Weapons ready, Daryl and Dixon cautiously swept around the bus on all sides. Flies buzzed about the dead, feasted-on skeletons inside – mostly teenagers, by the look of them, likely once on their way to some kind of summer band camp or competition, judging from the instrument cases scattered on the floor and seats. How they ended up here was anybody's guess. Perhaps the driver dropped dead of the sickness suddenly and crashed.

The bodies were long ago picked over, though one walker was still gruesomely at work, trying to gnaw the very last bit of meat off a bone. Daryl shot it with a bolt. Then he got out the siphoning hose and pump while Dixon pulled a black neck gaiter up over his mouth and nose and crawled in through the backdoor of the bus. He recovered Daryl's bolt and then began tossing backpacks out the windows that were not pressed against the ground.

The school bus had enough gas to fill all three of the empty ten-gallon gas cans Daryl had brought with him. He'd been optimistic throwing those in the bed and had not expected to fill more than one. He was then able to fill the entire tank of the pick-up truck to full (eleven gallons, Daryl estimated). Still pressing his luck, Daryl stretched the hose into the bed of the truck to fill his motorcycle's tank, too. Another gallon and a half pumped through the siphoning hose before the gas finally stopped flowing.

They wouldn't be able to do this much longer, Daryl thought. Gas sitting around in tanks, not circulating, would likely be spoiled in a month. They'd still have the looted stores to which they'd added stabilizer, but even with limited driving, they were looking at the possibility of running out of fuel in eight months, unless they lucked upon a gas tanker.

When Daryl hopped out of the bed of the pick-up, Dixon was going through lunch boxes and bags. The teenager salvaged eight boxes of juice, four unopened bottles of water, two small bags of pretzels, a bag of apple chips, three Slim Jims, five bags of fruit snacks, a package of fake cheese crackers, and two granola bars from the otherwise moldy and rotting mess. Daryl was impressed with the speed and efficiency of Dixon's looting and the way he kept his eyes intermittently on the road and tree line beyond the ditch as he did so.

The teenager grabbed The Stand by Stephen King from one of the kids' backpacks. "Been wanting to read this one," he said. "They didn't have it in the town library."

"You're living that book, kid. Don't know what the hell you want to read it for."

"You've read it?"

"Long time ago. You see a flute in there?" There were music cases strewn everywhere.

"Why?"

"Sophia used to play in the 5th and 6th grade band."

Ed had protested the expense, Sophia told him at one of their tea parties, and her parents had argued about it. Carol had lost that argument, of course, probably after a slap across the face, though Sophia didn't say so. What Sophia did say was that Carol told her privately she could rent the instrument, not buy it, and she would have to keep it in her music locker at school. No practicing at home. She should go to the music room early before school to practice instead.

Carol filled out the permission form for her, along with the school musical instrument rental form, and she attached an envelope with enough cash to cover the rent for the school year. Where the cash had come from, Sophia didn't know, but Daryl did – Carol had told him once about the secret, cash-under-the-table part-time sewing business she had that Ed didn't know about. When it was time for the annual band performance, Carol was in the front row, but Ed was nowhere to be seen.

Dixon crawled back out of the bus and tossed three bloody cases on the ground. "One of those has to be a flute."

Two of them were. "You know which of these is better?" Daryl asked.

"No idea."

"Take 'em both." Daryl slid the flute cases into the back seat of the truck and shut the door.

"How long have you and Carol been married?" Dixon asked.

"We ain't married."

"Oh. You just…lived together that long?"

Daryl's brow creased with confusion. "Ain't been that long." Carol had just moved into his bedroom yesterday, though he suppsed Dixon might not be aware of that if he hadn't noticed Sophia hauling Carol's stuff out of her room. "Only been livin' in the same house 'bout seven weeks."

"So…Sophia's not your daughter? I thought maybe I had a cousin."

"Nah. She's Carol's and some asshole's, but he's dead now."

Dixon smiled slightly and asked, a little jokingly, a little uneasily, "You didn't kill him, did you?"

"Asshole didn't live long enough for me to kill 'em."

Dixon's smile hitched.

"Easy. I ain't never killed a man in my life. Yet. Sooner or later, my luck's likely gonna run out there, and I'll have to."

"I'd have killed those men, if my...father...hadn't. Martinez and Crowley. I mean, if they hadn't gotten the drop on me. If I'd been able. I'd have killed them to keep them away from me. From the kids."

"Reckon you would of. Glad you didn't have to." Daryl walked around to the driver's side of the truck.

Soon, they were on the road again. Dixon didn't ask again about how Merle ended up on the roof, and Daryl was relived. Instead, the boy asked, "Did my mom lie about how they met? She said my father saved her from some guy who pulled a gun on her in a bar."

"That's true. I was there when it happened." Daryl told Dixon the story he'd told Carol their first day at Fun Kingdom.

"Did my father really graduate magnum cum laude from Emory?"

"Pffffft! Merle? Hell no. Eked his way out of high school. Joined the army a year later. Served 'bout ten years. Got out. Married your mama. And then…seven months into it, she left."

"Why?"

"Dunno. Maybe 'cause…well….Merle had a drug problem," Daryl admitted.

"What kind of problem?"

"Kind that fucks you up."

"Did he hit her? My mother?"

"Nah. No! Hell no! Never. Merle never hit a woman in his life. And he was crazy 'bout your mamma. Tried to stay clean for her. He was clean, for the first six months they were married. But then he fell off the wagon again."

"And you?" Dixon asked. "Do you have a drug problem?"

"Never touched that shit. Can't say I never been drunk off my ass though."

"Yeah. I can't say that either. That day I buried Ryan and Lizzie…and I had all that booze I'd stolen form you and your...uh…Carol, after the kids had cried themselves to sleep, I think I drank almost enough to get alcohol poisoning." He sighed. "That was stupid. I ended up throwing up out the window twice that night. The next day I couldn't do anything except lie in bed. Mika had just lost her sister and father, and she was the one bringing me water and soup. She was afraid I was going to die, too."

"Still drinkin' a lot?" Daryl asked. They boy had consumed three ounces of whiskey when he told his story back at the cabin.

"Not like that," Dixon said. "I'll go a day without it, then have one drink the next day. Maybe two the next. Two at most. Just to…relax, you know?"

"Yeah," Daryl said quietly.

Dixon glanced in the back of the truck. "It's weird not having Daisy with me. Can I bring her next time?"

"Sure," Daryl said. "Next time…what?" This was their last trip to the cabin, he assumed.

"Next time we go to the Greene Family Farm. I bet Beth would like her."

They didn't need that mess, Daryl thought, of Dixon trying to get in Beth's pants. They really didn't. "Can't go there often. Gas."

"How far is the farm through the forest? Hiking from Fun Kingdom? It's a lot shorter that way than by road, isn't it?"

"Six miles," Daryl answered warily. "Got a boyfriend, you know."

"Maggie said they broke up."

"Ain't what Jimmy said. Said they never really did. Misunderstandin'."

"Maybe that was wishful thinking on his part," Dixon speculated. "Did you see the way she smiled at me?"

Daryl sighed and pushed the accelrator a little harder.

[*]

Daryl had brought empty cardboard boxes for loading up the books. Dixon had a lot. He might not have had a formal education, but he'd clearly had an education. There were books on the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, on hunting, tracking, camping, foraging, fishing, racing, motorcycle repair, carpentry, and firearms. He had novels, too – science-fiction, horror, westerns, and historical fiction. As Daryl began packing up the third shelf of the second bookcase, his hand froze on a title: Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse.

Why did the boy have that book?

Every muscle in Daryl's body tensed. His jaw tightened and his teeth ground together, and it wasn't because he was thinking of the scars on his own back or all the times his own father had whipped him. It was because he was thinking, That bitch, that fucking bitch, took Merle's son away from him and then isolated the boy from the world, kept him out of school, kept him in a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina where she could get away with abusing him. That fucking bitch piece of –

Dixon interrupted his venomous thoughts: "Don't bother with that shelf. That whole shelf of books was my mother's before she died. I don't want any of them. Except her poetry journal." He grabbed a journal with a brown leather cover and a ribbon dangling out between the pages. Then he glanced at the book Daryl had half pulled out. "She had a rough childhood," he explained. "She didn't like to talk about it much."

The thoughts in Daryl's head scattered and ever so slowly his nerves began to unwind, and then a wave of guilt rushed through him because of the raging, false accusation his mind had made against a dead woman who had probably loved her son and raised him tenderly. Of course she had. Dixon was too damn well adjusted to have been abused. He wasn't a mess like Daryl. But Dixie had been abused as a child, apparently.

Daryl wondered if Merle had known that, if they had ever talked about it those seven months they were married. He and Merle had never talked about the beatings that started when Daryl was six, after Merle went to juvie, the beatings that had stopped when Merle had gotten out and come home six months later, but then resumed again when he went off to join the army. But Daryl knew. Daryl knew Merle had gotten the beatings, too, when he was younger, before he was old enough to hit back.

When Dixon wasn't looking, Daryl slipped the book into his own bag.

Dixon took a shoebox down from on top of a row of books in the bookcase he was clearing. He walked over to the coffee table, flipped off the top, and rustled through it. "Was this really him?" he asked, holding out an old Polaroid photo to Daryl. "It doesn't look like the Hammer. Was it just some random guy she told me was my father?"

Daryl, feeling a strange flutter in his heart, walked over and took the photo from Dixon. He was holding his breath when he turned it to himself, and then his breath sighed out. Merle was barely thirty in the photo, and in the best shape of his life, after his years in the army. He'd just grown his hair back out from the army buzz cut, and it always got curly when he let it grow – thick, dark brown tendrils spilling over his head like he was some kind of intentionally disheveled male model.

In the photo, Merle was leaned back against the old, red Harley Road King he'd had back then, before he sold it for drug money and later built the chopper Daryl owned now. He wore a black leather biker's jacket, black jeans, and ankle boots with buckles. He was smiling through his thick, brown biker's beard, a real smile, a genuine smile, not that grating, condescending sneer Daryl had so often seen on his brother's face. He was outside of the bar where Dixie used to work in the early 1990s, and she was probably the one snapping the Polaroid.

"It's him." The photo shook in Daryl's hand, and some kind of unnatural noise tore up from his throat and out of his mouth. He dropped the photo into the open shoe box and walked out the cabin door, letting it slam shut behind him. He paced a circle in the dirt cul-de-sac, then stopped suddenly, took in a deep breath, and rocked hard on his heels until the feeling – whatever the hell it was – had passed.

When he came back inside, the shoe box was nowhere to be found, packed away in one of the cardboard boxes, perhaps, and Dixon had finished packing up the bookcase. He was folding down the top of the box on a coffee table and tucking the flaps closed. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't mean to upset you."

"Wasn't," Daryl lied.

"You know, it's okay to be sad your brother's dead. Take some time to grieve. Mika cried herself to sleep for six nights straight after Ryan and Lizzie died. I still sometimes…for my mom, you know? It hits you sometimes, out of nowhere, when you think you're doing fine." Dixon picked up the cardboard box and carried it out to the truck.

Daryl picked up a box and followed him. As he slid it into the bed of the truck, he said, "'S just…I ain't never seen a photo of Merle before."

"What do you mean, never?"

"My folks weren't the picture-taking type. A waitress friend of your mama's took a whole roll at their weddin', but the film got exposed. Nothin' came out."

Dixon stepped away from the truck. He reached inside his black and red racing jacket, pulled out the Polaroid photo of Merle, and handed it to him. "You keep it."

"Nah. No. He was your daddy. Only photo you got."

"He wasn't my daddy. And maybe that wasn't his fault. Maybe that was all my mother's choice. It was certainly her choice to lie to me about it. But he was your brother. Your whole life. Take it."

Daryl slid the photo from Dixon's fingers. He looked at it once more before slipping it into the inside pocket of his own leather vest. "Take it for safe keepin'," he told Merle's son. "You ever want it back, just say the word."

"I'm not going to want it back," Dixon insisted, but that Harley in Merle's picture was red. Same color Dixon chose for his own racing motorbike. That, Daryl thought, was no coincidence.

[*]

Daryl had never driven an armored vehicle before. Merle had, many times, he was sure, and this one in particular. He could smell the stale, lingering scent of Merle's cigarettes in here as he followed the pick-up truck Dixon was driving back to Fun Kingdom. They'd completely cleared out the cabin now, except for the furniture and some linens. It was a good place to hole up, and they might use it again, while hunting, perhaps.

The CB radio crackled and Daryl glanced down at it. "Are you listening?" an enraged voice asked. "You think you three can just go AWOL like that? Deserters."

The word deserters came through the speakers with a hiss that sent a chill up Daryl's spine.

"Did you take that little shit with you?" The rant continued. "Don't think I won't hunt you down just because you got a few days head start on me! I've got Shumpert out looking for you. Allen and Tim, too. You bought some time with that prison bullshit, but not much!"

The enraged man on the other end of the radio let out a grunting scream of frustration that made him sound like a madman. Then he returned to his speech, his voice low, as if he was speaking with his mouth pressed to the microphone: "Hammer, you lying piece of shit! Were you trying to lead me into a trap? That prison was overrun. The Woodbury Army lost three men clearing it looking for what happened to you! Three men! But that boy was never there, was he? Well, that's just fine, because I found myself five more men for my army living in the prison cafeteria, and I can't wait to let Tomás loose on you!"

There was the sound of pounding, as though the madman might be slamming the microphone against something, and then the radio went silent. That was, Daryl supposed, the Governor. And the Governor was after Dixon and who he imagined to be his living, deserting soldiers.

If Daryl brought this armored vehicle back to Fun Kingdom, it would be like a neon sign of the boy's presence. They could hide it from view of the gates perhaps, but the safest course would be to get rid of it altogether. The Governor's soldiers would specifically be looking for this vehicle. He drove around the pick-up, cut it off, slowed, and stopped the armored vehicle. Dixon slammed on his brakes. The teenager threw the pick-up into park and rolled down his window as Daryl strolled back to him. "What is it?" the boy asked.

"Change of plans."

[*]

Daryl drove that armored vehicle in the opposite direction of Fun Kingdom, and also away from the farm, a good ten miles, with Dixon following. Along the way, they stopped and picked up the feasted-over remains of four different bodies. They stopped three times in three different locations: at a gas station, at a country house, and at a small country church. They must have looked at twenty gnarled, unidentifiable corpses and killed a dozen walkers before they found four bodies that more or less looked the size of three soldiers and a teenage boy.

These bodies they stripped of any remaining identifiable rags of clothes. Daryl chopped the right hand off of one – or what was left of the hand – with Dixon's hatchet, which was among his butchering tools packed in the truck. Meanwhile, Dixon tied the hands of the walker that most resembled his own height and build behind its back with rope.

They placed the bodies inside the armored vehicle on the shoulder of the highway near a hill that rolled down into a rocky ditch with a narrow creek. Daryl popped the vehicle into neutral, opened all four of the doors, and he and Dixon gave it a heaving push. It rolled over the edge of the hill, picked up speed, and crashed onto the rocks below.

One door slammed shut, but at least two remained open, and one of the bodies fell halfway out an open door. If the Governor found the vehicle, it would look like the men and boy had crashed and died and been consumed by passing walkers.

"What about their guns, though?" Dixon asked.

"He'll assume looters passed by and got 'em."

"Shit!" Dixon cried.

"What?" Daryl asked.

"We put my two spare motorbike tires in the back."

Daryl sighed. "Well, let's go get 'em."

[*]

Dixon and Daryl were each rolling a tire up the hill when a military truck whizzed by on the highway above. Uncle and nephew froze, turned, and looked at one another. The driver might not have seen them on the hill, but there was no way in hell he hadn't seen the pick-up truck on the shoulder above.

The dark green military truck slammed on its brakes with a loud hiss. The vehicle began to reverse.

"Drop," Daryl grunted.

Both instantly let go of their tires, which rolled back down the hill and thudded against the crashed armored vehicle. Both dropped flat to the ground, swinging their weapons into their hands as they did so.

Uncle and nephew buried themselves, stomachs down, in the overgrown grass of the hill as a door creaked open on the highway above.