Normally Carol enjoys organizing the warehouse shelves, but today it feels like every minute of her shift just creeps by. She's already packed for the trip. Sophia is already packed for her sleepover at Carina's—in fact, she brought her pack to school and is going straight to Carina's room afterward so they can get dressed to go swimming.
When her shift is finally over, and Carol returns to the cottage, she's disappointed Daryl isn't there yet. But as she's setting her pack near the front door, she hears the roar of his motorcycle, and then his heavy boots on the porch stairs. When he comes in, she asks, "You took your motorcycle hunting?"
"Nah, just rode up to the mansion to get the running map."
"Running map?"
"It's got all the stuff on Jefe's camp map, and then some. We only got two copies, so, they stay on file at the mansion."
They toss their packs into the flat bed of DeShawn's farm truck, and Daryl hands her his rifle. "Since you ain't authorized to check out rifles for runs yet."
"Don't you need it?" she asks.
"Got m'bow, my handgun, and two knives. Think I'll manage."
Carol has her handgun on one hip and her silver three- knuckle-ring knife on the other, but she's glad for the rifle and its useful bayonet. She settles the firearm upright between her seat and the window when she climbs into the red cab of the truck on the passenger's side. Daryl lays his crossbow on the middle of the long bench seat between them and then takes the wheel.
"So where are we going, exactly?" Carol asks five minutes later as she unfolds the supply runner's map and the truck rumbles over the stone bridge that crosses Copper Creek.
"SM 16."
Carol finds that notation, handwritten in blue ink, on the map. "What's the SM mean?"
"Strip mall."
"And what do the numbers mean?"
"We just number 'em. To keep track. There's an index. Got in my vest pocket."
Dirt kicks up on the road behind them. Daryl's driving fast, Carol thinks, and when she measures the distance with her fingers on the maps, it looks like the strip mall is only sixty miles away. "You expect this to take us until nightfall?"
"Gonna move on to SM19 after we get the furniture."
Carol finds SM19 and sees it has a T in a circle after the notation. "What's does the T mean?"
"Means it was overrun by thrashers last time anyone saw it. But herds move on. Figured we'd get close enough to scout it out. Turn around if it looks bad. Check it out if it don't. We ain't never looted SM19, so, could be a good score if we can get in."
The idea of getting close to a herd makes Carol nervous. She's encountered some packs over the last year, but the last time she was anywhere near a big herd, she was gunning Hershel's pick-up truck off the burning farm, with Sophia screaming and looking out the back window at the desolation. Daryl's right, though. They can just spy it from a distance and then turn around and outdrive the walkers. In minutes, they'll be a distant memory, if those things can even be said to have memories at all.
"If it's overrun, we'll just go home early," he concludes. "Won't stay out overnight."
Either way, Carol thinks, they'll be alone together tonight, because Sophia's not coming back to the cottage.
Daryl stops to scavenge some cars along the way and to siphon off gas here and there. He asks Carol to "cover him" while he does.
Given that she was disarmed and desperate when he first encountered her, she's surprised by how naturally he asks it, with no hesitation at all, as if her were asking DeShawn or Garrison. "You trust me to?"
"Think if you wanted me dead you'd have shot me by now," he says.
"No, I mean, you think I'm competent to?"
"Pfft. Kept yourself and your girl alive out here for months. 'Course you're competent. Be dead if you weren't."
"I'd be dead if you hadn't shown up at that house when you did."
"Maybe. Or maybe you'd have gone all mama bear on 'em with that pairing knife."
She laughs. "You have more confidence in me than I do."
"Well that's a damn shame, ain't it?." He crouches down by the gas tank of a car, with a siphoning hose in his hand and an empty five-gallon gas can, and Carol raises her rifle and scans the nearby woods with her scope for any movement.
She hears him standing and the can rattling and lowers her rifle. He's sniffing the gas. "Fuck," he mutters and pours it out on the ground. "Spoiled."
"You can tell by smell?" she asks.
"And color."
"Wish I'd known that before I ruined the second to last car I was driving."
He moves on to another car, though, and deems that gasoline usable. He gets about four gallons. "Must have been stabilized," he says. Daryl pours the gas into the tank of DeShawn's truck and then checks two more abandoned cars. He declares one spoiled and the other "good to go." He gets another three gallons of gas from that one, and he puts the can in the bed.
They reach the strip mall an hour later. All the shops are connected as part of a single-story, U-shaped, white cinderblock structure. Carol spies the furniture store right away because it's on an end corner, with a higher roof than all of the other shops. Four walkers linger in the small parking lot, lurching among the drifting wrappers of fast-food sandwiches and between the half dozen or so abandoned cars. Daryl, after throwing the truck into park, leaps out of the cab and draws his knife before Carol even has her door open. She scurries out. "Let me shoot some!"
"No sense making noise and wasting ammo."
"You have a suppressor. And I need to practice on close moving targets."
"Fine. I'll just get this one." He strides toward it as she unshoulders her rifle and aims at a walker. She brings that one down with a single headshot, but that gives another time to get closer, and she grows nervous as it growls and jerks toward her. She fires quickly, too quickly, without properly rooting herself. Still unused to the kickback on Daryl's rifle, she drops the firearm downward on the recoil and hits the creature's chest instead of its head.
It keeps coming. Trying not to tremble, she raises the rifle and aims again, but the waler switches position in its jerky lurch and the bullet soars past its head and lodges in the brick wall of the strip mall. She's about to fire again when a bolt cuts through the side of the walker's head, and it grows suddenly silent mid-hiss before crumpling to the asphalt.
"I had it!" she insists. Lowering her rifle, she sees no sign of the fourth walker. "Where's the other one?"
"Stabbed it."
"I guess you don't trust me after all. And why should you?" She shoulders the rifle. "You know how Sophia and I survived all that time? Running, mostly."
"Said you killed a couple dozen out there."
"Sure. Over months and months. When I had to."
"Well, that's a lot more than most people I've met. The ones who never leave the walls." He rips the bolt from the walker's head, reloads his crossbow with it, bloody tip and all, and swings the bow on his back. "And you ain't used to my rifle. The .308's got three, four times the recoil of the .223 that AR-15 uses."
"Yeah," she agrees, stretching a hand back to feel the tension in her muscles. "I can really feel it in my shoulder."
He strolls the rest of the way over, gets behind her, and reaches out to rub the spot she indicated. She expects him to be rough when he begins to dig in, but he's surprisingly gentle – working from a soft touch to a firmer one bit by bit in slow, steady circles with his thumb. She closes her eyes and enjoys the sensation for a good forty more seconds, but then his thumb freezes suddenly in mid-circle, and he draws his hands away.
Carol's eyes fly open and dart around for a walker, but there's none. She turns back and finds him swallowing. "What's wrong?" she asks.
"Nothing. Shouldn't be lingering out here, though, without clearing the whole perimeter."
He swings his bow back into his hand. "I go around left, you go around right. Meet halfway in the back. Run in to trouble, holler."
She nods. She doesn't run into trouble, other than a single walker on the right side of the building, which she bayonets in the head. When they meet in the alley by a green dumpster, Daryl glances at the bloody bayonet. "See ya got one."
"Yeah." She wants to feel proud of that, but she's still ticked off he took down her second walker, and she didn't within the first two shots. Not ticked off at him, really, but at herself.
"Well let's pick out your couch," Daryl says.
"We should check out that burger joint, too, see if there's any condiments or pickle jars or – "
"- Copper Creek already looted this mall clean. 'Cept the furniture store and dry cleaners. And the State Farm office. Didn't break into those."
Before they go to the furniture store, Daryl gets his pack from the truck and pulls out and then rolls out on the pavement a breaking-and-entering kit, with all sorts of silver tools in a black, Velcro belt-like holder.
"I always just smashed a window with a brick," Carol says.
"There's a locksmith back at Copper Creek. He lived in the town ten miles from the ranch. Had all sorts of tools when he showed up. Didn't have the balls to go out and use 'em though. So now he shovels shit." Daryl crouches down and selects something from his kit. "Pound on the window while I work on picking this lock."
She pounds while he picks, rattling the glass window of the furniture store. He gets the door unlocked, pulls it open slightly, and then pushes it shut again, waiting to see if the pounding draws any walkers to the front.
Carol grows tired, and he takes over, slamming his fist against the % mark on the 20% OFF SALE sign painted in orange letters and white outline on the window. She peers in, her hand against the glass, but nothing stirs. They wait another five minutes before venturing inside, weapons ready. "You clear right, I'll clear left," Daryl tells her, and they make their way through the showroom floor and meet in the middle, by a massive, black leather recliner and a matching, L-shaped sectional leather couch with six cushions on the long end and three on the short end. "How 'bout that set?" he ask. "It matches."
"There's no way that would fit in that little living room."
"Oh, God. You're one of those women who take forever to shop, aren't you?"
She laughs and waves a hand at the couch. "That couch would stretch all the way into the kitchen. It would block off the hearth, and it wouldn't even fit in DeShawn's truck."
"Fine, if you're gonna take all day, I'm just gonna sit here in my new recliner and relax." He throws himself into the leather recliner and presses a button on the side. The battery must still be working because it slowly reclines and stretches out a footstool. "Ahhh," he says as he leans it back and puts his feet up.
"We're not bringing that back either."
"Hell you talking 'bout? It's got cupholders!" He runs his hands over them. "Look at all the beer I could fit in these things. And an ashtray! Built right into the arm!" He flips the metal door open. "Oh. That's a charging port. Modern."
"Yeah, pretty sure most people stopped smoking in their recliners by 2010."
"Got a designated pocket for the remote control!" He pulls the display remote out of a leather pocket on the side.
"We don't have a television."
"Could fit a hunting knife, though. And look, 's got a pocket for your Harlequin romance novels."
She smiles. She's actually glad for the ribbing, because it means he trusts she's gotten over her initial visceral reaction to his teasing that day and he's not afraid of it happening again. "Denim Dreams was not a Harlequin."
"Sorry. My mistake. Silhouette."
"It wasn't a Silhouette, either." She crosses her arms and gives him a suspicious look. "How do you know the names of all the romance lines?"
"My grandmama I told you about? She used to order 'em by the boxload."
"Boxload?"
"They'd come in a damn box," he says. "No shit. A whole box of 'em. Once a month. She'd hide 'em in her closet. Those nights I slept over, when I woke up 'fore 'er, I'd go dig one out and skim for all the raunchy scenes."
"I thought you were around nine when she died."
"Yeah? So?" he asks. "Ain't like them books are written on a tenth-grade level."
"They aren't written on a fourth-grade level either."
"Ain't so sure about that."
"Well, the content certainly isn't intended for fourth graders. Did you even understand it?" She can't imagine he was reading it to get off at such a prepubescent age.
"Mostly I was just trying to figure out what the hell Merle was always talking about when he was bragging 'bout the girls he banged."
Carol wonders, suddenly, if he got caught reading one of those books by his grandmother and if she deeply shamed him for it. Maybe his I ain't dirty reaction to her mentioning the naked lady cards had nothing to do with his father. "She ever catch you with them?"
She braces herself for a potentially hostile reaction to that sensitive question, but he just says, "Yeah. She laughed her ass off."
So that was not the source of his defensiveness, she deduces. "Are you really just going to sit here while I look at furniture?"
He reaches down and cranks the lever again until the stool is all the way out and he's almost flat on his back. "Nah. I'm gonna count the cracks in the ceiling, too."
She shakes her head and begins wandering the store. He really likes that recliner, she thinks, so in the end, she chooses what is advertised as a "power reclining loveseat" but is basically two leather recliners, attached side by side, divided by a small table and set of cup holders between them. It's about the same length as their current love seat. When reclined it will certainly take up more room, but it would fit well, she thinks, facing the fireplace, instead of with its back to the door as the loveseat is now. It's surprisingly comfortable, and though it's not as sophisticated as she would like, the dark brown leather would go well with their current flooring and walls, and there's a somewhat more formal matching armchair that could replace the gaudy grandmother chair. But what she really loves is the lift-top coffee table that has been arranged with the set, which also has four drawers built into its base that will allow for some very much needed extra storage and wheels that mean it can easily be moved around the living room as needed.
When she goes to tell Daryl her decision, she finds him still in the recliner, though it's humming and shaking lightly now.
"It's a massage chair?" she asks.
"Bet you want it now, huh?"
"Well, a vibrator would be great for my one-handed reading."
"Pffft!" He stabs a button on the arm with his thumb, and the chair immediately stops shaking. He pushes another button and lowers the footstool so he's sitting upright. "So you ain't upset 'bout me ribbing you anymore?"
"I know I overreacted. I was just sensitive about it because…it's just…." She sighs. She explains herself a little more explicitly than she did that day: "I like to read those books because I've never had good sex. Ed was my first. And he just, he never cared, ever, what I wanted. And sometimes he didn't even care if it hurt."
Daryl grits his teeth as he stands.
"And I just want to know what it's like, I guess. Good sex."
"Don't guess it's much like reading," he says.
"You don't guess?"
He looks abruptly down at the floor, and she judges it's best to move on from the subject. "I found the set I want. You want to come look?"
Now he looks back up at her. "About fucking time."
She smiles. "It's been fifteen minutes. Literally."
He smirks. "Well, figuratively, felt like fifteen hours."
She laughs. "You better hope you never have a girlfriend," she says as she begins leading him through the store.
"Managed to avoid it this long."
"You mean since the world ended?" she asks. He can't mean he's never had a girlfriend, surely.
"Yeah," he mutters, and raises his hand to gnaw at a thumbnail. When they reach her selection he says, "Thought you didn't like recliners."
"But you do, and I think this will work with the space we have. And the levers are manual so no worry about the batteries running out. Why don't you give it a test spin."
He does, and while he's reclined, she sits down next to him in the other seat and reclines it, her hand outstretched on the space between them and inch from his. "It's nice. Isn't it?" She smiles, turns her head sideways, and his face is right there, turned toward hers, and her smiles gets just a little bigger.
He swallows, bites his bottom lip, and his blue eyes flit down to her lips. He begins to lean ever so slightly closer, and she's certain he's about to kiss her, when there's a pop, and his footstool snaps down, and he rocks forward in the chair. "Works for me." He stands. "Let's get this shit tied down."