Daryl follows the signs up a hill to the winery tasting room as the pick-up truck dips in and out of holes in the windy dirt road. He turns into a gravel parking lot and switches off the engine. Several walkers stand in the overgrown grassy field stretching up toward the wooden stairs that climb to the second-story deck where another "tasting room" sign points. It's not possible to see much of the basement story here at the top of the hill.
"Why aren't those walkers moving toward us?" Jackson asks.
One does hobble toward the truck, on a single leg (it appears to have lost its lower left leg), but falls on its face. The rest lunge in their direction, arms outstretched, but can't seem to move more than a step.
"Traps," Daryl replies and slides out of the truck. The fallen walker belly crawls toward him like a soldier under barbwire, and when it emerges from the grass onto the gravel, Daryl shoots it with a bolt.
Sure enough, steel, bear-like traps litter the grassy field. Daryl can see at least one glinting through the tall blades of grass. The walkers growl angrily as they try futilely to wrest their legs free of the metal teeth. As Daryl recovers his bolt and reloads, he sees that the dead walker's decayed leg simply snapped off as it tried to rip itself free of the trap.
Someone was camping here once, clearly, but Daryl doesn't think they're any longer alive, or they would have cleared their traps and reset them by now. The untended vines they passed as they drove up the dirt road are another clue that no one has been at work here in some time. The vines wither, picked over by birds and worms, bearing only a few rotting grapes.
For now, though, Daryl's goal is to reach the tasting room. The traps are hard to see in the grass, so he collects several long branches from a pile of tree trimmings at the edge of the gravel parking lot and uses one at a time to beat the ground as they inch step by step through the field. He makes Jackson walk behind him, rifle poised in case one of the walkers breaks free. When a stick springs a trap, and the steel teeth close down and snap it in half, Daryl leaves the stick behind and uses another. By the time they reach the stairs, their boots have beaten down a clear path of return in the grass, and three of the walkers have been shot dead.
Daryl cautiously climbs the stairs, warning, "Watch for trip wires." They encounter one, thin and barely visible, across the top of the stairs. Daryl follows it with his eyes to the edge of the deck, where some kind of trap is rigged to pull the trigger of a shotgun when the wire is tripped.
Jackson fishes a pair of soft, orange foam earplugs out of his pocket, as does Daryl, and the men roll them between their fingers and shove them into their ears. Jackson goes to the bottom of the stairs, while Daryl steps down two steps, out of the range of the shotgun, and trips the wire using his last, outstretched stick. The shotgun fires a resounding blast, and the shell tears through the opposite rail of the deck, splintering the wood, but the path is clear now. The few still-living walkers in the field lunge toward the sound, and one breaks free of the trap, leaving it's lower left leg behind in the clutch of its steel jaws. Jackson raises his rifle and shoots it.
Once at the front door, they pick the foam plugs out of their ears and return them to their pockets. It's important to listen now. "We'll grab that shotgun on the way out." Daryl peers through the dirt-caked glass of the tasting room window, where hazy sunlight paints the cherry wood, circular tables inside. Suddenly, a walker slams its face against the glass and he draws back in surprise. Soon, two more walkers gather. The shotgun blast has drawn them. He knocks loudly on the window anyway, in case there are more, and they wait a few minutes, but no more walkers are drawn to the noise.
Because the door is locked form the inside, Daryl looks around the deck for something to break the window with. He finds a large, decorative rock with the words "Bowen Family Winery" carved into it.
"I'll do it," Jackson volunteers, so Daryl draws a knife in each hand again.
Jackson hurls the big stone, and the glass cracks. He hurls it a second time, and the glass shatters. Daryl storms forward and stabs one protruding walker head, leaves his blade lodged inside, stabs a second head, recovers his first knife, and then stabs the third walker in a fluid dance of motion.
"Not bad, old man," Jackson compliments with a smirk.
Daryl recovers both his knives and cleans his blades while Jackson drags the walkers through the window to clear the space. The young man brushes away the shattered glass with the thick sleeve of his leather jacket and then crawls through the free space and unlocks the door for Daryl. Once Daryl is inside, they quickly sweep the space, wincing and crinkling their noses and scraping their boots off on chairs or walls when they step in dried piles of vomit.
Empty wine bottles litter the floor, tables, and bar area. They crunch over shattered glass from fallen and broken bottles. There are two unisex restrooms in the hallway, empty except for backed up sewage that has spilled over onto the floors, and a single door leads downstairs to the cellar below.
The door is unlocked, but its dark on the stairwell, so Jackson clicks on the flashlight mounted to his scope, and the men make their way cautiously down the creaking wooden stairs, sweeping their gaze over the rails and across the winery floor at the oak barrels and stainless steel fermenter tanks.
When they reach the floor, Jackson clicks his flashlight off, because there are enough high windows to lightly, if hazily, illuminate the place, except for a few corners of shadow here and there. They walk low and fast and sweep the floor from left to right and top to bottom, but they find no sign of life.
They meet again by a tapped barrel, where splotches of dry red wine, looking like old blood stains, paint the gray cement floor. Daryl places his hand beneath the tap and turns it, but only a drizzle of wine comes out before the flow stops. He brings his hand to his mouth and laps up the pool. "Ain't bad," he says as he flicks his hand to air dry it, leaving a red stain in his palm. "I guess. Ain't much for wine."
"They sure made a mess pouring drinks from it." Jackson looks at the wine-stained floor. "Seems wasteful."
"Well, look at all the damn barrels they got." The oak barrels are stacked three-high on thier sides. "Must be at least a dozen that ain't been tapped yet."
"And each sixty-gallon barrel holds 300 bottles worth of wine. That's..."
"3,600 bottles," Daryl concludes.
"Eventually. I mean, it has to age in the barrell between six and thirty months before you bottle it."
"How the hell you know all this?"
Jackson gestures to a free-standing sign at the edge of the row of barrels. "I read the tour sign."
"Oh."
"Of course, who knows when it was put in the barrells? Before the world ended, certainly, and that's been months now. So at least some of it has to be ready."
"Now we know it's clear, let's see what's left in the tasting room," Daryl says.
When they return upstairs, Jackson shakes his head at the scene. "What the hell happened here?"
"Drank themselves to death," Daryl speculates. "All the vomit. Alcohol poisoning, maybe. Looks like they tried to settle in and hunker down at first, built them traps, but then they just gave up. Maybe when the food ran out. Probably ain't no snacks left."
He begins searching a corner shelf, but there are only coasters and wine stoppers and other useless trinkets. He does pocket a corkscrew, just to have an extra, and also a wine topper with a silver beaver atop it, because Carol once said she thinks beavers are adorable, right before making a stupid sexual joke about Daryl and beavers.
"They could have gardened," Jackson says in disbelief. "They certainly have the land for it. And they already had grapes!"
"Some people just give up. Anything behind the bar?"
Jackson finds only glassware and empty bottles of wine. No edible snacks remain in the tasting room, and no bottled water. There's not much unopened bottled wine left in the racks either. Daryl goes straight to the end, where a handwritten price tag on yellow, star-shaped paper reads $150, and snags the one remaining bottle in the small section and quickly buries it in his backpack.
"I saw that!" Jackson tells him. "You must really want to make an impression tonight."
"Shut it." Daryl grabs another solitary bottle that is in a section priced at $75 and adds it to his pack as well. The price tags go down from there, to $48 and then $24 and finally $15. All of the other remaining bottles are in the $15 section, which is the largest section. There are ten bottles there, which they put in a cardboard box with dividers.
"I hope this stop was worth it to you," Jackson says. "We didn't get much out of it."
"You kidding? The barrels."
"We don't have room for any barrels. The bed is completely full."
"Got to be a couple farm trucks around somewhere. Let's see if we can find one and get it started. There was a back door in the basement. Might be a loading area."
They go downstairs again to check it out, and when they exit the back door, they find a dirt parking lot and loading area.
"You know, we could have come in this way and avoided that sea of walkers," Jackson observes.
"Was just following the tasting room signs. 'Sides, don't think you could get here from the road we were on."
There is another dirt road back here, though, leading up and down the hills and likely reconnecting somewhere with another paved road. Three dead walkers littler the dirt loading lot. One of them has had its head decapitated, and the loose head is still snapping its jaws. Daryl stroll up to it and shoots it with a bolt, and the jaws still.
He recovers his bolt and finds Jackson looking into the windows of a dusty, flat-bed farm truck with a red cab. That's when he sees the tire tracks in the dirt. They're fresh. No more than a forty-eight hours old, by the look of them. "Someone's been here recently."
Jackson turns and follows Daryl's finger as he sweeps it over the tracks, which lead up the hill, and then, presumably, though he can't see it, down another hill and then up a third, all the way up the dirt road that climbs to a large, white, farm-style house.
"That must be where the owners lived," Jackson says. "Think one or more of the family is still alive and staying there?"
"And left their undead relatives rambling around in the tasting room? Didn't have the deceny to put 'em down?"
"Maybe they couldn't stand to."
"Nah. Looks like whoever did this didn't have no trouble killing these three walkers out here." He looks around the lot. "Looters maybe. Came in the back road, took some of the wine barrels. Didn't bother with the upstairs. And then they went back to the house."
"Should we go check the house out?" Jackson asks. "See if they're still there? If they need help? A camp to stay in?"
"Hell no! Ain't no reason to court trouble. Whoever they are, they ain't no wilting violets." Daryl points to the head on the ground. "Cut one of those walker's heads clean off."
"With what? A sword?"
Daryl shrugs. "Or a machete maybe. Let's go. Forget the barrels. Let's get out of here 'fore they come back."
Jackson reluctantly agrees, and they walk toward the backdoor of the basement wine floor, since there doesn't seem to be an easy way around to the front parking lot. Daryl turns the knob, swings the door open, and feels a sharp, steel point press ever so slightly against his throat.
He freezes. One inch forward and he'll be speared.
Daryl sees the whites of her eyes first, and then her flaring dark nostrils, and finally takes in the rest of the slender, dark form of the woman who now holds the tip of a thin, elegant curved sword against his throat.
The woman must have come in from the front, while they were around back. Maybe she'd seen them. Maybe she'd been watching the entire time they cleared the winery. At any rate, she'd certainly seen the walkers they slew in the field, and the ones they slew in the tasting room when she came in through the deck. She knew someone was here.
"Hands up," she hisses, in a voice low and commanding.
Daryl raises his hands.
"Tell your son behind you to slide his rifle off his shoulder to the ground," she orders.
Daryl swallows, and when he does, he can feel the tips of the sword more keenly. He motions with a wave of his fingers to tell Jackson to comply, and the young man does, squatting to lower his rifle.
"And now take off your handgun. Slowly. One false move and I ram this sword right through your father's throat."
Daryl's momentarily puzzled how she knows Jackson is his son, but then he realizes she's just assuming. Two men together, who look somewhat alike, one clearly more than a decade older than the other. Really, though, she could have assumed they were brothers. He doesn't look over forty already, does he?
After Jackson's handgun is on the ground, she orders, "Now disarm your father. His handgun first."
Before Jackson can do so, another woman steps from the shadows of the winery floor and into the frame. She stares at the men in the doorway through wide blue eyes. "Daryl?" she exclaims.
The black woman moves her eyes without moving her head or flinching in her position. Her eyes flit first to Andrea, and then back to Daryl. "You know him?"