer an issue, Ellie kindly told Patricia the truth. From the looks Shane keeps getting from the older woman, he suspects she knows something came of his and Ellie's playacting, though. Pretty much everyone knows that now, obviously.
"You know, while I miss air conditioning, right now, I just want a fan to keep a breeze going," Ellie complains as she stretches out on the air mattress.
Shane chuckles, joining her and laying on his side to face her. "You and me both. Think Merle considered this place might work, except then he would have to help rig up an electric grid for a generator before you ladies rioted on him."
"He might still have to tinker. If the Station's unoccupied and usable, it's going to be set up more to keep up communications and such going with emergency power, not residential areas. Granted, that would provide us with refrigeration at least, but I'm tired of the outdoors and not yet brave enough for the summer indoors without electricity."
"What? No declaration that your stalwart Dixon ancestors lived off the land and don't need modern conveniences?" he teases, drawing fingers down her arm from her shoulder. She's got the translucently pale skin of a true redhead, which requires sunscreen by the bucket, in her own words. It's a contrast with his own darker skin, courtesy of Eastern European ancestry he's never been entirely clear on.
"Nope. Haven't you realized I'm a city girl now?" she teases, reaching up to draw him down for a lingering kiss.
Daryl's words are in the back of his mind, to make sure he's sure. Sharing a tent seems like that step too far to certainty, except their current life means this is about the only time to figure out what they are to each other. He's constantly drawn in multiple directions even with sharing responsibility with Daryl and Jacqui, and Ellie's daytime attention is equally demanded between the children and her medical skills.
Shane turns as the kiss ends, capturing the hand cupping his jaw and kissing the palm. He freezes as his brain registers something very different about her left hand. Holding it out away from him, he rubs his thumb on her now bare ring finger. With no ability to tan, there's no pale mark against her skin like many would have from wearing jewelry long term.
"Ellie?"
"It was time," she says softly. "No matter where this goes, it was time to pack that away. One day, it'll be Sadie's, should she choose to marry."
"It didn't bother me." That's an honest answer, actually. It was never Lori's own rings that jarred him, but Rick's ring on that chain around her neck. Seeing that gold band brought a ghost in between them that should have warned him they may never overcome that issue. Unlike Lori or Daryl, he's never seen Ellie with Isaac's ring.
It's possible the other man didn't wear one. Not all cops do, because metal jewelry is dangerous in a first responder profession, enough so that he's surprised Daryl has gold rings even more than Rick's dogged dedication to tradition. Isaac might have chosen silicone, too. Or perhaps wherever Ellie's bands have gone for safe keeping, they're now snug beside her late husband's.
"I know it didn't." Turning her hand, she laces their fingers together. "I didn't want to linger on with it and let it become something I couldn't get over, like Daryl. At the time, I thought having that necklace made was a sweet gesture. Now? I worry it's a crutch he uses so he never takes any chances."
Shane settles down next to Ellie, braving the heat and humidity to have her snuggle close. "How long was he married?"
"He and Rowe met when we lived in Louisiana, so they were together since Daryl was eighteen. Rowe was a year older. Nine years together, and it's been eight since Rowe died."
Shane can't imagine finding someone you loved that much that young. Even Rick and Lori, young as they were when they married, were struggling because they married so young and grew more and more apart as they aged. Then again, who knows how things would have panned out for Daryl if Rowe had lived? Rick and Lori were pretty happy for the first ten years.
"And you and Isaac?"
"He was my best friend's younger brother, so I met him when we moved back to Georgia when I was fourteen. He was eleven." She grins at his arched brow and playfully swats his belly. "Geez. He was just Renee's kid brother until he graduated from college and needed a place to stay while he job hunted in Atlanta."
"The roommate that never left?"
"I suppose." He shivers as she drags fingertips from his navel to the hollow of his throat. "I was never interested in the sappy romantic gestures. It was the things like coming off a double shift, dead in my feet, and seeing the shopping was done and the laundry taken care of."
Shane can see the appeal. Coming home after a double himself, there never was anyone who did those things for him. Most days, he was happy with that, because it also meant no fight about working too much. Some days, though, he envied Rick going home to meals he didn't have to cook and dishes he didn't have to wash.
"Maybe that's what I missed out on. Never did a lady's laundry for her."
Ellie giggles softly. "I suspect you would have turned that naughty, somehow. But you can always give it a try now. You already know it's my Achilles heel."
"Me and your scrub board? That's your sexy?" He knows his grin is that sly one that one occasional partner called his panty dropper. It gets him a kiss that promises a lot more, when the timing is better.
Her voice is husky when she pulls away. "Try that laundry shirtless, and I'll have competition."
Shane smothers laughter in her shoulder, not wanting to wake the baby. He presses a kiss to her shoulder. "We should get some sleep. Maybe tomorrow, we can manage a bed. If the Station isn't viable, I'm voting we go raid for RVs."
"Or raid the marinas for boats with cabins, if the dock survived and the Station didn't."
"Hmm. Boat could be nice, too, but probably not so much for Merry."
That earns him another kiss, a soft smile that tells him it was considering Merry priority, and Ellie tucked across him like that first night in the Greene farmhouse. Shane rubs her back gently, feeling her drop off to sleep with the ease of someone used to shift work and snatching sleep in demand. He lingers awake, feeling her breathe against him.
Daryl told him to make sure he's absolutely sure before he commits, and Shane is still not sure what that level of confidence is. It's the first time he's truly dissatisfied with his lifelong noncommitment, because there's nothing to compare this to except Lori. With all that's wrong with that relationship, he doesn't want to bring that into comparison here.
Deciding he isn't going to figure it out tonight, he lets himself start to doze, wondering if making Ellie happy really is as simple as mundane things like laundry and food.