Shane had radioed Rick to tell the group to return to the House of the Future. When they parked, Shane was cooking burgers and hot dogs over a charcoal grill across the way from the house, in front of an ice cream shop that had a handful of tables and chairs out front.
"We brought the ketchup and mustard!" Rick said as he reached into the van for a box of condiments. "Sauerkraut and jalapenos, too."
"And chips," Glenn added. "Those little individual bags."
"I call dibs on the Cool Ranch Doritos!" Daryl shouted from where he sat at one of the tables, a can of beer in front of him.
"Is it true there's ice cream for dessert?" Carl asked as he ran toward the tables.
Shane pointed a spatula at him. "Entirely true, my little man. They've got your favorite, too. Those Strawberry shortcake bars."
"Those aren't his favorite," Rick insisted as he walked hastily over with the box. "His favorite are the…you know…the brown ones sort of like that, right, Carl?"
"Chocolate Éclair Bar," Carl said. "No, Strawberry's my favorite."
Rick looked at him credulously. "Since when?"
"Since forever," Carl insisted.
"Seems like I know your son better than you do," Shane said.
That was a mistake, Carol thought as she brought over a can of jalapenos and set it down on one of the tables. Rick was glaring at Shane. "Can you open the ice cream shop, Rick?" she asked to diffuse the situation. "I'll get out some napkins and utensils for us. And paper plates, if they have them."
They didn't have paper plates, but they had Styrofoam bowls. The security guard had cleared a lot of the ice cream treats to the deep freezer in the House of the Future, but the ice cream in the cannisters behind the counter had melted and curdled, and the stench was awful. The ice cream cones and cookies used for ice cream sandwiches were moldy. But there were jars of maraschino cherries, cans of pineapple, bags of marshmallows and gummy bears, and various jarred sauces that might still be usable. The chocolate candies had melted into a gooey mess inside the bags, and she wouldn't trust the cannisters of whip cream, not three months in, not after sitting through the August heat.
Carl and Sophia ended up eating at a two-person table with each other. They were getting to be best friends, Carol thought, which was inevitable since they were less than a year apart and they were the only two kids in their little world. But it was also going to be strange when they went through puberty. The idea made Carol vaguely nervous.
After getting her burger and smothering it with ketchup, mustard, and jalapenos, Carol sat down across from Daryl at the two-person table where he was already sitting. He was eating his sauerkraut-and-mustard-covered hotdog with his bare hands, despite the fork and knife he'd been given. "Mind if I join you?" she asked.
"Looks like ya already did." He licked each of his fingers clean and then took a swig from a can of Budweiser. That had come from the fridge in the house. Carol had asked only for a bottle of water when T-Dog "dipped in," holding his breath, for the cold drink run.
Carol cut off a piece of her burger and took a bite. She hummed. "This is the best thing I've eaten in months."
"Didn't like m'venison?" Daryl asked.
"Besides that." He'd killed one deer during their month together in the quarry camp. He'd caught some small game here and there, too. He'd tracked and shot a second deer a couple of weeks later, but he'd found it being feasted on by a walker. Hunting was harder now, she supposed, with all the competition from walkers. But if he could manage to bag just two deer a month, that would be…Carol calculated…around five ounces of meat per person per day. That was more than the daily recommendation, though half what Ed used to eat. "I just mean it's a taste of the old world."
"Mhmmm." Daryl took another swig of his beer.
Carol glanced behind herself to make sure Sophia was emersed in her own concerns before asking, quietly, "So you found a dead animal in the house?" She took another bite and watched Daryl react with slight confusion, which he tried to hide. "A big security dog, Rick said," she continued after swallowing. "One of those sniffing dogs." She cut another bite. "He was in there with the security guard, and when he died and turned, the security guard ate him. Left some drops of blood?"
"Mhhm, yeah," Daryl agreed and nodded as he plucked up the last shreds of sauerkraut on his plate, which he dangled over his open mouth and fed himself like a bird eating worms.
"That would have made more sense," Carol told him. "If that's what Rick had said. But what he said was a couple of raccoons."
Daryl chewed more slowly. He swallowed and then ran his tongue along his teeth inside his mouth. Wordlessly, he took another sip of beer. "Yeah, raccoons," he agreed as he set the can down.
Carol pushed her bowl aside for the moment and folded her hands on the table. "What did you really find in that house?"
"Don't matter. It's gone now."
"Are you not telling me the truth because you think I'm weak? I know I was, but I'm trying not to be anymore. Don't you think I've made progress? You don't think I could handle it, whatever it was?"
"I don't think you should have to handle it," Daryl said. "No one should have to handle it. It was bad. Real bad. But it's gone now, so let's just leave it at that."
"Okay," Carol said softly, shivering to think what he might have seen, but glad he didn't think her too weak to handle it if she had to. He was just being compassionately protective of her. No, not of her. Of the group. He hadn't told the kids or Andrea or Lori either.
"Everyone gets seconds!" Shane shouted from the grill. "A dog if you had a burger, and a burger if you had a dog." He pointed his spatula at Daryl. "No seconds on the beer though. We have to ration that."
"Do we?" T-Dog asked. "Because we haven't even checked out the beer garden yet. Beer lasts up to six months in cans and bottles. Longer if we refrigerate it."
Daryl raised his beer can in T-Dog's direction. "Boo ya!"
[*]
"A looting we shall go, a looting we shall go, hi ho the derry oh a looting we shall go!"
Everyone was singing it now except Daryl. Glenn was singing it out the rolled down window of the pick-up truck he was driving. Carl and Sophia were singing it from the lowered tail gate they were sitting on as the truck crawled slowly through the park. Shane and Andrea were singing it from the left side of the truck where they walked, their rifles swinging shoulder to shoulder, each holding an open bottle of beer. Rick and Lori were singing it from the right of the truck, and Carol and T-Dog from behind. But Daryl just looked irritated as he intermittently sipped his can of beer.
The group – two in the cab and eight piled into the bed of the pickup - had driven straight to the Kingdom of Prussia (a German-themed section of the park) to the Drunken Jester's Beer Garden to load up, but now they were making their slow way through the park to explore what else was worth looting. The floor and passenger's seat of the pick-up, as well as half of the bed, was now full of bottles and cans of beer, several of those little single-serve bottles of cheap wine (which the beer garden had also sold), canned and bottled soda, and bottled water. They'd agreed to snag a couple of drink refrigerators from one of the shops and plug them in at the House of the Future to keep the drinks longer, though Daryl had warned that to make sure they stayed on, they needed to take short showers and only use the lights at night so as to never run down the battery all the way before it could recharge.
"Come on, Mr. Dixon!" Sophia cried. "Sing with us!"
Daryl shook his head.
"A looting we shall go," the group chorused, absent Daryl's voice, "a looting we shall go, hi ho the derry oh a looting we shall go!"
They'd just passed through the archway to the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the truck jerked to a stop. "Here's a good one!" Glenn cried. "The Queen's Royal Tea House!"
"Fuck I want tea for?" Daryl muttered.
"They might have tea cookies!" Sophia exclaimed as she slid off the tailgate of the truck.
"Born and raised in Georgia, and you don't like sweet tea?" Carol asked him.
"Oh, yeah," Daryl mused. "Love that shit. I was thinking tea tea. You know…" He held out his pinky and pretended to sip a teacup.
Carol chuckled. "Well, I think I can make some good sweet tea with whatever we find in here. There's plenty of sugar throughout this park."
"We're going to need to find a lot of toothpaste, too," Lori warned. "To keep the kids teeth from rotting from all the sugar in this park."
"Got an entire box full from that CVS," Daryl told her. "Back in the van."
Rick found the key for the tea shop. At least it didn't stink in here, Carol thought as they all went inside. The shop was small enough that it didn't need to be swept for walkers – they could see everything when they walked in.
"So pretty!" Sophia walked up to a porcelain tea set and lifted one of the cups. "I wish I could have it."
"Can have whatever the hell ya want!" Daryl told her.
Sophia laughed. "Oh, yeah, I can now! Can we take this tea set back to the House of the Future, Mom?"
"We'll come back and get it later, after we're settled," Carol told her. They weren't sleeping there tonight, and probably not tomorrow night either while it aired out. "We don't want it breaking in the bed of the pick-up."
"Will you have a tea party with me, Mr. Dixon?" Sophia asked. "After we get settled?"
"Uh…ain't you a little old for tea parties?"
"The Queen of England has a tea party every day, and she's like…100. Was. Maybe she still is."
Daryl moved on through the shop without committing to the future tea party. He found something he liked, though – jars of honey. Carol watched as he started loading them up in a cardboard box he found behind the counter and tried to imagine him drinking from flowered, porcelain teacup and eating cookies off of little china plates. She chuckled. He looked up, found her watching him, and narrowed his eyes suspiciously before returning to his task.
They filled the bed of the truck with three more boxes of loot, including some tea cookies that were still sealed in their original boxes.
"We need to find a coffee shop next," Shane said as the kids climbed up onto the tailgate again. "I could really use a cup of Joe to get me going in the morning."
"Oh, is that what gets you going in the morning?" Andrea asked.
"Well…" Shane grinned. "I could think of some other things that might work." Then he glanced at Lori, as if gauging her reaction. Lori coolly looked away.
"There's a coffee shop in The Aztec Kingdom," Glenn told him, consulting the map where he stood before the open door of the pickup.
"Wasn't that more of an Empire?" T-Dog asked.
"Yeah, well, I don't think the Aztecs were known for their coffee either," Rick said. "This place isn't exactly concerned about historical accuracy."
"But the Aztecs were in South America," Andrea reasoned. "And South America was known for its coffee."
"Aztecs were in Mexico, college genius," Daryl muttered.
"Whatever," Andrea replied. "Mexico had good coffee too."
"It also has the Pyramid of Skulls," Glenn noted. "It raises you up 268 feet and then drops you into a fiery pit of lava."
"Sounds fun," Lori said drolly.
"Not a real pit," Glenn said. "It's an illusion."
T-Dog chuckled. "Thanks for the clarification."
"I wish the rides were working," Carl announced.
"Let's just keep going in a steady circle around the park," Rick insisted. "We need to explore it all anyway. We're going to fill the truck up in no time, but we can always come back to loot more another day. We'll store some things in that museum room Daryl mentioned. And maybe along that hallway. For now, though, let's just take note of what's here and where it is."
Glenn climbed back into the driver's side of the pick-up and the slow roll of the looting party resumed.