Chapter 5

They started moving again when the rain slowed, but as they covered the short distance back to the house it turned to sleet, and then to hail. Daryl sucked a breath between his teeth and tightened his grip on the steering wheel but didn't make any further comments.

Winter had arrived.

It's not that winters this far south in Georgia were particularly harsh, they weren't. During the day, most of the time a long-sleeved shirt and maybe a jacket was plenty warm enough. But it was a different story after the sun went down, with the temperature often falling enough that a man who was sleeping rough could freeze to death in the night.

Winter was about more than bein' cold, though. The whole time they were carrying supplies into the house, Daryl was counting things. Firewood was still too low. He didn't have a clue how to fix the generator, and that's what powered the well pump and would've given them water inside the house. They were still carrying water from the outside pump into the house in buckets, and he didn't know what they'd do if that froze up. They had a few crates of the bottled stuff, but they needed to find containers to fill and keep inside just in case. They'd not fixed themselves an outhouse yet, they were just carrying water into the house in buckets and using it to flush the toilets. That wasn't a long-term plan.

He didn't know anything about plumbing. Merle did, but Merle wasn't here. Hell, if Merle were here the generator woulda likely been fixed the first day.

By the time they'd stacked their haul in what had been Herschel's dining room, they were both soaked to the bone and the sound of hail hitting the windows was making him jumpy. The downstairs windows had mostly been broken out before they'd boarded them up, so that was the upstairs windows taking that beating. Walkers didn't have any way of getting up there, but if they lost those there wouldn't be any keeping the inside of the house warm.

Damn it.

"Daryl?"

"We still got a couple weeks before it really hits," he said, answering the question he was sure she was about to ask. "We're fine."

She gave him her half smile, nodding, "We're better than fine. I'm going to build the fire. We'll dry off a bit, warm up, and then we'll poke around in this haul and decide what would be nice for supper."

Her head was tilted, and she was looking at him like she had a whole bunch of questions that she just wasn't asking. Maybe she hadn't been about to tell him how woefully unprepared for the cold part of the year they were, after all. Sometimes he forgot that she likely got all her food from the grocery store for the whole of her life. That she just pushed a few buttons on her wall and the house she was in was warm.

The first time Merle went to juvie it had been winter. Daryl remembered piling all their clothes on top of himself and curling into a ball, wishing for the warmth of his big brother at his back, shivering. He remembered being so distracted by the cramping of his stomach and the fuzzy, dizzy feeling of going too long without anything to eat that he didn't hear the old man coming.

Winter made you weak if you weren't ready for it.

He shook his head and said, "Sounds good," because she looked like she was waiting for him to answer.

An hour later, they were arranged in their nest of mattresses and blankets, staring at each other over bowls of kraft mac & cheese.

"I thought it would be bad without butter and milk."

He shrugged. "Never tried it that way. Always just added the water." It felt like the most idiotic conversation he ever had.

Carol sighed. "Are you going to tell me what I did, or are you going to make me guess?"

"The hell you talkin' about?"

"Somewhere between playing three questions and getting the supplies inside, you got mad at me."

"Ain't mad at nobody!"

She rolled her eyes and said, "Because you're acting like nothing's wrong."

Well, shit. "Ain't everything about you. Just thinkin' is all. Not mad."

"Fine," Carol said.

Her voice was clipped, and now he really was starting to get mad.

"You mad at me, now? 'Cause I said I ain't mad?"

She sighed, and turned back to her dinner. After a while, she said, "I'm sorry. You're right, it isn't all about me. Do you want to tell me what's bothering you?"

"No," he said. It came out a little harsher than he meant for it to.

Now she was staring at him again. He didn't like being stared at.

He wanted the comfortable feeling they'd had on the run back. He knew better than to think that was happening any time soon. He stood up, then picked up his bow. "I'm goin' on watch. Get some sleep."

The window they usually climbed out of to get to the roof was cracked, and outside balls of ice half the size of his palm were scattered around. He could see the cracks in the windshield of the SUV from where he was, and he bit out a curse.

Walker could push its way through that easy, now. That meant if they did any more runs they would have to be small and short, getting only what would fit in a bag and could be carried on the bike.

He worried at the problem until it was time to wake Carol and switch out watch.

When he got back downstairs, though, he had a hard time walking across the room and waking her. She was snoring softly, which she usually didn't do. Her face was red and her eyes were puffy lookin'. Daryl figured he knew too much about what she looked like when she'd been cryin', and he sure as hell was the cause of it more than he should be.

He woke her without looking at her, mumbled a good night under his breath, and tried to make his head quiet down enough to go to sleep.

What felt like a heartbeat later, Daryl hovered in the space between sleep and waking, enjoying the warmth of the blankets and the smells of breakfast filling the room. It was a strange feeling, but not an unpleasant one. He knew that any minute now his brain would catch up to his body and he would be on his feet and decided what needed doing first, but that all seemed very far away.

He could hear Carol shuffling around in front of the fireplace, humming an unfamiliar tune under her breath.

"Coffee's ready when you are," she said softly. He wondered how long she'd known he was awake.

He tried to say he was going to lay here another few minutes. It came out as something between a moan and a grumble.

Carol laughed at him, soft and silky sounding, and he started to feel that strange contented feeling melting away.

He cursed when it escaped him, only to be replaced by the too familiar headachy feeling of getting half enough sleep.

Carol shook her head at him, "How are you this morning?"

"Need coffee," he answered, pushing himself to his feet and stumbling toward her. It was about then that the memory from yesterday hit him. Carol didn't look upset. In fact, she looked exactly as she usually did in the morning, fresh and new and ready to start over. He suspected that some mornings it was more of an act than others, but he was still piecing together that theory.

Could be she was actually one of them morning people folks talked about. Daryl always figured they were a myth. Nobody woke up that happy.

"You feeling better?" Carol asked the question softly, keeping her attention on what was quickly becoming their breakfast.

Daryl sighed. "Gotta be. Figure I'll take another look at that generator today, but not for long. If I ain't managed to fix it yet, I ain't gonna waste another day tinkerin' with the damned thing. Give it a look and go from there. Winter stuff was likely in the barn, but there might be some bubble wrap and tape up in the attic or somethin'. Find that, we can get started wrapping the insides of the windows. You want to have a look around for that while I give that machine one more try?"

She smiled at him, and handed him his morning cup of coffee.

Carol rationed everything, but she still gave them each two cups of coffee a day like they weren't using the last of it in the world. She said that it wouldn't keep forever, anyway, and that they ought to enjoy some things as long as they could.

Daryl didn't look forward to running out of coffee any more than he looked forward to running out of cigarettes. But he'd already decided he wasn't letting himself think about those things today.

"So last night was about winter," Carol said.

She very carefully made it a statement, but he felt the question simmering underneath.

He shrugged. "Don't like winter. 'specially since we couldn't hunt enough in the fall, cause we ain't got a system worked out for storing meat. Winter ain't nothing but cold and wind and assholes with cabin fever." He hadn't meant to add that last part, but he didn't draw attention to it by taking it back.

People got messed up in the living room instead of somewhere else more often in the winter. They didn't go to bars to drink, or find hookers for other purposes, and they sure didn't go out and find strangers to get into fight with. The woods were empty and cold, the house was dangerous, and Daryl hated winter.

Carol sipped her coffee. "We'll insulate around the broken windows as much as we can, and there are a lot more blankets in the house than we're using. We have enough food, even if a lot of it seems to be canned beets and pickles. We really are going to be fine, as long as we don't end up having to run. And there's no way of predicting that, so all we can do is be as prepared as we can. And learn to love beets."

"Herschel liked beets," Daryl muttered, shooting her a look that made his disagreement obvious.

He liked the expression she made when she was amused but thought that it would be mean to laugh. It felt a lot like she'd forgiven him last night's mood.

"I shouldn't have pushed," she said. "You told me it wasn't about me."

"We gonna talk this to death? I ain't mad. Never was. You?"

She sighed. "Of course not. I didn't have any reason to get angry. I wasn't angry last night."

The emphasis she put on angry told him enough. "You cried."

She blinked at him, then looked away. "Not everything is about you. Drop it."

Oh.

Well, shit. And the morning had been going so well.

He jerked a nod in her direction and finished off his coffee. It was time to get to work was all. He wasn't running from her like the hounds of hell were after him or anything.

He didn't avoid her all day, either, they just each had their own tasks to see too. They'd not found a single sheet of plastic they could use around the windows, so Daryl spent the entire day chopping wood and killing Walkers.

He killed six, and it bothered him. They hadn't seen that many close to the house since they'd first cleared the place. The house itself was secure for anything short of another huge herd of the things, but he really wished he'd managed to get his hands on at least some barbed wire fencing and got that up.

He didn't let himself think about how much more they could have gotten done with a dozen people than they got done with two. Hell, if they'd had a dozen people they wouldn't have had near enough food.

Trade-off, he figured.

And obsessing over details like that weren't doing a damned a thing to make him feel any better.

Dinner was canned beans, potatoes that had been wrapped in foil and shoved into the ashes of the fire, and johnny cakes. The fried corn bread was still warm when Carol handed him his plate, and he caught himself gawking at her.

"This is too much."

"I'm in charge of keeping up with what we have. We have plenty. Eat."

Damn, it was good. "You got a real gift," he said around a mouthful of food.

She rolled her eyes at him. "I heat up food."

"Naw. I mean it. Eatin' better than – ," he stopped, then thought the hell with it and admitted, "better than I ever have. Gonna get fat, you keep it up."

Patches of red started at the bottom of her neck and worked their way up to her cheeks.

"So," Carol said, "want to play three questions?"

Hell no, he didn't want to do that. But he did want that feeling back, the comfortable feeling he'd had before he let the inside of his head make everything weird, so he said, "You go first this time," and set about getting himself comfortable.