By the time we'd been at the camp for a week, I'd gotten a better sense of the dynamics of the group. Most of them were locals, except for Glenn, who was from Michigan but had been living in Atlanta for the past couple of years. Most were from the suburbs and had a fairly conservative background and that made me an outsider. One of the first nights we were there, Dale dragged us over to the main campfire and began asking questions about where I was from.
"Portland!" Lori exclaimed. "Goodness, isn't it scary raising kids around all that?"
I was bewildered. "Around what?" I asked. Several people exchanged glances and eventually, Shane spoke up.
"You know, legalized hard drugs, rioting, Antifa . . ." he explained with a grimace.
"Ah. Yeah, that's not really what it sounds like on Fox News," I said with a smile. "I actually worked on getting that drug legislation passed, and it's allowing a lot of people to get help with their addiction, and costing taxpayers a whole lot less than keeping them in prison. And Portland is great and as safe as any other city. Quite frankly, I felt much safer there than here, pre-outbreak. Antifa just gets blamed for the actions of opportunistic anarchists who show up to peaceful protests. Of course, peaceful protesters in Portland are being beaten or tear-gassed by the police frequently, but that doesn't get covered on right-wing news stations." I gave Shane a tight smile. "In any case, I don't live in Portland proper. I live in a small town about an hour away, in wine country."
Silence followed my little speech and as I looked around the circle I realized that almost everyone was either skeptical of my assessment, or shocked at my words. Shane, in particular, looked furious and about to launch into an argument, when Merle spoke up from just outside the group, where he'd been lurking. "Betcha ain't got chupacabra in Portland, eh? Daryl ever tell you about the time he saw one while hunting?"
All attention focused on Daryl, who rolled his eyes but shrugged. "Ya, I saw one out in the woods, drinkin' the blood of a deer I'd just shot. Tried to shoot it but the bolt jus' bounced off it." The group was silent for a moment, and then Glenn burst into giggles, which sent everyone else off. Daryl must have told this story before and was clearly used to this kind of response because it didn't seem to phase him, and Merle joined in the laughter.
Dale looked at me across the fire, the only one not laughing. "You believe this stuff?"
I shrugged. "I come from the land of Bigfoot, remember? And there are dead people walking around out there, so vampire dogs don't seem like that much of a stretch." Daryl glanced at me and I smiled, hoping he'd see me as an ally. I could tell he was pulling away from the group, and from me as a result, and I didn't know why. I was sure it had to do with Merle, but he clearly didn't love being around his brother so it wasn't some kind of wish they could be on their own. Daryl wouldn't open up to me if I asked him directly, so I needed to build up some trust and work toward the conversation.
Nothing could have prepared me for the events following the larger group's run to the city. I wasn't dumb enough to try and tag along, despite Andrea's encouragement. I didn't think she should have gone either but she clearly had something to prove and didn't care that she hadn't ever killed one of the 'walkers' as Glenn had started calling them. We'd been with the group for two weeks and her constant obsession with her gun was driving me crazy. I was pretty sure she'd never even shot it, but she seemed to think just holding it made her a force to be reckoned with. My dad had taken me shooting a couple of times when I was a teenager and I hadn't liked it, but it had helped me appreciate the need to be trained before using one.
Shane hadn't offered to go, which was irritating the hell out of me since he was supposed to be the leader, and the day before, when Ed started pushing Carol around, he'd refused to step in. I finally stepped between Carol and Ed, which just resulted in being knocked on my ass and having Carol pissed off at me for interfering. I had dealt with battered women before, and I knew it was a complicated issue, but I didn't really have the mental bandwidth to deal with her dysfunction in the middle of this apocalypse and I was growing more and more worried that she wasn't protecting Sophia. Carol could read my unspoken accusations and started ignoring me entirely.
Lori didn't seem to like me much either. I'd tried to talk to her a few days ago about assigning chores to all the camp members, regardless of gender, and she'd muttered something about raging feminists and walked away. As Shane's female counterpart she seemed to think she was in charge of the women and children, and Carol went along with whatever Lori asked. The real problem between Lori and I, however, was that I had wandered into the woods to find some edible plants and mushrooms a couple of days before and saw her and Shane pulling their clothes back into place after an obvious hookup. They saw me too, and Shane asked me to "be discreet" before walking back to camp, while Lori just avoided my eyes. It had been tense since then, and with half the group gone, it got more awkward.
Merle had continued to try and push my buttons over the past couple of weeks, even if he had defused the situation around the campfire on my behalf. He constantly called me sexual pet names, which I just ignored, and eventually grabbed my ass when I walked by him one night by the fire. I whirled around and shoved him back, hard enough that his chair tipped over, but he just laughed, high as a kite.
"Don't. Touch. Me." I gritted out, storming over to my chair next to Daryl. Merle righted himself and grinned at me, "Well if y'ain't gonna let me feel ya up, at least sit on Daryl's lap so y'can feel the hard-on he has for ya." I just shook my head, exasperated. "I don't know how you've dealt with him your whole life" I muttered to Daryl, who was glaring at his brother across the fire.
Merle had also regularly made racist and homophobic jokes, the latter often aimed at Daryl, and those I couldn't let go quite as easily. I had a mixed-race family, queer sister, and transgender niece, not to mention dozens of friends who were in vulnerable populations and I lit into Merle the first few times I heard him insult them. He just seemed to be entertained by my outrage, and eventually, Daryl told me to "just ignore him for fuck's sake" and I reluctantly took his advice. I didn't stop wearing my Biden-Harris shirt to bed, but I didn't flaunt it either, for the sake of peace. It was odd to be so out of place based on my politics, and I realized that many of the shirts I'd brought for the herbalism retreat had things like "equality, equality, equality" in rainbow lettering, or "white silence is violence". I wore them anyway and got a few raised eyebrows but I saved the purely political one for when I was away from most of the group.
That morning, Daryl had gone hunting, as usual, and I'd actually asked to go with him just to get away from the tension with Lori and Carol, and maybe get him to open up about whatever was eating at him. He'd barely glanced my way and muttered, "Nah, jus' slow me down and scare away all the food. 'Sides, I'm plannin' on bein gone overnight" before taking off. I ran after him and told him I didn't think that was wise, with dead things roaming the woods, but he said something about tying himself into a tree to sleep and brushed me off.
Merle had jumped in with the group headed to Atlanta at the last minute, and I ended up spending most of my afternoon talking to Dale as he kept watch on the roof of the RV. It was late afternoon by the time we heard the siren from Glenn's car and the whole reunion between the Grimes family played out like the happy ending from a movie.
I watched Shane and Lori afterward, avoiding each other's eyes, and wondered how this was going to affect the group's dynamics. Lori's husband seemed to have been Shane's superior officer as well as his close friend, and I didn't think Shane was going to easily share any kind of authority with this group. He'd basically moved into Rick's spot in every way, and was now going to be thrown out on his ass if the look on Lori's face was anything to go on.
It took a bit before we heard the story of Merle being left on the roof and I was horrified. I understood better than anyone how awful Merle could be, but he wasn't usually violent and I wondered what he'd taken that day to push him from inflammatory comments to attacking folks. I was more sensitive than a lot of the group to his constant racism, sexism, and homophobia, but I thought there must have been something more to him, underneath all the bluster, or Daryl wouldn't have put up with him, and even there wasn't, I didn't think I could leave him to die on a roof.
Even without walkers getting in, he was going to be in the blazing hot sun without any water or shade until someone showed up to let him out. I understood that the group had made a split-second decision that they all felt bad about, but all I could think of was how Daryl would feel when he found out his brother had been left. I knew he thought of himself as an outsider already, he'd gotten more and more short-tempered the longer we spent with the group and with Merle, and I thought this might push him over the edge. Would he leave? Would I go with him? Would he let me? I slept fitfully that night, thinking of Merle on the roof and Daryl going to get him and never coming back.