12:50 PM
On the road to St. Demetrios Monastery
Ozzy shifted gears on the truck. From the shotgun seat beside him, Dianne said, "I didn't peg you for a religious man."
"That's because you're an excellent judge of people," Ozzy told her, "and I'm an atheist."
"Who knows a lot about the Orthodox church? And where its monasteries are?"
"Don't you have a religion you walked away from? At least when all this shit happened?"
"My parents were Unitarian Universalists. So as far as they were concerned, no matter what I did, I hadn't walked away."
Ozzy chuckled.
"So, now that you're in the coalition, I hope you've given up highway robbery?"
"Well, my cavalry will still ride the roads, keep them clear of walkers and secure them for trade. And if we happen to encounter some assholes on the way who absolutely need killing, no reason we shouldn't take their stuff while we're at it."
"But no more robbing the innocent?" Dianne asked.
"No more robbing the innocent," he agreed.
"And how will judge their innocence?"
"Oh, I'm an excellent judge of character." He turned his eyes from the road momentarily to smile at her. "I had you pegged as good people from the day you came to negotiate for Daniel."
Dianne chuckled.
"So…Gavin? Is that's serious?" Ozzy asked.
"It has the potential to be serious," Dianne told him. "We both want to see where the road takes us."
Ozzy shook his head. "It's a shame. You and I could have had an excellent ride. Keep me in the rearview mirror? In case that train crashes?"
"Don't you have any women to chase at Mount Vernon?"
"There are only three women in my camp who don't have a boyfriend or husband. One's my little sister. One's half my age. And one's Margo."
"And what's wrong with Margo?"
"She's…Margo." Ozzy glanced at her briefly. "Do you have a lot of single women in the Kingdom?"
"There's Frankie," Dianne told him. "Gavin's ex-girlfriend." There were others, but it would be convenient if Gavin's ex, who now clearly regretted dumping him, was perhaps occupied with another man.
"How good can she be if he dumped her?"
"She dumped him, actually, for that woman at your camp—Ashley."
"Brittany?" he asked.
"Whatever," Dianne replied.
"So you're the rebound chick?" Ozzy asked.
"I am not the rebound chick! Gavin and I were friends before we were lovers. We already respected each other."
Ozzy raised an eyebrow. "And enemies before you were friends?"
"Water under the bridge."
"Well, like I said, if it doesn't work out, don't forget—there are other roads."
"Oh, I'm sure you won't let me forget."
3:45 PM
The Frontside of St. Demetrios Monastery
Carol and Dianne crouched between two bushes on the other side of a creek outside the monastery and surveyed the camp through binoculars. Ozzy and Daryl had gone to scout out the back of the camp. Before they walked up to the front gate and said hello, they wanted to make damn sure they knew what they were dealing with.
The creek ran through the earth several yards in front of a low fence. About halfway-down the fence line, the creek had been diverted by a man-made canal of sorts, so that it ran under the fence (blocked off from walkers by an iron grate that still allowed the water through) and wound its way into the camp. The creek was split in two once inside the camp, with one branch going to feed am irrigation canal and the other trickling off to feed a man-made pond.
The chest-high nature of the fence made it easy to spy out the camp. Such a fence would be useless to stop a human enemy, but it was well designed to deal with walkers. It was a zig-zag split-rail fence, like you might see on a battlefield, but it was fortified by numerous sharp wooden pikes sticking outward through the rails, which would easily catch up any of the undead. In fact, one was caught up now and writhing in place like a pinwheeling marionette.
The camp had gardens, fields, and a small orchard of dwarf fruit trees. In the far distance, at the back of the camp, Carol could make out a stone chapel with a domed roof and what looked like a dormitory. Numerous people in plain clothes, men and women alike, were busy working, plucking fruit, trimming trees, fishing in the pond, planting seeds, yanking weeds, and more.
"They don't look like monks," Carol said.
"They probably just settled here," Dianne replied.
Carol swiveled her binoculars to take in a man with long brown hair who was now striding toward the fence. He wore blue jeans and carried a black, studded leather jacket over his shoulder by a single finger. In his other hand, he held a wrangling contraption that looked similar to what Hershel had used to guide walkers into the barn.
Now near the gate, the man put aside the wrangler, pulled on the jacket over his short-sleeve white t-shirt, and zipped it up. Then he pulled a silver spiked leather collar out of one pocket and put it around his neck. Next came a pair of leather safety gloves, followed by two silver spiked black leather bracelets, which he clicked around his wrists before picking up the wrangler again. He looked like something out of an 80s heavy metal video.
The man exited gate in the fence line—which was covered with metal spikes pointing outward, swung it closed, walked over near the caught-up walker, and leaned the wrangler against a pike for now. He got behind the walker, and instead of killing it, seized it by the chin and seemed to wrestle with it. The walker snapped and writhed and chomped—it would have sunk its teeth into the man if he weren't wearing so much protection. As was, the spikes on his leather bracelet caused the creature to hiss when its jaws came down on them. After a few more second of struggle, and a strong twist, the man let go and stepped back. Carol focused in on the walker and saw that its jaw had been snapped.
The man took a small hand-saw off his belt and began sawing off the the walker's hands while the creature attempted to crane its neck and uselessly sought to bite him with its slack jaw. The sawed-off extremities the man took and threw in a pit dug outside the fence before putting the wrangler around the still-living walker's neck and then peeling the creature from the pike.
"What the hell is he doing?" Carol asked.
The man led the now disabled walker back into the camp a ways and put it in some kind of large shed, which he then padlocked.
"Oh, I see what they do with them," Dianne said. "Look in the far east field."
The far east field was being plowed. The heavy steel plow was being dragged by four walkers, who were latched together in two rows of two, and then latched to the plow. A man steered the plow from behind them while another man walked backward closely in front of them, a mere foot ahead of the hungry, hissing, disabled walkers, offering them the teasing lure of meat, which drove them forward so that they dragged the weighty the plow across the field.
Whenever one of the walkers would sense the man at the plow in back and attempt to turn, the man at front would hold up and ring a bell, and the walker would immediately turn forward again.
"It's an interesting take on the horse-drawn plow," Carol admitted.
"And look at that contraption to the west," Dianne said. "Behind that little orchard."
It took a second for Carol to find what Dianne meant. At last, however, her lenses brought into sight a large metal turnstile-type contraption with gears beneath it. Broken-jawed, handless walkers were tied to the turnstile, one between each set of bars. A vertical bar extend upward and then outward from one of the trunstile bars to allow a cage to dangle in front of the first walker. Inside the small cage, a live squirrel scurried back and forth. The gears were cranked as the bars of the turnstile were pushed foward and around a pivot point by the bodies of the walkers moving in a continuous circle as they extended their handless arms in the direction of the animal they could not grasp. In a sort of endless, mindless cycle, they chased but never caught their meal.
The gears, it seemed, where producing power as they turned. Wires stretched out from the contraption and were attached to three different battery packs that were apparently being used to store the electricity being generated by the walker mill.
"Walker power," Carol said. "The new green energy."
"More like gray energy," Dianne replied.
3:56 PM
The Backside of St. Demetrios Monastery
Daryl and Ozzy surveyed the camp from a grove of trees outside the back fence. Through his binoculars, Daryl could make out a lot of activity in the fields and gardens, and it looked like there were two people fishing in the distant pond, but there was nothing much going on here at the backside of the camp, near the dormitory and stone chapel, except for a woman drawing water from the well behind the chapel and filling storage containers with it. She had a baby in a papoose on her back, and that, combined with her long black hair and brown skin made Daryl think of the paintings of Sacagawea in his junior high school history textbook. A man exited a wooden outhouse behind the dormitory, squeezed some hand sanitizer onto his hands from a dispenser attached to the side of the outhouse, and walked to the well, rubbing his hands together. He kissed the woman, said something to her, and then kissed the head of the baby before heading back to work in the fields.
Suddenly, a pack of monks spilled out of the dormitory and began walking down the dirt path toward the chapel.
"Time for vespers," Ozzy said.
"How come they all got different costumes?" Daryl asked.
The monks were all dressed in black, but some had belts and some didn't, some seemed to have one robe and some had layers, some had embroidered accessories on their robes, and while each wore a funny hat of some kind, the hats were not all the same shape. Some of the men had just the beginnings of a beard, and some had long, scraggly beards that looked like they hadn't been trimmed in years.
"The ones with the pleated brimless caps and just an inner cassock are novices," Ozzy explained. He didn't have a pair of binoculars, so he couldn't see the monks as clearly as Daryl, but he seemed to know what he was talking about. "They haven't taken vows yet. The ones with the cylindrical brimless hats and leather belts are like level-one monks. That's when they stop cutting their beards. The level-two monks, that when they take formal vows—chastity, obedience, poverty. They're the ones with that embroidered square cloth on their backs. And then when you really level up? That's when you get that fancy over-the-shoulder drape down the front and back."
"And a really long-ass beard." Daryl took in all the monks as they disappeared into the chapel and calculated that there were six novices, five level-one monks, four level-two monks, and only one level-three monk. "So the level-three monk is in charge?"
"Well, the abbot is in charge, but he'll be a level-three monk."
"Ain't but one of those."
"Then he's in charge. Just so you know, they don't actually call them level-three monks."
"Figured."
"It goes novice, rasophore, stavrophore, and Great Schema."
"Fuckin' parasites," Daryl muttered. "What, they just lounge in the dorm and go to prayer all day while all these other people work the fields and gardens and fish and all that shit?"
"I doubt it," Ozzy said. "They probably just aren't working at the moment. If they're keeping their pre-apocalyptic schedule, they wake up at midnight, pray until four in the morning, have a light breakfast, a three-hour nap, and then its physical labor from eight in the morning until to noon. They'll be working the gardens, fields, cleaning the outhouses, mopping floors, chopping vegetables-whatever they're assigned. Then it's the common meal and midday prayer, and after that, another two and half hours of labor. Then they go wash up in the dorms and head to vespers. After this it'll be an early dinner and then another service – compline. Then it's quiet hours. Usually they sleep eight to midnight. So they get a total of seven hours sleep, split up."
"How you know all this shit?" Daryl asked.
"Does it matter?"
Daryl could make out the faint hum of chanting. It drifted from the chapel to the grove. "When's combine over?"
"Compline? Seven."
"A'ight. Let's hike back to the truck. Eat us some grub, drive back, and then when com-pine is over, we'll introduce ourselves to the Great Squeem-ah."
"Great Schema," Ozzy said.
"'S what I said. Great Schemer."
"Let's just call him the abbot, why don't we?"
Daryl didn't answer, because he was contacting Carol on the walkie talkie. "Hey, Miss Murphy. Whatchya wearin'? Over."
"Let's just say it's green," she replied. "With envy, because they have a really nice set up here, and they're getting the walkers to do some of their work for them. Over."
"And now they ain't even got to pay a tithe to the Redeemers," Daryl replied. "Listen, meet back at the truck. Gonna eat, and then we're gonna meet that Great Schoombah. Over and out."