There was nothing of note in the dining room, though Carol did admire the pewter, three-pronged candelabra. "Take it," Daryl told her.
"I'm not wasting room with a candelabra. But I might need that painting." She pointed toward a work of abstract art on the wall opposite the oak dining table: a canvas of smeared colors.
"I bet that cost them rich pricks a lot of money." Daryl strolled up to the painting and waved his hand up and down it like a brushstroke. "Looks like a dog sat in paint and wiped its ass all over the place."
"Really? I kinda of like it."
"Stahp."
"I'm serious. You don't know me."
"Yeah," Daryl said, continuing on through the open doorframe that led into the kitchen. "You keep tellin' yourself that."
The kitchen cupboards had no food - only dishes and pots and pans and various likely never used appliances – gifted, perhaps, and then stored away.
"I want that crockpot," Carol insisted pointing up at a high shelf in one of the white cabinets. Then, as selling point for Daryl: "It'll use less energy than the oven."
Daryl climbed up onto the black marble countertop to take it down – it was still in its original box – and set it on the island counter to pack up later.
Carol opened a cabinet to discover it had nothing at all but glass flower vases in it – some clear, some tinted red or purple – of varying shapes and sizes. "He must have brought her a lot of flowers. You never bring me flowers."
"'Cause I ain't fuckin' 'round on you like he obviously was on her," Daryl muttered.
"Well, you did give me two knives with flowers carved on them. That's how I knew you liked me."
"Pffft. Just good knives is all."
"You keep telling yourself that."
They ventured into the walk-in pantry, which was like something out of Carol's dream kitchen, except this wealthy couple had made little use of it. The entire top shelf, all the way around on three sides, housed nothing but cardboard file boxes of old work papers. One shelf on one side had nothing but folded table linens.
They did score ten 8-packs of unflavored, canned seltzer water, three large canisters of protein powder (Daryl: "Guess Lawyer Steve was tryin' to bulk up."), three boxes of unopened fancy crackers (Carol: "Remember how drunk you got at that hotel?"), one canister of salt, one canister of pepper, one canister of quinoa (Daryl: "Hell's kwa-in-oh-a?"), six cans of Organic Sparkling Apple Cider beverage (Carol: "Ugh. Should we even take that?"), a package of dry seaweed (Daryl: "Who the fuck keeps seaweed?"), a jar of Thai Yellow Curry Sauce (Carol: "But they have nothing to cook it with."), a jar of Organic Watermelon Fruit Spread (Daryl: "What the fuckity fuck?"), a bag of Jicama wraps (Carol: "Are those like tortillas?" Daryl: "Hell if I know, but guessing they ain't s'posed to be green." Carol: "I don't know. Maybe they are supposed to be."), a bag of Turkey Stuffing Seasoned Kettle Chips (Carol: "That might be okay."); a bag of seasoned smoked salmon – 2.5 ounces worth (Daryl: "Wonder how much they paid for that."), and an unopened Christmas tin of mixed nuts and dried fruit that still had the plastic across the top of the inside of the tin (Carol: "Best thing in here.")
"Hell's all their food?" Daryl asked as they stepped out of the pantry. "Don't look like they made a run for it. Truck is in the driveway. Think they lived long enough to eat it?"
"I think a lot of rich people like this don't cook for themselves," Carol said. "They eat out or order in most of the time."
"Hell they need this big ass kitchen for then?"
They gathered batteries from the kitchen junk drawers, matches from the fireplace mantle in the living room, and two flashlights. They opened what they thought would be a coat closet built under the stairwell only to find it was a wine cellar of sorts, with racks on both walls and a narrow path between, extending several feet back under the stairs.
"Merry fuckin' Christmas!" Daryl exclaimed. "No wonder that neighbor was tryin' to bust in."
Carol pulled out one of the bottles. "Think it's super expensive?"
"Wouldn't know. Just take a color you like for tonight. Get most of the rest in the mornin' when we know how much room we got."
Carol wandered into the master bedroom while Daryl checked out the laundry room and hall closet. In the master bath, she found six unopened packs of birth control pills and squirreled them away into her backpack. If they had sex tonight - and with a nervous excitement she suspected they would –they'd probably keep having sex. It would be nice to have a few months with no need for condoms.
She took all the pills in the medicine cabinet – Xanax, Vicodin, Benadryl, Ibuprofen, two half-finished jars of antibiotics, Prozac, and on and on. Maybe Daryl had been right about rich people and their medicines.
She explored the walk-in closet off the master bath – which required turning on her flashlight – and envied the woman her rows upon rows of shoes neatly organized in built-in cubbies. Too bad the woman had feet a size smaller than Carol's. Her light fell on a pair of red high heels and she thought of Daryl's rant when he was high at the farm. It made her nervous to recall it. She wasn't exactly the bend-over-a-motorcycle-in-high-heels type, and she hoped she didn't disappoint him tonight. She shooed away the niggling voice within, reminding it that Daryl had been pretty damn pleased with what they'd done so far.
Meanwhile, Daryl had rounded up various wattages and sizes of lightbulbs they could use in the House of the Future, which had been stored in the cabinets of the laundry room. They lay all the loot in the foyer for now.
Upstairs they found two guest bedrooms, furnished with neatly made-up beds that were likely rarely used and a third bedroom with nothing but exercise equipment and a stereo. There was a tower of CDs next to the stereo. Carol was a bit surprised – she thought couple with this kind of money would have transitioned from CDs by now to MP3s, or whatever it was the kids were listening to these days. She wandered over to look at them and found them in alphabetical order by musician. She pulled out The Last Waltz by The Band and brought it over to Daryl. "It's not the one you had, but…"
"Fantastic." He took it from her and opened the double CD case. "Thanks." While he paged through the linear notes, she went out into the loft, which was apparently the wife's study. Her framed degrees indicated a B.A. in Sociology and an M.A. in Criminal Justice. Two professional recognition plaques suggested she had been in the FBI.
"She worked for the FBI," Carol said when Daryl emerged from the exercise room with a stack of ten CDs. "Maybe the guns were all hers."
"Doubt it. He bought 'em. Cost a shitton. How much can an FBI agent make?"
"According to this pay stub?" Carol asked, lifting a paper from the desk, "apparently $2,018 a week, with matching 401K contributions and health insurance."
"Fuck," Daryl said. "I should have been an FBI agent."
"I'm pretty sure you need a college degree for that." She smirked. "And a willingness to submit to authority."
They entered the garage from an inside door and opened it with the button on the wall to let in the sunlight to see what they had. Fortunately, the battery backup for the garage door was still working.
Inside they found a 2009 Cadillac Escalade luxury SUV, which must have been bought brand new a few months before the world as they knew it ended. They also discovered twenty gallons of gas in red five-gallon storage containers, two quarts of oil, antifreeze, and a half gallon of fuel stabilizer. "And Shane didn't want us to waste gas comin' up here," Daryl muttered. There was also a workbench that looked like it had never been used. From the drawers to that, they would take some boxes of nails and screws and washers. They had plenty of tools already.
They gathered everything they wanted to take in the foyer and put things in cardboard and plastic boxes they found in the storage closet, but they didn't pack them into the U-haul or truck just yet. They wanted to do an assessment of the whole neighborhood before they decided what was most important to take and how best to fit it all.
Carol found the keys to both of the couple's vehicles hanging from hooks on a key keeper in the kitchen, and they went to check if either would start. Both did. The truck was monstrously large, with an extended cab and a massive bed. "It's a lot bigger than yours," Carol noted when he hopped down from the driver's side. "I think I would need a step ladder to get up there."
"Yeah. Wanna guess how tiny his dick was?"
"Smaller than yours?" she asked. "But isn't that the fate of most men?"
"Stahp. Wasn't tryin' to say mine is huge."
"Well, yours is definitely in the top twenty-five percent. But it's not in the top ten percent. At least not in the line-up I've seen. But top ten percent makes me uneasy, so…I prefer it that way."
"How many dicks you seen, Miss Murphy?"
"The first time I ever used the Internet? Lots. But then they put blocking software on the library computers."
Daryl snorted.
They decided not to take the pick-up, because, as big as it was, it would be certain to be a serious gas guzzler. The SUV was three years newer and would get much better mileage. It also had a decent amount of cargo space if they removed the back row of seats and folded down the other two. Carol, they agreed, would drive it back to Fun Kingdom, and Daryl would take his pick-up and the U-haul. They moved the SUV out of the garage beside the giant pick-up and siphoned the gas from one to the other, which brought the SUV's tank to full.
"Wanna see what's behind door number two, Miss Murphy?" Daryl asked.
"Do I ever," she said. "But lunch first. It was a long drive and I'm hungry."
They each had a can of seltzer water, split the 2.5 ounces of smoked salmon, and ate some nuts and dried fruit from the Christmas tin. Carol used the downstairs guest bathroom – she had to set her flashlight upright on the back of the toilet because there was no window - and found the toilet actually flushed once, but it did not refill. There was no running water. She used the hand sanitizer she found in a pull-out wicker basket on the corner shelf. Then she pocketed the bottle. Meanwhile, Daryl contented himself with taking a piss in the backyard.
[*]
They left the gathered loot in the foyer for now and walked on with only their private packs and weapons toward the next house. Their good luck, however, began to wane. The next three houses were locked up tightly. They could see walkers bumbling inside, but they couldn't manage to break in. The windows were extra thick, and even though Daryl went back for a hammer from the last garage, no amount of hammering seemed to shatter any window. These houses didn't have those weak, vertical windows by the front door like the last one had. No amount of prying with a crowbar would get the garage doors open either. "'S like tryin' to bust into a bank vault," Daryl muttered.
At the fourth house, however, Carol found a front door key stored inside a fake rock. "You some kind of witch?" Daryl asked. "First the safe, now this?"
She unlocked the door but did not yet open it. They knocked and waited for walkers. Soon, there was scratching and gnawing from the other side of the wood.
"Sounds like two," Daryl said.
"Can I try out my new handgun?" Carol drew her Smith and Wesson from her inside-the-waistband holster.
"A'ight. I'll draw 'em down to that window." He pointed down the house. "You go on in and pop 'em once I have." Daryl walked down past some dead, brown bushes to a bay window and pounded with his fist. Soon, two faces were gnashing against the glass. Daryl flicked them off. "They're here!"
Carol threw open the front door and disappeared inside. He expected to hear one blast followed by another – maybe a third if she missed one shot - but he heard nothing. The silence made his heart thud, and he swung his loaded crossbow off his shoulder and bolted for the slightly open door.
He slammed the door all the way open and burst inside to find Carol kicking back a walker while struggling to draw her knife. Her handgun was on the foyer floor, and a second walker seized her arm with its gnarly fingers. Heart hammering, Daryl fired, and his bolt penetrated the creature's squishy skull.
By now, Carol had her jasmine knife out, and she drove into the head of the walker she'd kicked back. She ripped it back out with a cry of frustration, and the black blood dripped onto the grayish-white tile of the floor as the monster collapsed. Carol stepped back and braced herself with one hand on an antique tea cart.
"Hell happened?" Daryl ripped his arrow from the walker's head, flipped his bandana from his back pocket, and began cleaning the tip.
Carol let out the breath she'd been holding in a long sigh. "The gun jammed."
Daryl reloaded his bow and slung it back on his shoulder. He picked up the fallen handgun and racked the slide hard to expel the round jammed in the chamber. He dropped the magazine, locked the slide open, and looked down it. "We're gonna do jam clearin' drills when we get home. A thousand of 'em!"
"Yes, Professor," she said sarcastically.
"Well, you clearly need 'em."
"I was kind of hoping to hear that you're glad I'm alive."
He slammed magazine back into the handgun, put on the safety, and slid the gun into the holster inside her waistband. "Glad you're alive. Now be more careful so I don't lose ya."
[*]
After clearing the rooms to make sure there were no walkers, they began examining the contents of each. Various evidence seemed to suggest that one of the house's occupants had been a doctor while the other was a software engineer. "There seem to be a lot of DINKS in this neighborhood," Carol said.
"Is that your school marm way of sayin' dicks?"
"No, I said dicks earlier, remember? I was talking about all the dicks I've had the pleasure to see."
"Don't remind me," Daryl muttered.
"DINKS. Double-income, no kids. Money to roll around in. Me, I'd rather have the kid."
"Yeah, well, I ain't never had either."
"Well you can borrow Sophia anytime you'd like. I'm sure she'd enjoy fishing with you."
"Should teach 'er to hunt," he said. "Small game. Don't worry. Ain't gonna take her to hunt outside the gates. Yet. Maybe in a year."
Did he foresee them together a year from now, Carol wondered? Clearly he saw the community as still together, if he was thinking of taking Sophia hunting outside the gates in a year, but did he see them together? She almost asked but thought better of it.
These DINKS actually cooked. There was a lot of once fresh food rotting in the refrigerator and defrosted freezer. From the pantry, Daryl and Carol managed to box up several unopened jars and cans, all of them labeled "organic" and/or "natural" including peanut butter, applesauce, pickled okra, pickled bean salad, pumpkin, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, mushroom portobello slices, raw Goji berries, and sliced bamboo shoots.
"Why don't rich people eat normal food?" Daryl asked.
"Other than the bamboo and Goji berries – whatever those are - most of this is normal. It's just organic."
"All food's organic."
"Grab all that gluten-free pasta."
"Fuck's gluten anyway?"
"Probably whatever makes pasta taste good," Carol said as he handed her three boxes and she put them in the carboard box on the table in the breakfast nook.
Upstairs in the house they found an entertainment room, a guest bedroom, a bedroom that had been turned into a storage room, and a nursery that looked like it had never been used – possibly designed to receive a child that had not yet been born before the world ended.
"Weren't gonna be DINKS for much longer," Daryl murmured.
There were four large boxes of disposable size-one diapers they could take for Lori's baby, as well as a three-pack of unopened bottles still in the plastic wrap and four canisters of formula, should they need it. (Shane had already looted three, but ideally Lori would breast feed successfully and for as long as possible.) They didn't need the clothes or toys – Fun Kingdom had plenty, but they snagged the baby monitor.
They were able to get inside the expansive garage from a door at the end of an empty hallway. There was a four-dour luxury sedan and two small sports cars inside.
"I think I want to take home that red corvette instead of the SUV, Pookie."
"Ain't fittin' shit in that thing."
"But what am I going to do when I have my mid-life crises?"
"Guess you'll just have to do a lot of fuckin'."
She caught his eye with a raised eyebrow and he looked quickly away. She was reminded once again of his motive for this weekend and felt that nervous fluttering of wings in her stomach.
They scored another fifteen gallons of stored gas and didn't bother to siphon off what was in the sports cars. They grabbed a solar-rechargeable portable power station / jump starter / compressor that had four outlets for plugging in electronics and two USB ports. Finally, Daryl took a can of wax.
"Gonna wax your truck, Pookie?"
"She's a good girl. Deserves it."
"A good girl does deserve a nice rub down," Carol agreed.
"Stahp."
She pouted. "That mean you don't want to give me one later?"
He looked at her through narrowed eyes, as if trying to decide whether or not to take her seriously. "Naked?" he asked finally.
"That's the best way to do it, I presume. I'm sure we can find some quality massage oil in one of these houses."
"Totally naked?" he ventured.
"I might leave my panties on," she said. And then to let him know she was willing to let this evening go farther than they had before, "but then I might let you take them off me eventually."
He ducked his head and smiled. She turned and walked away, and she could feel his gaze on her ass.
They couldn't bust into the next five houses but then found one that was unlocked. They explored it and gathered more loot. The next seven houses were likewise impenetrable, but then they found one like the first, with a weak enough window by the front door to bust in and reach around to unlock the dead bolt. There, they killed three walkers, including a child who must have been just a little younger than Sophia. Carol froze up before the creature when she saw how young it had once been, and Daryl had to step in and stab it.
He didn't lecture her for it. He put a hand gently on the small of her back and asked, "You a'ight?"
She nodded. "Gotta be."
They moved on. The discomfort of having to kill a child walker was worth the cost, however, as they found ten more gallons of gas in the garage and two dozen usable cans of food in the pantry.
The next nine houses they gave up trying to bust into, but the tenth was unlocked. Unfortunately, it had been mostly cleared out of anything useful by the fleeing owners, though they did manage to round up some batteries and lightbulbs and a pair of boots that fit Daryl perfectly. He also grabbed a red and black poncho for the coming winter.
"You know, we have plenty of clothes at Fun Kingdom," she said.
"Yeah, but I look badass in this. And you took that leather jacket."
"Because I look hot in it," she said.
"Damn right you do."
Six more houses were impenetrable fortresses to them, but at the seventh, Carol busted in the window of a car in the driveway and opened the garage with the garage door opener. They'd tried that many times before, whenever there was a vehicle in the driveway, but either there were no openers in the vehicles, or they didn't open anything, even when they tried to switch out the batteries. This time, however, the door arose.
"Hallelujah!" Daryl shouted with raised arms.
"I aim to please," Carol told him as they strolled smiling into the open garage, which was clearly used not for cars but mostly for junk storage. As luck would have it, the interior door leading into the house from the garage was unlocked, and there were no walkers in the house.
The couple who had lived here, the wall calendar in the kitchen indicated, had gone on vacation shortly before the collapse, which might explain the presence of only one car. They had left several detailed notes for "Stephanie," who was supposed to be stopping by to water their plants and get their mail.
The plants were, of course, long dead, but the house was clean and free of walker stench. The downstairs study had a built-in bar with a well-stocked liquor cabinet and a wood fireplace. In the master bedroom was a four-postered, king-sized bed with a canopy. The bed was situated in front of another wood fireplace. The large window in the attached sitting room had a view of the lake. Carol swung her pack onto the bed and declared, "This is where we're staying tonight."
"Yes, ma'am," Daryl agreed.
They back tracked and packed up the loot they'd left in the foyers of the other houses and then parked the truck and SUV in the long driveway of their selected house. Every inch of the U-Haul trailer was filled. All the cargo space in the SUV was stuffed full, and even the passenger's seat and passenger's side floor were covered. So, too, was the passenger's side of Daryl's truck, but they'd left the bed one-third empty for their packs and whatever loot they would end up taking from the house where they were staying tonight. That they would pack in the morning.
Daryl went out to the backyard to gather wood from an already chopped pile for the fireplaces just as the sun was beginning to set. By the waning light of the closing day, Carol explored the master bathroom, where she found a bottle of massage oil. She placed it on the nightstand by the side of the bed. Daryl had promised her a rub down, after all, and maybe that would help to relax some of her nervousness about tonight.
She also stripped the bed and left the sheets in the walk-in closet. She gathered fresh sheets from the linen closet and began to remake the bed because she didn't know what the couple might have been doing in it before they left, because the sheets had sat collecting dust for about five months now, and because tonight was special.
Daryl came in with his arms full of wood and began arranging it in the fireplace. He curiously glanced back at her neatly tucking in the comforter.
"I changed the sheets," she explained.
"Why? Looked fine."
"I know, you think it's stupid," she said. "The bed was already neatly made-up. But I just – "
"- Nah. Get it," he interrupted. "You like things to be nice."
"I do."
Squatting on his haunches, he pointed to the fireplace. "This'll be nice, yeah?"
He was trying to make tonight special, too, she realized.
She smiled. "It will be. It'll be very warm. And romantic."
"Pfft," he said as he returned to his work, as if that wasn't what he was trying for at all. But she knew it was.
When he had stood, and she was done with the bed, she asked, "Did you get wood for the fireplace in the study, too?"
"Yeah. 'S already in there."
"Good, because after a long day of looting, I need a cocktail."
"Thought you didn't like hard liquor."
"I didn't like the whiskey straight up. But I've never had a girly cocktail. I never had the money for bar drinks. And it looks like that bar had everything. Of course, I don't know how to make anything."
"Saw a cocktail recipe book on the bookshelf in there. Mix you up whatever the hell you want. Girly as you want it. But probably ought to have some dinner first or you're gonna be flat on your ass."
She sashayed up to him. "And here I thought you'd want to get me drunk to get in my pants."
"I already been in your pants, Miss Murphy. Part of me anyhow."
And tonight, she thought, he wanted another part of him in those pants. There was that nervous flutter again – butterfly wings all over her stomach. "Let's go see what the pantry has to offer for dinner," she said.