Carol watched Sophia slap the leather reigns of an unmoving carousel horse and cry, "Giddyup!"
On an equally still horse next to her, Carl raised one arm and twirled it as if spinning a lasso.
The horses wore chainmail, and they appeared to be pulling a war chariot with great wheels. This section of the park, near the main entryway, was labeled The Kingdom of Rome.
They'd driven the vehicles through the open exit gate and parked them before the entryway carousel, where the group was now waiting for Daryl to finish casing the park. He'd suggested riding his motorcycle all around it before they went in any farther as group. If there were any walkers, he reasoned, they'd be drawn out by the sound of the engine, and he could dispense with them.
Carol listened as the roar of Daryl's motorcycle engine faded to a distant purr. She grew nervous when she couldn't hear it anymore. "Think he stopped?" she asked Rick, who was supervising the playing kids with her. The rest of the group was lingering by the van, looking at park maps, and discussing what to loot first.
"Maybe," Rick answered. "Maybe he saw a walker and had to kill it. Or he might just be too far away to hear. This park is huge."
It had taken them a long time walk the place, Carol reasoned, back when they visited. Still, the silence worried her. "Can't you check in with him on your walkie talkie?" Shane had given Daryl his for the course of this mission.
"If you want." He unclipped his walkie talkie and pressed the button. "Daryl, come in." He let go the button and waited, but there was no response. He raised it to his mouth again, "Hey, Daryl! Come in!"
Carol glanced toward the kids, back to the vehicles where the rest of the group was pointing to maps, and then at the walkie talkie again.
"Daryl, come in!"
No response. Now Rick looked nervous.
"Should we go looking for him?" Carol asked. "Should we send - "
Rick held up a finger to silence her, and then she heard it, the distant purr of the motorcycle engine. Her muscles unwound with relief as the roar gradually grew louder and louder.
When Daryl was finally back before the carousel and the other vehicles, the kids slid off their horses, and the group reconvened by the vehicles.
"Why weren't you coming in when I called you?" Rick asked with worried annoyance.
Daryl looked down at the walkie talkie clipped to his belt. "Oh. Huh. Forgot to turn the damn thing on. Sorry." He pulled it off his belt and handed it back to Shane.
"Carol was worried abut you!" Rick scolded.
Daryl looked up from his bike at Carol with a furrowed brow as though he wasn't accustomed to having anyone worry about him. "Didn't draw any walkers," he said. "Didn't even see any. But the door to the security office was wide open. A guard or two might of been working when everything went to shit. Died and turned and wandered off somewhere in this park. So, we still got to be on the lookout. But there can't be many in here."
"Be careful," Rick warned. "Kids, always stick with someone who's armed. Which is…" he looked around. "All of us now I guess." His eyes fell on his wife. "Except Lori. You should learn to shoot, honey."
"You know how I feel about guns," she told him. "I learned gun safety because I knew they were going to be in the house. But I never had any interest in them myself. I don't like them."
"Well, you don't have to like them," Rick replied. "You just have to learn to shoot them. I'll start teaching you tomorrow. Unless you'd rather not have me as your instructor. In which case I hear Daryl's a good firearms instructor."
Lori rolled her eyes toward Daryl skeptically and then back to Rick.
"You, too, Carl." Rick rested a hand affectionately on the boy's head. "You're getting lessons."
"Awesome!"
"Whoa, whoa, hold up now," said Lori, raising a hand. "He's only twelve."
"I was twelve when I shot my first rifle," Rick said. "How old were you, Shane?"
"Eleven," Shane answered. "How about you, Daryl?"
"Mean alone?" Daryl asked looking a little confused by these numbers.
"No," Shane clarified. "With the supervision of your dad. Or whoever."
"I was five I guess, when Merle first showed me how."
"Five?" Rick asked. "Okay, well…" He turned to Lori. "See? Most people start learning to shoot by twelve."
"Well, I don't know that you three good old boys are most people," Lori said. "When did you learn to shoot, Glenn?"
"Uh…a few weeks ago."
"See?" Lori said.
"It's come in handy though," Glenn told her. "What with undead walking around and trying to eat us alive and all."
"Why does nobody want to know when I learned?" T-Dog asked.
"I'm just saying," Lori said, "firearms have only one purpose. And I'm not sure I want to live in a world where – "
"- Just take the goddamn lessons, Lori!" Shane shouted.
The fiery jealousy that seemed to be stewing just below Shane's surface for the first few days after Rick's return was dying, bit by bit, Carol thought. Maybe Shane was beginning to think he had dodged a bullet through Rick's return. Or maybe he was just that worried about Lori's safety.
Andrea must have thought the latter. "You don't need to yell at her," she said, glancing jealously at the other woman.
"Fine," Lori said. "I'll take lessons. From my husband." She really emphasized that my husband part, a message to Shane, perhaps? Or a way to tell Andrea she was hands-off Shane now?
They had their own little soap opera playing out here at the end of the world, Carol thought. She guessed some things in life never changed.
"So, should we take a tour?" asked Glenn loudly in an attempt to diffuse the whole situation. He held up the map he had been studying. "Figure out where the best place to camp might be?"
Carl and Sophia caught each other's eyes. They both smiled great big grins and simultaneously cried, "House of the Future!"
"What?" Andrea asked.
"House of the Future," Carl insisted. "If they ever finished building it. It was supposed to open in the Kingdom of the Future section at the start of this year."
"They had brochures about it when we were here," Sophia agreed.
"It's what, a haunted house?" Glenn asked, unfolding his map again and searching for it.
"No," Carl answered.
"So, what? A fun house?" Glenn asked.
"No," Sophia answered.
Glenn looked puzzled. "Then what is it? A ride?"
"It was supposed to be like a bed and breakfast," Carol explained. She'd read the brochure Sophia had excitedly handed her last year, knowing full well she'd have to say no, that not only would they never be staying at House of the Future, but they would never even come back to Fun Kingdom. "People could stay in the park in the House of the Future and then be the first in line for a few select rides in the morning, an hour before the park opened, and keep riding an hour after the park closed. And then they could stay in the park all night."
"Yeah, but my mom said we couldn't come and stay when it opened," Carl complained.
"Well, the brochure said it was going to be $450 a night, Carl," Lori reminded him.
Glenn whistled.
"But that included free park tickets!" Carl insisted. "And free parking!"
"Carl, I would have had to have worked full-time for two days to pay for one night," Rick told him.
"Just two days?" T-Dog asked. "Deputy pay is sweet."
"More than two days, probably," Rick muttered.
"Did you see it, Mr. Dixon?" Sophia asked. "When you were riding your motorcycle through the park? Did you see the House of the Future?"
"Saw a two-story house with a bunch of solar panels on the roof. That it?"
"Probably," Carol said. "It was supposed to be an example of off-the-grid green living in a future world. It was going to be completely solar powered, with water fed by solar-powered water pumps, and a septic system with a solar-powered septic pump."
"So you're saying this thing might still have electricity and running water?" Andrea asked. "Sign me up!"
"Well," Rick said. "Let's find the place and clear it."
Glenn pointed to a spot on the map. "It says Coming Soon."
"But those maps probably haven't been updated," Andrea said hopefully. "They might have finished building it."
"Well let's find out," Rick said.
[*]
They got back in the vehicles and caravanned out of the Kingdom of Rome, through the Kingdom of Japan and the Kingdom of Egypt to the Kingdom of the Future. They came to a stop outside the house and spilled out of the vehicles again.
The small yard in front of the house was "fenced-in" on both sides of the front door by a tiny, two-foot-high white picket fence. A wooden sign stood just above the overgrown grass and read – "House of the Future" and then "Bed & Breakfast" just below that. A red mat – now caked with dust and dirt - had been rolled out across the asphalt and led to the front door.
"And this ain't a haunted house?" Daryl clarified. "It ain't one of those houses where shit jumps out at ya?" He tried the knob and found the door unlocked.
"No," Carl replied. "I told you. It's not a haunted house."
As Daryl pushed open the front door, a walker hissed and lunged toward him.
Sophia screamed.
Carol's heart seized and she reached instinctively for the butt of her hand gun, but before she had even touched the metal, Daryl had kicked the walker back hard with a boot to its stomach. He raised his bow and shot it in the head when it lunged for him again. Then he swung out of the way as the walker fell face forward onto the red mat leading to the door.
Daryl rolled it over and yanked out his bolt.
"It doesn't have any clothes on!" Carl said with disgust, turning his eyes away from the creature's rotting penis, while Sophia buried her face against Carol's side.
Carol put a protective arm around her daughter.
"That's weird," T-Dog said.
"Security guard, maybe," Rick speculated. "He decided to live in there, and then one night he died in his sleep."
"People sleep naked?" Carl asked.
"Sometimes," Rick told him. "Especially when they don't have children who walk into rooms uninvited."
"Well where there's one, there might be more." Shane unshouldered his rifle. "Y'all stay out here while Daryl and I clear the place."
"Why Daryl?" Andrea asked. "Why not you and me? Why do you never think of me? Daryl's the idiot who just opened the door without preparing for something behind it."
"Yeah, that was a dumbass move," Daryl admitted. "But my bow is quiet. Shane's got a silencer on his rifle. And we don't need a bunch of people clearing a house at once. Could get jumpy."
"Daryl's right," Shane said. "But next time we need to clear a house." He winked at her. "You're my huckleberry."
Andrea rolled her eyes.
The two men disappeared into the House of the Future, shoulder to shoulder, poised and pointing their weapons with each step forward, while the others waited anxiously outside.