When Carol is nearing the cottage, she finds Nadia picking walnuts from the ground and putting them in a pink-and-purple easter basket. Carol slows her stroll. "Hello?"
Nadia startles a little, and then puts a hand on her beating chest. "Oh, hello, you must be Carol?"
"How'd you know?"
"Sixty-eight people. It's not exactly a big town. Well, seventy now, I suppose." She has the slightest of accents, Eastern European, Carol thinks. "If all ten men who left this morning make it back alive, that is." She shakes her head. "No offense to your sponsor, but I wish Daryl hadn't dragged DeShawn into all this. I think it's better to leave well enough alone. They found Merle's shell. They could have left it at that. These men don't know where we are. It's just vengeance and loot at this point."
Easy for her to say. Her daughter wasn't almost raped by one of this gang. "Well, it will be safer for the supply runners without those kind of men on the road, right?"
"I suppose."
Carol looks up at the walnut tree. "Are we allowed to collect the walnuts for ourselves?"
Nadia looks guiltily in her basket. "I was just snagging a few that fell prematurely to the ground. The tree isn't ours. It's the camp's. When it comes time to harvest for the camp, they'll lay out tarps on the ground and shake the whole tree. I'm Nadia by the way. I'm sorry. I didn't introduce myself." She holds the basket in one hand and reaches out the other.
Carol shakes. It's weird, shaking hands. "I met your son," she says as she slips her hand from Nadia's. "Ivan? He walked my daughter to school this morning."
"Oh, yes, I told him he should go introduce himself. DeShawn said your girl looked to be around Ivan's age. You want to come in? Have a glass of wine? Chat?"
"Wine?" Carol asks. "It's not even ten yet."
Nadia smiles. "Hey, it's five o'clock somewhere. But, if it's too early for you, how about some instant coffee?"
"I'd love that."
[*]
Nadia's sitting room has gaudy grandmother furniture, too. These cottages must have served as in-law suites at one time. They sit at the kitchen table, though, and not in the armchair and loveseat. Nadia sits down with a bottle of whiskey and points it toward Carol's steaming mug. "Want to make it Irish?"
Carol puts a hand over the top of her mug. "I'll pass." After all, she still hasn't had breakfast, other than those two ounces of milk.
Nadia pours the whiskey generously into her own cup and then swirls the mug by its handle to mix it.
"DeShawn doesn't mind you drinking his booze?"
"Who says it's his?" Nadia replies. "I brought this with me. Ivan and I were part of a camp in a distillery. But everyone got some terrible flu, and Ivan and I were the only ones who didn't." She looks gloomily into her cup. "I quarantined Ivan in the tasting room to keep him safe. I treated everyone else on the distillery floor. But they were so sick. So sick. They started dying, one after another, and I locked the bodies in there. And then they turned. Some sooner than others, so some of the bodies got half eaten." Her sigh ripples the black surface of her coffee, and Carol understands why she makes the coffee Irish. "We couldn't stay there. So we filled a pick-up truck with what we could, which was mostly whiskey bottles and a few snacks and the last few vegetables in our garden, and we went looking for another camp." She takes a big sip of her laced coffee. "We ran into DeShawn and Daryl. They were tracking a feral horse. DeShawn was going to break it."
"He can break horses?"
"You thought he was all hat and no cattle?" she asks with a smile.
Carol shrugs. "I don't know anything about anyone here." She sets her mug down. "What's the school like here? How many children?"
"Eleven kids. Well, twelve now with yours. At sixteen they graduate. They can be guards and supply runners at that age if they pass the shooting test. It makes me nervous for Ivan. They're up there right now, probably doing some kind of weapons training."
"They do weapons training?"
"There's an archery range behind the big house, a shooting range, and dummies for stabbing and throwing knives at."
"I thought they'd be teaching…I don't know…math and writing?" Not that Carol thinks weapons training is a bad idea. She could use some weapons training herself.
"They do teach math. Up to a point. Reading and writing for the younger ones. Science for the older ones. The rest is all skills work. Gardening, farming, sewing, horseback riding, finding water, animal husbandry, archery, knives, martial arts, guns. All that."
"For the girls, too?" Given that Cody said there are no men in Jefe's inner or outer circle, she wouldn't be surprised if the weapons lessons were only for boys.
"Sure. All the kids. The lesson vary by age, of course."
"Can an adult get in on these lessons?"
Nadia laughs. "I don't know. I've never asked."
They sip and chat aimlessly for a while, making small talk about the weather, the kids' interests, hometowns—Nadia's parents moved from Russia to D.C. when she was nine, but she spent her teenage years in Savanah and settled there.
Eventually, Carol shifts the conversation to more current events. "Can I ask you something? About the sponsorship arrangements?"
"Sure. But I'm pretty new here myself. I'm still figuring things out. Ivan and I just got here four weeks ago. I'm still in the trial period."
"That's one of my questions." Carol waves her mug toward Nadia. "What happens if your sponsor doesn't renew?"
"Well, someone else steps up to sponsor you, hopefully. You become free game then. Anyone can offer to sponsor you, and you take your pick from those offers."
"And if no one offers?"
"From what DeShawn tells me, that's only happened once since Jefe instituted the no-entrance-without sponsorship rule, and it was because the sponsee turned out to be a mental case. When no one would step up to sponsor her after the trial period, they took her out to some suburbs somewhere, left her with three days' worth of food, three gallons of gas, and a car. And they told her not to try to find her way back."
"Seems cruel."
Nadia shrugs. "Maybe. But the possibility you might wake up to a crazy woman driving a knife in your chest seems cruel, too. Every group makes choices in this world that they don't necessarily feel good about. But I've eaten better here than anywhere since the world collapsed. Of course, DeShawn is inner circle. Anyway, I'm just grateful to be here."
"Grateful enough to satisfy any expectation of your sponsor?"
"DeShawn's expectations are not extreme."
Carol sighs. "So…I'll just be blunt, here. Are there sexual expectations? That come with this? I saw you and DeShawn this morning, out the window."
Nadia sets her mug down on the table and leans forward. "Carol, have you seen that cowboy? Have you seen how handsome he is? He's like a thirty-something Denzel Washington!"
Carol laughs. "I did notice the resemblance."
"He can grope my ass all he likes."
"So it's not an expectation of sponsorship? Or it is and you don't care?"
"I don't know. I never asked. He came onto me the second night I was here, after Ivan was in bed. He didn't say he expected it. He didn't say he didn't expect it. He just made a pass, and," she shrugs. "I responded positively."
"Because you wanted to, or because you thought you had to in order to get him to renew your sponsorship?"
"A little of both, maybe. I mean, he's certainly going to be renewing now." She flashes a smile.
"You really never asked if he expected it?"
"Carol, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. And I'm not going to risk upsetting the apple cart by asking potentially offensive questions that could upset an ideal sponsor. This place…it works. I lay low, I don't ask questions, I keep my sponsor happy, and I provide a safe haven for my son. I would advise you to do the same." She picks up her now empty mug and stands. "I need to get going. I have garden duty for an hour. Then I need to make lunch for Ivan."
Carol stands and brings her empty cup to the sink. "Garden duty – it's one of your community chores?"
Nadia nods.
"Do you know when I'll get assigned mine?"
"When Jefe gets around to it, I suppose." She takes Carol's mug from her hand and sets it in the sink. "It was really nice meeting you. Don't be a stranger."
Carol supposes that's her cue to leave.
[*]
Back at the cottage, Carol snags a peach from the root cellar. She just can't resist. She eats half of it and saves the rest for Sophia. It's a perfect Georgia peach, sweet and a little tangy. She ventures into Daryl's room to gather his laundry. The bed is unmade, but he doesn't have porn magazines lying all over it like Merle did.
She makes the bed up neatly and thinks he's not as messy as his brother, which is strange, because Cody said Merle was ex-military. The room is fairly spartan, and there are no clothes draped anywhere. The leather vest that she saw on the back of his desk chair yesterday is gone. He was wearing his angels wings when he left, and maybe that's appropriate – the avenging angel, sweeping in.
She begins emptying the laundry basket because she'll need that for the laundry. The boxes of ammo she stacks neatly on his roll-top desk. She looks down at the legal pad, where he's drawn some kind of hunting map scattered with X marks. Traps he's left, maybe? Copper Creek is labeled, and there's a crudely drawn house that says skinning cabin.
The packs of cigarettes she stacks neatly on the nightstand, next to a tall pile of books. He's a reader? Curious, she looks through the titles. She's not snooping, she tells herself, she's gathering intel. The mass market paperback on top, which has a cigarrette for a bookmark, is called The Case of the Missing Man. It rests atop Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, Frank Herbert's Dune, and Mario Puzo's The Godfather. The larger trade paperback beneath that is Catch-22. Then there's a motorcycle repair manual, Reader's Digest Fix-It-Yourself Home Repair Manual, and, underneath that, a large, thick hardback called Shooter's Bible Guide to Deer Hunting.
She takes Merle's porn magazines from the basket and opens his top nightstand drawer to tuck them in there. She can see his unfolded socks and boxers are covering something, and she roots for it. Another book. Some kind of dirty, sexy fiction maybe, she thinks, since it's buried, but when she turns it over, the title reads Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse. There's a pencil wedged between the pages, as though he's been marking passages.
Carol feels suddenly guilty for her snooping. She reburies the book in the drawer and closes it without putting the porn mags in. When the basket is empty, she opens his closet to get his dirty clothes. Only a few items hangs there: a long-sleeve black leather jacket, a charcoal grapy long-sleeve canvas work shirt, a brown, black and red poncho, and a sleeveless checkered shirt. There's a pile of clothes on the floor, but it's not much – some socks, boxers, a pair of Wranglers, and three wife beater undershirts, one white, two tan. Wife beaters. She's always hated that term.
Since they'll be washing Merle's clothes and their own as well, she takes down a second basket from the closet shelf. She removes the dirty winter boots, fingerless gloves, and wool socks its contains and puts those neatly on the closet floor. Then she puts his dirty clothes in one of the baskets. She scoops up the poncho, too, because there's dried blood on it. The blood isn't coming out at this point, but it looks and smells like it hasn't been washed since winter.
She wonders if the blood belonged to walkers or deer or men.
[*]
When Sophia comes home from school, she's wearing a forest green polo shirt with the words Copper Creek Pastures Camp etched in golden cursive over the front shirt pocket. In her hand she holds the T-shirt she wore to school, the one with the rainbow. She thrusts it at Carol. "You can cut it up for scraps now."
"But it's your favorite."
"It's too small! And it's for little kids! Mrs. Swainson gave me a proper shirt."
The rainbow shirt is too small. It fits tightly on Sophia, and it's frayed at the sleeves, but it's always been her favorite, and Carol's a little sad to see it go.
They eat the vegetable noodle soup for lunch at the kitchen table. Carol has heated it on the fire because the battery pack is still charging up at the big house. "Did you meet Jefe?"
"Who's Jefe?" Sophia asks.
"The leader of this camp."
"No, we didn't meet any Jefe. The headmistress is named Mrs. Swainson. But she just teaches academics. She walks around working with kids individually, and then they have other people pull us in and out for skills. There's a really cool woman named Haley who teaches archery. She's really good! And Noah came in to teach some gun stuff."
"You call your teachers by their first names?"
"Noah and Haley are only like…twenty."
"Still."
"And Dr. Eastman taught us how to use a stick to hit thrashers. Only he calls it a staff."
"Thrashers?" Carol asks. "I see you're already learning the lingo."
"Oh, and I need to do some homework tonight."
"I thought Ivan said there was no homework."
"But I'm behind a lot of the other kids," Sophia complains. "You never let me shoot your gun!"
"You never asked."
"Well, I need to practice dry firing." Sophia reaches into the pocket of her polo and pulls out what looks like a red round of ammunition with a spring in the tip.
"What's that?" Carol doesn't know much about guns other than what she's managed to figure out on her own to survive. She let her first handgun get so dirty the firing pin ceased to function, and she ended up abandoning it. After that, she found another gun and a cleaning kit and figured out how to dissemble and clean her gun. When she got it apart the first time, she struggled to put it back together and nearly had a panic attack thinking she wouldn't have a functioning firearm.
"Dry firing cap. So your gun isn't damaged when I practice dry firing on it. You didn't know that?" Sophia asks a little smugly, in an I know something you don't know way. Let her be smug about it, Carol thinks. Sophia would do well to know more than her mother.
"Well, you can practice dryfiring on my gun tonight. Did you make any new friends? Besides Ivan?"
"They're all a bunch of kids," Sophia insists. "Except this one fifteen-year-old girl, but she was kind of snooty. Other than her, Ivan and I are the only teenagers."
"Teenagers," Carol murmurs. "Big stuff. Any mere twelve-year-olds?"
"One. Can I go to Ivan's after lunch? He said I could use the swing on the walnut tree."
Carol smiles. "So you haven't outgrown swings yet?"
Sophia looks annoyed, and Carol says, "Go. Have fun. I'll come get you when it's time to do the laundry."
It's only after Sophia leaves that Carol remembers how, at the age of fourteen, she shared her first kiss with a boy at sunset on the swing set of an elementary school playground.