"A looting we shall go…" Carol sings.

"Stahp."

"A looting we shall go…"

"Stahp." Daryl pushes the accelerator a little harder.

Carol's hair, which is a bit longer and thicker and waiver than it was at the farm, rustles slightly in the wind that whips through her open window. "Hi ho the derry-o…"

"Stahp!"

"A looting we shall go!"

"You got to sing that damn song every time we go on a run?"

"Well I do now that I see how much it riles you up."

Daryl navigates the dark brown four-door sedan around the remnants of a blown tire. The car sports a dent in the rear passenger door, a slightly bent bumper, and scratches all along the driver's side. "Don't know why we got to take this piece of shit when we could have taken my bike."

"Your bike doesn't have much trunk space, Pookie."

She started calling him that last week. He hasn't been able to stop her. "Could of at least taken the sports car. It's the end of the goddamn world, we can finally afford any damn car we want, and this is what we take?"

"I do love that cherry red Porsche," Carol agrees, "but it also doesn't have a lot of space, and this sedan gets this best mileage of any vehicle we have. We need to conserve gas."

"Hell for? The whole damn world is our gas pump now. It's all gonna spoil 'fore we can use it up."

"Well I don't like to suck." Carol turns, smirks, and wiggles an eyebrow. "Gas siphoning hoses, I mean. Given the right pipe, on the other – "

"- Stahp."

"I think you're blushing, Pookie."

"'Cause 'm embarrassed for you."

Carol chuckles. She's been practicing her flirting, she claims. She didn't get a chance to hone the skill while married to Ed. Daryl's not sure who she's honing it for though. It's just the ten of them now, since the farm. They lost Andrea. She may dead. She may be alive. But she's not with them anymore.

"Well that's too bad. It must be terrible having to be embarrassed for your roomie all the time."

They aren't really roomies. They have separate bedrooms. They're more like housemates. Boat housemates to be exact. Rick was anxious to find a place to settle down, so Lori could safely have the baby. They wandered for a while, and when they came across a prison, Rick suggested clearing the place. He said it would be easy to fortify and defend. All those walls and fences.

Daryl thought that was a dumbass idea. The yard alone was crawling with walkers, and the place was likely infested inside. All those prisoner and guards. And he'd seen one with riot gear wandering around outside. Those would be hard to kill. It would take a long time to clear the place, and it would be dangerous work. Someone was bound to get bit. And then the place would be dark and dank and reek of the undead inside.

As Rick continued to insist they clear it, Carol kept giving Daryl the side eye. She's wanted him to be more assertive ever since that night after the farm burned down, wanted him to step up and challenge Rick's leadership, seems to trust him more than Rick for some reason. Well, Daryl knows the reason. Rick kept that secret from them all, about everyone being infected. And then he killed Shane. Sure, he had a good reason, but it wasn't exactly reassuring, the way he blurted it out that night. And sometimes Rick does makes dumbass calls, like chaining Merle to a pipe, or giving half their guns to a nursing home camp that ends up getting slaughtered anyway, or wanting to live in a windowless prison where walkers will likely pile up against the fence.

But what Daryl doesn't understand is why Carol thinks he's such leadership material. Maybe because he was the only one who bothered to keep searching for her little girl, but he failed to find Sophia. It still haunts him, that failure, even though she'd been in the barn all along, and he never stood a chance.

Carol hasn't been quite the same since. She is healing, though. She's grown lighter – lighter than she was under Ed's heavy shadow – but there's a sadness behind those twinkling blue eyes, a twitch in that pretty smile she puts on. And she's grown stronger – stronger than she was under Ed's fat thumb – but it's still Daryl she wants to step up and lead.

He did, at that prison. As he looked over all those walkers crawling the prison yard, he told Rick no. No. Ain't gonna help you clear it. Need to find a camp near fresh water. Someplace less closed in. That prison is a tomb.

Rick grumbled, but he didn't want to clear the place without Daryl's help, and he didn't want Daryl peeling off half the group after him. So they pressed on in search of a better camp. They crossed the Alabama border. It was Daryl's first time setting foot outside the state of Georgia. Carol's, too. They had that in common. They had a lot more in common, actually, than he'd have ever guessed. Small town upbringings. Covered-up abuse. Redneck survival skills – though hers tended more toward the domestic – sewing and mending, filleting and skinning (her skill with a knife had surprised him), making food edible and making it stretch.

They'd made a new camp at last, on a freshwater lake in Alabama, where'd they'd found ten houseboats anchored at the dock. Five of them were solar powered, or at least they used a combination of solar and gas, and had nearly full tanks, as well as extra gas in storage, and then there was the gas they siphoned to store from the fully gas-powered boats. There were only fifteen walkers to clear, and nothing for a mile in either direction along the shore except a locked-up snack stand, a canoe and rowboat rental stand, a bait and tackle stand, and a public restroom. The plumbing doesn't work in the bathrooms on shore, but they have bathrooms on the boats with tanks they hand pump out periodically through hoses into a latrine they dug on shore.

They keep the houseboats docked at the shore during the day, but in the evening, they float on a mile onto the lake and drop anchor, fish a spell, have dinner, and sleep out there, where walkers can't reach, and where bad men can't reach without a lot of noise and notice. They don't even really need a watch out there, though they keep a rotating one just to be safe. They drink the lake water, after filtering it (they've found three good water filters) and then boiling it. Carol and Maggie spent hours one day just storing up drums full of filtered and boiled water.

There's some decent hunting grounds in the forest lining the west side of the lake, and Daryl has bagged them two deer since they settled there. That and the fish make for a steady supply of meat. Rick and Carl and Beth are working on a garden on shore, hoping for some vegetables in the next three months, and there's the canned food they've gathered, and what few snacks still remain from the snack shop. But before winter falls, they want to loot and store as much as they can, so supply runners go out in twos once a week.

The biggest houseboat, with four bedrooms, is occupied by the Grimes family. Glenn and Maggie share one, now that they aren't hiding their relationship from Hershel anymore. Hershel and Beth share another, and T-Dog has his own, the smallest one, "all to his lonesome," as Carol says. The boat Daryl and Carol share has two tiny bedrooms and one bathroom.

Carol circles something on the map she's unfolded on her lap.

"Where we going anyhow?" he asks. "Said you had a plan?"

"Yep. We're hitting all the blood donation centers."

"I need to hang some garlic over my door to keep you away at night?"

"No, Pookie, you've got your personality for that."

"What are you talking about? I'm a fucking delight."

Carol laughs.

"Serious, though, why you want to hit a bunch of blood donation centers?"

"Because there are several in the semi-rural suburbs, where we aren't likely to be swamped by walkers. They're usually in strip malls that have dry cleaners and haircut places and thrift stores – not exactly the sort of malls people were looting at the start. So they might be untouched."

"Don't need stale blood."

"There could be valuable medical supplies, not to mention all the snacks for heroes."

"Heroes?"

"The blood donors? They give them snacks for heroes after they donate blood. Gatorade, bottled water, chips, cookies. I always liked those nutter butter cookies. I sure hope they have some nutter butter cookies left."

"Ain't exactly heroic, lying in a bed, drinking a Gatorade."

"Okay, Debbie Downer. Left at the next light."

"Ain't a bad idea though," Daryl admits as he makes the turn.

Carol smiles and folds the map as Daryl whizzes past an ambling walker and toward the strip mall a half mile down the road.