Beth surfaced slowly from the deep ocean of sleep, stretching her limbs and enjoying the cocooning warmth of the floral quilt still tucked in around her. Rolling over, she squeezed her eyes shut against the midmorning light streaming into the room through the filmy white curtains.
Midmorning! She shot upright, swinging her feet to the floor and pushing them into her shoes. Where is he? she thought. He was supposed to wake me for my watch hours ago!
A wave of dread washed through her, clearing out the last of the cobwebs. How had she slept so long? Despite her fear for Daryl, she noted that she felt more rested and alert than she had since—well, since the day long months ago when the first walker had crossed over the creek onto her family's farm. She chided herself for letting down her guard so completely. Sleeping in was part of the old life. She blamed the exhaustion.
Last night's long journey down that twisted and potholed dirt road had seemed to last years, at least. Daryl had insisted on running without the headlights, just in case. They navigated the turns and dips of the road with only the pale moonlight sifting down through the pines to guide their way. Several times they had to stop and clear fallen logs and encroaching branches from their path. Beth kept watch on the surrounding woods while Daryl did the heavy lifting, taking care not to put too much pressure on his bruised wrist. He was pretty sure now that there was no permanent damage; just a deep soreness that would probably ease within a few days. The second time they were forced to stop, as Daryl strained under the weight of a rotted out birch, a scrawny female walker dressed in the shreds of a diaphanous nightgown had loomed out of the woods like a ghost from a children's story. She didn't even make a sound; it was just luck that Beth was looking in that direction when she emerged. Too tired for fear, Beth stepped neatly to the side when the walker lurched toward her, turning to dispatch the creature with a coolly efficient stab to the temple. The woman crumpled almost softly to the ground, and Beth found herself for the first time in a long time wondering who she had been when she was alive.
Every little while they had passed another drive or side road, but Daryl seemed determined to put as much distance as possible between them and whatever pursuit might come in search of the dead men back at the funeral home. The grim set of his jaw and the forbidding look on his face told Beth that he was still dwelling on the words of their attackers. She shivered at the thought of what would have happened if those men had succeeded in taking her. Gratefully, she reached out and laid a tentative hand on Daryl's shoulder, just needing the reassurance of contact. The tension in his face eased slightly at her touch, and when Beth pointed out another open side road that dipped to the right and curved away into the woods, he turned into it. Two miles later, a tall fence appeared along the right side of the road. They found the gate—closed—a hundred yards down, and Daryl jimmied open the rusty catch to let Beth pull the car through, and then closed it behind them. The short wooded drive opened into a large clearing, and that was where they found the house.
It was two stories and either white or pale yellow; it was hard to tell in the darkness. All the windows were dark, and, apart from the song of the crickets, silence reigned.
They parked the car and approached like two shadows, alert and quiet as they made a perimeter check of the entire structure. All the windows were still intact, an increasingly rare find. When Daryl turned the knob on the back door, it opened silently into a disused kitchen. The air was stale inside the house, and in the moonlight, Beth could see a fine layer of dust over the table and floors. Nobody had been here in a while. Still, they had to clear all the rooms. Perhaps the people who had lived here had died and turned here, too.
In the end, it didn't take very long. Daryl had hollered a hello, then made a racket slamming the kitchen cupboards to try to draw out the dead, but nothing stirred in the stillness that followed. Together they moved through the first floor—the kitchen, a living room furnished with secondhand sofas and a rag rug, a bathroom—now useless of course—and a small study. One whole wall in the study was full of bookshelves, and there was a worn wooden desk facing the room's one large window. Beth was reminded of her father's study back at the farm, a homely room where he would spread out his Bible and his reference books as he studied the Scriptures.
Upstairs, they discovered another bathroom and three bedrooms, all with doors wide open. As unlikely as it seemed, the house was empty.
"I'll take first watch," Daryl volunteered, pushing her gently toward one of the bedrooms. She knew he was as tired as she was, but before she could object, she caught sight of the full sized bed in the largest bedroom, piled high with pillows and blankets, and felt a wave of exhaustion sweep away her altruistic urges. He saw the surrender in her face and grinned. "I'm gonna go down and watch from the front room."
She had shaken the dust from the quilted bedspread and slipped beneath the sheets, falling instantly and dreamlessly asleep.
Daryl should have traded places with her somewhere in the wee hours.
Fully awake now and alert for signs of danger, she carefully opened the door of the bedroom and listened hard. When no sounds reached her, she made her way downstairs, her knife hand before her as she balanced lightly on the balls of her feet the way Daryl had taught her to avoid giving away her position with a noisy footfall.
She slowed as she reached the last few steps, and was surprised to hear what sounded like muttered cursing. Relieved, she recognized Daryl's voice and rounded the corner into the sun-filled kitchen.
There he was, crouched on the floor over an old one-burner propane backpacking stove, attempting to light the burner. He was concentrating so hard on what he was doing that he didn't seem to notice her.
"Ain't this a sight?" she teased. At the sound of her voice, he jerked and tipped backwards over his heels, landing with an undignified grunt on his butt.
Beth hid her smile of amusement and offered her hand to help him up. He gave her a wry look and got to his feet without assistance. "Some lookout I am, huh?" He nudged the tiny stove with his boot. "Was tryin' to get this goin' so I could surprise you. Been a while since we had a hot breakfast." He didn't meet her eyes, but her heart squeezed a little at the hint of vulnerability in his words.
"Is that why you didn't wake me up for my watch?" she asked.
He nodded once. "You needed the sleep," he said shortly. "And I found this contraption tucked up in that corner there, so I've been tryin' to figure it out."
She was touched. She put a hand on his arm and waited until he raised his eyes to hers. "Thank you," she said simply. His mouth twitched up at the corners in an almost smile, and he knelt back down to reexamine the stove.
Beth crouched down beside him to take a look. "Did you prime it?" she asked. Daryl looked at her blankly. "Here, let me take a look."
She picked up the small stove and shook it. A sloshing sound assured her that there was still fuel inside. Grasping the handle, she gave it a few quick pumps, then released a tiny bit of the pressurized fuel into the priming cup. Lighting it with one of the matches Daryl had been using, she waited a few moments, then slowly opened the fuel line, causing a circle of blue flame to spring up under the stove's one burner.
Daryl looked agape at her. "How'd you know how to do that?" he asked.
She smiled a little sadly. "My dad used to take us camping a lot. We each had to carry our own gear and learn to use it." She looked at Daryl curiously. "I thought you'd have known, too, all that time you've spent in the woods."
He shrugged. "Didn't have anything fancy. I always did my cooking with a stick over the fire. It was just me, most of the time, so I kept it simple."
Beth almost opened her mouth to comment, but stopped herself. Daryl spoke without an ounce of self-pity, and he wouldn't want hers. Instead she asked, "And what were you planning on cooking, Mr. Dixon, once you got this stove going?"
Daryl's face lit up as he reached in his bag and produced with a flourish two cans of Spam. "I found these in one of the cupboards. Breakfast of champions."
Beth had never tasted Spam—before or after the turn. She examined the cans dubiously as Daryl balanced a frying pan, also presumably pillaged from the kitchen, on top of the stove burner. He made short work of removing the meat from the cans and soon had several fat slices sizzling in the skillet. The aroma quickly banished any misgivings Beth had about Spam. It smelled heavenly.
Searching through several kitchen drawers, she came up with a couple of stainless steel forks, and they sat cross-legged around the small stove, eating the juicy, crispy slabs of meat right out of the pan. It was hot, and Beth tried to slow down to avoid burning her tongue, but it had been too long since yesterday's lunch. Within two minutes, it was all gone. Beth had a temporary urge to pick up the pan and lick it clean. Daryl snickered as if he could read her mind. "Guess you like it, then."
She grinned sheepishly. "Guess so." Standing up, she tossed the forks into the frying pan and headed for the back door. "Since you cooked, I'll do the dishes."
Daryl leapt swiftly to his feet and stopped her with a hand on her arm. "We ain't checked the whole property yet. Why don't you wait on those while we see what's what?"
It was a good suggestion, a careful one, and she should have thought of it herself. Something about sleeping in a real bed and the quiet peacefulness of the old farmhouse had dulled the edge of her usual vigilance. She knew that was dangerous. This was no longer a world where you could let your guard down.
With Daryl and his crossbow in the lead, they paced their way around the perimeter of the property, following the line of the wooden fence that encircled it, using the cover of the trees and outbuildings for stealth where they could. The fence was well-made, about five feet high and constructed of thick 2x8 pieces of lumber nailed horizontally to sturdy fence posts placed every few feet along the length of the fence.
The half of the property that fronted the road was deeply wooded. At the gate where they had entered, Daryl checked to make sure the sliding bolt was still closed. It would hold off a small crowd of walkers, but anyone with a working brain could still operate the mechanism and come through. Still, the house was invisible from the road, which was good. The back half of the property opened up to reveal the house, a faded blue barn, and two outbuildings.
They checked out the smallest one first. It contained a collection of tools: shovels, rakes, a post hole digger, saws of various sizes, a lawn mower, and two machetes hung from pegs on the wall. The opposite wall held a small but well-stocked tool bench. A search of the drawers revealed the predictable assortment of screwdrivers, hammers, nails, and various pieces of hardware. An LED lantern, the kind that could be recharged kinetically, with a crank charger on the side of the case. Beth raked away some of the cobwebs with her hand before taking down first one, then the other of the machetes. Stepping out of the shed, she took a few practice swings with each of them before selecting one and tucking it carefully under her belt. She felt better. She had escaped from the funeral home with just one blade. Now that she had something with a little more heft, her steps grew more confident.
The second small building was just a few steps from the back door of the house and partially underground. Half a concrete block steps led down to the door, which was locked. Daryl lifted his boot, preparing to aim a kick at the knob, but Beth stopped him with a quick, "Wait!" Without explanation, she flew back to the tool shed and rifled through the drawers of the tool bench. In the third one, she found what she was looking for—two loose keys she had remembered seeing among the jumbled mass of nuts and bolts. She ran back and handed them to Daryl, whose skeptical face turned surprised when the first key turned easily in the lock.
"Knew I kept ya around for somethin'," he joked. Beth elbowed him playfully. A tiny smile tugged at his lips before he resumed his defensive posture and pushed the door inward. Cool, dry air emanated from the opening. After pausing for a moment, Daryl swung the door wider. Beth held her knife hand loosely out in front of her and stepped into the darkness.
It was hard to see anything in the gloom, but they didn't hear anything, either, which she supposed was a good sign. Daryl stood so close to her that even though they weren't touching, she could feel his body heat on her back through her thin shirt. Her involuntary shiver had nothing to do with the cool of the cellar.
Slowly their eyes adjusted to the dark, and shapes appeared in the faint light filtering into the cavelike building from outside. "Daryl," Beth breathed, "look at all of it!"
The walls were covered with shelves, and stacked upon the shelves were row upon row of neatly labeled containers. She strained her eyes to make out the labels: "Flour", "Dried Fruit", "Rice", "Powdered Eggs", "Beef Soup Mix", and on and on. "I know what this is," Beth continued excitedly. "Long term food storage!" She ran her fingers wonderingly over one of the white plastic buckets. "It's all sealed up so it will keep for a long time. It should still be good."
"How do you know?" Daryl asked, keeping an eye on the door.
"My friend Jackie was Mormon," she explained, "and they had a big room in their basement looked just like this. We got in trouble once for breaking into a bucket full of dried apples, lookin' for a snack." She chuckled at the memory.
Daryl took in the size of the room and guessed, "There's probably enough stuff here to keep us goin' for months. It's hard to believe. Somebody musta seen it all coming down and prepared for it." Beth stepped out into the sunlight. Daryl glanced at the shelves one more time before following her, turning to relock the door as he left.
"Question is," he continued, "where'd they go?"
They found the answer in the barn.