Day 140

There was a knock on the front door. I was alone at the house, wearing pajamas and socks and slowly got up from the couch to go open it. I could smell a cake baking. It was all peaceful, quiet, just warm enough, and yet… I felt empty. There was no joy even if I knew things were good in this house. I moved robotically to the door and opened it. Light came from outside, white and bright, blinding me. I raised my hands to cover my eyes and try to see who'd knocked but for long seconds I couldn't.

"Who's there?" I asked

"It's me."

That voice… My heart burst in my chest. It was him. It was Daryl!

"I can't see you!" I said lowering my hands trying to see even with the light.

"I'm here. I'm right here," he told me.

"Daryl!"

I took a step to go thought the door, to try and see him, touch him, but as soon as I crossed it I was in the woods, the light gone, Daryl gone. I was alone there, looking around confused, still frantically calling out to him.

There was a walker fallen on the ground and I moved there to see it. Looking down, I saw it had been taken down with an arrow. It was stick perfectly in the middle of its forehead. Daryl. I bent down and pulled it off the skull and held it to my face to see it. He'd been here. Finally, a sign that he was around after so long!

"Daryl!" I called, hoping he'd hear me. "Daryl, where are you?!"

Movement behind me got me turning suddenly, arrow still in hand and then… I screamed. My heart stopped, my chest was ripped and my world crumbled. He was there, right in front of me… Turned and stumbling to me, jaws open and hungry like every walker, but this was Daryl, his eyes dead, his body decaying, smelling putridly. And he was coming to me and I couldn't move, hand clutching the arrow. Something moved in me and I looked down at my stomach and could see the baby moving in there, strongly, visibly. And then Daryl was on me, too close for me to be able to defend myself, grabbing me, scratching, inches away from biting me.

I screamed and cried and tried to fight him by my limbs felt heavy and his hands were tight on my shoulders, now shaking me strongly.

"Sam? Sam!" It was Michonne and I was in my bed, still screaming. Reality came back to me slowly as I looked at my sister, breathing hard. "Just a dream! You're okay. Look at me, you're fine, you're okay…"

She hugged me like she would hug a child and shushed me, petting my hair, rocking me in her arms as I sobbed. I tried to speak as I cried but I don't think Michonne could understand a word. I was saying I had seen him, he'd been there but he wasn't there, and that he'd been turned, and that I needed him, I needed to find him.

I missed him like hell, my life only half happening, the other half frozen, waiting to move on, at the last night we spent together, when he told me he loved me and that this was his child.

Where was he? Where the fuck was he?

He had to be here now. We had a place. We were safe, we were eating well, growing things, we had chickens! The baby was growing and moving, and he had tried to feel it once, he could feel it now! He had to be here, why wasn't he? Why did this had to happen, what kind of fucked up life was that that brought us something so, so good and then ripped it off our hands like that? He had to be here! They all had to, this could be the community I had dreamed of for everyone, why weren't them all here?

It was all good. We had problems, of course, but overall, things were good. We'd found very smart chickens inside the walls, hiding and finding their own food on the grass and under the trees, able to escape the walkers that had been in there by hiding. Smart, smart chickens. When we cut off the grass with gardening tools we looted from a store in the nearest little town, they showed up scaring the living hell out of us, and then we started feeling them and they grew used to us, becoming more docile with time. They were all free, out of the chicken coop, going in there on their own to sleep at night. We needed to find a rooster now and we'd have eggs and more chickens. We had fruit trees, some that would not normally be found in Georgia, and we were eating well, and soon the vegetables we'd planted from the seeds we found at the same gardening store would be blooming.

The water part was not easy but it was manageable. The house had none, of course. It would be dreaming too much hoping there would be a well inside the property like there was at the farm… But we did find a small farm nearby that had it. The farmhouse had been destroyed by a fire and nothing in there could have helped us, except for the well. Twice a week we went there with a truck and several barrels and buckets we'd gathered and brought back enough water for the tree of us to drink, cook, wash and flush, for the chickens, and for the plants when it didn't rain for long.

So it was working. Michonne, Andrea and I had been together for about two months now. My relationship with Andrea had taken a complete turn, it was something else. I had taught her to fight with no weapons, self-defense, and now really knowing now to fight she felt more confident, but not as she tried to be before. Not it was real, now it didn't seem forced anymore like it had been. She was going though many changes, physically and psychologically, and I had decided I'd be there for her for whatever she needed. She was my sister now.

Now, with Michonne… We had a history. We had a past, and a strong one at that. When she moved away from Savannah on 11th grade I thought I'd never see her again. I had let her down multiple times during out two-year friendship then and I had been sure she was better off without a friend like me.

"Why the hell would you think that?" Michonne asked me once when I told her that.

"I broke promises to you, Mich… More than once."

"You had a problem, Sam," Michonne told me firmly. "I knew that every time you promised, you wanted to go through with it."

"I did want to…"

"So that's what counts. At the moments you made the promises, you were being truthful. But your decease, your addiction was stronger than you. I went through it the wrong way, I know now… Keeping asking you to promise me you would quit, that was not the right way to go."

"It was your best, that's what's important. Don't matter if it was the right or wrong way to do it. It was more important to me to have someone that cared as much as you did."

She nodded with a sad smile, looking down, "You were my best friend. I just wanted to see you well."

"I know… I wish I had been well enough for it to be… You know… Enough. Today it would be, with the person I am now."

She smiled, "That's gotta count for something."

"Well, life did bring us together again, right? You were always supposed to be my sister!"

She laughed nodding and we hugged tearfully. Michonne had been so, so special to me… I had known her for a long time at school but then one day in the first week of 10th grade I walked up to her, asked her about her dreads because I'd been wanting to get them done too, and that was it. We were together until her parents had to move away from Savannah at the second semester of 11th grade, and we'd never met again. I'd quit school not even a week after her departure.

Michonne had been opening up a bit more, slowly. At the beginning she didn't even explain the walkers she had on leashes, just told us that they kept the other walkers away for some reason, and they did help quite a lot while we were on the road, but they didn't keep all of them away. Big crowds still closed in on us even with them. One day Michonne had one of their heads cut off by accident when we got surrounded, and when the fight was over she was kind of shocked with that. Quietly she moved to the second one and killed it too, and never spoke of it. Andrea and I still didn't know what they had meant or what had happened to her before finding us, but she would tell us on her own time, we didn't press.

And it was on this day that she did. It got me crying 'till the end.

Michonne had a son. A baby boy, two years old, named Andre. She lived with her boyfriend and had gone to a refugee center at the outbreak with him, Andre and a friend. It all went well for a while, but one time she went out to go find useful stuff, food, medicine, and when she returned to the center, it was all gone, overrun, nobody had survived. She found her friend and boyfriend turned near the drugs they had been taking, making them useless to defend themselves and Andre. Michonne had lost her son, her everything. My heart was tiny I my chest just to imagine her pain. She was so mad with grief, so enraged, that she made sure the two walkers were not able to bite or scratch and had tied them to chains. Michonne was looking at a wall, not seeing anything, her eyes filled with tears as she told me.

"I was somebody else, Sam. Not me. Not the one you knew. I was gone, faraway. I kept them with me as a reminder to not trust anyone. He was Andre's father and yet didn't protect him. If this had not been trustable, nothing else would ever be. So I walked, and walked. Moved south. Wanted to find Savannah but I don't even know why. I just… Walked. My mind went blank for long periods; I'd be faraway when I came back to myself. I was not me."

Then she blinked and looked at me, the tears rolling down her face. "And then I found you. You and Andrea brought me back. Your dreams and plans brought me back. Your hope to find somewhere safe and to find your group, your family, brought hope back to me. It brought me back."

She got me crying like a baby.

I had never been much into cars. Couldn't figure what was the big deal. I'd wished I had one for transportation, but wouldn't have cared about brands or models or whatever. But now I'd found this black H3 Hummer in a locked up garage and I adored it. It was my car. With time each one of us had found a good one and took it for ourselves.

I looked fucking great in it.

I'd go out alone at least one a week. Michonne and Andrea didn't approve it, but it was something I just had to do. Had to. I'd go back to the main road, sometimes nearly got back to the farm, then circled back, entered the side roads, the neighborhoods, other farms. Always looking… For them, for any sign they'd been there, for arrows, just anything that'd help me keep my hopes up, and it was always the same. There were signs of people, but no way of knowing if it was them, no goddam arrows. If Daryl had been there, anywhere I was, he was taking the used arrows back so he wouldn't run out of them. That was smart… But I wished he'd leave at least one behind.

Please just leave one behind…

Nothing… Again. But I refused to let my hopes die. What would I be without them? What would I de fighting for? I had to still believe, as I returned on my way home, that next week there would be something. Someone, some sign, some trail, anything.

The worst part of it all was that I knew nobody was looking for me. Daryl was not trying to find my trail. He'd be just moving on with his life, protecting the group, making sure they found a place, but not looking for me. He thought I was dead, why would he? He'd have found me already, my Daryl, such an outstanding tracker. He'd have found me. I wished I'd learned it from him. I'd have asked him to teach me if I'd known…

But how would I have known?

If I wasn't distracted thinking about this one more failed search, I'd probably have noticed, but I didn't. I just drove straight home and brought this group of men straight no our gate.

I'd been back for about half hour when there was a strong, loud knock on the wooden gate. We froze where we were at the car as we unpacked things I'd gathered today – of course, I didn't just wander around looking for them, I'd also take useful things back home. Today it had been real long parachute cord, a few pairs of boots and a box of ground coffee – and were silent for a long moment, minds working fast, hearts accelerating.

"Come on, I know you're in there!" a male voice said when we didn't make a sound. "Saw you getting in. Blond girl in a huge Hummer?"

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Our weapons were in our hands already as we thought of what to do, who the fuck was this? It was not a voice I'd heard before. Someone had followed me, stupid, stupid distracted, dreamer ass!

"What do we do?" Andrea whispered.

"We just wanna talk!" the man said again. "You gotta have a group in there, just let me talk to your leader! It's all I want, to talk!"

"Ok", I whispered to them, who turned to look at me waiting for instructions. "I'll go up the latter and talk to them. They don't know it's just us, they don't have to know. I'll say… I ain't the leader, the leader's a man and he's inside and sent me to see who it was."

They nodded, agreeing it was important for them to think the leader was a man. Fucking sexist world even after the goddam apocalypse.

So I replaced my weapons around my waistband, had guns on a holster, took a deep breath calming down as we walked over to the gate. We had a tall wooden ladder there on the ground, which they helped me put up, and I climbed it.

There were four cars parked there. At least four man out and by each of them, heavily armed with fire weapons, all heads turning to me as I appeared over the wall. In front of them it was clear who was the leader. He smiled pleasantly up at me.

"Ah, the Hummer girl!" and he opened his arms, not carrying guns but with a pistol on his waistband. "Nice to see you up close!"

"How can we help you?" I asked.

"Let me introduce myself first. My name is Philip, but they call me Governor," don't laugh, Sam. Seriously, Governor? What a haughty ass. "I run a community a few miles south of here. And you?"

What now? Real name, fake one, who's our leader? Go with middle name.

"I'm Lynn, nice to meet you. How can we help you, Governor?"

He took a second to answer, a little smile playing on his lips, and then said with the most condescending tone I'd ever heard, "Are you the leader?"

"Jack is our leader," I said easily, my father's name flowing out of my lips without a thought. "He sent me. You can tell me how we can help you and I'll let him know."

He laughed. The mothefucker actually laughed and I just knew then. No good. No good at all. My wrist ached my I just tilted my head, not laughing with him as he looked back and around at his men, who were laughing quietly as well, and I waited.

"Well, as I am certain that Jack is right inside this gate listening to every word I say, I'll go with it then, Lynn."

"Please go ahead," I told him, trying to keep my cool.

"I see you have a community going on here, just like I do. My town's called Woodbury. I'd like to invite you… And Jack, for a meeting where we can discuss the potential future of our communities regarding trading and partnerships that I am certain would benefit us all."

Would have sounded good if I believed a single word he was saying.

"I see. Interesting… But what do you have that might interest us?"

He laughed again, quicker this time. "A whole town, Lynn. People, supplies, food, water… Artillery. Everything that is of interest these days."

I was quiet, thinking for a moment. Artillery, he said. I looked at the men behind him and, sure enough, there were rifles, pistols and more than one fucking machine gun. Machine guns! If he ordered them to attack now we'd be done.

I needed time.

"South, you said?"

"Thirty miles or so," he said nodding. "It's on the maps, there's no missing it."

I paused and looked around. I knew those looks. The Governor was at least acting, but he should take more care with his men. Their intentions were all but written on their faces. Most of them eyed me with that look some men eye women as if they're a product, something to consume.

There would be no business with this man. No trade, no relationship. This would end bad and we were just three when he clearly had a whole town and artillery. I needed to buy time, needed to gather my thoughts, decide what to do.

"Sounds interesting. Too good to be true?" I asked him.

"Not at all. It can be good, and this is up to you."

I nodded, "We'll gather to discuss it and come to a decision. We might show up for a visit at Woodbury, to see the town and have a meeting with you. How does that sound?"

He nodded quietly with a little smile for a few seconds before finishing. "Sounds terrific. I'll be looking forward to your visit."

And at that he looked back over his shoulder, nodded and all the men started getting into the cars again. He looked at me again, nodded and held my look with his head down, his eyes betraying him. No friendship here.