When Daryl next peered around the tree, still at a distance, the dog stood barking before a wounded, fallen deer that was weakly lifting its head. The deer had been shot twice in the gut.

The dog and deer were alone for about two minutes before the teenage boy burst through some trees. His run gradually petered to a jog and then a walk. "Good girl!" he called to the dog. "That's a good girl!" He fished into the pocket of his brown-and-tan camo jacket and pulled out some kind of treat, which he tossed to the dog. Then he raised his rifle and put the deer out of its misery with a final killing shot to the head. Daryl noted his firearm, a black, semiautomatic AR-10, likely chambered in .308, a decent caliber for hunting deer, but definitely not the wooden, lever-action rifle Daryl had seen in the boy's hands before.

The boy wrestled out of his backpack, dropped it to the ground, shouldered his rifle, and then crouched to open the pack. He pulled out some rope, a gut hook, a tightly folded tarp, and a pair of latex gloves, which he pulled on his hands before drawing his hunting knife and preceding to field dress the deer. It clearly wasn't his first time. He was only a few minutes slower than Daryl would have been – and easily twice as quick as Daryl would have been at his age.

"She's not a big one, girl, but I bet she'll yield forty pounds still." The boy wrapped the field dressed deer in the tarp and tied it tightly. Then he found a thick, sturdy stick and wound the other end of the rope around it. He put on his backpack, stretched his arms behind himself to hold the stick near his lower back, bent forward slightly, and began dragging his kill through the forest.

The boy wasn't covering his sign this time, busy as he was with the deer, and not imagining anyone in pursuit of him. Daryl stood melded to the tree for another ten minutes, and then he began to quietly follow the clear trail of the dragged deer.

[*]

The hot pink Fun Kingdom frisbee flew through the air and Max ran bounding after it, leapt up, and caught it in it's mouth. "Thatta boy!" Carl yelled.

Sophia tugged the Frisbee and Max played tug of war for a moment before relenting. Andre ran up, shouting, "Dog, dog doggie! I pet the good little doggie!" The dog wasn't so little. Andre was only about a foot taller.

Rick and Michonne were now driving around in the SUV to check the parking lot and the nearest few miles of road for any sign of the dog's owner. Rick was peeved they'd let the dog in. What if it had been a trap? he'd asked. What if someone had been lying in wait to pounce when you opened the gate? Michonne told him that Carol had scoured the area with binncoulours first, but that had only mildly appeased him, so she'd volunteered to go driving with him to make sure there were no threats nearby.

Sophia had fed Max with the scraps leftover after Andrea cleaned the fish she'd caught this morning. It was a warmer-than-usual November day, and Andrea had actually managed to catch three. Carl Grimes had fetched two dogfood bowls from a giftshop (both read "King of the Dogs"), and Carol had given Max some fresh water and a piece of acorn squash. Then she and Sophia had trimmed and brushed his mangy hair as best they could.

For good measure, they had sprinkled the dog with some flea powder Daryl had picked up long ago because he'd said it would be good for warding off flees and ticks at a campsite. Glenn had joked he might need to sprinkle a little on himself if he didn't get a bath soon, and Daryl had preceded to shake the powder on top of Glenn's head. Glenn ran all around the living room of the house they were looting, and Daryl chaseed him around it, puffing the flea powder at him, until it got in Glenn's face, and Glenn cried bloody murder. Then Daryl said, "That'll learn you!" and went back to looting the house, shoving three unopened bottles of flea powder in his pack.

[*]

Daryl had followed the boy uphill in the forest for forty minutes now. The kid had to be getting tired of dragging that deer. The dog barked twice and started sniffing the ground near where the forest edged against a narrow dirt path. The boy stopped, too, so Daryl, several yards behind him and deeper in the forest from the edge, molded himself to a tree. Very quietly, he fished his binoculars out of his pack and then peered around the tree to peek through them.

The boy was throwing branches and brush aside. He pulled out a bright red sports motorbike – the same one Daryl had seen strapped to the bed of the monster pick-up truck the kid had looted from the housing complex. The boy rolled the bike out of the forest to the narrow dirt path and leaned it on its kickstand. The dog leapt up onto the dog seat on the back, but the boy shooed it down and set his pack there instead. The dog appeared to whimper but, tail momentarily tucked between its legs, accepted it would not be riding.

The boy unwound the rope from the stick he'd used to drag the tarp-wrapped dear and tied that rope to a metal bar at the tail of his racing bike instead. He was going to ride from now on, but Daryl didn't think he'd lose him. The boy had to ride slowly with that deer tied to his tail, or he'd lose the deer. The dog would have to keep up, too.

The boy pulled a key out of his pocket and stuck it in the bike. Then he kicked, turned the handles, and headed off down the path at about fifteen miles per hour, the dog running alongside him, and the deer trailing behind. The motorbike – much quieter than Daryl's motorcycle - emitted a steady but mild roar.

Daryl jogged after the sound of the engine, staying well inside the forest, outside of the sight of the path. He swerved around trees and jumped debris as he jogged. After what felt like a mile and a half, he came to a stop at the edge of the forest and leaned panting against a tree. He raised his binoculars again. He watched as the boy suddenly picked up speed on his racing bike and leaned sideways, turning his bike horizontal and taking it down almost until the pedal touched the ground. The bike skidded on forward that way for a few feet, and then the boy jerked the bike up to standing again before driving on. The motion caused the deer to slide this way and that before pulling straight again. The dog ran after the deer.

A move like that took amazing skill, and Daryl certainly couldn't have done it on his much larger motorcycle. But why had the boy done it at all? Maybe he just liked showing off, even if there was no audience to show off for. But when Daryl – walking now - got to the spot where the boy had leaned his bike almost to the ground, he saw why. Attached to a tree at the edge of the forest, and stretching across to another tree on the other side of the dirt path, was an almost translucent trip wire – high enough that the dog could walk under it, but low enough that any human driving, riding, or walking would have tripped it.

To rig his alarm, the boy had used clothespins, two AA batteries, and some wires that would send out a spark if the line was tripped. The spark in turn would set fire to the entwined fuses of a small bundle of firecrackers. That would send up quite the warning noise, Daryl thought. The kid hadn't wanted to trip the line because he hadn't wanted to bother resetting it – because it was his.

Which meant his camp had to be nearby.

[*]

When Rick and Michonne returned, Carol was sitting at the picnic bench near the House of the Future cleaning her AR-15 while the kids were showing the dog around the park. Rick pulled the SUV to a stop, and both stepped out of the vehicle and shut the doors.

"Find anything?" Carol asked.

Rick nodded as he walked over to the picnic table, where he rested a hand on the butt of his revolver. "About four miles north up the main road we found an Athens Police Department car on the shoulder."

Michonne strolled over and sat on the edge of the bench opposite Carol. "So we got out to investigate. There was a dead man inside, with the doors shut and the windows rolled up. And Detective Grimes here can tell you the rest."

Rick smiled at the teasing moniker. "The IDs in the car indicated he was once a cop and the dog's handler. It looked liked they'd been sleeping in the car, maybe between camps."

Between camps, Carol thought. That was one way to put the kind of death and destruction that had overtaken the quarry and forced them onto the road for almost two weeks before they settled here.

"The cop had managed to cut his gut very badly on something," Rick continued. "I don't think he was stabbed. It looked like he had some kind of accident involving glass. I think he figured he wasn't long for this world, and he didn't want to die and turn and eat his dog, so he kicked it out of the car, left it a bowl of food and water, and locked himself inside before blowing his brains out."

"Poor Max," Carol said. "Having to witness that."

"I bet he stayed by that car and his old handler for days before venturing out in search of a new home," Michonne said.

"Well, I'm glad we can give him one." Carol lay aside her cleaning rod and began snapping together the parts of her rifle. "How old was the body?"

"Based on the bloat and the fact that the body had turned red but the nails hadn't started to fall out," Rick answered, "I'd guess about two weeks. We got his handgun, a rifle, a baton, and four hundred rounds of ammunition out of that car. A walkie talkie, and about a dozen MREs he'd been living off of."

"And fifteen cans of dogfood," Michonne added. "And a sweatshirt that belonged to the handler that I figured we'd give Max to sleep with."

"What are we going to do with a single walkie talkie?" Carol asked.

"I figured we could use it to listen for stray CB radio transmissions," Rick said. "You can't talk back, but sometimes they pick up something. Who knows. Maybe we'll hear Shane one day."

Carol looked at him warily. He hadn't said much about Shane's sudden departure. It had seemed to relieve him and only to worry him in so far as it hurt Carl, but maybe, in his own complicated way, he missed his old friend, too, a friend he'd lost once through a kind of betrayal and had now lost a second time.

Lori walked out of the house, looked warily from Michonne to Rick, and asked, "What did you find?" Rick repeated his story, and she said, "I think I'm headed in for a nap. Want to take one with me?" She glanced a little pointedly at Michonne when she asked it, as though telegraphing to the other woman - I'm about to fuck my husband.

Rick, oblivious to the silent messaging between the women, but aware he was probably about to get laid, smiled. "Sure," he said, before following her inside.

[*]

Sticking at the edge of the woods beside the path, and walking slowly now because he was exhausted after hours of hiking with bouts of running, Daryl sipped water from his canteen. He could no longer hear the purr of the motorbike's engine, probably because it was parked in the boy's camp by now.

Eventually, through the branches of the trees, Daryl spied a cabin. Taking cover, he crept closer to spy out the boy's camp through binoculars. A large, military-style armored vehicle was parked sideways all the way across the narrow dirt path at the back entrance to the campsite. The boy had left his motorbike parked behind it and had apparently dragged the deer through the armored vehicle to get it into his camp, which meant he was probably avoding trip wires on either side of the armored vehicle.

The camp housed a single, one-story cabin, a wooden outhouse, a couple of picnic tables, a stone well, a propane grill, a charcoal grill, an outdoor firepit, and a storage shed. That monster pick-up truck the boy had looted from the housing complex was parked in the dirt cul-de sac surrounding the cabin. That cul-de-sac in turn was surrounded by a circle of trees that would have been complete except where it opened up at front to reveal a dirt road leading downhill.

The armored vehicle served as a barrier between the edge of the woods and the path on the backside of the cabin – a path unlikely to be used as a road by anyone but the boy, since it didn't seem to lead to any road. But in front of the cabin, the wider dirt road probably led down to connect, eventually, with a paved road. Across that dirt entry road was a roughly constructed wooden fence with a gate large enough for vehicles to get in and out of. A person could walk around the fence, which ended at the woods on either side, but he couldn't drive around it, because of the trees. Daryl also suspected the boy had trip wire alarms strung on either side of the cul-de-sac through the woods, forming a complete, if patchwork, protective perimeter.

Through his binoculars, Daryl spied heavy tracks indented into the dirt on the cul-de-sac – possibly from the armored vehicle, but the tracks stopped suddenly, two feet outside the front gate, as though perhaps the boy had swept them away down the dirt road to hide his location.

The dog was standing outside the open root cellar at the back of the cabin now, pacing back and forth until the boy emerged and closed the wooden doors. He'd skinned and quartered the deer already, Daryl could tell, from the strewn pieces on one of the picnic tables and the bloody tools still laying atop it. He must have gone down to the cellar to hang the parts on meat hooks to bleed and age.

The dog barked, jumped up, and rested its paws on the boys' chest as he scratched it behind its ears. The boy didn't have his rifle on his shoulder anymore – he'd probably left it in the cabin – or maybe he had an armory down in the root cellar - but he had his pistol in his holster at his side and his hunting knife as well.

The front door of the cabin slammed opened, and a little girl rounded the side of the cabin. Her blonde hair was in a braid, and she couldn't have been more than ten. "Here, girl!" she cried, waving a bone at the dog. "Come and get it, girl!"

The dog grred and seized one end of the bone and tugged. The little girl laughed and played tug of war with the dog. The cabin door opened again, and this time a little curly, brown-haired boy – seven or eight maybe - came running out. "I want to play! Let me play, too!"

"Come on," the teenager said. "Go on in and get lunch ready and on the table. I'm near starved!"

The children obeyed, leaving the dog to its bone. Daryl was near starved too, he realized, as his stomach growled. He'd hiked over twelve miles on foot today, some of it jogging.

The boy went to the hand water pump at the stone well and began to pump it to fill a wash basin. The boy wasn't quite alone, but he was close to alone. There was no sign of an adult. The boy was the adult of this camp, Daryl suspected. But there had once been adults, he thought, because he spied a graveyard beyond the cabin, at the edge of the dirt cul-de-sac. There, three crooked wooden crosses, loosely constructed of tied together branches, rose from light mounds of earth. More alone than he used to be, Daryl thought.

A gentle stream of smoke puffed from the chimney of the cabin. While the kid was scrubbing his hands and arms in the wash basin he'd just filled, Daryl made a creeping sweep around the left side of the circle of woods around the cabin. He spied the perimeter trip wire and avoided it. Part way around the semicircle, he heard the gnashing of a walker, and turned and followed the sound deeper in the woods to dispense with it so it wouldn't bother him in his explorations.

He found the walker hanging upside down by its ankle in the trap that had been set for it. It reached hungrily for Daryl, chomping its jaws and growling, and the rope swung. Daryl leveled his bow downward at its head and squeezed off a bolt. The growling and grasping ceased as the bolt thunked into its gnarled forehead, but the walker continued to swing lightly from the tree.

This one had been a farmhand, judging from the overalls, and had stumbled all the way from the farmlands surrounding the Greene family, Daryl supposed. Those farmlands were over twelve miles west through the forest and along the stream now, which might explain why the Greene family had never run into the boy. But Otis had hunted in the direction of Daryl's hunting grounds to the north, and so had the boy, because he'd come across both in the forest. The forest beyond Fun Kingdom's parking lot must be somewhere near the middle of the farm and the boy's camp in a northwest/northeast direction from them. He'd have to map out the precise distance later.

Carefully avoiding the other two walker traps that had not yet been sprung, Daryl ripped his bolt out of the creature's head. In the center of the traps lay a bloated deer. It had probably been no good to eat when the boy came upon it, and so he was now using it for bait to keep the walkers away from the camp and from the trip wire.

Daryl walked back to the cul-de-sac's perimeter, and then around to the armored vehicle. He emerged from the woods, stayed hidden behind the armored vehicle, and walked across the dirt path to the other woods, which he likewise explored. He found more walker traps, with dead possums as bait this time. By the time he approached the trip wire perimeter, and peered again at the cabin through the tree branches, the boy had hung the deer hide on the wall of the cabin to tan, put on a new, clean shirt, cleaned his tools, and pumped water to fill a clear five-gallon water jug. He was now playing with his dog. The boy tossed a tennis ball toward the woods where Daryl was hiding, which the dog ran to recover.

The dog approached within two yards of him to claim the ball that had rolled just beneath the trip wire. Daryl willed every muscle in his body to still. The dog sensed him anyway. She dropped the ball, growled, and then barked into the forest.

Now warned of a presence, the boy began to reach for his pistol, but before he could draw, Daryl burst from the forest, tripped the wire, set off the popping firecrackers – which startled the dog and sent it running toward the cabin - and closed the space between himself and the boy with his crossbow raised and aimed right below a thick, sweeping curl of auburn hair and between his blue-green eyes. "Hands up!" Daryl roared.

The boy raised his hands as the dog now ran back toward them. She inserted herself between Daryl and her boy and barked and growled.

"Call off your dog 'fore I shoot it," Daryl ordered.

"Heel, girl!" the boy commanded anxiously. The dog sat on its haunches, ceased barking, but continued to eye Daryl fiercely and with a low growl. Then, very loudly, the boy cried, "Vanish!"

The windows of the cabin slammed shut and internal wood shutters fell into place. The smoke thinned suddenly from the chimney, as if a damper had been closed.

"Leave them out of this," the boy said, hands held at his shoulders. "If you're with the Governor, then I'm the one you want. I'll cooperate. I'll go back with you, if you just leave them be." He had a southern accent, but it wasn't Georgian. Daryl wasn't sure what it was. "We'll walk away to where ever your vehicle is. But if you try to hurt them, I'll draw, and you'll have to shoot me. I know the Governor won't be pleased if you don't bring me back alive."

"I ain't workin' for the Governor," Daryl told him. "I don't know who the fuck the Governor is. If I was workin' for the Governor, I'd have had at least three chances to take you by now – at the housing complex, the strip mall, and in my woods."

"So I was being followed," the boy said.

"Closer than you knew. And I didn't take you."

"I did wonder why y'all didn't try to shoot out my tires," the boy admitted. "And I'd never seen either of you at Woodbury. But you keep turning up like a bad penny."

Turning up like a bad penny? Who the hell said things like that anymore? Least of all teenagers?

"I ain't interested in killin' you or those kids," Daryl said. "Even if you did rob me and my woman. Twice. I am interested in knowing what the hell's going on." And whether or not the boy had seen – or knew anything about – Merle's walker. "Who are you? And where'd you get that armed vehicle? And who the fuck is the Governor?"

"It's a long story," the boy said. "Can I put my hands down? And can we sit on the porch?"

Holding his crossbow with one hand, and despite the growl of the dog, Daryl reached out and yanked the boy's pistol from his holster and then slid it into the inside pocket of his own leather vest. The dog growled louder but remained sitting. Daryl patted the boy down one handed and removed his knives. He had three on him – a buck hunting knife, a folding survival knife, and a combat knife concealed in his boot. Those Daryl tossed on the ground for now. Daryl motioned with his crossbow, and the boy walked, hands up, to the porch. Daryl didn't think there was anyone but those two kids inside, and they had probably "vanished" at the boy's command, but he wasn't taking any chances. He made the teenager sit in a rocking chair that was not near any windows, with his back to the cabin wall. Daryl stood directly across from him and leaned back against the support pillar of the covered porch. No one could snipe him from a window here, and it anyone inside got a mind to shoot through that cabin wall, the boy would stop the bullet before it hit Daryl.

"Can I put my hands down now?" the boy asked.

"Yeah, but on the arms of that chair, where I can see 'em."

The boy placed his palms flat on the arms of the chair. The dog pattered onto the porch, circled, and lay at the boy's feet in front of Daryl.

"So where do you want me to start?" the boy asked.

"From the beginning."