In all the tumult that had occurred, and all the emotional rawness that came with it, Carol had completely forgotten to keep taking her birth control pills. She hadn't even noticed she'd forgotten until the day she got the light cramping, noticed the faint spotting, and realized it was possible that, given when they'd last had sex, she was experiencing implantation bleeding. Which meant she was now officially six days pregnant. It was far too soon to tell, of course, but Carol knew. She just knew.
Daryl blinked. He looked down at the palm of his hand pressed against her belly. "Are you sayin'…what? You're pregnant?"
"It's extremely early. But I'm almost certain of it."
"Pregnant?" he repeated. "With my baby?"
Carol laughed through her tears. "Whose else would it be?"
A huff of air, resembling a laugh, escaped Daryl's mouth. He put a hand gently on her hip, stepped closer, and moved his palm across her belly. "My baby's in there?"
"I mean…it's just barely an embryo at this point. But please, Daryl. I need you. Alive and well."
He swallowed. "You need vitamins, right? You need a doctor."
"Alexandria has two doctors. Denise and Siddiq."
He sighed heavily. "Maybe you're right. Maybe Soph went north. Lookin' for us. In Virginia. She knew Noah's from Richmond. Knew the name of his neighborhood. Maybe she and Carl and whoever else might be with them…maybe they found a map and they're headed there."
"Maybe," Carol whispered. Her hope was shriveling, but she wanted to believe her little girl was still alive and would have headed to Richmond.
Daryl nodded and stepped away. "A'right. We pack up. We head north."
Inside Dixon's cabin, Carol left a note, just in case. She also left a couple of cans of food and a few rounds of .22 ammunition for Carl's rifle.
Sophia—
Go to Noah's neighborhood.
Love,
Mom and Dad
First, they went to a farm Maggie had told them about, one that would have a horse trailer that could attach side-car style to Daryl's motorcycle. There was nothing living there. The transformed owners and farmhands had ended up wrangled into Herhsel's barn, and the Greenes had already looted the house of any food long ago, but there were still tools in the barn and a few horseshoes. Carol used a book about horses she found in the farmhouse to figure out how to shoe Freckles. Daryl had nearly worn the poor horse's shoes off in his frantic search for Sophia.
They loaded Freckles into the trailer attached to the bike. They strapped their bedroll and packs to the top of the trailer and put Daisy in a basket on the motorcycle's luggage rack. Carol wore both Daryl's crossbow and her AR-15. It was going to be a crowded ride. They were also going to have to ride carefully with that rickety trailer; there would be no going highway speeds. But that was fine, Daryl said. That would help them stretch the gas. Thirty-five miles per hour was his bike's sweet spot for fuel efficiency. Carol didn't even know there was such a thing as a sweet spot for fuel efficiency.
They only had fifteen gallons of gasoline left-eight in the tank, and seven in a fuel can. "I shouldn't have gone riding," Carol said as she mounted the motorcycle behind him. "I wasn't thinking. I just needed to get out, to check the roads. I was hoping—"
"-Don't worry 'bout it," he called back to her as he kick started the bike. "Bike gets fifty miles to a gallon. Forty with this trailer, maybe. And we know the clearest way now. Be faster than our first trip there."
Carol wrapped her arms around him, and he plowed forward with the trailer creaking at their side. Freckles snorted at the sudden movement, and Daisy let out a bark.
10:15 PM
Daryl tried to make it the whole way in one day. They almost did. They were just forty miles outside of Shirewilt now, but it was deathly dark, and the orange light on the fuel tank had just come on. They had just passed an abandoned elementary school with only two walkers lurching about the parking lot. Daryl made a U-turn in the road to head back to it, saying, "You need your rest. Should stop for the night while we can still find a safe place. Otherwise, might run out of gas God-knows-where."
Carol agreed, and part of her agreed because she didn't want to show up at Shirewilt and find that Sophia wasn't there, that her fantasy that her daughter would have pressed on and found the place was just that—a fantasy.
They killed the parking lot walkers, beat on the windows of the school, and found there were only a few more inside. After clearing those, they staked out a kindergarten classroom for the night and stabled Freckles in the hallway outside the open door. Daisy, after sniffing out the room, curled up on a bean bag chair in the book corner. Carol discovered a box of three dozen packages of fruit snacks and several bags of goldfish crackers in a supply closet. "We've got breakfast for tomorrow!" It was a good thing, too. They were out of food in their packs.
As Carol readied their bed roll by the glow of a battery-operated lantern she'd set on one of the student desks, Daryl swept his flashlight over the classroom wall. Children's art work littered the yellow cinderblocks. Cut-out handprints on colored construction paper also peppered the walls. Each print bore the first name of a student. The hazy beam of the flashlight froze on one that read Sofie. Carol saw it, saw how long Daryl let the beam linger there, and then said, quietly, "Come to bed."
After they'd settled in on their bedding atop the circular rug in front of the whiteboard, the scent of horse manure drifted from the hallway through the open door.
"Lovely," Carol murmured. She rolled to Daryl against his unstitched side and buried her nose in the crook of his neck, so she could inhale his scent instead—smoke and mint and the soap he'd scrubbed with in a creek after dinner. "Did you find toothpaste?" They were out of the tube she'd brought to Virginia and back.
"Nah. Found wild mint leaves by that creek. Chewed on a couple." He slid his hand to her stomach and rested his palm there.
When she'd told him earlier, she wasn't sure how he was going to react to the news. They had agreed to table the discussion of having a child until the new year, after all, when both the pills and the condoms would have run out. Back then, they were expecting things to become more settled over time. But they were far from settled now.
"Does it scare you?" she asked.
"Shitless," he admitted. "But I'm gonna step up, Carol."
"I know you will."
He'd been strangely attentive ever since she'd told him, turning back to check on her repeatedly as they rode the highway, stopping to make sure she drank enough water and got enough to eat. It was as if his protective instinct had kicked in, or maybe his guilt over failing to protect Sophia. If that were case, he might blame himself if he lost this one, too.
"I could miscarry," she warned. "And if I did, it wouldn't be anyone's fault. It's very common in the first few weeks, and it's very early yet. Just days on. You should know that."
He kissed her forehead. "I'm here now. Sorry I left you alone so much these past few days. Should of—"
"—I understand," she assured him. She'd always heard that in a good marriage, your joys were doubled and your sorrows were halved. The double joy she'd experience, but the half sorrow she wasn't so sure about. She felt her pain, and then she felt his, too. She knew it was the same for him, that he'd needed the space to track alone because the burden of both their pain was too much. "But you're here now. And I love you, Daryl."
July 11
7:05 AM
They rode through the sunrise, Daryl squinting against the growing light. The whole Virginia landscape was illuminated by the time the motorcycle puttered to a stop, choking out the last fumes of gas, a mere four miles from Shirewilt.
They unloaded the trailer, saddled Freckles, and mounted the mare. Daisy trotted alongside them as they rode on, clip-clopping over the asphalt of the quiet semi-rural suburb. When they arrived at the wall of Shirewilt, their hearts sank. The new gate was open, and a few stray walkers roamed the streets. Daryl spurred the horse inside, dismounted, and took out one with a crossbow bolt. He drew his knife and took out two others while Carol used her throwing knife on the last. When the walkers were slain, they closed the gate to prevent more from wandering in and began to investigate the eerie silence.
None of the walkers were familiar to them, fortunately—they weren't Shirewilt's turned people. Doors to the once occupied houses were ajar. Daryl and Carol tethered Freckles to the hitch of a rusted pick-up truck and cautiously approached one of the houses. Daryl looked down at a partial brown print on the brick stoop. "The hell?" he asked. Then he pushed the door the rest of the way open with a creak. "Stay back," he warned. He took one cautious step inside, then two, then three before stepping abruptly back and muttering, "Shit!"
He meant it literally. He'd just stepped in a thin pool of sewage on the floor. It had leaked from the hallway near the bathroom and covered the entire foyer. The house reeked, and Carol pulled her shirt up to her mouth. Gagging, she ran from the stoop and vomited in the bushes.
Daryl came back out of the house anxiously asking if she was okay, if it was morning sickness.
"No!" she told him. "That won't start for weeks, assuming I have it. It's the stench of the sewage!"
"Oh."
Carol laughed. It felt good to laugh, a brief movement of weightlessness in the midst of a constant heaviness.
They investigated the other houses and concluded that there had been some kind of sudden eruption of a backlog of sewage. It had flooded house after house, filling bathtubs and toilets and sinks and running across floors. It seemed the residents of Shirewilt had decided that clean-up would be too a great a task, and that they couldn't risk the unsanitary conditions or a possible future repeat of the gnarly eruption. They had simply packed up and left the neighborhood. Every pantry and storage closet was empty, and there were shoe prints in the shit.
"Think they went to the Kingdom?" Carol asked. "Zach knew the way."
"Dunno. But that's a long ride by horseback. I say we go to them botanical gardens, see if we can bum some gas for m'bike from those people we liberated. See what they know."
"I want to leave a note, in case Sophia comes here looking for us."
In the end, Carol left several note—one on the main gate, one on the rear pedestrian gate, one on a black iron lamp post, and one on the front door of the first house in the neighborhood. She was playing Hansel and Gretel and leaving her own trail of breadcrumbs for her daughter to follow, a daughter she didn't quite believe was alive but could not allow herself to believe was dead.
Carol didn't want to expose the botanical gardens camp to potential raiders who might find the notes, so she left the address of the gardens in a cryptic message:
Sophia-
Go to the following address: My birth month followed by your birthday on a street with the same name as the last name of your 4th grade teacher. We'll leave a message for you there.
Love,
Mom and Dad
1:09 PM
When they arrived at the front gate of Audubon Botanical Gardens, the horse whinnied and reared back suddenly, while Daisy barked madly at the sight before them.
On either side of the gate, stabbed into the earth, rose two wooden pikes bearing signs that read: Raiders and Rapists Beware! This Is Your Fate. Atop the sharpened pikes sat the impaled, chomping, hissing, decapitated heads of Pete and Ron Anderson.
From somewhere up in a tree to the left of the gate came a male voice ordering, "Hands up!"