Through the front window of the van, Carol watched Daryl ride around the lowered orange-and-white-striped parking arm and ease narrowly between it and the next parking booth. T-Dog stopped the van before the gate. Daryl paused on the other side, boots on the pavement, and looked back at them.
"I got it!" Shane shouted out of the open window of the pick-up from behind the van. He reversed, backed up a long way, and pulled over in another parking lot entry lane with another lowered arm gate. He hit the accelerated hard. The pick-up roared down the lane, gaining speed, until it was it shaking. In another few feet, the truck smashed into the wooden parking arm and sent it splintering. Shane slowed to a stop on the other side.
"Well, that's one way to do it," T-Dog said as he reversed the van. He pulled into the other lane before driving cautiously over the splintered pieces of wood and into the wide-open lot of Fun Kingdom.
The caravan carried on toward the front entrance. The parking lot looked vacant except for three of those golf-cart like trains they used to ferry people from their cars to the front gate. Ed had refused to take one when they visited, afraid he might be expected to tip, even though Carol assured him he wouldn't be. That had been a rare good day, except for a few sullen moments on Ed's part. It must be one of the few good family memories Sophia had.
They'd only gone to Fun Kingdom because Sophia had gotten a free kids' ticket at school for her reading program, and Carol had found half-off coupons for their adult tickets. Carol had packed a cooler of food for lunch and dinner and purchased nothing inside the park itself. They'd left home at 6 AM to get there and had left the park at eight in the evening to be home by midnight, so they wouldn't need to stay overnight in a hotel. Still, Ed had complained it was much too expensive and had insisted they would not be coming back again.
At the front circle before the entrance to Fun Kingdom, an empty work truck was parked along the curb, but there were no walkers to be seen anywhere. Daryl pulled up on the handlebars of his motorcycle and hopped the curb near the work truck before roaring up to a turnstile leading to one of the ticket booths. He turned the engine off and dismounted. Shane eased the pick-up truck over the curb, drove it over the wide cement walkaway, and came to a stop near Daryl. T-Dog did the same with the van, and soon everyone was spilling out of doors.
"Better not have put a dent in my pick-up tearing through that gate like that!" Daryl growled at Shane.
Shane laughed and jerked a thumb toward the pale blue beater. "What? This thing? Would you even notice?"
"I'd notice," Daryl assured him.
Rick wandered over to the iron exit gate on the other side of the ticket booths and examined it. Shane hopped the turnstile and went to look over the iron gate over the park's main entryway through a fake castle. The rest of the group lingered near the van and gazed up at the tall fake stone towers on either side of the entryway.
Carol wandered away from the van and up to Daryl, half hugging herself. "So…" she said. "I shot my first walker. I didn't get it on the first shot. But I did kill it on the second."
"Yeah. Saw."
She'd hoped for a little more encouragement than that. "Do you think I did okay?"
"Were you sure of your target and what was beyond it? Were sure there wasn't no one behind that walker?"
"There wasn't," she answered.
"Yeah, but were you sure when you shot?" he asked.
She nodded confidently. "I knew Andrea was to my right, and that Rick and Glenn and Shane were at the car behind me. You were way behind me, keeping watch, and everyone else was in the van."
"Told you that gun is loud. Told you not to shoot it unless you had to."
"Well, I did have to," Carol said with frustration. "That walker was going to kill Lori."
Daryl shrugged. "It's just Lori."
It was the faintest hint of a smile at the edge of Daryl's lips that told Carol he was joking. She laughed slightly. "That's mean. That's terrible."
He smiled a little bit bigger and ducked his head. When he raised it again and met her eyes, she was smiling wider than she meant to, and he was still smiling, too. She covered her mouth to hide her smile. When she'd forced her lips back into a straight line, she lowered her hand. "Seriously, though, did I do okay?"
"Killed it, didn't you?" he asked.
"Yeah. I just…I guess I thought you might have more to say."
"What I look like? A motivational speaker? You done fine."
"Well, I guess that's high praise coming from Daryl Dixon."
"One shot next time," he told her firmly, holding up a single finger.
Carol smiled. "You'd make a good football coach, you know."
"Pfft. I'd have to learn the damn rules first."
"You didn't watch a lot of football?" Carol asked skeptically. Ed watched hours of it a week. He got grumpy if she walked too close to the television or if she got too loud in the kitchen when she was preparing his snacks.
Daryl shrugged. "It was on."
"Ed was the star linebacker of our high school football team."
"Yeah, well, I ain't much of a team player, and I dropped out of high school after I turned 16. Second it was legal. Not that they'd of come looking for me if I'd of done it sooner."
"I did, too. At 16."
Daryl looked at her doubtfully. "Nah," he said.
"My dad died, had no life insurance, and my mom hadn't worked…ever. They got married right out of high school, and she was a stay-at-home wife. She couldn't find a job that paid more than minimum wage. I'd had an after-school, part-time job since I was fourteen at the grocery store, so I was already making a little bit more than she could get to start. I dropped out so I could work fifty hours a week. We were going to lose the house otherwise."
"Damn. Me, I didn't even have a good reason. Except that school was a boring ass waste of time."
"I got my GED eventually," Carol todl him. "But I quit working a year after I married Ed. He didn't like me working." She grimaced to think she'd given in to him and wonder where she might be today if she hadn't. Well, she'd still be in an apocalypse, she supposed, but she might not be so reliant on others.
By now, Rick and Shane had returned from their examinations. "Gather round, everyone!" Rick ordered. "So we can talk about how to get in."
Shane looked a little peeved that Rick was assuming the lead, but he joined the gathering circle.
Daryl, however, walked off.
"Where's he going?" Rick asked.
"It's Daryl," T-Dog said with a shrug.
Rick conceded with an eyebrow shrug of his own and returned his attention to the group. "Now listen up."
"Yeah, listen up," Shane echoed. "We need to make a plan."
"That fence is high," Rick took over, "and it's got spikes at the top. It's not designed for people to sneak in easily. The exit gate has a dead bolt lock on the inside, probably because it's locked from the inside before the park workers leave through the front gate, which I'm guessing they lock from the outside?"
Shane nodded. "With an iron padlock over the deadbolt. I don't see how we can bust through the entry way gate. I don't think we can cut through that padlock with our bolt cutters. Or any bolt cutters. So someone's going to need to go over the fence and open that exit gate from the inside. It's going to be hard to scale. There aren't any footholds. So we need - "
"- to come up with a plan to get inside," Rick cut him off. "Now I think we have a few options here. If we can manage - " He stopped talking and looked over Carol's shoulder toward the parking lot.
She turned to see Daryl carrying a huge extension ladder their way.
"Where'd you get that?" Rick called.
"From the work truck out front," Daryl called back as he continued toward them. "I can climb over, unlock the front gate from the inside, and y'all can just walk through."
"Before we do any of that," Rick insisted, "we need to make sure this place isn't teeming with walkers. Is there anyway we can survey it from up high?"
Sophia pointed to the tall towers of the entry way castle.
"If we extend that ladder all the way," Glenn said. "It'll probably reach."
"I'll do it," Shane volunteered.
"That's a fake tower," Rick said. "Who knows what it's made out of and if it will hold your weight."
"It could hold my weight," Carl suggested.
"No, Carl, you're not going up in some tower," Lori assured him.
"You know, it's not a bad idea," Rick told her. "He'd just be taking a look around."
"And if the thing starts to collapse?" Lori asked.
"We'll catch him," T-Dog suggested.
"Oh, great, that's really reassuring," Lori said.
"I'll do it," Sophia volunteered. "I climbed up all the way into that treehouse." Her daughter was bolder since coming back from that trauma, Carol thought. Sophia had been terrified, but she'd also been forced to use her wits and strength and survive alone for two hours until Daryl could rescue her. Walkers still terrified her, even of the sound of them clomping around last night had, but she seemed to have more confidence in herself. "I'm even lighter than Carl. "
"No, you aren't!" Carl cried.
Sophia put a hand on her hip. "Are you calling me fat?"
"Carl can do it," Rick insisted. He held a half-raised hand out towards Lori and reassured her, "I'll make sure he doesn't get hurt."
Daryl positioned the ladder against one of the towers from the outside and extended it. He stepped back so Rick could hold it for his son.
"You'll have to crawl in between two of those prong things," Andrea told Carl.
"Merlons," Daryl said.
"What?" Andrea asked.
"Merlons," Daryl repeated. "They're called merlons. I know. It's a big word for a man like me. Two whole syllables."
Andrea rolled her eyes. Carl put a foot tentatively on the bottom rung and grasped a rung higher up.
"The gaps 'tween the merlons are called crenels," Daryl told Andrea.
"The whole thing is a parapet," Glenn added a little excitedly, like a kid happy to be getting an answer correct in school. "I know that. I didn't know about…" He looked disappointed in himself. "Merlons and crenels though."
"And how the hell did you know that?" Andrea asked Daryl.
Daryl pointed to a sign near the iron entry way gate, on the bottom of the tower. It contained a diagram of a medieval castle with all of the parts labeled. "'Cause I'm observant."
Andrea shook her head. "You're never going to let me live that criticism down, are you? Look, I'm sorry I made stereotypical assumptions about you based on…" She waved her hand up and down and over him. "Your jagged, torn off shirt sleeves, and your thick accent, and all your knives, and your racist brother."
"Well, sorry I made stereotypical assumptions about you, too," Daryl said.
Rick held the ladder steady while Carl made his slow, careful way up, binoculars around his neck. Lori hovered nervously nearby.
"Wait," Andrea said. "What assumptions did you make about me?"
Daryl shrugged.
"Tell me!" Andrea demanded.
"A'right. Assumed Daddy handed you the keys to your first car when you turned sixteen. You were a good little girl in high school, but then you lost your virginity at a college frat party to some guy you barely knew. Freaked out the next mornin' and went and got the mornin'-after-pill. Daddy paid for all your college tuition, room, and board. And maybe even a little of your law school tuition, too."
Andrea glowered at him.
"What I get wrong?" he asked.
"I'll have you know, my father did not just hand me keys to a car when I was sixteen. I was eighteen and headed off to college and it was my high school graduation present."
Carol snorted. "Sorry," she apologized, and then walked over to Sophia, who was intently watching Carl, and pretended she needed to say something to her.
Carl now climbed between two faux stone merlons into the tower, turned around, and gave a thumbs up to the group below. "It's sturdy!" he hollered. Then he jumped. The tower shook slightly.
"Don't jump!" Lori cried.
Carl threw his head back and probably rolled his eyes, though they couldn't see that. Then he turned forward again, raised the binoculars, and scoured the park in all directions. When he came back down, even more cautiously than he'd gone up, he said, "If there are any walkers in that park, I didn't see them."
"So no packs or herds," Shane said, "that's good."
"But there may be some between buildings," Rick reasoned, "in those wooded areas…maybe even inside the buildings, if there was anyone working here while it was closed and they died suddenly and turned in there. So we have to be cautious."
They repositioned the ladder against the iron fence near the exit gate, and Daryl climbed up it. Carol winced as he swung his leg over, because he looked like he was about to pierce himself on one of the spikes, but instead he seized the top horizontal rail with one hand and settled a boot against a vertical bar. He swung his other leg over very carefully, seized the horizontal bar with both hands, and hung suspended that way for a second before repositioning his hands and shimmying down. He slid the last few feet and landed on his ass, but he merely stood and brushed himself off.
Daryl strolled over to the exit gate and strained to open the deadbolt, which must have been rusted it place. Finally, after hitting it with the palm of his hand several times and then giving it a grunting pull, he managed to slide it free.
Sophia and Carl were the first to line up at the gate. Daryl pulled the gate open, turned his hand palm up, and waved his arm across the large cobblestone circle on the ground in the direction of the grand carousel that was standing across from it. "Welcome to Fun Kingdom."