A/N: All 13 episodes of my coming-of-age novella "Grasping Hot Coals" have now been published on Kindle Vella. (This novella is not related to TWD.) New Vella customers get 200 free tokens, enough to unlock most of the novella for free (and the first three episodes are free to begin with). I hope you will give it a read, and if you enjoy it, please be sure to "like" each episode! Thanks.

Amazon dot com /Grasping-Hot-Coals/dp/B099Y6V699/

6:30 PM
Shellman's Sporting Goods Store

Noah bounced a basketball in the aisle of Shellman's Sporting Goods and attempted to make a shot into a display hoop lowered from the store's ceiling while Zach leapt to block him.

"Maybe your people aren't the best looters after all," Gavin said to Daryl.

"Yeah, well, Carol says we're takin' inventory and discussin' the split."

"Good thing Carol's in charge and not you." Gavin smirked. He looked around. "Dianne's already in the archery section. She's probably pocketing all the best stuff in those amazing cargo pants of hers."

"Shit," Daryl cursed and jogged off toward the archery section.

"I'm checking out the shoe section," Jerry announced. "The kids in the Kingdom just keep growing."

"Kids will do that," Gavin murmured.

Carol didn't announce where she was going, but she went straight to the gun section and was disappointed to find they didn't sell any guns at Shellman's Sporting Goods. They only sold gun accessories and ammunition, and only one of the three shelves in the aisle was stocked yet. If they were only going to stock half the store before everything deteriorated, they should have started with the gun section.

She claimed an empty cardboard box – the stockers had left them at the end of the aisle – and cleared the shelf of a hundred and one boxes of ammunition – twenty each of 12 gauge shot gun shells, 9 mm, .22 LR, .223, and .308: Shellman's stocked only the five most commonly used rounds. There was an uneven number of .223 boxes—twenty-one. That was the round she used in her AR-15. Carol surreptitiously slipped a box into her backpack.

A score of a hundred boxes of ammo would have been fantastic anywhere else, but in a sporting goods store, she'd expected more and felt a hint of disappointment. Carol went on to shovel seven universal gun cleaning kits into the cardboard box, eight tubes of firearms grease, six pairs of shooting earmuffs, fifty single packages of soft foam earplugs, eight pairs of eye protection, and seven holsters.

She left the box at the end of the aisle and went to look at the camping section. On the other side of the camping section was the bicycle aisle. Dixon was there, busy gathering bike chains, tire tubes, and other spare parts to maintain the bikes in the Kingdom. Tina wandered up beside him, and Carol could just barely see the tops of their heads over the shelving, though she could hear them perfectly as she crouched to load flashlights into a box.

"So…" Tina said. "Zach and Noah have both been flirting me. You're the only guy in your group who hasn't been."

"Daryl's been?" Dixon asked.

"Ewww!" Tina exclaimed, and Carol, on the other side of the shelf, suppressed her chuckle. "I meant the only one of you three guys my age."

"I have a girlfriend," Dixon told her. "Back home."

"Ah. Good to know it's not just me. I know I look…pale and kind of weak."

"You look just fine," Dixon assured her.

"Your girlfriend…is it a sort of a you-were-both-there kind of thing? Or are there lots of girls your age in your camp?"

"It's a sort of I love her and I'm not cheating on her thing," replied Dixon, sounding a bit irritated.

"I'm not coming onto you," Tina assured him. "I'm just asking because I sort of have a boyfriend back home, too. Benjamin. We aren't going steady or anything. We've flirted. Kissed a little. And he's sweet and cute, but…I don't know. We don't really have anything in common. I think he's just doing it because I'm there. And I'm the only girl between seventeen and twenty in the Kingdom. The other girls are too young for him. Or too old. Although there is this one twenty-year-old knight who's going with a thirty-year-old woman."

"Knight?" Dixon asked.

"It's what we call our guards and soldiers."

Dixon snorted. "Okay. No delusions of grandeur there."

"So what can you tell me about Zach and Noah?"

"Uh…not much. I haven't known either that long. Noah helped save my girlfriend from this…uh…situation. He can shoot okay. Not great, but okay. He's polite. Helpful. A little geeky."

"You say that like it's a bad thing. Geeky how?"

"He was a like a math major at Emory when it all started."

"And Zach?" she asked.

"I think he was king of his fraternity."

Tina chuckled.

"He was going to Georgia Tech when it started. He was in their marksmanship club, though. He's a good shot."

"Is all that matters to you?" Tina asked. "If a guy's a good shot?"

"And if he has my back. Sure, yeah, what else matters?"

Carol smiled and finished her scavenging as they talked. The camping section was only one-fourth stocked, but in addition to the flashlights, she scored several packs of batteries, two rechargeable lanterns, three headlamps, bug spray and sunscreen, and something called a "Zip Cooking System," which worked with propane. There were also three sizable high-end coolers at the end of the aisle they would likely load up.

Once finished with her task in the camping aisle, Carol left her filled boxes by the coolers and moved on to find Daryl in the hunting section. He had two shopping carts he'd filled with camouflage clothes, four pairs of binoculars, six bags of deer feed, and some kind of hanging rope system-at least that's what she assumed it was. "Hey," she said.

He turned from the shelf. "Hell kind of sporting goods store is this?" he grumbled. "Archery section was only one set of short shelves." He thrust both his hands down in parallel as if to indicate the paltry width of the shelves. "And they got this one little aislefor huntin'. Place is all full of helmets and pads and soccer balls and footballs and baseball bats and shit."

"Yeah, well, those are sports, Pookie."

"Find anything in guns?"

"No guns, unfortunately. I got a hundred boxes of ammo and some cleaning supplies, though."

"Scopes? Powder? Bullets? Brass?"

She shook her head. "It was a small section. And it wasn't fully stocked." She peered into the cart and pulled out a wooden circle with holes on the top and what looked like aluminum inside. "What's this?"

"Pot call," he answered while surveying the shelf.

"Which is…"

He turned, took the circle from her, and pulled something else out of the cart, a wooden tool of some kind with a metal protrusion. He can began scrapping the aluminum until a loud squawking emitted from it. Three seconds later, Gavin, running, rounded one end of the aisle with handgun drawn. He relaxed when they saw where the noise was coming from.

"Jesus Christ," Gavin muttered. "Warn a guy. I didn't know what that was."

"Hell you think it was?" Daryl asked.

"I didn't know," Gavin answered. "Which is the point." He holstered his handgun.

Dianne now strolled up beside him. "Is this really it for the hunting section?"

"Yeah, and that knife case ain't stocked yet." Daryl jerked his head toward it.

Dixon joined them now. "Sounds like you found a good turkey call."

"Least someone knew what it was!" Daryl exclaimed

"Maybe we should check the back?" Dixon suggested "For boxes of stuff that hasn't been put out yet?"

"Good thinking," Carol said.

It took them all awhile to get the locked doors to the storage area in the back open, and then they had to light the place up with their battery-operated lanterns to see what they were doing in the windowless space, but it was well worth the effort. They ended up with one hundred more boxes of ammo, gun powder and bullets for reloading (they'd collect their spent brass for casings), cleavers, utility knives, and hunting knives. But the best find of all was the 86 buckets of Mountain House Classic Meal Assortments. Each bucket had twelve, two-serving packets of camp meals with a thirty-year shelf life.

"2,064 meals," Noah said.

"Boo-yah!" Daryl exclaimed.

"Did you do that math in your head?" Zach asked.

"It's just multiplication," Noah told him. "Like…three numbers. Multiplied."

Tina laughed and Zach glowered.

"Three beef Stroganoff," Jerry read from the side of one of the buckets. "Three classic spaghetti."

"Classic?" Daryl asked.

"As opposed to the more modern variety of spaghetti, I suppose," Carol said.

"Hell's modern spaghetti?" Daryl asked. "Lemme guess. Kale spaghetti?"

"You got something against kale?" Carol asked. They were growing a lot of kale back at Fun Kingdom because there had been plenty of seeds in that garden center and it was remarkably easy to grow.

"Only when yuppies put it in shit."

"Three beef stew," Jerry continued, "two chicken fried rice, and two granola with blueberries."

"We each get 43 of those buckets," Gavin insisted.

"There's four of you and five of us," Daryl said. "Y'all get 30 and we get 56."

"There's five of you here," Gavin said, "but there are a lot more people in the Sanctuary and Kingdom than at…wherever your camp is."

"How you know that?" Daryl asked.

"I don't," Gavin admitted. "I assume."

"Well you know what they say 'bout people who assume. Makes an ass—"

"-Boys," Dianne interrupted. "Carol and I will sort this all out later, as representatives of our two groups." She looked deliberately at Carol. "Right?"

Carol nodded. "I think it would be best if we handled the negotiations."

"Hey, what about me?" Noah asked. "I mean, I'm kind of my own group now. I'm representing my people back at Shirewilt."

"We'll work it out," Carol assured him.

Later, as others were loading up boxes onto a rolling flat dolly, Carol strolled over to where Daryl had just unsheathed an ornate, interestingly shaped knife. "What's that?" she asked.

"Buckinbear Bodice Dagger."

"What's it for?" she raised an eyebrow. "Bodice ripping?"

"Stahp." Then his eyes flitted over her tan, short-sleeve, button-down blouse to her breasts. When he returned his eyes to hers, he was leering. "Mean, if ya want it to be."

Carol chuckled and shook her head. "No thanks. Not one of my fantasies. I'd just have to sew back on all the buttons, and that's work."

"'S called a bodice dagger 'cause ya wear it in yer…" His eyes fell to her breast again. "Bodice."

Carol snorted. "Well, I don't have a bodice. I just have a cami t-shirt and a bra."

"Same difference," he murmured. He sheathed the knife, drew close, and slipped the leather strap attached to the hilt around her neck. Then he unbuttoned the first two buttons on her shirt, one by one, for better reach before tucking the knife down beneath her white cami. The sheath fell between her breasts, which he brushed lightly with the backs of his fingertips before drawing his hand out again. When he lifted his eyes from her chest, she tilted her chin up. Daryl leaned in to kiss her.

"Get a room!" Jerry shouted from behind the now loaded dolly.

Daryl glowered as he drew away. "A'right, let's sort all this shit and then load up and get back to Sure Walt. Sun'll be settin' soon."

"Shirewilt," Noah corrected him.

"Dumbass rich folk neighborhood names," Daryl muttered as he threw his weight behind the dolly and began pushing it from the storage room.