When Shane first said they would go looking for her lost people, Beth expected days or weeks of hiking, something that she dreaded with colder weather creeping in. It makes the reality a much more pleasant surprise that she expected.
"How do you keep fuel for it?" she asks. He led her off the hidden property by a different gate, emerging into a neighboring property where the house burned at some point. The timber framed upper story collapsed into the remaining shell of the brick ground floor. Like the tree squashed house that hides the boat house, this one is also a disguise.
Hidden under a woven canopy of living greenery is an old school bus, one of the smaller ones usually used to transport disabled students. Its once bright orange paint was repainted at some point to a green and brown pattern she thinks is supposed to imitate a turtle.
She asks about the fuel, because she remembers people griping about the difficulty of finding clean fuel that isn't tainted by water or just broken down beyond being useful. The bus that she was supposed to flee the prison on was full of diesel fuel Daryl led a crew to retrieve from a marina, since apparently marine diesel lasted longer than street diesel due to still having old additives in it.
Shane leads her around to the rear of the bus and taps the weirdest contraption of barrels under the rear she's ever seen. "It's converted for vegetable oil use. Still gotta have some diesel in the secondary tank to start and clear the fuel lines when you stop the engine, but otherwise, just plain old French fry fuel."
"That's amazing. Did you make this?" She crouches, peering at the barrels and their tubing and valves.
"Nah. Found it at some back to basics retreat place down on the Gulf Coast. Luckily, they documented everything they did in this self-published book they sold to interested people, so I can at least keep up with everything."
She starts to ask why he walked to Atlanta with this at his disposal and then reconsiders. Engines are loud and limited in where the vehicle can fit. On foot? He's practically invisible if he wants to be, him and Biscuit. In Atlanta, that would be more important than the countryside.
"Will it be safe to use? Diesel's are noisy."
"Yeah. Wouldn't take it to Atlanta, because odds of encountering an unfriendly there are too high. But I've driven it with no unwelcome encounters so far." He does that little body shift that she thinks is a weird sort of shyness, probably because he's not used to human company anymore. "Plus it's getting too damn cold for you to be rough camping."
Not him, she notes. Part of her wants to protest that she's too soft to endure anything he can, but it's stupid to deny that the vehicle will make their search safer and more efficient. It's not really about the comforts. "Plus you won't have to leave the dogs, right?"
She hopes not. The idea of leaving Muffin and the puppies behind makes her want to grind her teeth. They're so defenseless, relying on luck and camouflage if Shane is gone trying to find Beth's missing people.
"That is the other advantage. Muffin and Biscuit can hoof it pretty good, but the pups are too young for anything long distance yet." Shane clears his throat. "The barrels carry fifty-five gallons each, and one thing that you can find fairly easy still is vegetable oil. It's pretty rancid in the old oil storage tanks behind restaurants, and the stuff still new in the jugs isn't too much better, but the engine doesn't care. Gets about ten miles to the gallon."
Remembering complaints and wistfulness as all the jugs the supply teams found were rancid from too many months in Georgia's heat, Beth nods. It's too bad no one ever came across something like this for the prison. She thinks that her daddy and the other council members would have been a lot less stressed.
Standing, she studies the rest of the bus. The front end of the top is one big reinforced rack, like you would see for luggage, but a larger scale. To the rear of the roof, she sees the outline of what she thinks might be solar panels. There's racks welded on the back that look different from the rest of the bus, holding cans that look like fuel cans from old war movies. There's a padlock on the back door, and the windows are carefully obscured. "Extra supplies go up there?"
"Yeah. Inside was converted as a skoolie RV, so there's not a ton of storage space. Got a tow hitch, if needed." He leads her to the bus's front door, unlocking another exterior lock here. Beth precedes him up the steps, looking around curiously.
The driver's seat area seems fairly standard for any small bus, although there are cupboards installed in areas that normally are mostly wasted space on a bus. On the left is a two-seater dinette that has a third 'seat' pushed mostly under the table. She guesses with the table lowered, it would be a sleeping space, like Dale's old RV table lowered to make a bed.
On the right is an actual kitchen counter with a sink and a glass covered two-burner stove. Above them are several cabinets. "No fridge?"
Shane reaches out and slides out the cabinet under the sink. "Chest style fridge. Runs off propane or the solar panels on the roof. Can be a freezer instead, but you gotta pick one or the other. Dry storage is over here." He lifts the seat cushion to one of the dinette seats to show her what's inside. "All three of them have storage."
When he points to a mirrored set of doors, she goes and opens them to find a tiny toilet in an odd little bathroom. Based on the drain on the floor, she thinks it may double as a shower stall somehow. "Combo bath?" she asks, curious.
"Composting toilet, but converts for a shower if you're somewhere you can spare the water. Don't have a huge tank, just twenty-four gallons, so not all that useful really. But there is hot water at least."
"Probably not." Beth thinks it might be easier just to take a bucket bath, to be honest, and save water. She likes the hot water option. How long has it been since she had hot water she didn't have to boil to get it that way? Granted, Shane told her the boathouse has hot water if the generator's running, but she hasn't experienced that. At least yesterday's bath was lukewarm instead of prison water frigid.
At the back of the bus, she reaches the full sized bed and takes note of the way hanging netting normally used for toy stuffed animal storage has been hung with various things in them. A flat screen TV no larger than most computer monitors Beth remembers is mounted on a swivel arm.
"Back when I found it, it had a lot more electronics, but I took most of them out. No need for them nowadays. They eat up battery power from the solar panels, and the bedroom isn't truly sound proof. Changed out the pretty curtains it had for blackout curtains though, so you could use the little TV if you wanted for DVDs."
Considering there's a stack of them in a shelf that doesn't quite match the original interior, she figures he probably spent a bit of time doing that himself. She wonders how much time he's spent in the bus itself, since the boathouse seems to be his primary home. "If it has captions, that would solve the sound issue, right?"
The relieved smile he gives her makes her glad she suggested that. Considering the fights she remembers on the farm about safety and most of the folks thinking he was paranoid, Beth imagines he's grateful she's not being spoiled about it. Hell, it's been so long since watching a DVD was even an option that watching one muted certainly isn't a hardship at all.
"Compared to what I'm used to, this is old world luxury," she tells him. "To be honest, I never went further than the prison yard once we mostly secured the place. Daddy lost his leg in the early days of clearing the prison out. Got bit and had it amputated, which saved him. Maggie being obsessed with being every man's equal and the supply run queen meant I was always the one staying with him."
Later there was Judith, often Andre as well, because Michonne was the ultimate badass and direly needed outside the walls. Honestly, she didn't mind most days, because too many times the supply runners came back empty handed and exhausted, or they lost someone to unexpected disaster, like Zach. Just look what happened when she wasn't right beside Judith for once?
Shane hears the underlying frustration and grief in the girl's voice and feels sorry for her. It doesn't sound like they prepared her much for a world where the fences fell, especially if she was on her own. It's a sign of her own stubborn determination that she escaped her kidnappers and stayed safe, he thinks.
"If we get loaded up quickly, we can be on the road in an hour. Might make it to the prison by afternoon, depending on the roads. I haven't really been over in that part of the state to know for sure."
She takes a deep breath and nods. "Tell me what you need me to help with."
His prediction proves correct, because she might be a tiny slip of a girl whose thin frame is obscured by the slightly too large clothing of a teenage boy, but she's a damned hard worker. Life in that prison couldn't have been easy, not the way she keeps marveling over small things like electric lights and the idea of hot water. Why they settled a prison of all places, he'll never understand. Half of Georgia has stout fences, after all. His boathouse is proof of that.
"You ever learn to drive?" he asks once the bus is loaded. Supplies up top, plus what's inside, should last them about two weeks even if they don't scavenge. He hopes he's found survivors by then.
Beth looks up from where she's rigging some sort of rope contraption to hang toilet paper like a wacko daisy chain in the bathroom cubicle and frowns. "Of course I can drive. Is it stick shift or something?"
"No, it's not. Guess whoever converted it didn't want to bother with a manual transmission."
"Then I can drive it, but might need practice. I can drive stick shift, sort of, if it's like Daddy's old tractor."
Shane starts the engine on the bus, letting it warm up and watching the gauges idly. "Depends. His tractor let you shift in motion, or did you stop?"
"It shifted in motion." She nudges one of the pups gently out of the way to take a seat at the dinette closest to him. There's a crate tucked under the edge of the bed frame that they will probably spend some travel time in, since they're too young for being fully housetrained yet. Shane doesn't want them up on the furniture until then. But they all followed their mother's example to potty before loading onto the bus, so they're free to explore a while.
"Should be easy enough if you ever need to try. With most gasoline spoiling, I'm guessing it wouldn't hurt to find something to practice on when you can, if you can find a diesel still working." Most of the cars out there now are just large hunks of useless metal unless some scrap of government manages a refinery again. He doubts that'll ever happen, especially not when diesel's easier to produce and no environmental oversight to limit it.
Everything's ready to switch over, so he does so, explaining the process. If anything did happen to him, she needs to know how everything works. Before he puts the bus in gear, he gets up and goes to drop the three bars that hook into place across the folding front door. "Always make sure it's secure, because the retracting arm won't keep a determined pack of walkers out."
Somehow, Shane represses the memory of being trapped in that bus after the fight with Rick, desperately trying to keep the door shut. It was the first modification he made to the bus when he decided to take it to explore his way back up from the Florida coast into Georgia. The second was the blackout curtains that can cover every single window so no light creeps out at night and nothing can see if they're pulled in daytime. All the front ones are pulled open for now, including the front living area so Beth's not sitting in the half-dark.
Beth eyes those three braces and nods carefully. He suspects she knows there's a story behind them, since three is a bit overkill, but she doesn't ask. Compared to what he remembers of Maggie, the girl is practically a ghost for all she talks. Hoping it's a natural inclination and not some fear of remembering his fits of temper back at the farm, Shane settles back in the seat.
Checking the interior one last time, he sees that Biscuit is lounging on the bed like he prefers, and Muffin comes forward to settle next to him as he drives. The pups keep sniffing about, loving the new space. Beth quietly spreads out the map on the table, turning her attention to that. Satisfied they're as prepared as they can get, he heads for the stout gate of the once proud property and the outside world.
Carol is exhausted and aching, and the lingering scent of the damned walker blood and guts on that makeshift poncho is seared into her sinuses. The smoke from the fire that followed the explosion she caused makes her eyes water, but she admits as soon as Daryl's lifted her right off her feet that she's also crying.
"Oh, Christ Almighty, you're alive," he mutters over and over. Then he sets her on her feet. "I looked and looked, but I couldn't find Sophia or Andre or Judith. Just Beth, and I lost her. Assholes stole her right away from me." His voice breaks, and he gives a little sob, never one not to grieve openly. Barely back to himself after Merle's death, the man turned all his rage and grief from that into looking after the children of the group like an avenging angel serving as an overprotective uncle.
"Daryl!" She grabs his shoulders and shakes him, ignoring everyone else, because other than Carl's gloriously alive face, he's the most important one here.
"M'sorry." He rubs at his eyes, and she thinks how odd it is that he isn't wearing his battered leather vest. The random thought skitters across her exhausted mind, even as she also registers that Carl's missing that damned deputy's hat of his.
"They're alive, Daryl. Sophia got Judith out and Andre too." She hears multiple cries of joy beyond them, glad that she brings Michonne and Carl some happy news.
Daryl blinks disbelievingly. "All by herself?"
"With what you taught her? Yeah. Tyreese found them hiding in that hunting cabin you showed all the kids. That's where I found them all when I came to see why the prison was burning."
Her banishment was one of the stupidest things Rick Grimes could try, acting as if he could actually separate her from the children she's sworn her very life to protect. That's not just Sophia. She just waited, biding her time for the sickness to pass. They're so foolish on watch these days that she got right to the fences several times, passing notes to Sophia on how to be prepared to leave when the time came.
The Governor reappearing out of nowhere fucked all those plans, but Sophia remembered the cabin as her first stop on an escape.
"Where are they?" Michonne asks, shaking like a leaf when she stumbles forward. "They're safe?"
"Tyreese has them at a little guard shack these people used. Their guard was happy to spill all the information I needed when I realized y'all had walked into a trap. Follow me."
They follow her like puppies, and her heart aches badly at seeing so many survivors but not Beth. Losing her will damn near kill Daryl as another failure to add to the immense guilt he carries, and this blow will be worse than most because it's a child to protect. Nevermind that Beth's not even a teenager anymore. In Daryl's eyes, she's always going to be that scared kid who slit her wrist at the farm because no one taught her how to survive in a world gone to hell.
Thin arms wrap around her as they walk, and Carol smiles down at Carl, throwing an arm across his shoulders. Rick may have been making strides to repair the months of neglect he inflicted on his son after Lori died, but when the boy was abandoned? That's when Carol lived up to her promise to his dead mother that she would protect Lori's children as fiercely as her own. The man in question is on Daryl's other side as the hunter walks next to Carol, for once opting for diplomacy and not pushing his luck with Carol.
That's good, because while she understands the basic idea that he thinks he was protecting her as much as anyone else she might kill in some rampage of cleansing the prison, right now she still wants to feed him his own damned balls.
The reunions are bittersweet, with Andre clinging to his mama and Sasha squeezing Tyreese so tight the man actually sounds pained. Judith is passed around, from Rick's guilty and grateful tears to Carl's excited kisses to Daryl's delicate cradling like she's the rarest treasure on Earth. But the baby cranes her neck, looking for who isn't there, missing Beth like she has for days now.
Daryl is the first to make the realization of who Judith wants to find, and he presses a firm kiss to her soft hair. "We'll find her, baby girl. We'll find your Bet." Sophia releases Carl from his strangle-hug to throw her arms around Daryl and Judith, nodding determinedly.
Yes, they will. Carol found the rest of her people, despite the odds being astronomical. They'll find somewhere safe to stay, let everyone get a night's rest, and her figure out who these newcomers are in their midst as well.
Then she and Daryl will find Beth if they have to turn over every damned rock in the entire state of Georgia.
A/N: Two separate groups turning over rocks in Georgia... I feel bad as the evil author not letting them succeed for months. Bad author, bad! (Yes, Daryl's missing vest and Carl's missing hat are Important Plot Points.)
Some limited insight to how the group flexed and changed with Carol and Michonne not losing their children. There will be future blurbs into the other group, probably fairly often, if not as an endcap to every chapter. POVs will rotate between those closest to Beth, so expect to see Daryl, Carl, and Sophia as well.
Cool links that inspired the Turtle Bus (remove spaces):
id/ -Waste-Vegetable-Oil-Conversion-Diesel-/
complete-bus-conversion-guide/