3:30 PM
Audubon Botanical Gardens Conservatory

The conservatory walls were half wood, on the bottom, and half glass, on the top. The glass portion of the walls curved upward and over to form a dome ceiling. The trio stayed below the glass portion of the walls, creeping low and peering up to see what was inside as they cased the perimeter. The browning fern trees and rotting palms inside partially blocked their view, but they could make out two armed men walking about.

"Ron hasn't exactly been fully honest with us, has he?" Cyndie asked.

Bent over and out of sight, they scurried back to the front, glass door. Cyndie crouched down on one side of it, against the wood wall, and Carol on the other, while Jerry leapt forward, pounded full force on the door, and then leapt back.

A few seconds later, the door flew open, and a man holding an AR-10 emerged. Carol shot him in the head, and, as he fell, Cyndie swept up his semiautomatic rifle and turned it toward the door. When the second man they had seem came out in response to the sound of gunfire, Cyndie, put a bullet in his head.

"This one's mine then," said Jerry, returning his battle axe to his back and taking the fallen man's rifle.

They made their way inside and began sweeping. Ron had told the truth about one thing -the conservatory definitely looked live in. Mattresses covered with sheets and blankets littered the floor and small appliances rested on the entry booth ticket counter, which had outlets. It seemed the conservatory still had power. The fountains were not only running, but running clear. There were water jugs resting by the bases of one fountain, some full and some empty, and towels strung over a drying rack next to the other fountain. Much of the plant life in the conservatory was dead or dying—the neo-Saviors had not maintained it—but they were growing a few things in some of the garden boxes—herbs in one, vegetables in two others, and it looked like what was the very beginnings of a marijuana garden in the central display, between the dying trees.

As Carol was talking all of this in, someone leapt from behind the trunk of a decaying palm and opened fire. The bullet whizzed past her, close enough that she could feel the breeze. Carol ducked quickly behind a stone fountain and shot back with a rapid burst of two rounds, and the man collapsed.

Her heart still thudding, she joined the others as they prowled the length of the entire conservatory and checked behind every tree and plant but found no more men. Carol circled back to the dead neo-Savior and patted him down. She took the rifle off him and slung it over her shoulder, removed a magazine pouch from his belt and clipped it to her own, and then took a ring of keys off his belt loop.

Just as she was beginning to examine the keys, she heard a wild rat-a-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat spray of automatic gunfire coming from the direction of the clinic. That was followed by a single pop-pop, another rat-a-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-rat-a-tat-tat-rat-a-tat-tat and then another pop. This was followed by silence.

"Sounds like Dixon and Zach got the infirmary guard," Cyndie observed.

And after expending only three rounds of ammunition, Carol thought, to the guard's likely two dozen or more.

Carol began to circle through the keys on the ring. They were labeled. Some had the names of vehicles, like flatbed, pick-up 1, pick-up 2, tanker 1, tanker 2, while others had letters: A, P, C. One read: ED BLDG. "It looks like one of these keys is for that small educational building we passed on the way here." The botanical gardens had likely held summer camps and field trips for school children. "We should check it out."

They heard more gunfire throughout the gardens as they made their way to the building. One spray of automatic fire was suddenly silenced without the return of any gunfire. That, Carol assumed, was either Daryl or Dianne taking someone out with a bolt or arrow.

The blinds covering the windows to the educational building were drawn shut, so they couldn't see inside. They knocked loudly on the door to draw anyone out, but no one emerged to investigate. Jerry tried the handle and found it locked. Carol handed him the key and covered him while he opened it. She and Cyndie swept inside, one turning a barrel left, and the other right.

They weren't expecting to find living people inside, but they were greeted by the screams of four women, who backed away in terror against the far wall as Carol and Cyndie strode inside. The women were barefoot and wearing only sheer negligees with no undergarments. "Who are you?" one cried.

"We're not here to hurt you," Carol assured them, holding up a hand. "We're here to help."

Cyndie was staring at one of the women, probably because she looked to be around her own age. "What is this place?" she asked in a hollow voice that suggested she knew precisely what this place was and didn't want to believe it.

The rectangular building was divided in half by a classroom partition, the kind you can roll open if you don't want a wall there. In this half, where the women were, there was a long folding table with blue plastic chairs, a couch, an armchair, and a shelf that contained some food, drinks, utensils, and dishes. There was also a classroom sink, made of stainless steel, much like you might find in a chemistry classroom.

Leaving the women with Cyndie and Jerry, Carol cautiously rolled open the partition divider and entered the second half of the building, where she found two king size mattresses on the floor, a table covered with sex toys, and a bathroom with a toilet and sink. Carol tried the light switch, and it actually came on. She turned the faucet, and clear water ran into the porcelain sink. She turned off the faucet with a squeak and shouldered her rifle before returning to the main room.

Three of the women were now huddled together on the couch, and the fourth was sitting in a chair at the table.

"Where's Jerry?" Carol asked.

"He went to find them some real clothes among the neo-Saviors things back in the conservatory," Cyndie explained. She, too, had shouldered her rifle.

Carol nodded. She spied a clipboard hanging on the wall just inside the door, with a pen attached to it by a string, and took it down to examine it.

The first sheet of paper was headed with the words, "Pleasure Sign-Out Sheet." Underneath that was written, "THE RULES: (1) Only those worthy Redeemers authorized by Lord David to be rewarded for exceptional service can make a reservation."

So that's what the neo-Saviors were calling themselves. The Redeemers? How original.

Carol read on as her gut twisted:

"(2) No concubine can be reserved more than three times in a single day, to prevent the merchandise from wearing out. Allow two full hours between reservations. (3) Maximum one hour of pleasure. (4) Respect those who will come after you-No damaging the merchandise. (5) Report any noncompliance by the concubines to Lord David." The women were described on the sheets simply as "blonde," "brunette" "redhead" and "barely eighteen."

Carol, growing angrier by the second, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the clipboard, scoured the sheets, flipping through the pages and looking at the sign-out lines. "Get them dressed and calmed down," Carol told Cyndie. "I need to go find Dianne."

Carol took the clipboard and went to look for the archer. She found Dianne standing before a garden plot ripe with vegetables and talking to Aaron. Her bow was on her right shoulder, and she had two rifles slung over her left. Aaron had his rifle on one shoulder, and a different rifle on another. This led Carol to believe the guards had been shot in the two sections they were assigned to clear. "There's no way they grew all this in a couple of months," Dianne was telling Aaron. "Clearly they took over an already established camp that's been planting since near the start."

Carol handed Dianne the clipboard. "Before you welcome either Pete or Ron Anderson into your Kingdom, you had better take a look at this. We found it in a room with four captive women locked inside."

Dianne flipped through the several pages of sign out sheets with Aaron peering over her shoulder, and both saw what Carol had seen—that while David's name filled a full one-fourth of all the sign-out lines, no doubt because he had the authority here, among the several other names listed on the sheets, Pete Anderson's name and signature was also present. It was listed next to "blonde" two times, next to "brunette" two times, and next to "redhead" once. But far more shocking than that was Ron Anderson's name, signed, on two separate occasions, next to "barely eighteen."

"That little piece of shit!" Aaron cursed, and Carol realized she'd never heard Aaron say a swear word since meeting him a few days ago. "He was alone with Enid in the attic once. I swear to God, if he so much as laid a hand on her-"

"—I doubt he went down this road until he fell in with these men," Carol said.

Aaron swallowed hard. "He was always showing unwanted attention to Enid, though. She finally told him flat out she wasn't interested. That was the day before he left Alexandria to run after his father, the day after Pete was sent out."

"If he'd tried something," Carol said, "from what you told me about Enid, she'd probably have stuck a knife in him. But here…here he had terrorist backing, the fear of punishment by David for any non-compliance."

"You know," Dianne said, flipping back the papers until the stack was flat against the clipboard, "if Negan had instituted a sign-out sheet like this, Gavin's name would have been on it. But he never touched any of those women without their full consent. He just watched movies with them back in his room and then slept on the couch so Negan would think he hadn't rejected his reward. I mean…until he legitimately got together with Frankie. But that was with her full willingness."

"You really think that's what happened here?" Carol asked. "With Pete and Ron?"

Dianne looked back at the clipboard. "I want to think so. Because the alternative is horrifying." She sighed. "I'm sure the women can confirm the truth for us, one way or the other."

They returned to the educational building and asked the women about the actions of Pete and Ron. The women told them what they didn't want to hear. Aaron put a hand on his stomach as though he might vomit. Carol felt close to vomiting herself.

When Aaron, Dianne, nad Carol had stepped out of the educational building again, Aaron said, "Ron always struck me as having a strong sense of entitlement. In the old world, he never would have ended up here…but he might have ended up one of those entitled frat boys who commits date rape after date rape and never gets caught. Or if he does get caught, he gets a slap on the wrist because he's good at swimming or something."

"I'm clearly not taking Pete and Ron back to the Kingdom," Dianne asserted. "That's a given. The only question is—what do we do with them?"

5:45 PM
The Audubon Café

The coalition convened on the ground-level deck of the botanical garden's café, after locking Pete and Ron in the former harem. Ron had a throbbing goose egg on his head, which Dixon explained. When they neared the clinic, presumably to "save" Ron's father, they obscured themselves behind bushes. But Ron raised the alarm by shouting a warning to the guard. Dixon smacked him across the head with the butt of his rifle to silence him and knock him out, but by then the guard was opening fire blindly in the general directions of the bushes. Zach leapt up, shot back twice, missed the first time, and hit the guard in the stomach the second, before seeking cover again. The guard, though injured, opened another spray of indiscriminate fire, at the tail end of which Dixon took him out with a single shot to the head.

The workers (the coalition had found eight male workers in total) and women from the harem were now sitting inside the café, which would have power until the sun went down in an hour and a half. According to a brochure Ozzy had found, the conservatory, café, educational building, emergency clinic, and the one set of bathrooms that were closest to the conservatory all used solar power and "natural water sources, pumped in by solar pump through a filtration system" as part of the gardens' "green initiative." But there was no storage of the power generated during the day as that storage had been on the electrical grid, so the gardens went dark at night.

Aaron, who had been talking to the workers, now stepped out of the café and onto the deck, shutting the French doors behind himself. "The workers say there were eleven armed guards who didn't go on the raid."

"We got one," Dixon said.

Dianne crossed her arms over herself. "Two for me."

"Two here also," Ozzy said.

Carol held up three fingers for her group.

"One for me," Aaron added.

"And I got two." Daryl leaned back against the rail of the deck. "So we got 'em all."

"They say they started this camp eleven months ago," Aaron continued. "And it was taken over five weeks ago by the Redeemers. They tried fighting back, but they only had a few guns. Several of them ended up dead in the battle, and all of them disarmed. The ten surviving men were enslaved and put to work in the gardens they had planted in the first place. And the three women in the harem."

"But we only found eight workers," Carol said.

"Three have been killed since." Aaron's nostrils flared. "One was executed because his wife wasn't fully cooperating in her role as a concubine. The other, because his sister wasn't. The third, he was just seventeen, because his mother wasn't. After those executions, the women decided to comply. They all still had husbands, brothers, or sons among the remaining survivors."

"I ain't no math genius," Daryl said, "but ten minus three doesn't equal eight."

"And you said three women?" Cyndie asked. "There are four."

"The fourth one, the young one?" Aaron answered. "Kylie is her name. They snagged her two and half weeks ago from one of the communities they were extorting when those people didn't have enough goods to meet the collection quota. They also took her older brother, Grayson, to make a worker and to hold over her head as someone they threatened to kill if she didn't cooperate."

"So what do we do about Pete and Ron?" Dianne asked. "They're clearly guilty of rape."

"And Ron tried to get me and Dixon killed." Zach glanced through a window of the café, toward the young woman inside. His jaw was clenched tight. "I say we cut off his dick and feed it to him."

In the end, the assembled council decided to leave the decision of what to do with Ron and Pete entirely in the hands of the liberated men and women, who would be given back their original camp. The coalition went inside the café to deliver their verdict.

"Whatever you decided to do with those Anderson fuckers," Daryl told them, "'s up to you now."

They also offered to take Kylie and Grayson back to their former camp, from which they had been abducted.

"You can't." Kylie blinked back tears. "When the Redeemers last went to collect again, three days ago, my people fought back. But they weren't like you. They didn't stand a chance. They only killed two Redeemers. And the Redeemers killed them all. They killed them all and just took everything back here."

"You can stay with us," Jonathan, one of the workers, said. He was standing close to one of the harem women, who shared a matching wedding ring with him. "Here. If you want. In a free camp."

"Or you can come with us," Aaron said gently. "We have a real psychiatrist back at our camp. She might be able to help you, after everything you've been through."

Kylie shook her head. She wrapped an arm around the woman next to Jonathan. "These people know what I've been through. I'll stay here." She glanced at her brother. "Right, Gray?"

Grayson nodded.

Aaron handed Kylie a walkie talkie. "The invitation stands, if you ever change your mind. That has a range of thirty miles. The other one is in the hands of a young man named Noah, in a camp not far from here. He can come get you and take you to us."

"Do you know where the other camps they were extorting are located?" Carol asked.

"Besides Kylie's community," Jonathan answered, "which is gone, and yours, which I assume is the one they called Shirewilt, there was only one other we ever heard them talk about. A community living in St. Demetrios, wherever that is."

"I know where," Ozzy said. "It used to be an Orthodox monastery. We should go tell them they're free."

The liberated workers were given the guns taken off the slain Redeemers—eleven rifles and six handguns.

"Do you think you can defend this place?" Dianne asked them.

"When the Redeemers attacked, we only had four guns between us," Jonathan answered. "Now we have these, and…well, there's plenty of ammunition. Come. I'll show you."

Carol used the key ring she'd taken off the dead guard in the conservatory to open the armory (that was the key labeled A), which was in an office near the front gate. The Redeemers had five shotguns in there, which they apparently only used for hunting, three crossbows, dozens of arrows, and about 100,000 rounds of assorted ammunition and shotgun shells in green metal cannisters and various boxes. There were also gun cleaning supplies and various parts of firearms, including barrels, scopes, and firing pins.

"Take the shotguns and shotgun shells to that camp in the monastery," Jonathan told Ozzy. "The Redeemers took them from there." He nodded to a notebook on a desk in the armory/office. "That notebook should tell you what they took from where. I guess you guys already got your guns back when they raided you, but take what's yours from the pantry. I'll show you where that is. But leave us whatever they took from Kylie's community and whatever they looted from the already dead."

The notebook indicated that the two tankers of gas—one of which was still completely full and one of which was about three-quarters full- had been hijacked on the highway, but there was no way to return them. The drivers had been killed, and whatever camp they may have belonged to was unknown. Jonathan told them to take the full tanker for themselves, in gratitude for their liberation, and to leave the other partially full one with them. He also told them to take one of the Redeemer's flat-bed trucks, so they could haul all the goods they'd be taking, and because the flat-bed had belonged to the monastery camp. "You can return it to them."

The sun was setting by the time the caravan pulled out of the gates to head back to Shirewilt, with Carol and Daryl taking up the lead on Daryl's roaring bike.