5:30 PM
The Forest
Most of the walkers had followed Zach and Daryl through the trees back toward the visitor's center, but almost a dozen still remained in the forest. "Come on! Come on!" Dixon urged as he kick started Daryl's motorcycle. It caught with a roar that would probably draw still more monsters from around the building to the forest.
Carol slew one more walker with a thrust of her hunting knife, walked backward a few steps, turned, and then mounted the motorcycle behind Dixon. She sheathed her knife, still wet with blood, and grabbed hold of her nephew to keep from flying off the bike as he took off through the woods. The tires ground over the rough forest floor for a few yards before Dixon suddenly picked up speed and jumped a fallen tree log. The landing jarred Carol and made her blink but didn't seem to faze Dixon, who shot the bike forward again, leaving the pursuing walkers in his wake as he made his way over the hiking path for about a mile before careening out of the forest onto the dirt road at the rear of the visitor's center.
About a half mile ahead of them, Carol could just make out Daryl and Zach in the back of a pick-up truck that was following a sedan. A man was with them – Gavin, she supposed, unless Gavin was the big man she'd seen on the roof, but her money was on the leaner, older one. Zach's head was thrown back, and the young man was laughing. Both vehicles were headed up the road toward the idling military truck. When Noah spied Dixon and Carol bursting from the forest, and saw that everyone was accounted for, he popped the truck into drive and began moving down the road.
Dixon raced forward and slowed to a hover at the side of the pick-up truck, long enough to give Daryl a thumbs-up. Carol sighed with relief to see her husband looking no worse for the wear. Dixon let the pick-up pull ahead before weaving in and out around it and the sedan in a flowing figure eight. Next he shot around the rear bumper of the military truck and roared forward past the driver's side. Noah glanced at him and shook his head. Dixon flew past and veered sharply right in front of the truck, leaning low, before jerking the motorcycle up again. Carol's head spun lightly. She'd just turned thirty-nine. Maybe she was a little too old for this roller coaster.
"Was all that really necessary?" she asked Dixon, raising her voice to be heard over the purr of the engine, as he steadied the motorcycle and eased into a more stable glide.
"Sorry, Aunt Carol," he replied, "I'll take it easy from here on out."
5:50 PM
Route 360
The dirt road had picked up a side road which had spilled onto the highway. The retreating caravan had driven another several miles northeast on 360 before easing to a stop at a bent guardrail near the side of the highway. They were a good way from the herd now, and the pack that had pursued them would surely have given up by now.
Carol dismounted the motorcycle and strode over to kill a walker trying to crawl out the half open window of a car. She heard Daryl call to Dixon, "Better not have scratched m'bike with them show off moves!"
"How could you even tell if I did?" Dixon called back. "It's not like you keep it polished."
"Polish you if you put a scratch in it!"
Dixon laughed.
Sheathing her knife, Carol made her way over to Daryl, who was now looking over his motorcycle like a jeweler examining a diamond. When he heard her approach, he turned and put a hand on her cheek. His eyes raked over her body for any sign of bite marks. "I'm fine," she assured him.
He leaned forward and kissed her before stepping back and looking at his bike again.
Zach walked toward them from the pick-up truck, followed by a man with thinning brown hair and a light goatee. "You're Gavin?" Carol asked.
"Yes, ma'am," the man replied, extending his hand. "Carol I presume?"
Carol shook his hand.
"I didn't know you'd be coming," he said.
"Change of plans," Zach told him. "Our elders decided we needed supervision. Didn't want the party to get out of hand."
Daryl shot him an annoyed look. "Better be damn glad you had supervision back on that battlefield."
Zach grinned. He pointed a finger at Daryl. "I know! High school football coach."
"No," Daryl grunted. Carol gave him a curious look, and he explained. "Kid's been trying to guess what m'job was in the Old World."
"You played though, right?" Zach asked. "When you were in high school?"
Daryl scoffed. "My high school wasn't big enough to have a team."
The driver of the pick-up, a rather stern looking blonde woman, approached them. She wore some kind of leather armor on her wrists. It would be good to prevent getting bit, Carol thought. The woman looked Daryl over in an appreciative way. A little too appreciative for Carol's taste.
"I'm Carol Dixon," Carol said, maybe a little more loudly than she'd meant to. "And this is my husband, Daryl."
The woman turned her attention from Daryl to Carol. "I'm Dianne," she said and extended her hand.
Carol, feeling a little silly for her territorial pissing, shook Dianne's hand and, in a much more friendly tone, said, "I like your sleeve armor. Does it protect against bites?"
"The first one anyway," Dianne replied. "But it keeps my bowstring from stinging my arm when I mess up and make my draw too long. Which I still do sometimes even after years of practice."
"Years of practice?" Carol asked. So Dianne had, like Daryl, been an archer before all this started. "For hunting?" she asked.
"More for sport," Dianne answered. "For competition."
"2008 Maryland State Longbow Champion," Gavin said.
The woman's deadly straight lips curved into a partial smile. "How did you know that?"
"Jerry told me."
The others had made their way over now, and names were exchanged all around. The younger woman in Gavin's group was the one they had brought the insulin for – Tina.
"The insulin's in the truck," Noah told her. "I really hope you find a substitute for it before what you already have and what we brought runs out in two years."
"We're all lucky if we live another two years, aren't we?" Tina asked.
Noah smiled. "It's good to have a positive attitude, I guess." He nodded to her short-sleeve Star Wars shirt. "I like your shirt!"
"This?" she asked, tugging on the bottom of it. "Someone just looted it."
"So not a sic-fi fan then?" Noah asked with disappointment.
"I am, actually. It's just I'm more of Star Trek fan, really."
Now Noah grinned.
Dianne asked to see Daryl's crossbow, and he handed it over for a short while before impatiently urging her to give it back. Maybe it was the crossbow and not Daryl Dianne had been admiring, Carol thought.
"It's getting late, boss," the big man, Jerry, said to Dianne. "Doubt we can make the exchange and get back to the Kingdom before nightfall."
Boss? Carol wondered. Was Dianne the leader of the group? She'd thought Gavin was.
"We should make camp for the night," Gavin said. "Somewhere safe. And do the exchange there." He looked at Carol as though he assumed she was in charge. "Unless your people want to move on already?"
"I'd like to get back home tonight," Noah said. "My mom and my brothers will be worried."
"There's no way you could make it all the way back to Georgia tonight," Tina told him. "It wouldn't be safe to travel that far this near sunset."
"Not Georgia, no…I found my family. In a community not far from here. I'm going to be staying with them now." He glanced around. "We should be able to get back there by sunset. You all could camp there tonight. We could make the trade there, and then you could all head on to your homes in the morning, after a good night's sleep."
"Sounds good to me," Jerry said, looking at Dianne for approval. Dianne looked at Gavin, who nodded.
Zach's stomach growled. "Sounds good to me." He put a hand over his stomach. He smiled at Tina. "I'm Zach by the way."
"So you said already," she replied. "Twice."
"I think we've met somewhere," Zach told her.
Noah rolled his eyes. "That's the lamest line ever."
"No, really," Zach insisted. "I do."
"Camp on the Lake," Tina told him. "In Ohio. It was the summer after 7th grade. For me anyway." Then with a grimace, she said, "You called me Porky."
"Uh…" Zach smiled uncomfortably.
"I was fat back then," she admitted.
Noah glanced from Zach to Tina doubtfully and then narrowed his eyes at Zach. "You called her Porky?"
"Well…it was a long, long time ago, you know, we were kids." He looked Tina up and down. "You've lost a lot of weight. And wasn't your hair black? It's totally blonde now."
"I haven't exactly had the chance to dye it since the apocalypse," Tina remarked.
"C'mon!" Daryl barked. "Social hour's over. Let's move out." As Dixon began strolling back toward Daryl's motorcycle, Daryl called, "Hey! I was just letting you ride that for the getaway." He jerked his thumb toward the military truck. "That's your ride now."
[*]
As they drove back to Shirewilt Estates, on a different route this time, to avoid nearing the battlefield where at least half the herd had lingered to feast and the other half may have returned, Daryl spied an expansive parking lot and a large, wide, one-story building called "Shellman's Sporting Goods." He raised a hand to motion the others to follow him off the highway onto the opposite-direction frontage road, which they back tracked on until veering off into the parking lot. He puttered the motorcycle to a stop and felt the warmth of Carol slip away. Noah, Dixon, and Zach exited the military truck, while Jerry and Tina spilled out of the sedan and Gavin and Dianne out of the pick-up.
Carol scoured the empty parking lot with binoculars. "Seems clear," she said. "Just that one walker way over there."
Dianne drew an arrow from her quiver, strung it into her bow, and set the arrow flying all the way across the lot and into the head of a walker bumbling around between a couple of ATVs parked for sale out front.
"Damn," Daryl muttered. "Good shot!"
Dianne nonchalantly shouldered her bow.
Carol was looking at the storefront now. "The windows and front door are intact," she said with disbelief. "I can't believe it hasn't been broken into and looted." She lowered the binoculars and turned to Noah. "Your community never looted this place?" They were just fifteen miles from Shirewilt Estates now.
"I guess they didn't know about it," Noah said. "I never heard of it."
"It looks brand new," Gavin observed. "No cars in the parking lot. The Saviors checked all the sporting goods stores we could find in the phone book within a 150-mile radius of the Sanctuary. This was not in any phone book we scoured. And we had a Richmond Metro book." He glanced at Dianne. "I take it the Kingdom didn't know about this store?"
"We never tried looting south of Stafford. I don't think the Hilltop has either. Oceanside, even when it was at Hallowbrant, never went far. Alexandria, maybe. Aaron goes all over the place. But he clearly didn't find this."
"How many communities do y'all have up here?" Noah asked Tina.
"A lot," she replied.
They made their way cautiously to the front door. A posted sign on the front indicated that the store wasn't expected to open for the first time until four weeks after the collapse. "That's why it wasn't in our phone books," Gavin said. "The newest one we have is three months from before everything went to hell."
Daryl put a hand on his forehead to peer through the glass. Dixon, Noah, and Zach were already pounding on the windows to make noise to attract anything from inside.
"What are you doing?" Tina asked them.
"Drawing them," Zach told her. "Anything that might be inside. So we know what we're dealing with before we go in." He smirked. "First time outside the gates?"
"For a while," she replied. "But I've been kind of sick you know. With the diabetes? We were out there at the start, me and my sister and brother-in-law. I stayed behind gates once we were with the Saviors. And this is my first time stepping out since I settled in the Kingdom."
"Like he's one to talk," Noah said. "He was at Grady from almost the start of this."
"Only because they wouldn't let us out," Zach reminded him.
"You were prisoners?" Tina asked.
"Something like that," Noah told her.
"Your boyfriend didn't come on this run with you?" Zach asked her.
"Real subtle," Noah muttered with a roll of his eyes and then returned to pounding on the window with Dixon.
Daryl stood back from the glass entry door. "Ain't nothing lurching this way. But it looks only half stocked."
"Looted from the back?" Carol asked.
"Nah. Ain't looted. Looks like they just weren't done stocking before the opening."
A hand on each of his hips, Gavin looked at Daryl. "Fifty-fifty on the loot?"
"Seventy-thirty," Daryl told him. "We brought you insulin."
"But we were going to give you ammo for that. That's been agreed to. But what's in there." Gavin pointed toward the door. "We need to decide how to divide that."
"How 'bout finder's keepers?" Daryl asked. "Whoever grabs it first and loads it first gets it."
"Hardly fair. There's four of us and five of you, and you've got three young ones." Gavin looked the teenagers over. "Good runners probably."
"Ain't my problem my people are better looters'n yours."
"Why don't we work this out when we actually see what's in there?" Carol asked. "We can take inventory, discuss our relative needs, and then draw up -"
She was cut off by the sound of shattering glass as Jerry battle rammed the front door with a heavy, pebblestone-coated trash can he'd picked up from just outside. The glass rained down inside and just outside the store.
"Damn!" Daryl exclaimed.
Jerry tossed the trashcan aside and grinned. "We're in!" he boomed.