The group approached the diner from behind, coming to a stop beside a single empty pick-up truck in the back parking lot. From here, they could see nothing but the rear cinderblock wall of the diner. They'd have to walk around front for a better view.
"Let's do a perimeter sweep to start," Rick said. "Glenn, Carol, you stay by the truck. Guard our supplies. Whistle if you see anyone."
Glenn nodded.
"I don't want to guard supplies," Carol insisted. "I need practice clearing."
"Suit yourself," Rick told her. "But stick with Daryl. And take the rifle this time."
Carol took her rifle from the pickup and readied it. She jogged with Daryl and Rick to the back of the diner. Rick indicated with motions that he would go right while they went left.
Daryl ran along the side of the building toward the front, his crossbow ready, and Carol stuck to his side, her rifle poised. As they neared the cinderblock corner of the building, in the air there arose the familiar sound of growling that came from a sizable crowd of walkers. Carol's breath caught. The last time she'd heard growling that hungry was when the camp was overrun.
"Daryl!" came Rick's loud cry from the front of the building, followed by a gunshot. "Help!"
When Daryl and Carol tore around the building, they found the glass front door shattered. There were walkers inside gnawing on two bodies, and more pushing in on the feasters for their own taste of blood. Still more of the creatures were crawling through the busted glass toward Rick, who kept shooting them from outside.
Carol raised her rifle, aimed, and shot at one of the feasting walkers. She missed its head, and her shot sent up clothes and bits of decayed flesh from its back instead. It turned angrily toward them. The rifle shook in her hands as it growled toward her. Rick brought it down with a blast from his rifle.
"Stop! Hell y'all shootin' for!" Daryl shouted. "Back to the truck! Now! Those people are dead! No helpin' 'em. Let's go! Let's go!"
"There's a little boy in there!" Rick shouted. "I saw him go into the kitchen."
When Carol heard there was a child, her fear for herself was consumed by adrenaline. She steadied her grip. She closed one eye and peered down the scope of her AR-15, and just like she was back at the range in Fun Kingdom, and these monsters were merely targets, she began picking them off, one by one by one, far more quickly than Rick had been doing.
"Damn, Miss Murphy!" Daryl wooted beside Carol. "Good shootin'. Goin' for that boy. Cover me!"
With the walkers nearest the door now fallen, he burst inside. His boots squished over the fallen carcasses, and he nearly tripped. A walker on the outside of the feasting ring turned and lurched for him, jaws gnashing. Its head snapped back as a round from Carol's AR-15 tore through its skull. Carol swiveled and shot again at another walker that was after Daryl as he moved quickly to the left and tore toward the kitchen, trusting Carol to bring his pursuers down.
[*]
The gray metal door of the kitchen swung violently open when Daryl slammed his palm against it in a running lunge. He skidded to a stop across the stone tile floor. Damn if Rick wasn't right. A little curly haired black boy, not more than about three, was crying and trying to climb from the top of a closed trash can to a higher perch on a metal shelf. Daryl slung his crossbow onto his back and snatched the child up around the waist. If he hadn't, the kid would likely have pulled that shelf straight down on top of himself.
The boy screamed bloody hell. "Calm down!" he growled. "Gonna be fine!"
Carol and Rick were both inside the diner when Daryl caried the kid out of the kitchen, and not a single walker was standing anymore. There must be well over twenty of them scattered on the floor. The human bodies they'd been feasting on were half consumed. Daryl could tell they had once been two black men.
Glenn ran inside, rifle pointing, mouth half open. When he saw the destruction was already done, He shouldered his rifle. "What happened here?"
Carol took the crying boy from Daryl's arms and started bouncing him on her hip and making silly faces to calm him. Damn if that kid didn't stop crying and laugh. But then his big, brown eyes fell on the remains of his people, and he started to bawl again. Carol took him outside.
"Smell that?" Rick asked.
"Pot," Daryl replied. Its sickly sweet scent was somehow still noticeable over the stench of the walkers.
Rick looked around the floor, pushed aside one of the walker bodies with his foot, and stooped to pick up a blunt. His eyes were hard and dark when he stood.
"They was gettin' high. With a kid to take care of." Daryl bit down hard on his back teeth. He remembered being about three the first time he saw his mother get high, though he hadn't known that's what she was doing at the time. He just knew she wasn't responding to him when he tried to talk to her and that Merle had ended up making him a meal of grits and canned peaches for dinner that day. After Merle went to juvie three years later, Daryl learned to open his own cans.
Rick and Daryl looked the fallen walkers over. Three were in mechanic's uniforms. Several had on biker's vests. They'd probably worked their way up from the repair shop and church in search of food, possibly heard the men laughing, and gathered. The men had probably been too high to notice them until they were crawling through the busted glass of the front door. Why hadn't they boarded that up if they were crashing in here?
Daryl's eyes swept the diner. There were open cans of food on some of the tables and rolled-up sleeping bags resting on the booths – four in total. "Got to be at least one other person with 'em."
"Then where is he?" Rick asked.
They caught each other's eyes.
"Shit," Daryl muttered. Together, all three men bolted out of the building to make sure Carol wasn't dealing with a high or angry third man.
[*]
When Rick, Daryl, and Glenn rounded the back of the building, a svelte, dark-skinned woman stood with the point of a curved, single-edged sword pressed lightly against the base of Carol's throat. Carol's rifle was shouldered because she had the little boy in her arms.
"Mama, mama!" the boy cried.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Rick said as he shouldered his rifle and stretched out a staying hand toward the woman.
Daryl kept his crossbow trained on the strange, sword-wielding figure. She looked like she'd stepped straight out of a fairy tale about an African princess into a Mad Max movie and then come out the other end some combination of the two.
"If that's your boy," Rick assured her, "we aren't trying to hurt him. We just rescued him from a pack of walkers in that diner. If you'll just step back, Carol will hand him to you."
The woman drew her sword away so quickly that, for a moment, Daryl feared she'd slit Carol's throat, and his heart seized. But Carol was unscathed.
The black woman slid the sword into a sheath on her back and then gathered the child into her arms and kissed his face. The boy wrapped his little arms around her neck.
The woman turned her worried eyes on Rick. "Where are the men he was with?"
Daryl finally lowered his crossbow. Rick seemed speechless. He was probably looking for the kind of words he'd used as a cop when he broke the bad news to a victim's family. But Daryl felt no sympathy for this woman. Who the hell left a three-year-old alone with a couple of potheads in an apocalypse? "Got overrun by a pack," Daryl said coldly. "Both dead now. But that's what happens when you get high and don't give a shit 'bout yer kid!"
The woman's eyes flashed fire. She ran with the child toward the front of the building.
"Shit, man!" Rick cursed. "Why'd you tell her like that? She didn't have to know they were high. Now she's going to feel guilty!"
"Should feel guilty. What the fuck do you think she was out doing? Probably lookin' for more pot."
Rick jogged after the woman.
Carol followed, but Glenn went back to guarding the supplies, and Daryl made his way more languidly to the diner. When he arrived on the scene, the woman had the child's eyes pressed to her shoulder, which was rising and falling as she tried to suppress some emotion that seemed more like anger than sorrow.
"They were smoking?" she asked, and the look in her eyes told Daryl that she hadn't expected it. That was when he noticed the walker blood staining her dark jeans. Wherever she'd been, it probably wasn't to help those men get more drugs. She'd been slashing through walkers with a purpose.
Rick nodded. "I'm sorry. When we got here, they were already..." He shook his head. "We saved the boy, though."
The woman bent her forehead against the top of her child's head and let out a trembling sigh.
"May I ask where you were?" Rick's voice was calm, friendly, non-accusatory. Daryl wondered if that was how he always started his interrogations when he was a cop.
The woman, not answering, walked away from the diner and around into the paved front parking lot. She let her knapsack slide from her shoulder and squatted to the ground to set her son on his feet. Silently, she unzipped the pack and pulled out a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, which she set on the ground. Then she pulled out a tube of antibiotic ointment, a roll of medical tape, and, finally, gauze. "I was finding these things for my son."
She pulled off the boy's sweatshirt to reveal blood-spotted washcloths secured with duck tape across his belly. He whimpered when she peeled them off. Two gashes spread across the space below his belly button. There were also scratches on his chest and arms. "We were in a refugee camp near Atlanta, but things got bad," she said. "It started spreading. Food ran out. So we left. We've been roaming ever since. Last night, we got run off the road near this diner. Our car flipped over. Before I could get to my son, he crawled out through the glass and cut himself up. We hunkered down in the diner for the night, and I left him with Mike and Terry this morning to go find something better to treat his wounds. I don't want him to get infected."
The boy whined softly as she began cleaning his cuts and scrapes and coating them with antibiotic ointment, but he didn't pull away. He was one tough little kid, Daryl thought.
"Who ran you off the road?" Rick asked. "And why?"
"Three men. I didn't pause to take down names. I got thrown from the car. Mike and Terry just got bruised and temporarily knocked out inside it. Andre was crying, but I pretended to be stunned so the men wouldn't draw their weapons. I waited until they got just close enough for me to take them by surprise."
"You killed them?" Rick asked. "All three?"
"No one runs a family off the road just to have a nice chat with them," she replied coolly.
"And then you went to the diner?"
"It had already been busted into, and it was empty. At the time."
"Why didn't you board up the door?" Daryl asked.
"We didn't have any boards or hammers or nails," she said. "And we weren't planning to stay long."
"Why did you go for the medical supplies?" Rick asked. "Why didn't your husband go?"
"My boyfriend. And I went because I'm much better at killing walkers than he is."
"With that sword thing?" Rick asked.
"It's a katana. And yes. I've gotten a lot of practice killing those things with it." She slid the boy's sweatshirt back on, put the medical supplies back in her pack, and gathered her son up in her arms again.
"Can you show me the car that got turned over?" Rick asked. "And the bodies of the men you killed?"
"Why?"
"So we can know if you're telling the truth," Rick answered. "So we can decide whether or not to invite you back to our camp with us."
"And what makes you think I want to join your camp?" she asked.
"You're alone with a child," Rick answered. "We have medical supplies. A lot more than you have in that pack. We'll make sure those cuts don't get infected. There are two other women in our camp, besides Carol here. Kids, too. I have a son." Rick made direct eye contact with her when he said that. "He's just twelve. I know how hard it is to protect a child in this world without help. So, why don't you show me the car?"
The woman nodded and began walking away from the diner.
Daryl and Carol followed.
[*]
The woman, who called herself Michonne, led them a quarter of a mile to a ditch at the side of the road. A white sedan was overturned inside it, and shattered glass coated the grass. The decapitated dead men were lying half on the grassy shoulder.
"And they ran you off the road?" Rick asked.
"They came jumping out of their car, yelling Claim."
"Claim?" Daryl asked.
"That's what they said. Like they were claiming me." Her nostrils flared.
The slain men's heads, which had rolled down to settle against one another in the ditch, had turned. The dead mouths snapped at the air. It reminded Daryl of that Hungry Hippos game he'd seen at garage sale once. He'd wanted it, but he hadn't had even the quarter they were asking.
He turned his crossbow on one. "Fucker looks like Kris Kristofferson." He pulled the trigger, and a bolt wooshed into its forehead. The snapping ceased.
Michonne, holding her son Andre in the crook of one arm, unsheathed her katana and drove the point into each of the other two snapping heads. The little boy watched the whole process as if he were watching her squish a couple of ants on a kitchen counter.
"Two steps to permanently kill," Rick said. "Seems a little inefficient."
"Beheading is safer," Michonne told him. "You can keep your distance, unlike with a knife. And there's little sound, unlike with a gun. I was just a little too busy worrying about my bleeding son to finish them off before they turned."
Daryl kicked one of the loose heads. "Damn ankle biters."
Rick looked around the scene. "Where's their car then?"
"It was still running, so I took it," Michonne told him. "I used it when I went scavenging. When I spied your woman with my son, I parked it a little ways back and snuck in on foot."
"Didn't hear the car?" Daryl asked Carol. "Didn't see 'er coming?"
"Sorry." Carol smiled at the little boy. "I was busy playing patty cake."
[*]
Michonne sat on the steel kitchen counter next to Andre, who was sipping apple juice from a real glass. No time for sippy cups in an apocalypse. They'd all come to the kitchen to load up. The shelves were three-quarters empty, but whoever had looted the place initially hadn't had room to haul off everything.
"What's the priority here, Carol?" Rick asked. "You're the chef."
"I want all the big boxes of Bisquick," Carol said. "And all the jars of applesauce. I can use applesauce in lieu of eggs for baking. Get the grits and oatmeal. The canned refried beans and the jarred salsa."
"They must have served Mexican breakfast," Glenn observed.
"Then whatever still fits," Carol said. "The bags of brown and white sugar will keep. The granola, the raisins, the jelly, and the canned fruit. That's pasteurized juice, the orange and the apple. It'll keep another year."
"This place is a diabetic coma waiting to happen," Rick muttered.
"We'll burn it off by living like they did in the 18th century," Glenn said. "Look at Daryl." He patted Daryl's stomach. "He's lived on pop tarts his whole life and on beer for the last three months and he's in great shape."
"Don't touch me again, man," Daryl warned him.
[*]
Little Andre sat on his mother's lap in the front seat of the pickup where Michonne was wedged between Rick and Glenn. Carol now wore her pack on her back – stuffed full – and her rifle on her shoulder as she rode behind Daryl on his motorcycle. The U-Haul was busting at the seams, and the bed of the pick-up had boxes piled so high there was no way Rick could see out the back.
They had left for their supply run at the crack of dawn and were back home in Fun Kingdom right about dinner time. Sophia came running out of the House of the Future to greet Carol when the motorcycle pulled to a stop in front of it. "Find anything good!"
Carol dismounted and hugged her daughter. "Found a lot of things good." The others had begun to emerge from the house. "And a couple of surprises."
The pick-up eased to a stop nearby. Rick leapt out of the driver's side and then took Andre from Michonne. He set the toddler down on his feet on the asphalt as Michonne slid out.
"What's this?" Lori asked.
"Survivors?" Shane added. "And you just brought them here without discussing it?"
"A mother and a child!" Rick exclaimed. "What is there to discuss?"
"He's right," Lori told Shane. "There's nothing to discuss. Welcome. I'm Lori." She reached out her hand to the woman.
Michonne introduced herself to everyone. She followed Lori inside the House of the Future like a prowling cat and looked around it with the same curiosity. Carol showed her upstairs to the "evil room" that she had transformed into something inviting. One would never guess what had happened here. "This room is all yours and the boy's," Carol told her. "I figure you can share the bed."
Michonne lay her pack on the bed.
"Up! Up!" Andre cried, and Michonne lifted the little boy to set him on the bed.
"If you need us to put a rail to keep him from falling out, I'm sure - "
"- It'll be fine," she told Carol. "Thank you. Thank you for rescuing my son and taking us in."
"Well, you sure seem to have some skills with that katana. We'll find a way to put you to work here. Sophia – that was my daughter- will have fun playing with Andre, I'm sure. She may treat him a bit like a baby doll, though. She always wanted a little brother." Carol smiled at the boy. "Make yourself comfortable. Lori said dinner would be served in about twenty minutes, down in the dining room. We'll pull in an extra chair from the kitchen, and Andre can sit on your lap for now. We'll get him a wooden chair and a booster seat from one of the restaurants later."
Carol waggled her fingers at the little boy, who smiled at her, pointed to his chest with his thumb, and said, "Andre! Andre An-tony!"
[*]
"Michonne," Rick asked across the table. "Is that French?"
"I don't know." Michonne's voice was tight. She still looked tense as she offered Andre cut up bits of hot dog from her plate. "My parents were originally from New York. There was a local artist they liked. They took the name from her."
"Named after an artist," Rick said. "Interesting. Well, I'm named after a king."
"King Rick?" Lori asked skeptically and a little peevishly, glancing from Michonne to Rick.
"King Richard, of course," Rick said.
"The homo or the one with the lion heart?" Daryl asked.
"An English historian," said Michonne. "Who would have guessed?"
"I got layers," Daryl told her. "Like a Moon Pie. Why? What was your first impression? That I'd be the type to get wasted while my kid got devoured by walkers?"
Carol put a hand on Daryl's knee under the table as if to say hold back.
Michonne swallowed hard. She looked down at Andre, who was intent on seizing pieces of hotdog from her plate and shoving them in his mouth and seemed unaware of the conversation around him. "Mike and I used pot on occasion before the collapse," she murmured. She looked up and directly at Daryl. "I haven't touched it since. I didn't know he had any left, and I certainly didn't think he'd be that irresponsible. But maybe I should have seen it coming. This world changes people. I've killed dozens of those things. But I'd never killed a human being before last night. Have you?"
Daryl shook his head.
"Well, you will," Michonne told him. She looked around the table from face to face. "If you want to defend this little paradise, someday, you all will." She gritted her teeth and put her arm protectively around Andre. The little boy laughed, leaned back against her chest, and held up a piece of hotdog toward her.
Blinking away the gathering tears in her eyes, Michonne smiled, made a loud harumphing sound, and pretended to bite down on his hand.
The little boy laughed.