Carol's enjoying this "shopping trip," as she likes to call their supply runs. She likes looting with Daryl. It's more fun than going on a supply run with anyone else, mostly because he keeps her entertained. He's so easy to rile up. But Daryl's not as annoyed as he pretends to be, she suspects. She's caught him smiling at her jokes more often than he knows, that sort of secret, half-smile of his.
It always feels good to make him smile, because he's not much of a smiler, normally. It's far too easy to make T-Dog smile – all she has to do is smile at him. Rick and Glenn aren't much harder to please, and Hershel seems to live with a perpetual look of bemusement. But Daryl's a challenge, and drawing an upward twist from his lips always feels like a small victory.
He stops now in front of the next shop, one of those cheap, unisex hair salons, which charges $17 for a shampoo, cut, and dry, according to the sign taped to the inside of the glass window. Carol's familiar with the type of establishment. It's the sort of place she used to go for a haircut when she was 'splurging' and not simply cutting her own hair.
"Seventeen bucks!" Daryl cries as he reads the sign. "What a rip off."
Ed said the exact same thing when he found out Carol had gone to such a place, except he'd added – Why'd you waste so much money, you stupid bitch? "You know that's considered cheap," replies Carol, feeling oddly defensive.
"Got me a $22 hair trimmer once. Probably got a hundred haircuts out of it."
"Well sometimes it's nice just to have someone else do it for you."
"Did. Had Merle do it."
Her eyes flit over his hair. "That explains a lot."
"Well he obviously ain't cut for me in a while."
"Bust us in, and I'll give you a haircut. You could use one."
"Don't need one," he grumbles, but then he pauses. She never knows what he's thinking when he changes his mind. His first instinct is always to say no to just about any suggestion she makes, but then, sometimes, he pauses. Those wheels churn in his head, and he comes up with a reason why it might be acceptable to do what she suggests after all. "'Cept…is getting a little long. Don't want lice."
They bust their way in, clear the small hallway and the bathroom and storeroom in back, and then she invites him to take a chair. He drops his crossbow on one of the chairs and sits in another, adjusting his handgun and knife so they don't dig into the seat. Carol has a handgun on her hip, too. Rick's been teaching her to shoot, starting with a .22 Colt semiautomatic pistol and an AR-15 rifle chambered in .223, because both have light recoil, he says. Better to be comfortable with your gun than to have a larger caliber, he assures her, and she agrees. She's quite comfortable with her guns now. Her AR-15 is locked in the trunk at the moment, however. Handguns are better than rifles for clearing confined spaces, and they try to stick to crossbow and knife anyway to keep the sound low and save ammunition.
Carol fans out a black haircutting cape and prepares to wrap it around Daryl. "Don't need that."
"It will keep their hair off you."
"Had a lot worse on me."
"It'll go down your shirt. You'll itch."
"I ain't precious."
"Fine." She tosses the cape to the floor and finds a pair of clippers that doesn't have corroded batteries. It has no batteries, but she gets a couple from an unopened package in a drawer.
The clippers emit a light buzz when she turns them on. "Not too short," he insists, and flinches instinctively when she first touches him. It's not the clippers, she doesn't think, but her fingertips on the back of his neck, brushing off some hairs. Intimate contact. Daryl's not a fan. It's why she tries to stick to shoulder bumping to show affection. But after the initial flinch, he eases back into the chair and into her touch.
"Want me to dye your hair while I'm at it?" she teases. "I bet you'd look good with jet black hair." She watches his reaction in the mirror, the way his eyelids droop like a veil lowering in disdain.
"Thought you liked blondes."
"I do. But dark black would make an amazing contrast with those baby blues of yours."
"Pfft." But there it is, reflecting in the dusty mirror, that faint hint of a smile.
"I'd kind of like to dye mine." Carol turns off the clippers for a moment to fluff one side of her gray-white hair. "People always think I'm 50, and I'm not even 40 yet."
"Your hair looks fine."
Now Carol smiles. She turns on the clippers again and works on the sides, after putting a finger to his chin and forcing him to tilt his head just so. She finished with the clippers, sets them aside, and grabs the scissors and a comb. As she works her fingers through the now shorter strands of his head to shake out some of the excess loose hair, he doesn't flinch. "I used to be a redhead," she tells him.
"Nah. No way."
She uses the comb now, and he seems to like that, looks for a moment like a dog getting his head scratched. "I was. I turned a lot of heads back in my day."
"Yeah, then why'd you settle on the jughead you did?"
She shrugs. "Ed was the only one who asked me on a proper date. All the rest just wanted to take me home for the night."
"Ed? A proper date?"
"He was charming when I first met him, believe it or not."
"But he changed? Later?"
"Revealed himself, more like." The scissors snip quietly across the hair at the back of his head, and she combs some more. "I went to one of these places once. I just wanted someone else to cut my hair for once. When he found out I'd done it, he called me a stupid bitch and hit me for wasting money."
Daryl's eyes darken in the mirror. His jaw twitches slightly. "Want me to cut your hair?" he asks.
It's about the sweetest thing he's ever said to her. It's an offer that's completely out of character for him, and he's only made it, she knows, because of the scab he's just watched her pick off. It touches her maybe a little too deeply, and she brushes off the feeling. "I wouldn't trust you to."
"Probably right not to. There's a reason Merle always had a buzz cut."
She chuckles. "You cut his hair?"
"Yep."
"Well, he didn't do such a bad job on you. I liked your hair when I first met you." She combs his hair once last time and puts a hand down on the side of the chair as she looks at him in the mirror. "It was sort of like this, but this, I think, is even better."
"Ain't bad," he admits and runs his fingers through the front of his hair, spiking it up a little as he does.
As she brushes some hair off is shoulder, she says, "After this blood center, we'll hit one of those big plasma donations centers. It's about nine miles away. Not sure what else is around it."
He steps out of the chair and recovers his bow. "You sure know a lot 'bout these places."
"I used to donate plasma twice a week when Sophia was in school and Ed was at work. I never told Ed. He didn't want me to have a job. But they pay you, you know, for your plasma. Back then it was $20 for the first donation of the week and $50 for the second. So I made a $70 a week. That was my secret money. The money Ed didn't know about, that I could spend however I wanted."
"Like on getting haircuts?" he asks.
"Like on getting haircuts," she agrees. "And once…once I felt so rebellious. I bought myself one of those little six packs with the single-serve bottles of wine. One glass in a bottle, you know? And I had one that afternoon and I hid the rest in the toilet tank for later."
"Ed didn't want you to drink? He drank like a damn fish."
"He didn't want me to spend money on myself."
Daryl grunts. "Find you a bottle of wine on this trip. A real bottle."
They go through the drawers and recover any unopened packages of batteries they can find. They take one of the hairclipper kits and a pair of scissors, too, and some shampoo. "Should get the brown dye." Daryl smirks. "Rick's going a little gray round the temples."
"He is not."
"Should get that miracle grow gel for T-Dog."
Carol chuckles. "I think he's sexy bald."
"Sexy?" Daryl exclaims. "Pfft." If she didn't know better, she'd think he was a little jealous. He sweeps up the canister full of dum-dum lollipops on the counter that they give to the kids to keep them quite during a haircut. He plucks one out, rips off the paper with his mouth, and spits in on the floor. Then he shoves it in his mouth.
"Give me one," she insists.
"Nah," he mutters around the lollipop. "Told me you don't like to suck."
"I said I don't like to suck gas siphoning hoses. Give me the sour apple."
"Fine." He digs around in the cannister and tosses her a sour apple flavored one.
They suck on their lollipops on the way back to the car and shove their salon loot in the trunk before slamming it shut and locking it again.
Lollipos consumed, it's finally time to loot the blood donation center. When they reach it, there's no shattered glass, which gives Carol hope. But when she peers through the windows, she sees signs that the place has already been looted. The two refrigerators that were no doubt once well stocked with bottled water and Gatorades are now empty except for a handful of bottles, and the counter is barren of snacks. The cupboard beneath the counter has been thrown open, and several open cardboard boxes, bearing the label Snacks for Heroes, sit empty atop a nearby circular table.
Carol's eyes move from the tables to the donation beds on the other side of the low barrier wall that sets off the snack area. That's when she sees the sleeping bags and pillows on two of the beds. "I think someone's been camp – "
Something hard and cool and round presses against the back of Carol's head. "Hands up now. Both of you. Or we both fire." The voice is cool and male and lightly accented, a faint Alabama drawl. They must have come from behind the strip mall, around the corner, so as not to be seen.
Carol slowly raises her hands. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Daryl do the same beside her.
"Strip them," the male voice orders.
Carol here's a rustling. The second person must be shouldering a weapon. That means only one gun is trained on them, but Carol's not making a move with what must be the barrel of a rifle pressing against her head, and Daryl's not either.
She feels her gun drawn from her holster, then her knife from its sheath. A hand pats over her, from breast to waist and down – a small hand, light – a woman, she thinks. Daryl is told to lower his right arm so his crossbow can be stripped from his shoulder.
When they're fully disarmed, the man orders, "Turn around. Slowly now."
When Carol turns, she sees a young man who is likely in his late teens or early twenties, about an inch taller than Daryl, with sandy blonde hair and blue-gray eyes. He wears a forest green t-shirt that reads Donor Life Is the Best Life. Beside him is a young teenage girl, fourteen, maybe, with wavy red hair and piercing green eyes.
Daryl studies the young man and says, "Jackson."
The young man studies him back, replies, "Daryl," and cautiously lowers his gun. "Of course you would have survived. Hunter and all, right?"
The redheaded girl glances at Jackson cautiously, as if unsure whether to lower her gun.
"Strange coincidence," the young man says. "Running into you."
Carol looks from Daryl to Jackson and notes the resemblance. Jackson's eyes are a slightly grayer blue than Daryl's, but they aren't far off. His hair is the same color Daryl's might have been ten or fifteen years ago, before it darkened. "Are you two related?" Carol asks. "Cousins?" It's her best guest.
Daryl takes in a breath and says, "Jackson's my son."