Given the speed with which Daryl flew down the highway and the side roads around the large swathe of forest, and then up the windy dirt road to the Greene Family Farm, the ride only took thirty-five minutes. He puttered to a stop at the front gate. The Greenes had a doorbell, too, of sorts. Not a baby monitor, but a long rope you could yank that would ring a dinner bell hung from a frame over an acre inside the gate. He rung it. He figured someone would be up with the rooster, and the rooster had been up for an hour.
After he'd rung three times, Maggie came strutting from the stables, with a rifle in one hand and a pair of binoculars around her neck. She'd spied him out and recognized him, he supposed, since she wasn't pointing that rifle. "Daryl?" she asked when she arrived at the gate, looking confused by his presence. "Glenn's not with you?"
"Nah. Need you to show me where the stream is. Where Jimmy and Beth first saw that walker that bit Otis."
"Your brother's walker?"
He nodded.
"I'm sorry for your loss. But why do you need to see the stream?"
"Gonna see if I can track it, see where it come from."
"Why?"
"Because."
"That's the answer you give a two year old," Maggie told him.
"I'll be outta your hair. Won't bother you none."
"The stream is beyond the gate on the other side. I'll show you." She unlocked the padlock and unwound the chains that held the two cattle gates together and swung them open. He rolled his bike inside.
"Can I leave my bike here? Two days maybe?"
"We've got plenty of space. I can't promise Jimmy won't try to ride it though."
"I'll take the key," Daryl muttered.
After Maggie rechained the gates and they began walking, with Daryl rolling his bike, he said, "Rick says they can come train on our range. Patricia and Jimmy. Beth should, too."
"Beth should," Maggie agreed. "But she's in no condition at the moment."
"What condition is she in? And your daddy?"
"Well, Beth broke up with Jimmy for going behind her back and agreeing to the whole thing," Maggie replied, "but she hasn't tried to kill herself again. Daddy's been burying himself in the Bible ever since his bender. And I think he's softened on Glenn. He and Patricia patched things up, too, after their fight about him being responsible for Otis dying. And me, well, I'm just relieved to have the walkers out of the barn. That's the big update."
Daryl left his bike beside one of the farm trucks out in front of the house. Beth came out the screen door, crossed her arms over her chest, and jutted her chin out while glaring at him fiercely with her blue eyes. "What's he doing here?"
"Just passing through," Maggie said. "To the stream."
"You had no right!" Beth exclaimed. She stormed down the stairs from the porch. "You had no right, mister, to kill my mother and my brother." She strode up to him a stabbed a finger sharply into his lower shoulder. "No right!" She stabbed him again.
He looked down at her finger like an elephant looking at a tiny, annoying fly it wasn't quite sure how to swat away.
"Beth, back off," Maggie told her. "That wasn't your mama. And that wasn't Shawn. They weren't who they were."
"But we don't know they couldn't have been cured!" Beth cried as she stepped back away from Daryl, still glaring at him.
"We do know!" Maggie exclaimed. "It's been over four months since Shawn turned, and has anyone shown up with a cure? We've been through this, Bethie. Glenn was at the CDC. He saw it. He saw the last scientist standing, and that man blew himself up. There is not and will not be any cure. Ever. Now you've got to learn to deal with that!"
Beth's nostrils flared. She looked Daryl up and down with a mean girl glare. "You still shouldn't have done it without telling us. You come on our land. While we're at church!" She shook her head, turned, and strutted away.
"I think she likes me," Daryl said.
Maggie chuckled and led him on through the farm. She let him out the exit gate, told him what path to follow to the stream, and then swung it shut behind him.
[*]
Daryl made his way cautiously down the steep path that led to the part of the stream that was closest to the rear gate of the farm. He passed a tree with a heart carved in it and the initials J.S. and B.G. Jimmy and Beth, he supposed. And he also supposed Jimmy wasn't getting any action down by the stream anymore, since Beth had dumped him.
He examined the area closet to the path first, then the water line, where he found hints of Beth and Jimmy's prints. Then he moved farther back on the shore. He found a boot print – deep in the dirt –Merle's size. Daryl followed the sign, which was intermittent.
Along the way, about a quarter of a mile down the shoreline, he found a large, hollowed-out piece of driftwood on the shore. He examined it because it was unnaturally located, as if it had been dragged farther away from the water toward the hillside.
He realized why when he saw the folded magazine pages peeking out of the hollow. He pulled one out and unfolded it to reveal a naked, buxom blonde centerfold grasping and squeezing her own breasts while she sat on a wooden chair with her legs spread wide, making an exaggerated, orgasmic face. He chuckled, folded it, and shoved it back with all the other torn-out centerfolds along with the one intact Playboy magazine that was tightly rolled up and crammed deep in the hollow.
Jimmy's porn stash, he supposed. Plenty of boys had done that when he was growing up – hid their porn magazines and favorite centerfolds in hollowed-out trees in the woods to keep it far from their mothers' nosy snooping. Daryl hadn't needed to do that. His father's porn collection lay strewn about the trailer. Girly mags were lying on the coffee table in their old cabin even while his mother was still alive. The teenage boys right before the Outbreak had needed to make even less effort to access porn than Daryl had. Those kids had the Internet. But the apocalypse had thrown them all back to the ancient ways. Jimmy, Daryl supposed, was no exception.
The teenager couldn't risk being caught with that by Hershel back at the farmhouse, or by Beth either, though that stash was all he had to comfort him now, at least until Beth remembered he was the only boy in the world. At least the only boy in her world. She hadn't met Carl yet, but Carl wouldn't be much competition for Jimmy for at least five years. Well, maybe only three, if Carl kept getting better with that rifle, and he took after his father in appearance. (Women seemed to think Rick was attractive. Daryl had heard Andrea and Jacqui agreeing on it at the CDC, and Michonne had mentioned something to Carol about it once.) Lori would have a heart attack if a fifteen-year-old Carl started chasing a nineteen-year-old Beth, Daryl thought.
He hiked on, his eyes on the sign, his ears tuned for walkers and other threats.
[*]
"T!" Andre exclaimed, pointing to the letter in the book.
"Good job!" Lori told him. "C-A-T. That spells CAT."
Carol walked over and set two plates on the table for them, each with two pancakes. She'd used jarred applesauce rather than wasting fresh eggs to make them. "Brunch," she announced.
"Yum!" exclaimed Andre as he picked up a pancake with his hands and tore off a bite.
"Thank you," Lori told her.
Carol put two pancakes for herself on a plate and sat at the table with them. They had a little fresh butter from the farm, but she didn't use it. That was for cooking communal dinners.
While Andre ate with his hands, Lori took up the fork and knife from her plate and cut into her pancake. "I'd have gone gardening with Rick and Michonne, but I just get so physically exhausted these days with the pregnancy. And I'm really more talented as a preschool teacher."
"Mhm," Carol murmured as she cut off a piece of her pancake. "Andre's clearly been learning a lot." She took a bite.
Andre continued to eat his pancake piece by piece with his hands. When the little boy was done, he said, "Be excused! I go play with blocks!"
"Okay," Lori told him. "But stay in the living room where I can see you."
Andre's speech had really taken off in just the past week. But what was amazing was his letter recognition.
Lori pushed her now empty plate aside. "Do you believe in emotional affairs?" she asked Carol.
"I'm not sure what you mean." Carol took a sip from her water glass.
"How would you feel if Daryl was spending a lot of time talking to another woman, even if you knew there was nothing physical going on?"
Carol gave the question some serious thought. Daryl did spend time with other women. He fished with Andrea on occasion. He'd asked Michonne to show him how to use the katana, but had quickly given up, deciding he wasn't anywhere near graceful enough. Both women teased him, and he seemed to have a gruff affection for them both, bred, perhaps, of living in close quarters and surviving together. He respected Michonne's skill and courage a great deal, it was clear, and his respect for Andrea had been gradually growing. None of that bothered Carol in the least. But she also hadn't slept with Daryl's best friend, and there was no reason for Daryl to need his ego stroked by another woman.
Carol was trying to think of an appropriate answer when the static purr of the baby monitor receiver that sat in the window was interrupted by the sound of the bark of a dog.
[*]
Daryl had hiked five miles along the stream by now, and for the last four he had been in a ravine with tall, steep, sides leading to the forest above. From the position of the sun, he judged it was about eleven in the morning now. He was afraid he'd lost track of Merle's prints. It had been twenty minutes since he'd last seen one, but then he spied an almost perfect print on the muddy shore. He'd memorized the shape of the treads by now, top to bottom.
Still lurching from the east, he thought.
He took a break for some water from his canteen, had a soothing piss, ate a late breakfast, and then marked his multi-page, hand-drawn map. The map had his entire post-apocalypse history marked on it, in his own private code, and connected from page to page in ways only he understood.
Everything was on that map: the extended stay hotel where he and Merle had been crashing when things first went to shit, the quarry camp, the CDC, the spot where they'd lost Dale, the spot where'd they'd almost lost Sophia, Fort Benning, the hotel where Carol had asked him to teach her to shoot, Fun Kingdom, the gated housing complex where he'd first (unsuccessfully) tried to have sex with Carol, the Greene family farm, the forest he'd traversed while hunting (with spot where he'd encountered the boy marked), and now the land along this stream: the path that led up to the gate of the Greene farm, Jimmy's porn stash (which he had simply labeled TITS), the natural bridge across the stream he'd passed about twenty minutes ago, and a part of the stream he'd judged to be particularly good fishing.
Daryl refolded his pages, shoved them inside his pack, and hiked on.
[*]
Carol ran from the table, up the ramp, and to her room, where she seized her AR-15 from the closet. She also grabbed a pair of binoculars and strung them around her neck. When she was halfway down the ramp, she heard Sophia's voice on the receiver: "Hey, there! Hey doggie! Where'd you come from?"
Carol flew out the front door and hopped on one of the Segways outside – it seemed the quickest way to get to the front gate. The pick-up truck and SUV were parked down by the storehouse and she'd have to backtrack to them. She pushed the Segway to it's twelve-mile-an-hour limit, her heart hammering the whole time, hopping her gut had been right about the boy and his dog, hoping that he wasn't dangerous, because he had a rifle, and Sophia only had her sword.
When she got to the gate, she was relieved to see Michonne was with Sophia. The woman had her katana in one hand and her other on the butt of her handgun at her waist, and her eyes were flitting all over the parking lot beyond the exit gate where the dog stood, it's paws on the iron bars, its tongue through them, licking Sophia's outstretched hand.
It was not the boy's dog after all. This one was a German Shepherd, and a male. Its tag jangled as Sophia reached through the bars and scratched it behind the ears. Carol stepped off the Segway and came to stand beside them, looking about like Michonne.
"Can we keep him, Mom?" Sophia begged. "Can we?"
"How hasn't it gone feral by now?" Michonne asked. "Unless it belongs to someone still living."
Carol was now scouring the area beyond the gate with binoculars. She saw no signs of human life or any unexplained vehicle. "What do the tags say?"
Sophia lifted the dog's tag. "Max. Is that your name? Max?"
The dog barked.
"And it says Athens Police Department Bomb Squad. And it has a phone number."
"Maybe his human died recently," Michonne speculated. "I'd say within the last four weeks. He clearly hasn't been groomed for a while, but if his owner had died any longer ago than that, no way he wouldn't be displaying signs of going feral by now."
"He's certainly friendly," Carol said.
"Can we Mom?" Sophia begged. "Can we keep him? Pleeeeease?"
Carol looked at Michonne, who shrugged and said, "I don't see why not."
"We could use a good guard dog," Carol noted. "And he'd be great for supply runs if he really can sniff out gunpowder and other explosives." The dog could help them find hidden stashes of ammunition and gunpowder in houses, perhaps.
They agreed to take him in, but Carol stood guard, AR-15 in hand, eyes and ears opened, while Michonne unlatched the gate, swung it open, and let the dog inside. She swung it shut and latched it again.
Sophia was on her knees now, laughing as the dog licked her face.
[*]
Daryl had hiked another three miles, but he hadn't seen another print Merle's size for a while and was beginning to lose hope when he spied one, not far from the water. It looked like the walker had come out of the water onto the shore and then began lurching toward the distant farm, which was about nine miles from this spot.
He scoured the opposite shoreline. Given the width of the stream now, he thought it would be too deep in the middle for a walker to easily make its way across from the opposite shore. It must have come from the side bank where the stream curved and then picked up again. That was his best guess, anyway.
Daryl made his way down the shore and turned where it curved. On the side bank, he began scouring for prints again. He didn't see one, but he entered a part of the forest where branches were snapped and brush was scattered as though something Merle's height had walked through that area.
He continued to follow the sign into the forest for another half mile or so. He was reaching the point where the trail was no longer clear when he heard the excited bark of a dog. Daryl ducked instantly behind a tree.
He was sure it was that dog. He knew that damn bark by now, but what he didn't know was what kind of weird gods of fate kept hurling that dog and its boy in his path. The barking grew closer and closer and then stopped in one spot, where it grew more excited. Daryl crept a little closer to the scene, hopping from tree trunk to tree trunk for cover.