4:31 PM
One mile outside St. Demetrios Monastery
Daryl turned in a confused circle. "What the fuck?" The flat-bed truck was gone.
"This is where we parked it, isn't it?" Ozzy asked.
They'd pulled off the paved road onto a hiking trail through the woods, driven the vehicle in, and left it obscured while they returned to the road and hiked to the monastery.
At least they still had a ride home. The plan was to make contact with the monastery, spend the night there (if welcomed) or in the woods (if not), and then hike three miles to the rendezvous point for pick-up at noon tomorrow. Someone from the Kingdom would be coming for them. At the Kingdom, they should find their military truck full of supplies, Daryl's motorcycle, and Zach and Dixon, who would have driven the vehicles there with Tina and Jerry. After touring the Kingdom and spending the night, they'd be heading back to their own Kingdom, the Fun one.
Daryl scoured the ground and looked up when Dianne and Carol joined them. "Where's the truck?" Carol asked.
"Someone took it," Daryl murmured. "Drove off this way." He swept a finger along the hiking path, deeper in the woods, and swung his crossbow off his back. At least they hadn't left their own stuff in there, just the monastery's.
Dianne turned to Ozzy. "Didn't you take the keys?"
"Of course I took the keys!" Ozzy pulled them from his pocket and shook them in front of her. "Someone must have hot-wired it."
Daryl growled and began prowling down the hiking path, following the sign.
Carol fell in step beside him. "Whoever took it is probably miles away by now."
"Not unless this path goes to a main road. Gonna hike it and see."
"And if we find the thief?" Carol asked.
"Take our shit back. Well, the monks' camps' shit." As Daryl walked on, the others in tow, he asked Ozzy, "You know where this hiking trail leads?"
"Why would I know that?"
"Seem to know everything else."
They hiked in silence for a bit, Daryl fiercely concentrating on the sign as the tracks grew fainter, until Carol said, "Great Scoombah?"
"Great Schema," Daryl clarified. "Highest level of Orthodox monk, after novice, rasophore, and stavrophore."
Ozzy stopped walking and blinked. "So you were listening?"
"I'm always listenin'," Daryl told him. He strode ahead of the others and touched a tree where the bark had been chipped off. "Trail's gettin' narrow. Truck grazed the trees pushin' through."
As they hiked on, the path began to wind back in the direction of the monastery.
5:05 PM
St. Demetrios Monastery
"They stole their own truck," Carol said as they stood outside a gate halfway down the fence line that extended from front to back on one side of the monastery camp. There was a cluster of five tall walnut trees to the left of the gate, and to the right a large picnic pavilion in a fallow, grassy field that extended another several acres to a graveyard near the stone chapel at the end of camp. The graveyard was punctuated with a combination of old world tombstones and much fresher wooden crosses. Carol hadn't been able to see any of this through the dwarf fruit tree orchard or the walnut trees when surveying the camp.
The flat-bed truck had been pulled just inside the gate and was parked next to a motorcycle and four bicycles between the trees and the picnic pavilion. One of the bicycles was toddler-size and had training wheels on it. Someone had unloaded the bed of the truck of all weapons and supplies.
"Where is everyone?" Dianne asked. The camp was silent and empty, no workers in the fields anymore, no one outside at all.
"It's dinner time," Ozzy answered.
Daryl strode toward the low gate, which was studded with spikes on the outside to catch up walkers, and examined it to see how it opened.
"Pookie, remember they have four shotguns and three crossbows now," Carol warned.
"Pfft. Yeah, and we got –" Daryl fell silent because from the walnut trees to the left came the sound of two shotguns pumping.
Then a man yelled, "Hands up!"
Carol raised both hands, as did the others, and looked up into the trees at the camouflage blind nobody had noticed before. Two armed men stood inside it, including the 80s heavy metal man who had peeled the walker off the pike. He looked down at Carol over the barrel of his newly returned shotgun.
5:39 PM
Library of St. Demetrios Dormitory
Daryl walked along one of the shelves and looked at the titles on the spines of the leather books. Ozzy leaned back on the dark mahogany desk behind which rose a large, wooden chair padded with leather cushions. An icon hung on the wall behind him. Dianne cracked a walnut she'd gathered from the ground against the edge of one of the four circular tables and then began to pick out the core with a fingernail. Carol sat at the same table, in one of the hard folding chairs surrounding it, eyeing the guard who stood by the door with his shotgun resting upward on his shoulder. His name, he had already told them, was Carlton.
The name had taken Carol aback after seeing the man in a studded black leather jacket and spiked leather collar and bracelets. When she pictured a Carlton, she didn't picture headbanger hair either, or the black ink tattoos that were crawling out from under his white, short-sleeve shirt.
"I like the armor you used to wrestle that walker," Carol told him.
"What?" Carlton asked. "I never wrestled a pedestrian."
"At the front gate, when you snapped its jaw and cut off its hands."
"Oh. I call them dead heads."
"Like Grateful Dead fans?" Carol asked.
"Like dead things with dead heads. Gnashing and chomping."
Carol had already presented their case when Carlton and another man named Jeremy apprehended them. She'd explained how they'd overthrown the Redeemers and were planning on returning the truck and the loot but needed to spy out the place first for purposes of safety.
"Do you always keep someone on guard in that blind?" Carol asked.
"No comment," Carlton replied.
"How long are you going to keep us here?" she asked.
"The abbot will interview you and decide what to do with you when dinner and Small Compline are complete."
Daryl turned from the bookshelf. "Is there a Big Compline?"
"No," Carlton replied. "But there's a great one."
After apprehending them outside the gate, Carlton and Jeremy had disarmed them and collected all their weapons after a quick pat down. Carol's people didn't fight back, even though they would have won. They weren't trying to make enemies.
The men then led them inside the L-shaped dormitory near the banquet hall (which formed the short branch of the L). Jeremy entered the banquet hall to inform the abbot of the situation, while Carlton led them on. Carol peered through the open door and saw everyone eating. A quick calculation, which might not be fully accurate in passing, told her that in addition to the monks, there were twelve other men, nine women, four children, and a baby. She'd seen the baby outside, but not any of the children.
They moved on down the long branch of the L, over a cement floor, to the library at the end. On the way, they passed twenty-seven closed doors on each side of the lengthy hallway. Four were labeled "bathroom." The other fifty all had closed, rustic wooden doors, and they were very close together. Carol assumed these were the monk's cells. Over thirty of the monks must have died at the start.
"You don't trust us?" Carol asked now. "You don't believe our story? You think we're with the Redeemers?"
"I don't trust anyone outside of my camp," Carlton replied. "But I know you're not with them." His eyes shot from Carol to Dianne. "You women wouldn't be walking around with weapons alongside the men. You'd be in a rape room somewhere."
It seemed this camp knew more about their extortionists than Shirewilt had. "And how do you know that?" Carol asked.
"Because they threatened to take my sister to be their concubine," he said, "if we didn't double our offering by the next collection. But you're telling me they won't come to collect?"
"We killed them all," Carol assured him. "Most of them when they came to collect from our friends, and the rest back at their camp. Just like I told you."
"You must be quite the warriors then," he said skeptically. "They had twenty-two armed men when they first showed up here."
"How do you imagine we got your truck otherwise?" Carol asked him.
"It's not my job to imagine. The abbot will decide."
Daryl slid a book from one of the bookcases and sat down in the leather chair. He put his feet up on the large mahogany desk and opened the book.
"This library doubles as the abbot's office," Carlton said. "That his desk. That's his chair you're sitting in."
Daryl looked up from the book. "I'll move when he gets here."
Carlton seemed to chew the inside of his cheek, but he said nothing more.
Ozzy pushed off the desk he was leaning against and turned to face Daryl. "What are you reading?"
"Candid Narratives of a Pilgrim to His Spiritual Father."
"Otherwise known as The Way of the Pilgrim," Ozzy said. "My father made me read it when I was fourteen. It was boring as hell."
"Whatever the hell else hell is," Daryl replied, "I'm pretty damn sure it ain't boring."
Carlton let out a sharp laugh and then quickly silenced himself and looked sternly at his prisoners.
Ozzy asked Carlton, "You got a deck of cards or something to pass the time?"
"There's a chess set on that stand in the corner," Carlton told him.
"Shall we?" Ozzy asked Dianne.
"If you don't mind getting your ass handed to you."
While Ozzy went to fetch the chess set, Carol made her way over to the desk behind which Daryl sat. She walked around it next to his chair and half-sat on the surface near where he'd put his feet up. "Want to make out to pass the time?"
"Pfft. Stahp." He turned a page.
"Is it as boring as Ozzy said?"
"Nah. 'Cause it's got pictures." He turned the open book to face her, revealing the illuminated manuscript, with a sweeping first letter, vines dripping down the margins of the pages, and an illustration in the center of a man with a walking staff.
Carol chuckled. "You do like your picture books."
Daryl turned the book forward again and flipped to the next gold-rimmed page.
Carol slipped off of the desk and turned toward Carlton. "Do your bathrooms work?"
"You'll have to hold it. I'm not leaving your friends here alone to take you to the bathroom, and I'm not letting you go by yourself."
"I was just curious if they work. We saw you have at least one well, and the diverted creek water, too, and you're generating some amount of electricity at least."
"No comment," Carlton replied.
"What do you think I'm going to do with that top secret information?" Carol asked with a flirtatious smile.
Daryl looked up from his book, raised an eyebrow, but remained silent and returned his attention to the page. He knew she was working the guard.
Carlton chuckled. "I don't suppose there is much you could do with it. Yeah, they work, except the water in the sinks and showers run cold. And we have to hook the septic pump up to charged-up batteries and then pump out the septic storage tank once a month so it doesn't back up. And if we overdo the showers, the water storage tanks will run dry quickly, and we'll have to run the water pump for hours straight to refill them, which we don't generate enough electricity to do, so we ration showers. Which is fine, because there's only one toilet, one sink, and one shower in each of those bathrooms. Seems like a luxury now, but fifty monks to four bathrooms before all this?" He shook his head. "Good thing we have outhouses, too."
Carol strolled a little closer to the door where he stood, but not too close. "I guess with only four shotguns and three crossbows, you had to surrender quickly when the Redeemers rolled in."
"I don't know if we had to, but the abbot ordered us not to fight when he saw the size of their force. He wanted to make peace. But the price of peace was all of our weapons, all of our ammo, and half of our stored food. They even took the communion set and the crucifix in the chapel."
"We saw."
"And then they instituted collections, as if this land was theirs and we were paying for the privilege to farm it. We've been having a hard time making the food stretch. One of the monks carved a bow and some arrows so our head hunter could at least hunt."
"And you must really need to hunt," Carol replied. "I noticed you don't have a chicken coop or any other livestock."
"Yeah. We get our protein from hunting and fishing. But after the last collection, we won't be able to breed the fish unless we restock the pond. Fortunately, there's a lake less than three miles from here. And now that we have the truck, it'll be easier to transport the fish and frogs we catch alive."
"But it's been hard, hasn't it?" Carol asked sympathetically.
"At least the monks are kind of used to it. They already had fast days three days a week where they abstained from all meat, dairy, eggs, and alcohol. Then they had moderation days three days a week. No red meat. So no venison. So if we bag a deer, we only have to share it with monks one day of the week."
"So are the monks in charge of everything?" Carol asked.
He shrugged. "It's their monastery. They planted gardens and maintained the orchard, even before the collapse. They cleaned it of dead heads. Built the fences. The rest of us, we trickled in bit by bit and helped to fortify it, plow more fields, plant new gardens and crops, get the dead mill going. That's what we call that power-generating contraption. They shared what they'd built with us, so we're happy to follow their rules. But…we kind of have our own separate leadership structure, too. It's like two societies, operating in parallel. Still, we behave like guests in someone's house. If they ask us to do something, we do it."
Carlton sure had gone from no comment to fountain of information quickly. Carol kept pressing her luck. "And who's the leader of the non-monks? Would that be you?"
He laughed. "No. I'm the muscle. The one we turn to…that would be Cassandra. She's our head hunter, and she's the one who came up with the idea of the dead mill, too. But the abbot doesn't like talking to women, so…I'm sort of her go-between."
"Without any goats or cows, what do the kids do for dairy?"
"The baby is breastfed. The kids get powdered milk. You didn't bring any of that back to us. I guess the Redeemers used it all. But we still have enough for the kids for another two months. And our supply runners are out looking for more."
"The abbot, what sort of man is he?" Other than a man who doesn't like talking to women, Carol thought.
Now Carlton shifted on his feet. He seemed to consider that he had revealed way too much in exchange for just a pretty smile and a sympathetic ear. "You'll find out soon enough."
Carol, judging she'd exhausted her welcome, went to grab a book herself and sat down with it at the library table where Ozzy and Dianne were playing chess.
When the abbot finally came in, the sun was shifting enough that the rays of light were hazy through the library windows. The abbot appeared to be in his mid-to-late sixties, and his long beard was almost solid gray except for a few coils of black. When Ozzy saw him, he tipped his cavalry hat down over his eyes.
The abbot walked straight to his desk, and, with pursed lips, brought his stern, almost-black eyes to rest on Daryl's feet.
Daryl swung his feet off the desk and stood. He rolled the now empty chair toward the abbot.
"Pull up some chairs on the other side of my desk, why don't you all?" the abbot asked. He lit an oil lamp on his desk, probably because the sun was starting to set. They clearly rationed the electricity they produced. Water pumps and sump pumps were first priority, Carol assumed, then probably the ovens and stoves in the kitchen.
There was a burst of laughter from the hallway, several men, and then what sounded like the giggles of women. "Carlton," the abbot ordered, "please remind the laity that quiet hours have begun for the monks and that they should keep their merrymaking confined to the outdoor pavilion."
"Yes, Father," Carlton replied and began to head out the open door, but he paused and turned back. "Uh…you sure you want me to leave you alone with them?" .
"You took two rifles, four handguns, two bows, and nine knives off of them," the abbot replied. "I think if they were going to kill anyone, you'd already be dead."
"I suppose so, Father."
"Shut the door on your way out."
Carlton did, and the abbot sat down in his chair. By now, Carol, Dianne, and Daryl had pulled up three folding chairs from one of the circular tables and sat down, but Ozzy instead stood at the edge of the desk, his cavalry hat shadowing his face, and his eyes now on the scuffed tips of his boots.
The abbot tilted his head to peer under the brim of Ozzy's hat. He rose slowly from his desk, pushing up with his palms. Then he reached over and tipped Ozzy's hat abruptly up, as if he were giving a disciplinary flick to a child.
Ozzy raised his head and looked into the abbot's eyes.
"Ozymandias," the abbot said in a booming cantor's voice. "I see the prodigal has returned."