Daryl holds back when they get out of the car and a walker ambles toward them across the asphalt parking lot, gnashing its gray jaws and growling. His crossbow is already loaded, and if Carol's attempt to slay the ugly lurcher falters, he'll finish it off before it can bite her. But she's developed quite a backbone these few months, and she was already good with a knife because of her kitchen skills. All she needed to translate those skills was some courage and a little instruction.
She strides forward now, knife drawn. Carol winces when she drives the blade into the walker's forehead, and she makes a disgusted face when the black blood splatters her hands, but she'll get used to that. She'll get better at yanking out the blade, too, but for now she loses her grip as the creature collapses dead to the ground, and she has to put a foot on its decaying shoulder and bend down to slide the knife back out. Daryl sends a bolt soaring into the second oncoming walker. Its knees buckle and it collapses with a dying grunt.
"Got be quicker on the recovery," he tells her.
As she cleans her knife, Carol replies, "It's not like you could have reloaded that cumbersome thing in less time than it took me to get my knife back."
"Nah, but if a second one's coming at me, I can turn it around and pound 'em with the butt."
Carol's eyes twinkle. She heard coming and pound and butt and she's going to make another one of her corny sex jokes, he's sure. Except she can't seem to think of anything, so she just repeats, "Pound them in the butt."
"Said with the butt. Not in the butt."
"Well you better go get your hand around your shaft, so we can move on."
He groans and walks over to the fallen corpse from which his crossbow bolt protrudes, seizes the shaft, and rips it out. "You're like a fifth grade boy," he grumbles.
"Well, we can't all be as sophisticated as you, Pookie. Besides, you're the one who read something dirty into that. I just suggested you recover your arrow."
"Bolt."
"I didn't say you had to bolt to do it. A stroll is perfectly acceptable."
"Called a bolt," he tells her as he cleans the tip with the red handkerchief he's snapped from his back pocket. "Not an arrow."
"You say po-tay-toe, I say poh-ta-to."
"Arrow's longer 'n lighter 'n a bolt," he informs her while reloading the crossbow.
"So you've got a shorter shaft then?"
"Staph!" He swings the now loaded bow on his back, but then his irritation fades. He smirks. "Sides, girth matters more n' length."
Carol chuckles. "Whatever you have to tell yourself." She turns and begins strolling toward the sidewalk lining the shops.
Daryl huffs and follows. "Ain't got to tell m'self shit. The moanin' and groanin' says it all." He glances at her sideways as he catches up to her, enough to see the smile, and wonders if she thinks he has too little – or too much – experience in that department. He wonders, too, if she ever thinks about him, or T-Dog, or Rick, or – he can't imagine she thinks about Glenn – in a sexual way.
She was so timid when he first met her. He began to see a quiet strength in her that day he told her off on the farm, yelling that Sophia wasn't his…and he got in her face, and she flinched, but she stood her ground, stood strangely, stoically still and reacted to his unkind words with a calm but firm kindness.
Firm kindness. That was a trait she had about her, a kind of firm kindness. Those words together didn't really make sense, he supposed, but he didn't know any other way to describe it.
So he'd figured out pretty early on that she wasn't as timid as he'd thought at first, but the jokester personality…it had surprised him. It had surprised him…and yet somehow it seemed entirely natural to her at the same time, as if maybe she had become someone else in the shadow of Ed, and she was becoming herself again, or becoming the woman she should have always been, anyway.
He supposed he was different, too, than when they first met. She'd pulled him into the group, refused to let him hover on the outside. And he was a part of it now, as much as any of them, even if he sometimes did need to leave them all for a few hours and disappear into the woods alone. But he didn't want to be alone all the time now, and he didn't feel angry all the time, like he used to, like he must have for most of his life.
Oh, he still had his flashes of hot rage, and far more than that of annoyance, but the anger didn't thread through every muscle now, as if it were a part of his tendons, as if he could never unwind it. Instead, it coiled and uncoiled, came and went, and sometimes there were flashes of something else…something he didn't quite have a name for. Happiness, maybe? Belonging?
He sees she's headed for the blood donation center at the end of the strip and says, "Hold up. Might as well go in order and check 'em all." He nods to the pool supply store she's just walked past.
"What would we need from a pool store?" she asks.
"Chemicals," he said. "Can dilute the chlorine and bromine tablets, make a disinfectant out of 'em. For washin' clothes. And maybe use it so our toilet don't stink so damn much."
"Well, I'm not the one who's responsible for that."
"Yeah, you shit flowers." He cups a hand to his forehead and looks through the window. "Ain't no one been in here, looks like."
"I guess maintaining the backyard pool wasn't a top priority when it all started." Carol pulls on the handle of the door, but finds it locked, so she swings her backpack off her shoulder and takes out the glass cutter. They've managed to acquire a few breaking and entry tools over the past few months.
Daryl stands guard while she works. Once she gets them inside, they make a quick sweep of the aisles. Daryl starts by checking behind the counter for a gun. It's Alabama, after all. He doesn't find a gun, but he does find a half full bottle of whiskey. "Score!"
Carol glances at him as he tucks the bottle into his backpack. They grab some chlorine and bromine tablets – they won't need many, as incredibly strong as they are. They can be broken up into smaller pieces. Daryl grabs some water tests that they can repurpose to gauge the quality of their drinking water. Carol, meanwhile, turns to him holding a giant, inflatable pool ring with a unicorn's head and tail.
"No," he says.
"But I can float on it in the lake!"
"It's almost October! Gonna be too cold for lake floating in a few weeks."
"Well it's almost 90 degrees today."
"Hell we gonna fit it in the car?"
"They have deflated ones in boxes, silly." She tosses the ring through the air at him, and the unicorn's horn pokes him in the eye.
He rears back his head. "Oww!"
"Sorry, I assumed you had better reflexes." She opens one of the unicorn ring boxes and takes the tightly folded plastic out to save room by discarding the box. Then she opens another one – a ring with an elephant's head. "For Carl."
"Well, fuck then, I'm getting the floating recliner with the cup holders for beer!"
They stack all three of their deflated floating devices near the counter, along with a pump. They need a pump for the tires of Carl's bicycle, anyway, which Rick brought him after the last looting trip he went on. Rick had gone with T-Dog and come back with diapers and formula (in case for some reason Lori couldn't breastfeed) and all sorts of stuff for the coming baby. The bike for Carl had seemed almost an afterhtought, but the boy was eager to take it for a spin. Carl rides it almost every day now on the dock and along the shore, with a near-bursting Lori looking on, always reminding him, "Not too far! Watch out for walkers!" She's due in about eight weeks now, she thinks.
Daryl's grabbing a snorkel when he feels something soft whap him across the back. He whirls and jerks the yellow pool noodle from Carol's hand and smacks her back with it. She retreats and seizes a red pool noodle and crosses swords with him. He smacks her noddle hard a couple times before grabbing it and ripping it out of her hand. "C'mon. Ain't got time for grammar school games!"
She frowns at him. "You're no fun. And who calls it grammar school? It's elementary school."
"Maybe where you're from."
"I'm from Georgia. Just like you."
"Yeah, well, 'm from the part of Georgia's got grammar schools. One grammar school, anyhow."
"Doesn't seem like they taught you much grammar," she observes.
He flicks her off, tosses the pool noodles aside, and takes the snorkel. "Next shop," he says, and after tossing their limited loot in the trunk, they're soon standing in front of the dry cleaners.
"I guess I could use an iron," Carol says.
"Don't need no damn iron. Looking for a gun behind the counter. Koreans. Bound to have one."
"That's a little racist," she tells him as she tries the door, which is unlocked.
"Assuming a Korean business might have a gun?"
Carol lets the door fall closed and draws her knife. "Assuming a dry cleaner is run by Koreans."
He taps a sign on the glass, which is written in Korean characters.
"Oh," she says.
He shakes his head and unshoulders his bow and nods to her. Knife in one hand, she jerks open the door, and he's the first to sweep inside.
The plastic-bag wrapped bags sway on the rack as two walkers growl their way out from between the suit coats. Carol tries throwing her knife into the head of one – she's been practicing on shore with a target, but it spins downward and lodges in the chest. "Shit." She draws her second knife as Daryl's bolt pierces the brain of one of the two walkers, and when the creature has bumped against the front counter, she marches forward and slays it and then recovers both knives.
Daryl vaults over the counter, runs through the clothes to continue the clearing, and comes back just as Carol has walked through the swinging counter door.
"Clear."
"You're a good vaulter," she tells him.
"Well, got a lot of practice when I's a kid. Spent weeks vaulting into the open window of my dad's rusted-out 1960 Dodge Challenger. 'Til he caught me and gave me the back of his hand for marring its pristine beauty, anyhow."
She knows. About the beatings. She saw his bare back one time, when he was changing shirts in the living room, thinking she was busty outside on deck. When she came in and saw him, her eyes got this look of mixed anger and sympathy, and she asked, Who? He said, M'daddy. Was an asshole. And that, to his relief, was the end of the discussion. She didn't press him further.
"Were you trying to be Bo Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard?"
"No!" he insists. "Luke Duke."
"Bo's cuter." She smiles. "But then I like blondes."
He's not sure if that's a tease. He's not blonde. But he doesn't have dark brown hair like Luke Duke either. It's sort of a sandy brown, though it's been getting darker since he's been letting it get thicker and longer. He had no intention of cutting it, but now he thinks maybe he will. Just because short hair is easier to manage, of course. Not because it makes his hair look lighter and Carol likes blondes. It's just…her mentioning that has reminded him that he hasn't cut it once since the world went to shit.
Hers is the opposite. It seems to get lighter as it gets longer. Lighter and waiver. He likes it the way it is now. Short, but not too short – not that near buzz she used to have.
Carol reaches up and touches her hair like she's looking for something caught in it, and that's when he realizes he's been staring. So he flits his eyes away and underneath the counter. Then he draws a shotgun out and says, "See. Told ya." He looks around some more until he find a box of shells.
"Was Daisy Duke your fantasy girl?" she asks.
"Nah." He slips the box of shells into his back pocket and rests the shotgun upright on his shoulder. "Like brunettes." He figures that's what Carol used to be.
She rips open the plastic over a blouse and checks the size before taking it off the rail. "He was the only one who wanted to take me on a proper date. The rest just wanted to take me home for a night."
"Ed? A proper date?"
"He was charming at the start, believe it or not." She drapes the blouse over her arm and continues her clothes shopping. "That's why it never worried me, how rough around the edges you are. I know you can't judge a book until you've taken the time to read it."
"Yeah? You read me yet?"
She takes down a jacket and drapes it over her arm, too. "I've still got several chapters left, I suspect. Shall we carry on?"
Daryl nods, and they take their latest loot back to the car before hitting the next shop.