Author's Note: Amazon's Kindle Vella is FREE to eligible readers through October 11. You get to read 100 free episodes a day. Vella is a way to read serialized fiction. So if you like my fanfic, please try out my serialized novella on Kindle Vella while it's free. It's called "Grasping Hot Coals" and published under the name of Molly Taggart. If you do enjoy it, be sure to like each episode. I appreciate it! (kindle-vella/story/B099Y6V699)
[*]
Daryl tracks the Morales walker through the forest and out onto a road on the west side of the lake, where he and Jackson discover fragments of a blown tire strewn across the pavement leading up to a two-seater, light blue pick-up truck. Near the truck lies a fallen rifle, a dead walker, and dried blood. The bed contains a few cardboard boxes, a sleeping bag, and some camping gear, and the truck has been jacked up. A spare tire rests on the road.
Daryl looks cautiously left and right while Jackson crouches down and fishes out the walker's wallet. He opens it. "I wonder why so many people keep their wallets. Did you keep yours?"
"Never had one." Daryl looks at the fallen walker, which is long decayed. "That one probably died at the start, 'fore he knew money would be useless."
"Yeah, but that Thiago Morales died and turned recently, and he was carrying around his wallet for some reason. Maybe it was just to hold the condoms. He had three."
"Think he was out scavenging, stopped to change the blown tire." Daryl swings a finger back toward the scattered rubber on the road. "Got attacked by that walker when he wasn't looking. Pushed it off, shot it, but not 'fore he got bit. Ended up dying and walking off into our forest."
"Okay. So…what now?" Jackson asks. "You think you can track him back to his camp? You're hoping to find these old friends of yours?"
"Can't track without tracks. Might as well take the truck though. Drive a bit toward Birmingham, where Morales said they was going. See what we see. When the tank gets low, turn back, come on home."
"So no hunting today." Jackson peers into the bed. "But we're not coming home empty handed. There's an entire box of canned food in here." He shuffles some cans around to examine them. "Most of it Dinty More beef stew. Score!"
"Need vegetables," Daryl murmurs. He can hunt. He can provide meat, especially now that spring is creeping in and there's about to be a lot more coverage in the forest. But the gardens still aren't ready to be harvested yet.
"There's vegetables in the stew. Well, carrots anyway."
Daryl has plucked up the rifle – a semi-automatic, Browning Bar Mark II in traditional walnut, with a four-round magazine and a long-range scope. He peers in the cab of the truck and sees three more loaded magazines wedged in the cupholders. "Thiago wasn't fucking around. Still got bit, though." He shoulders the rifle and then rifles through another one of the cardboard boxes in the bed. "Honey. Carol'll like that for her tea." There's also a few bags of dried kidney beans and black beans and one bag of mixed beans with a 15-bean-soup recipe on the back.
Jackson peers over Daryl's shoulder. "That looks good. If only we had the ham."
Daryl reaches down, plucks up a can of Spam, and shakes it.
"Close enough!" Jackson say with a grin.
Thiago Morales has also managed to loot six jars of instant coffee, six boxes of powdered milk, and an assortment of extracts and herbs that Daryl thinks will help him score with Carol tonight.
"Wonder where he found all this stuff," Jackson muses. "I thought we'd cleared out everything around here."
"Ain't like we've hit every single house in two counties. Stay guard while I change this tire."
The keys are still dangling from the ignition when Daryl slides into the driver's seat later. It's a good sign. This truck has been here a week, ready for the taking, and yet no one has taken it. That means they're camp is pretty isolated from looters. "Get one of your maps. Tell me which way on this road is toward Birmingham."
"I didn't exactly bring my maps hunting with me," Jackson tells him. "But go left."
"You sure?"
Jackson smirks. "Thought you'd have a better sense of direction."
"Do. In the forest. Just don't know which way Birmingham is." Daryl makes a U-turn in the road and starts driving. The tank is three-quarters full. He'll stop if he doesn't see sign of anything when it's half-full, and then he'll head back toward camp and take one of the dirt roads that weaves through the forest to the shore of the lake. He doesn't really expect to track Thiago all the way back to his camp, but it's a chance to do a little scouting, anyway, to see if there are any threats nearby.
They drive for half an hour. Daryl does see signs left by Thiago Morales – dead walkers on the road, open trunks of looted cars. And then a few minutes later he sees a narrow dirt road, off the paved roadway, leading up a hill, with faded remnants of tire tracks, half washed away. He turns and drives up it, until he comes to a stop before a high, double chain link fence with barb wire and a sign that reads La Iglesia de la Raza.
"The church of the race?" Jackson asks. "What are they? Hispanic supremacists?"
"Morales just said his relatives had a compound somewhere outside Birmingham. Didn't know they were cultists."
"Maybe we should turn back. We might not be too welcomed here."
"Too late," Daryl replies as he looks through the glass at a young man approaching them with his rifle leveled and pointed.
"He's white," Jackson says in surprise.
[*]
The young man who meets them at gun point is wary, but not hostile. He looks to be about Jackson's age and has sandy brown hair and the whisp of a mustache crawling across his upper lip. When Daryl eases out of the truck, hands up, and tells him they found Thiago's walker, mentions each member of the Morales family by name, and says he once camped with them, the young man relaxes and lowers his weapon. He introduces himself as Zach, unchains the gate, and tells them, "Leave the truck and weapons outside. I'll bring you to Miranda and see if your story is true."
"Truck's got loot," Daryl says.
Zach lets him drive it just inside and then shuts and locks the gate behind them, but from there they go in on foot. "Thiago went scavenging because nearly everything we had left was destroyed by that flood three weeks ago," Zach says. "But then he never came back. I was about to leave to go looking for him."
Daryl looks the young man over. He's no tracker. He probably knows how to use that rifle on his shoulder well enough by now, but Daryl doesn't get the impression he's a serious fighter. He doesn't think Zach would really have gone looking.
"What flood?" Jackson asks.
Daryl surveys the compound's buildings, which include what looks like a warehouse, a long one-story barracks, and a church. There are two wooden watchtowers that have become rotted with water at the bottom. Zach leads them over the muddy earth and around shallow pools of water here and there that have not yet dried. They got a week of heavy rain back at their own camp, which probably raised the lake half an inch, but nothing like the flood that seems to have washed through here.
"A nearby levee burst," Zach explains. "We had a huge, sudden torrent of water from the river. It destroyed everything we had in storage. That's why Thiago was out scavenging. It completely ruined our electrical system. Destroyed the batteries we were running off of. We haven't had power since. We can still physically draw water from one of the wells, but the pumps don't work. They were electric. So there's no running water. And the only place dry enough to sleep is the church balcony."
"Is Morales alive?" Daryl asks. "Miranda's husband?" He never knew the man's first name.
"Juan?" Zach sighs. "When the levee broke, there was a deep, sudden flash flood before the water rolled on and leveld out. Louis almost drowned. Juan saved him, but I guess he took on too much water in his lungs. We thought he was going to be fine. He was walking around after, but then…Thiago called it dry drowning."
"And the girl? Eliza?"
"She's alive," Zach tells him.
"How many you got here?" Daryl asks.
"Just the four of us now," Zach answers. "We used to have almost forty people here, but a woman died in her sleep, turned in the middle of the night, bit her husband, and…well, you know. It spread. Quick. Then the flood killed Juan and three others. And now Thiago's gone, you say."
"What's with the name?" Jackson asks him. "Church of the race?"
"Yeah…uh…the original group here? Their ideology has something in it about taking lower America back for Mexico."
"Alabama was never part of Mexico," Daryl says.
Zach shrugs. "I didn't say it made sense. But their messiah guy? He was supposed to come in the end times to Birmingham."
"Why Birmingham?" Jackson asks.
"Hell if I know. And then there was going to be a plague that killed off half of all Anglos. And then this messiah guy was going to lead an army to take back the land."
Daryl huffs. "Well this shit just fed right into their beliefs then."
"Not exactly. They didn't expect their own people to die and start walking around and eating them. They had to…uh…"
"Make some modifications to the theology?" Jackson asks.
"Yeah."
"That's one way religions evolve," Jackson observes.
"But the Moraleses ain't racist," Daryl says. "And they didn't seem that religious." He thought they were nominally Catholic, not members of some weird cult.
"Well, they weren't in the church. Miranda's brother, Thiago, was. And so was a cousin of hers. So she knew about it. She'd been trying to her brother out, before all this happened. But then, when it did, and you lost your camp, and I guess you wanted to go right into the heart of Atlanta for some reason? They thought that was crazy, with all the rotters in the city. And Miranda told Juan, hey, La Iglesia de la Raza has that compound. They have food and guns. And maybe my brother will take us in."
"And they took you in?" Jackson asks. "Even though you're an Anglo?"
"Let's just say I didn't have the warmest welcome at first when Juan Morales brought me here four months ago. He was out looking for antibiotics. They had so much in storage to live off of because they'd already been planning for the end times. But they did run out of antibiotics. Eliza really needed them, so that's why Morales was out of the compound. He came across me. I'd been divided from my group by the rotters. I was alone. So Morales took me back and talked them into letting me stay."
When they get to the church, there's still a half inch of water just sitting on the floors, and the pews are rotting at the legs. The first two stairs leading up to the balcony are iffy, and Daryl thinks he might put a foot through rotting wood as he follows Zach up. Sleeping bags lie across the dry pews upstairs. It's not a good place to camp. They must be inhaling mold daily. Daryl supposes they don't know where else to go. The one-story barracks must be entirely uninhabitable.
"We should probably put all that stuff we have stored in the rental office in one of the uninhabited houseboats," Jackson says. "In case of flood. It'll be off the ground."
"Yeah," Daryl agrees and feels like a fool for not having thought of it sooner. He wonders what else they haven't thought of, what else they've failed to plan for.
When they get upstairs, Miranda and the kids, Eliza and Louis, are doing some kind of schoolwork at a card table in an open, loft-like space to the side of the pews. And open window lets in the sunshine and fresh air.
Miranda jumps up from her folding chair, and her mouth drops open. She walks quickly forward and actually hugs Daryl, which surprises him and causes him to stiffen instinctively. She was careful to keep her distance from him in the quarry. Like all of the women, she regarded him warily, but here, in a devastated camp without her husband, she seems relieved to see a familiar face.
He steps away from the hug, but says, "Good to see y'all alive." He glances at the kids. Louis has shot up two inches, and Eliza looks like she's started puberty. She's probably thirteen now. The girl asks immediately about Sophia, and Daryl swallows hard. "She uh…she…" He spits it out, rapidly, "Sophia ain't alive no more."
Eliza starts crying and buries her face against her mother's side.
"They found Thiago," Zach says. He chews on his bottom lip. "As a rotter. I'm so sorry."
Now Miranda cries. Crazy cultist though her brother may have been, she clearly loved the man. Louis hugs her from the other side, and the Morales family clings to one another until they recover themselves.
"Is it just you two, then?" Miranda asks as she swipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She looks at Jackson. "You and your friend - "
"- Jackson," Daryl tells her. "He's my son."
"You have a son? You never mentioned that!"
"Yeah, well…'s complicated. And, no, ain't just us. Got a camp." He tells Miranda who's still there from the old quarry camp.
"Dale?" she asks. "Shane?"
He shakes his head. "Got a baby named Dale though. Andrea's baby. And Lori had a baby. Judith. Another woman joined our camp. Michonne. There's this family, the Greenes, Maggie, Beth, and Hershel. Maggie's with Glenn. And there's Jackson's sister."
"Addison," Jackson says.
"You have a daughter too?"
"She ain't mine," Daryl answers. "Like I said…it's complicated."
"How's Carol doing?" Miranda asks. "Poor woman! I lost my husband, but she's lost both a husband and a daughter?"
"Carol's good." He doesn't tell her they're a couple now. That would be too much shock at once, he supposes. "Y'all should come back with us. Ain't healthy here, all this rot. We got a good camp."
Miranda looks at Zach, who nods. "There's nothing for us here anymore," he says. "We have maybe one day of food left."
"We can give you a dozen guns and maybe a thousand rounds of ammunition that wasn't flooded," Miranda says. "That's about all we have to offer."
"Ain't got to buy your way in. Carol'll be real glad to see y'all. So will the others. Go on and pack up your shit. Getting late. They're gonna be worried if we ain't back by supper time."