Maggie thought she could never know terror as strong as she did the day her mother rose from the dead and attempted to eat her brother. Shawn sacrificed himself to save Beth and Patricia, and it took only seventeen hours for him to die of the raging infection introduced by Annette Greene's teeth.
She still remembers him begging that he be placed in the barn before he actually died. Her brother's last hours were filled with fear that he would rise and harm his sisters. Otis carried him for her, laying him carefully in a bed of straw in one of the rickety old animal stalls. Three stalls down, she listened to the growls and thumps of the being that was once the only mother she can actually remember. Sponging off Shawn's sweaty face, she considered ending his pain herself.
Only the unforgivable sin of mercy killing her only brother stayed her hand.
In retrospect, she regrets not taking on that burden. No one ever expected Beth to be the one who snapped under the weight of Hershel's delusions about the undead. The adults failed Beth so completely that it doesn't surprise her that her sister spent almost all her time with the two newcomer teens and the convalescing deputy.
The world has far stronger ideas about what Maggie can survive. Hearing Daryl shout and his crossbow fire outside the house nearly froze her with terror. Once she was outside, all she could do was pray the injured deputy is as good as his partner and his sly ego imply. She knew her scream for him and the kids to run was heard, because she saw the movement past the barn going too fast to be walkers.
Then she was dragged into the rhythm of the fight, helping Glenn circle the house and praying they can buy enough time for the others to get loaded up and escape. It took several hours for everyone to regroup at the old highway where Rick's people once huddled under vehicles from a herd much like the one flooding Maggie's childhood home. Waiting until morning, there's no sign of Shane or the children.
Lori and Carol cling to each other, faces growing more bleak as even the bright light of day brings no cocky deputy and his three musketeers, as Glenn dubbed them. Leaving the two women behind with Dale, Patricia, and Otis and Patricia's seventeen year old son, Jimmy, Rick divides everyone up into vehicles to search, one native to one of Rick's people except for Daryl.
At least the stranded cars prove a motherload of fuel, once Daryl teaches them how to siphon gas even past modern safeguards. Having a mechanic in the group is invaluable. Following the search grid Rick and Daryl lay out, she and Glenn set off to search the farms north and then northeast of Maggie's home.
Daryl heads into the woods, reluctantly accepting Andrea as a search partner. The blonde looks pleased when he grumbles she's the only damned one older than sixteen that can walk quietly. The territory directly north of the farm is not farmland, so they have a lot of ground to cover.
They hope the handheld radio the pair carries can reach the ones in the cars. Daryl, Glenn, and Dale did a good job of rigging radios into their vehicles gleaned from the abandoned ones on the highway. At least the lack of signal interference from cell phones and other electronics helps the radios work better.
On the morning of the third day after the farm fell, they're still looking. Daryl and Andrea didn't even come back in the two nights that passed since that first terrible night. Radioing in their lack of success, they camp in the woods. It's hard to picture sleek, city girl Andrea managing roughing it in the woods, but Daryl hasn't lost her in a hole somewhere at least.
Maggie slides back into the driver's seat before noon and tries not to let her frustration boil over onto Glenn. Her boyfriend looks as wrung out as she feels, yet another house is a dead end. This one feels worse, because it is a cluster of four houses, all extended family. Maggie knew most of them, and the reality of putting down the eleven year old she once babysat for a church member is breaking her heart.
Glenn drags her into his arms, letting her sob out her grief over this once bright and boisterous family being gone. The fear that they'll find her sister this way eats at her, too. Once her tears subside, he offers her a handkerchief, which makes her smile a little.
"Aren't you a little young for these?"
He just smiles sheepishly. "Dale gave it to me."
How like the elder man to realize at some point Maggie's composure was going to snap.
"We should radio in." It's Rick's orders, honed from missing persons searches before. No one wants to lose a searcher looking for their lost sheep.
Glenn reaches for the mike. They don't keep the volume up, too wary of noise out in the field, so all coordination goes through Dale at the moment. As soon as Dale replies, his sorrowful tone tells them something is badly wrong before he elaborates.
"Daryl and Andrea found something, but it's not good news. Bloody and discarded clothing turning northeast of the farm."
Maggie's heart sinks. On foot, in the dark, with the only adult still recovering from a gunshot wound that affects his mobility? The odds were against their survival.
"Whose?" Glenn asks, looking heartbroken. It reminds Maggie that it might be her sister missing, but Glenn's got three of his people lost, two of them children.
"Sophia and Carl's."
It's a terrible thing to feel grateful that her sister's name isn't mentioned, not with both other children listed. She knows it isn't even a guarantee Beth is safe. It just means she didn't leave any signs behind. Maggie's baby sister could be walking in that herd, clothing tattered and intact.
"Do we keep searching?" Glenn asks, after he clears his throat twice to manage it.
"Rick wants you to regroup at the highway. Daryl is going to keep tracking the herd. Search around the edges to see if any tracks veer off."
"We'll head back." Glenn hooks the mike back on the radio and slaps the dash furiously. It takes him a while to calm down, and he scrubs tears off his face.
Maggie crumples the map on the seat between them in frustration. They had four more areas to clear, arcing out from this little neighborhood to end at the old Collins farm due east of the Greene farm. It was put off until today to give the herd time to clear the area.
Heart heavy, she drives back toward grieving people and gives thanks that they don't seem to want to abandon the search entirely.
As snarling and standoffish as Daryl tends to be around anyone other than the children of the group, Andrea can't really feel surprised when the man carefully bags the bloody remnants of Carl's red shirt and Sophia's battered canvas shoe and promptly punches a tree with an incoherent cry of rage. He may not care much for any adult, maybe even including his asshole brother most of the time, but the feral redneck has a soft spot for kids.
Three days of trekking through the woods at his heels, desperately listening to every scrap of lesson he sends her way, she's gotten a better feel for his prickly personality than she did in the months prior. As long as she respects what he does, the man will answer almost any question about his skill in the woods. But he's hurt and vulnerable right now, so she wisely backs off.
Offering the man comfort right now would be akin to jabbing a wounded grizzly with a cattle prod.
It's not that her gut doesn't churn with the memory of losing her sister. Amy might have been almost a decade older than the teens who fled into the woods, but the thought of any of them falling to a walker's teeth like her sister did makes her understand Daryl's need to scream and punch things all too well. She doesn't, because she honestly isn't sure she would ever stop screaming if she starts.
Daryl scrubs at his eyes, just as he did that day in the quarry after he learned Merle was left behind. "No signs of them here. They're either walking or stayed mobile a while."
"We keep tracking like we promised?" she asks, fists gripping into the material of her pants to keep her emotions in check.
"Course." Daryl stalks off, body language as shut off as it was the day they first met.
Andrea doesn't ask any questions, even if she only understands half his movements now. She just covers his back, taking her machete to a half dozen stray walkers even as Daryl downs his own share with his crossbow. The trail of destruction doesn't help a damn bit.
They exit the treeline on a farm similar to Hershel's, and Daryl reaches out to snatch her back under cover. As they look out on the farm, it seems like ants cover the place, if they could be human sized.
"Jesus," she whispers. "Think someone is trapped in there?"
Daryl shakes his head, so close she can feel the movement. "They ain't agitated. Seems like they lost momentum. Got stalled out for some reason."
Studying the herd, she understands. It reminds her of watching the big clusters in Atlanta, before Rick stirred them up. The things seemed almost sleepy and moved aimlessly, just like these.
The walkers trampled the crops left to die in the field. Andrea studies the far away farmhouse, noting architectural details that might help mark it off their list. After studying the herd a while himself, Daryl sighs.
"Gotta backup and track the edges, now that we know where they went. Don't see any kids, at least."
Her heart lurches when she realizes that's what he was scanning for. Small, petite walkers that resembled children he's been helping keep fed and safe. With one last scan herself for the same, she follows him back into the woods.
Lunch on the third day is hot and oppressive in the attic. The kids are doing their best to cope with the heat, smell, dim lighting, and fear-laced boredom. Shane edges the blankets up, glad the windows proved well maintained and noiseless when he slid them up.
An experiment about half a day trapped in the heat showed the walkers don't seem to notice the children's quiet voices. They're too high up for the sound to focus. He's taped the blankets to allow a breeze, glad the late homeowner put screens on the windows. Not everyone bothers with those on the attic windows.
"They still out there?" Sophia asks, carefully opening a can of black beans to add to the Spaghetti-Os in their little cookpot. She suggested the odd combination, saying one of her friends' dads had a funny cookbook that called it Spaghetti-O Western with cheese and green onions added.
It's one of dozens of stories the children exchanged quietly over the past two and a half days. They've even coaxed Shane into youthful stories, ones he keeps to his and Rick's middle school or younger years. His high school ones aren't something he is sharing with kids he's responsible for.
They have resorted to mock lessons now and then. All three are fascinated that he speaks Spanish and game for vocabulary lessons. Beth teaches finger positions for clarinet, imparting music knowledge where she can't teach them to actually play. Sophia is the little artist, teaching the kids little sketch techniques on scraps of cardboard using the pen from the Yahtzee game. Carl's nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Marvel comics is a storytime treat for all of them.
"Yeah. It's like whatever they were looking for disappeared and they stalled out."
Beth unwraps a peppermint and pops the little candy in her mouth, thinking hard about something. "I think daddy's farm is the only one around with animals. Otis either collected them or set them free. They were probably attracted to those, right?"
"Yeah. We gotta wait until something draws them away." Shane checks the water levels in their containers. He slipped downstairs yesterday, dipping water out of the filled clawfoot tub in both buckets and risking a trickle of water into the empty water jugs. They'll last another day there, and the food will hold out until then easily.
No one's had a real appetite thanks to the heat and smell, so they've rationed themselves without planning to. Even emptying the toilet bucket on the water trip only helped so much.
"Carl sleeping?" he asks quietly, taking Sophia's empty food cans and tucking them with the rest of the trash.
Beth reaches out and gently shakes the boy's shoulder. Carl snores just a little, making her smother a giggle. She reaches out and takes the bandana that slid onto the pillow, dipping it into the bowl of water they've been sparing for trying some sponging to cool their skin. Laying the damp cloth across Carl's forehead, they watch him settle a little as the breeze catches the damp.
The boy is struggling to sleep, as all of them do, to the point they're sleeping in shifts just to not have anyone's body heat too close. Carl seems to have lost the ability to sleep at night entirely. Shane's surprised Beth hasn't crashed as well, because the girl sat up playing card game after card game with Carl.
"Need to change your bandages, Sophia. You got a minute?"
She peers into the pot of food and nods. Shane envies the kids their lesser height, because all of them can stand up straight in the peak. Bringing the first aid kit to him, she peeks carefully out the window.
"There's so many." She shudders even as she lets him peel away the sweaty bandage on her arm.
They are lucky so far. There's still no sign of inflammation or infection. Shane slathers on antibiotic cream and reapplies a bandage, hating that it slows the healing process. He can't risk it, not in an attic that probably has decades of dust and dead bugs lurking.
"You think everyone else is okay?"
Unvoiced, is her mother okay, he thinks. Carol is slowly coming out of her shell and joined in the first shooting lesson he gave everyone, but he turned the adults over to Rick once the kids got started.
"Yeah, I bet they were. Remember the gunfire? I'll bet that was a distraction to let folks get to vehicles, because there were too many to actually overpower without running out of ammo."
She smiles slightly, leaning in for a hug. "Don't want to burn lunch."
Shane leans back against the wall next to the window as the two girls smirk over some shared joke. He doesn't have a damned clue what to do if something doesn't distract the herd soon. They can't stay up here forever, and he can't imagine how frantic their parents are right now.
Rubbing at his hair, going too long and shaggy, he allows himself to let go of the worry as the girls smother giggles. He's kept them safe. That'll count for something.
A/N: Multiple POVs in this, opting for ones I don't usually write. I wanted to sideswipe the fear and grief without being in one of the actual parents' minds.
Yes, the mistaken belief that Shane and the kids are dead will persist, sadly. It won't last ages, but long enough for Shane and the kids to bond and adventure, not realizing they're thought dead.
Puppies in the next chapter.
