AN: Here we are, another chapter here.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
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They easily found a place to hold up for the night in the abandoned town. They rifled through the contents of a few stores, but most of the places had been picked over pretty well and there wasn't much worth having to be found. What they had found, they'd packed into the back of the trucks and they'd left the little town not long after the sun rose.
When they left it, it looked every bit as frozen in place as it had when they'd found it. Their time there wouldn't be remembered by anyone because there was nobody left to even remember that the little town had once been a dot on a state road map.
Carol was driving while Daryl sat beside her and alternated between halfway sleeping and watching the road ahead of them with heavy-lidded eyes.
"You asleep?" Carol asked.
"Mmm," Daryl responded. "Not really." He sat up to prove that he was telling the truth. "You need to switch?"
"I'm fine," Carol said.
"T OK?" Daryl asked.
"He hasn't flashed his lights," Carol said. It was their agreed upon signal from T-Dog that he would flash his lights a couple of times if he needed anything. This could range from a bathroom break to a quick discussion about a newly arising concern. So far he'd only flashed then once since they'd left the little town that had been eerily frozen in time.
"You gotta piss?" Daryl asked.
"Do you?" Carol asked.
"I don't got a—don't got a kid sittin' on my bladder," Daryl said. "I guess I can hold it."
"I can too," Carol said.
"Suit yourself," Daryl said. "But it ain't nothin' but a thing to pull over."
He yawned and stretched. He had spent the night keeping watch. He'd known that T-Dog would be driving and needed some rest—especially since he'd be driving alone. There would be nobody there to keep him awake when the roads were clear and the curves got monotonous. He knew, too, that Carol simply needed the rest. She refused to complain, and she refused to make requests, because she remembered all too well the ceaseless demands that Lori had made, but Daryl knew she had some needs. It was only natural that growing another human being had to take it out of her—at least somewhat. She could stand to get a decent amount of sleep. The only way that Daryl had gotten her to agree to sleep, though, was by promising her that she could drive and he could nap in the truck.
He wasn't sleeping very much, though. It wasn't that he didn't trust Carol's driving or that he was particularly concerned about anything. He simply wasn't managing to cross entirely into the land of sleep and, instead, seemed to be stuck hovering at the point where his head simply felt fuzzy and his thoughts seemed a little distant and muffled.
Honestly, he welcomed the conversation if she wanted to offer it.
"You need me to drive?" Daryl asked.
"You're supposed to be sleeping," Carol said.
"Yeah, but I ain't," Daryl said. "You needed somethin'. What'd you need?"
"Nothing, really," Carol said. "Just—do we actually know where we're going?"
Daryl laughed to himself. He rolled down the window and lit himself a cigarette.
"We gonna know when we see it," Daryl said. "Look—in them mountains there's been people that's been livin' for—hell longer'n I can even say. They used to livin' off the land. Grow their own food, drink water that's naturally there…some of 'em without electricity, even. This is a place that's set up for survival 'cause that's what the hell the people that live there been doin' forever. When we get there, we're lookin' for somewhere we can have a good, reliable roof over our heads. We're lookin' for water and a patch of land to start growin' food. Build a smokehouse—if there ain't one there. Greenhouse. Barn for storage. Maybe we find us some livestock that's got loose. Domesticate it again. Start us a herd for food or milk."
"And you think we'll find all this tonight?" Carol asked.
Daryl snorted. Her tone of voice made the humor bubble up in his chest.
"Smartass," he muttered. He made sure to say it loudly enough that she could hear him, though. When he cut his eyes in her direction, she was watching him, eyebrow raised, and smirking. "Watch the damned road 'fore you get us all killed."
She laughed to herself, but she did turn her attention back to the road.
"I'm serious," Carol said. "How are we going to know?"
"We'll just know," Daryl said. "You gotta trust me. It won't never work if you don't trust me. You trust me?"
Carol smiled to herself.
"I do," she said.
Daryl was surprised at the warm feeling that flooded his chest at the two simple words. The tightening in his belly, too, caught him off-guard. She was teasing him, but he heard in her voice that she meant those two words—and that meant a great deal to Daryl.
Even if he wasn't certain how they'd know when they found the right place, or even that there was a perfect place out there, he was determined not to let her down.
"Daryl," Carol said, after a moment had passed.
He finished his cigarette and flicked the butt out the window.
"Yeah?" He asked, purposefully blowing the smoke out the open window as he said the word.
"Call it power of suggestion or—whatever you want," Carol said. "But I have to pee now."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"Me too," he admitted. "And I don't bet T's gonna bitch too much. Pick a good shoulder an' pull over."
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The orange-roofed motel was designed to accommodate the lower budget tourist on their trip to see the mountains. The second-story room was fairly easy to break into, though, and it was Walker free. Since it was also on the second floor, and the only way to reach it was to climb up a rather rickety set of steel and wood-beam stairs. The likelihood of any Walker stumbling to the top of them, and making the necessary turns to get down the narrow walkway to the room, was next to impossible.
They could all sleep well for the night, at least.
Inside the room, there were two double beds. The garish decorations inside—with brightly colored drapes hanging over the windows and floral bedspreads that clashed with the ridiculous paintings above the beds—were as much a declaration of the cheap past of the motel as the bright orange roof.
Daryl and T-Dog carried most of their necessary things inside while Carol set up their lanterns around the room and lit them to supply them with some light.
"Place smells like wet ashtrays have been fermentin' in here for about ten years," T-Dog declared, huffing out his disgust as he put down some of the bags.
Carol moved and tried the windows. Finding that they would give, she raised them up.
"It'll air out a little," Carol said. "We can leave these open for now."
"That's the kinda smell don't never air out. Still, we can leave 'em open all night," Daryl said. "Might catch a breeze. There ain't no Walkers down there right now, and they sure couldn't follow us up them stairs."
T-Dog stepped out the door and hung over the railing. Daryl followed him out to survey their surroundings from the second story more than anything. While he was out there, he lit a cigarette and T-Dog huffed at him and fanned in his direction.
"Man—I come out here to escape that shit," T-Dog said. "Burnin' my damned nostrils."
Daryl laughed to himself.
"You'll get used to it in a minute," Daryl said. "Smells damn near like home to me."
"You gonna die," T-Dog said.
"Damn sure am," Daryl said with a laugh. "Somehow—I'm startin' to doubt it's the smokes that'll get me."
"You don't never know," T-Dog commented.
"Maybe there are worse ways to go," Daryl said. "You brought any of that beer we found in?"
"In that gray cooler bag thing," T-Dog said. "With everything else we got from that BiLo."
Without Daryl having to ask for it, and maybe because he wanted to save Carol from some of the fresh cigarette smoke on top of the stale smoke, T-Dog dipped inside the room again. He came out a moment later with a couple of the beers. They were as hot as fresh piss, but they were wet.
Carol followed him out with a can of her own, but hers held ginger ale—a find that had had damn near thrilled her to the point that Daryl wished they could have found a great deal more of it. He'd promised her, though, and T-Dog had agreed, that all they found was hers.
"I hope you don't mind some beef jerky and mystery vegetables out of those cans with no labels," Carol said. "Because there's no electricity and I don't think it's wise to start a fire in there."
"Smells like there's already been a fire in there," T-Dog said. "Like the Marlboro plant burned down in the bathtub."
"We'll be fine for the night on what we got," Daryl offered.
Carol walked around to Daryl's side, opposite of where T-Dog was leaning on the rail, and looked out.
"It's so beautiful here," Carol said. "So quiet and peaceful. I used to love the mountains when I was a little girl, but I haven't been—well, since Ed and I got married."
"I come up a couple times with Merle," Daryl said. "He'd come up here huntin'. Get away from home, sometimes. He'd bring me with him. Hell—we mighta stayed in this motel right here. He was almost always stoppin' at these lil' orange-roof places."
"I didn't really come up this far," T-Dog admitted. "We used to go on vacation to my grandma's house more than anything. She lived in Alabama. There were some hills and all, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't like this."
"Well—unless y'all got objections," Daryl said. "We're lookin' at where the hell we gonna call home right now."
"As long as it ain't this stinkin' ass motel room forever," T-Dog said, "I'm just as satisfied to call this place home as I am any other town."
He let himself back into the motel room. It wasn't long before Daryl could hear the steady grind of the crank-operated can opener as T-Dog took his chances with some of the label-free cans that they'd taken off the shelves of a BiLo they'd raided in the little town that had been frozen in time. The place had been pretty well cleared out. Clearly the town hadn't gone still before people had taken to looting, and clearly the people had realized that they would need food, but they had left behind a lot of stuff. The town had gone still before they'd gotten hungry enough to take their chances. It had gone still before the practice of clearing out every available morsel had come to be the norm.
It was better for them, though. They hadn't gotten as much as they might have hoped, but they'd gotten something at least.
"I opened three cans," T-Dog called from inside the room.
"Yeah?" Daryl responded. "What'd luck decide was for supper?"
"Some kind of greens," T-Dog said, "Carrots, and Kidney beans." He appeared at the door, hanging out of it. "We can fight over who gets what. Ladies get first choice."
"We'll split it three ways," Carol said. "Everybody gets everything. Come on—I'll help you."
Carol followed T-Dog inside and Daryl lit another cigarette to give himself a moment longer to linger outside. He sipped the hot beer which he would likely follow with a second, and he surveyed their surroundings once more.
They would consider the motel something like their base camp until they settled on a place to stay. They'd spend the next day driving around looking for that perfect place to call home. From where they were situated, Daryl could make out clusters of tourist cabins built for renters, and he could make out solitary homesteads dotted around the mountainsides.
He could make out, too, the smoke of fires that he knew weren't burning by accident as it contrasted only slightly with the fog that naturally settled in white around the mountains.
The smoke, the fires, and the people who had clearly built them were something else to be considered—and they would consider all of it when Daryl brought it up to them over a shared dinner of a strange, luck-based vegetable medley—but those pieces of information would only be something they considered insofar as they let them help them decide if they wanted to go toward the fires or to steer clear of them entirely.
It wouldn't be enough to make them leave, though. The mountains had always been home to a great deal of different people, and there was more than enough space to share.
Daryl could feel it in his gut. They might not have found the exact spot where they were going to lay their claim and make their stand, but they were home. All of them.