The Governor's surrendered soldiers sat lined up against the outside wall of the Haunted Castle, which was a safe distance from the explosives. Abraham was no longer holding them at gunpoint, but instead stood talking with Rick and Andrea.

T-Dog, exhausted from carrying Carol, had lain her down on a bench outside the castle near the sitting soldiers and had gone on to the house to dig up the necessary medical supplies. Carol now leaned against T-Dog's balled-up coat and the iron arm of the bench and tried not to feel the pain in her leg, tried not to worry about Daryl and Dixon and the people at the farm, about Sophia, waiting and wondering beneath the trap door of that cabin. She tried, also, not to think about the fact that she had just a killed a man.

Standing beside the bench, Glenn pulled out a pocket watch. "It's been over twenty minutes," he said. "And still no explosion. She must have disarmed it."

"Is that Hershel's?" Carol, happy for the distraction, nodded to the pocket watch.

"Yeah. He gave it to me."

"Why?"

"Uh…last night. At the farm. I asked for Maggie's hand in marriage. He gave it to me, as a sign of his blessing. There was this whole story to go along with it."

"You're getting married?" Carol asked.

Glenn smiled sheepishly. "I was going to tell everyone at dinner this evening. Before…" He sighed. "Before all this."

Glenn had killed a man today, too, Carol realized. His first also. Daryl had slain his first man as well. And Rick. They were none of them virgins anymore when it came to that.

Abraham strolled over to the bench, leaving Andrea and Rick half-guarding – but mostly talking to - the surrendered soldiers. "How's the wounded soldier?" he asked, looking at Carol.

Carol smiled to hear herself called a soldier. "In pain. But I'll be fine."

"Is she a bomb expert? Your girlfriend?" Glenn asked him.

"Not an expert, no. But she had a boyfriend who was once. That's how Rosita's learned everything she knows. From her boyfriends. And her brothers." Abraham glanced at his watch. "She must have succeeded in her mission." As if to confirm his words, Max's bark sounded in the distance.

The dog was the first to come trotting toward them, his tongue lolling from his mouth, and then Rosita followed.

As the dog approached, Carol noticed the blood matted in the fur on its cheeks. "Is Max okay?" she asked anxiously.

"It's not his blood," Rosita answered as she came to a stop by the bench. She jutted out a hip, put one hand on it, and gave Abraham a fiery look. "You left me alone with the Governor."

"He was unarmed," Abraham said. "And he wasn't budging. I thought you'd just shoot him if you needed to."

"I was kind of busy!" Rosita bobbed her head with annoyance. Then she relaxed her posture. "The Governor came at me. So, the dog ripped his throat out. Then he had to lay there gurgling on the ground, holding his throat and trying to keep the blood from spurting out, until I finished diffusing the bomb. Then I finished him off." She made a casual shooting gesture with her thumb and forefinger. Carol gathered this was far from her first time killing a man. "Although I'm not sure he deserved the mercy shot."

"And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling dog!" piped up a blonde-haired soldier with a goatee who was the last in the line of soldiers closest the bench.

"This is no time for Scooby Doo references, Axel," Rosita told him.

"I thought we could all use a little levity," the soldier replied.

Abraham slung his M-16 upward against his shoulder and pulled Rosita to himself. He kissed her and then said, "Glad you're alive, darling."

Glenn told Carol, "I'm going to take Daryl's truck and go around by road to that cabin to get Maggie and the kids. All right?"

"Go," Carol told him. "Bring back my Sophia." Glenn nodded and was off.

Rick, who had overheard the conversation where he'd stood talking to one of the soldiers, strolled over. "Good boy!" he told Max as he scratched the dog behind its ears. "Come on! Let's get you cleaned up and get you a treat!" Max padded after Rick toward the House of the Future.

By now, T-Dog was back with medical supplies. One of the soldiers sitting against the wall, a short, curly haired black man of medium height and build, raised his hand. "I can help," he said. "I used to be an army medic."

Abraham waved him over, and the man took the first aid kit from T-Dog. "Bob Stookey, ma'am," he told Carol.

"I'm Carol Murphy."

"Well, Miss Murphy, I'll clean up all your scratches. But first I'm going to have to cut open the pants around that wound on your leg to gain access to it. Then I'll clean it, and you'll probably need a few stitches." As he opened the kit to take out the scissors, he apologized for being misled by the Governor. "The Governor found me while he was out with some of his soldiers looking for Dixon two weeks ago," Bob told her. "I'd lost my entire group to walkers, and I was completely alone. Like all of these other soldiers…I believed the description he gave of the traitor as a ruthless, murdering arson." He cut off the fabric in a square around her wound.

While Bob was cleaning her wound, Carol tried to distract herself from the pain by asking Abraham, "What's everyone's name? I know you're Abraham. And that's Rosita," she nodded to the woman who had now sauntered over toward the sitting, surrender soldiers. "But who are all these other soldiers who lay down their guns?" Quite a few of them looked like they'd never killed before and had no real desire to do so.

"That's Axel," Abraham said, nodding to the blonde man who had made the Scooby Doo quip. "And Oscar next to him." He indicated a thirty-something, dark-skinned man. "And then Big Tiny." He nodded to a much larger black man.

"The Governor found us at the West Georgia Correctional Facility, ma'am," Axel told her. "The guards locked five of us in the cafeteria and we were there for almost five months. But…uh…he sent Andrew and Tomás onto some farm."

Carol could only hope Andrew and Tomás were as reticent to fight as these three prisoners here had been, but she worried they wouldn't be. Daryl had told her the Governor had threatened to "unleash" Tomás on Merle when he still believed Merle to be alive.

"That's Rowan," Abraham continued, pointing down the line.

A brown-haired woman, likely in her late-twenties or early thirties, raised her hand. "Sorry," Rowan said. "I swear I didn't know what he was. Although…he was becoming increasingly strange in bed." Carol raised an eyebrow at this admission. "I was getting ready to break off my affair with him." Rowan grimaced. "Now I wonder what he would have done to me if I had."

Bob was now threading a surgical needle to stitch up Carol's leg.

"I'm Karen," said another brown-haired woman next to Rowan. She looked to be only slightly older than Rowan, in her early thirties, most likely. "I was just a schoolteacher before all this. I'm sorry. The Governor convinced us Dixon was a threat."

"Welles," said the man next to Karen. "I was a pilot in the National Guard. I was serving in a refugee camp at the start, but it got overrun. I tried to get out with a handful of survivors, but we were overweighted. My helicopter crashed, I was the sole survivor. I was injured, and the Governor found me. He brought me back to Woodbury and had me patched up. I thought he was saving people. I…I didn't know what he was."

"Alisha," said the woman next to him. She was in her late twenties, with brown hair and green eyes. "And this is my girlfriend." She smiled and pointed to the last soldier in line.

"Girlfriend?" the woman replied with a smile of her own. "That's the first time I've heard you call me that." Then she turned her head toward Carol. "I'm Tara Chambler."

Tara was yet another brown-haired woman in her late twenties. Carol wondered for an uneasy moment if the Governor had been collecting brunettes of a certain age.

"I was a police officer," Tara told her.

Carol winced because Bob was now pulling the thread through her leg. She curled her hand around the edge of the bench.

"Well, I was about to be," Tara continued. "I was a cadet. The Governor found me four weeks ago while looking for Dixon. He was searching an apartment complex where my father and sister and niece and I had been living off of the food in a delivery truck my father drove. We were finally out of food when he found us, and my father was sick. My father has since passed away, but my sister and nephew are still safely at Woodbury. I was grateful to him for taking us in. But when I saw him kill that young man…Jimmy." Tara sighed out heavily and shook her head.

All the soldiers hung their heads, one by one down the line.

"Your leg is all patched up," Bob said. "Now let's get those scratches on your face and arms cleaned up."

[*]

When Daryl arrived outside the gates of Fun Kingdom, the breeze had picked up slightly and the temperature had dropped five degrees, but the sky was still clear over the parking lot. Abraham appeared to be thoroughly in charge of the surrendered soldiers, who were now following his orders to collect and burn the bodies of the slain soldiers – and the Governor's, who had apparently been shot sometime after Daryl left.

Rosita stood nearby, her M-16 slung over her shoulder. The exit gate to Fun Kingdom was wide open, and some soldiers were carrying two green metal cases of ammunition inside. When Rosita saw the alarm on Daryl's face as he slowed his bike to an idle beside her, she said, "Don't worry. We didn't take over Fun Kingdom while you were gone. The ammunition they're bringing in – a thousand rounds - is a peace offering for having rolled up to your gates unprovoked. We're also leaving you a hundred gallons of gas. We want a truce between our camps. We don't want any trouble."

"A hundred gallons?" Daryl asked in shock. Abraham had only stolen ten that day on the road.

"They have plenty of gas in Woodbury," Rosita told him. "Two tanker trucks full. About eighteen thousand gallons worth. And it probably won't last more than two more years, even with fuel stabilizer. We run on solar and wind, too, not gas generators, so… Woodbury can afford it." She leaned forward confidentially. "But pretend I didn't tell you that. Abraham likes to appear overly generous. It's some kind of military strategy. He says it helps with building alliances."

Daryl thought maybe Rosita was attempting some kind of alliance-building strategy herself by telling him all this. "Is the sergeant takin' over Woodbury now?"

"Abraham is taking charge of the Woodbury Army," Rosita replied. "These soldiers have already offered their allegiance to him. But we'll have free elections for a new governor when we get back. The Governor's entire inner circle is now dead, except Milton Mamet. But I doubt he's going to be running anything except the laboratory." Rosita reached down and scratched around her ankle. She had pants on today, tight gray ones.

"Chigger bites?" Daryl asked with a smirk as he leaned back slightly in the seat of his motorcycle, his boots comfortably on the ground.

Rosita glowered at him. "No. It's December now. It's way too late and cold for them. And I stopped itching from those bites well over a week ago."

"So you did get 'em!"

She rolled her eyes. "Maybe. But these bites here are from house spiders."

"What did y'all do with Dr. Porter?"

"I read that book your son gave me," Rosita answered with a glower.

"He's my nephew," Daryl said. "What did you do to him? Dr. Porter?"

"Abraham lost it when he found out. I stopped him before he could beat Eugene completely black and blue. But Eugene's fine. He's back at Woodbury. Working as a laboratory aid to the head scientist there. That's the man I already mentioned - Milton Mamet. They're studying the undead things, seeing what can be learned about them."

"Ain't much to learn," Daryl said, "'cept you got to get the brain."

"That may well be," Rosita told him, "but we'll see."

"Still think he's a real scientist?" Daryl asked her, "your Dr. Porter?"

"No, I don't," Rosita said, "but Milton is. And Eugene's smart enough that he can follow instructions in a lab. If nothing comes of it – and I suspect nothing will - they'll move on to more important things. Like engineering."

"How'd y'all end up in Woodbury?" Daryl asked.

"Once it was clear Eugene was pulling the wool over our eyes," Rosita replied, "we aborted our mission. We were almost to North Carolina by the time I read that book. Abe was in no position to make decisions once he found out. He just shut down for a few days. He'd given his life to that mission. It was his whole sense of purpose. So, I took the lead for a while. I turned us around and started driving back south again. I wanted to head back to Texas, avoid Houston this time, try the panhandle. But then we stumbled on Woodbury five days ago. The Governor convinced us that little paradise had a nemesis that would destroy it if he wasn't captured. We didn't realize that nemesis was your nephew." She shook her head. "That's not at all how the Governor described him."

"Every mission turns out to be a lie," Abraham muttered as he approached them now. The bodies were burning at a distance in the parking lot, with a few soldiers supervising the cremation. "Eugene's. Now the Governor's."

"Well, Sergeant, now you've established your own mission," Rosita told him. "You'll lead this army. Honorably." She turned to Daryl. "Were your farm people killed?"

"They're on their way. But the farm's on fire and overrun by walkers. Lost most of the animals. The crops."

"My condolences for your losses," Abraham said solemnly. "I can only say we didn't know what he was."

"Nah?" Daryl asked bitterly. "You didn't see the pit fights?"

"Using the dead ones in those fights was a little unnerving," Rosita replied. "But boys will be boys. And Abe had no problem killing them and winning his matches." Daryl wondered who would win one of those pit fights – Merle or Abraham. "We need to get rid of that pit," Rosita concluded.

"Or expand it," Abraham replied. "Dig it out like a moat. Put a draw bridge over it to the gate. Who's going to cross a moat of dead ones? And then any others that lurch up to Woodbury will just tumble in."

Rosita raised an eyebrow. "Not a bad idea. What about the arena?"

"Keep it, but for more civilized boxing matches."

"I was thinking a stage for live music," Rosita said. "Or maybe stand-up comedy."

Abraham chuckled.

"I suppose it will be up to the new governor," Rosita said, "whoever that turns out to be. Though I might throw my hat in the election ring."

"Well, you're really grabbing the bull by the nutsack, aren't you, darling?"

"No better place to grab a bull." Rosita leveled her eyes at Abraham in what, for all Daryl could tell, must be some kind of sexual challenge.

"Who's guarding your town if the whole damn army is here?" Daryl asked.

"It's not all here," Abraham said. "Five guards stayed behind."

"And if they don't like that you took over the Army?" Daryl demanded. "If they're still loyal to the Governor?"

"The Governor is dead," Rosita said. "And those soldiers were already likely wary of him. It's probably why they stayed behind. Tyreese refused, you know," she told Abraham. "He just flat out said he wasn't going."

"And Sasha," Abraham agreed. "Smart cookie that one."

Rosita shot him a peeved look.

Abraham turned from her gaze back to Daryl. "Did you dispense with the three soldiers the Governor sent to the farm?"

"All dead," Daryl answered.

"Good," Abraham replied. "That Tomás made my neck hairs stand up."

"The Governor told us the farm was inhabited by a small gang of murderous men," Rosita explained to Daryl. "I presume that wasn't true?"

"Try two women, an old man, and a teenage girl," Daryl growled. He didn't really blame this couple for what had happened, but he was still angry. "Where's Carol? The woman who was injured?"

"She's been treated," Rosita told him. "And she's back at your house."

Daryl put his feet up again, revved his bike, and shot off through the open gate.