A/N: In this AU story, Daryl and Merle were never in the Atlanta survivor camp, but Carol was, for a time, before she ended up on her own.
The late August sun peeks through the grimy window as Carol stirs awake atop the dusty down off-white comforter on a queen-size, four-poster bed. The last of the prior night's rain drips from the leaf-cluttered gutters, slides and weaves over the dirt that cakes the windowpanes. It's Sunday, she thinks. They've survived another week. Just barely, but they have.
Sophia is curled and still sleeping at her side. Last night, Carol locked all the doors of this little country house and pulled furniture against the lower windows downstairs. She desperately needed a night of sleep. But there's no reason to camp here another day—there's no food.
Her stomach growls. The only thing they found in this abandoned house yesterday was a single can of garbanzo beans, lying on its side on the back top shelf of the hastily cleared pantry. Carol made sure Sophia ate two-thirds of the can. It was the first decent protein they'd found in three days. Carol did find a little pink, striped wax candle in the junk drawer, though, slightly warped from melting, and she stuck it right in the center of one of the beans and lit it before singing "Happy Birthday."
After all, Sophia turned 13 years old yesterday. It wasn't even the worst birthday party the girl has ever had. That would be her 9th, when Ed, in a drunken rage, threw Sophia's cake against the wall and then threw Carol to her knees and told her to clean it up.
Carol's learned a few skills keeping her daughter alive, but survival is getting harder. The longer they live, the fewer un-looted places they encounter. They keep moving, though, searching for food and staying ahead of packs of walkers and laying low from roaming bandits. Men, she has learned, can be worse monsters than walkers. Of course, Ed was the first to teach her that, but there are even worse men than Ed in this world. She learned that at Terminus.
Carol reaches for the 9 mm handgun on the bedstand. She's not the best shot, but she's learned if she closes one eye and lines up that white dot on that front little piece of metal with the other two white dots on the side pieces of metal, and she squeezes off two shots in a row, at least one hits where it needs to. The job gets done.
She racks the slide of the gun now, ejects the single round, and then drops the magazine. She pushes the golden round back down into the magazine on top of another one. It's habit, counting her ammunition, even though she well knows there are only two rounds left. She was hoping to find more in this little house, but whatever was once of survival value the fleeing inhabitants took—except that lucky, lonely can of garbanzo beans. Ed called them chickpeas, and he called her "a stupid bitch" for always calling them garbanzo beans.
Garbanzo beans, she chants in her head now. Garbanzo beans, Garbanzo beans, Garbanzo beans. Fuck you, Ed.
She lies back down and looks at the crack crawling across the stucco ceiling above. There's no point in waking her little girl yet. There are no walkers clacking on the windows. Sophia should sleep as long as she can. Peaceful moments like this are rare these days.
Carol wonders what would have happened if Ed hadn't been bit by that walker when the quarry camp was attacked. She wonders what would have happened if she had followed Shane to Fort Benning instead of Rick to the CDC when the group split. The CDC was a bust…and then a boom. They ended up moving on, looking for somewhere to camp. On a highway, a herd descended upon them, and they all ran together for safety the woods. That's where they encountered Otis, who took them all back to the Greene family farm. They were reluctantly welcomed by the family, but only on the condition that they surrender their guns. Rick foolishly compromised. Carol didn't care. She didn't even know how to use a gun back then.
It was a good camp, for three weeks. But Hershel Greene was secretly keeping walkers in his barn. When Rick found out, instead of talking him out of it, he began to help the farmer wrangle them in. Rick said it was the price they had to pay for the hospitality of their hosts. Carol always thought if Shane were still with them, he wouldn't be wrangling walkers into a barn.
One day the barn burst from the mass of walkers inside. The monsters flooded out. Hershel and Otis were devoured. Anyone who was outside retreated to the farmhouse. They had to bust the guns out of the storage closet where Hershel had locked them up. The gunfire as Rick, Glenn, Maggie, and T-Dog cleared the walkers by shooting out the open upstairs windows of the house drew a herd of walkers from somewhere deep in the woods. Somehow, a kerosene lamp was knocked over and set fire to a bale of hay. The fire spread. All was chaos. As the walkers pressed in, Carol took her daughter's hand and ran.
She got into Hershel's pickup truck. Praying, Carol flipped the visor down, and said an amen when the keys fell out. She watched the flames in the rearview mirror as she plowed through walker after walker, barreling toward the dirt road, her windshield wipers wet with smeared blood.
For the next two weeks, mother and daughter survived from country house to house. Carol returned, eventually, to find the herd cleared out and the fire burned down. But there was no one waiting for them there. She couldn't identify the gnarled, chewed on, and burned bodies. She didn't know if anyone had escaped alive.
It was a month later when they heard the broadcast from Terminus, on the radio of Hershel's old pick-up truck. And that was a good camp, too, for about three weeks. It had gardens and propane, storage food, and pleasant people. But then one day the raiders came.
Carol was working with Sophia in the gardens when it happened. She secreted her little girl into a root cellar when the raiders began capturing the women and herding them to cattle cars. They stayed down there, not making a noise. In the dead of night, mother and daughter snuck out of the root cellar and then out of Terminus through a hole in the back chain link fence, ignoring the pounding coming from inside the train cars, and closing their ears to the anguished cries of the women who had been dragged into the station to be raped one after another all night long.
The guilt gnawed at the inside of Carol's gut for days afterward, but there was nothing she could have done. She couldn't fight an armed gang by herself with nothing but a pocket knife. Her only priority was keeping Sophia safe. Sophia never spoke of it afterward, never questioned her mother's decision to flee.
They've been roaming ever since, mother and daughter, scavenging what they can – like the handgun that now sits on the nightstand, the gutting knife Carol now wears clipped to her pants, and the sleeping pills she holds onto, ready to crush up and feed to herself and her daughter if it ever comes to that. She doesn't know how much longer they can live like this, without a camp. One day they'll find no more food, or they'll wake up to a house surrounded by a herd, and they'll have a choice to make, the only choice left to them, a choice of how they want to go out.
But Carol doesn't want to think about that now. For now, they're still alive, and maybe they'll find a camp with decent people. She slips quietly from bed, checks the house, peers out the windows, and looks around one last time for anything of value. She takes a nice, still sharp pairing knife from the sharpening block in the kitchen and slips it in the front pocket of her pink, short-sleeve button-down shirt. Maybe they'll find some unrotten fruit growing wild from a tree one day soon.
[*]
Sophia adjusts her forest green backpack on her shoulders as they head for the brown sedan, her thumbs hooked through the plastic gray circles at the bottom of the straps. They only have three gallons of gas left. When they found the car, recently abandoned, door open, driver fled, the tank was over three-quarters full. Carol's learned to siphon gas from cars, but after a year, most gas that has sat uncirculating in vehicle tanks has spoiled. Unless they find a car that's been run recently, or stored gas that's been treated with fuel stabilizer, they're going to find themselves on foot soon. Maybe they can find a couple of bicycles. Carol hasn't ridden a bicycle in twenty-nine years. But they say you never forget.
Carol and Sophia crunch over gray gravel as they walk toward their sedan. They're ten steps from the car when the roar of a motorcycle engine reaches Carol's ears. A silver bike crests the hill, and a dark blue pick-up truck follows it up the dirt road toward the house. There's a single man driving the truck, and two more in the bed, armed with semiautomatic rifles. They swerve into the overgrown grass of the yard and come to a violent stop.
Carol doesn't like the looks of these men, two of whom are already vaulting from the bed of the truck and running toward them. "Get in the car, Sophia!"
Sophia runs for the back door on the driver's side and pulls the handle, but Carol locked it last night. Frantically, Carol reaches for her gun, but it's too late. They've been surrounded by all four men. Her handgun is plucked from the back of her pants by one, and she's stripped of the knife on her belt by another, while a third man turns her around and slams her back against the side of the car. A fourth man grabs Sophia by the hips, picks her up, and slams her sitting down on the hood.
The man who has thrust Carol against the car sneers. Two silver fillings in his front teeth glint in the sunlight. "Well, lookie here. We got us a couple of live ones, gentlemen! I call first dibs."
Carols heart sinks with understanding. The man who threw Sophia on the hood says, "Then I get the little one first." As he begins to unbuckle his belt, Sophia cries and turns and tries to scramble across the hood, but she's pulled back by one leg. "Hold her, Tony!" the man orders, and another man grapples to still the squirming, crying Sophia.
"She's only twelve!" Carol screams. Forget that thirteenth birthday last night. "She's only twelve!"
"Well then," the assaulting man says as he pops the button his jeans and jerks down his zipper, "she'll be – " His sentence dies in a gurgle as a bolt penetrates his Adam's apple. His head tilts back, and blood begins to seep down his neck. From behind the cars comes the crunch of gavel and the squeal of brakes.
The men surrounding Carol have stepped back from the car in alarm and are hastening to aim their rifles. She slips the pairing knife from her front pocket. There's a smattering of gunfire in two directions, and two of Carol's captors fall with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. The third Carol frantically stabs in the stomach with the little knife. The blade sinks into a fat roll of his stomach, all the way up to the handle. It's too small a knife, and too soft a place, to do much damage, but it must hurt, because he screams and drops the rifle to grasp frantically at the handle.
Before Carol can seize any fallen rifle from the ground, she's surrounded by this new group of men. She doesn't know if they've come to the rescue or to continue the assault. She just knows they've leapt out of a truck with a red cab and a flat bed with wood sides. The vehicle looks like it was meant to transport food from farm to market.
One of the men, who has squinty blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, rips the crossbow bolt out of the neck of Sophia's would-be rapist. His eyes fall on the man's unbuckled belt. A look of disgust passes like a cloud across his face as he glances from the man to Sophia.
Another man, in a white cowboy hat, who looks like a young, thirty-something Denzel Washington, seizes the man Carol stabbed and pins his arms behind his back before he can pull the paring knife from his stomach. A third man, who is stocky with a blonde buzz cut, pokes the dead bodies with a foot. A fourth, whose curly red hair falls out from beneath a green John Deere baseball cap, says, "Yeah, these are the men who jumped us two weeks ago. Some of them anyway. And that's the pick-up truck we looted that they took from us." He nods toward the blue truck the attacking men drove. "But the loot's gone. They must have taken it back to their camp."
"That's Merle's bike," the man holding the bolt says. He's wearing a checkered brown and yellow shirt which has had the sleeves cut off, and a crossbow rides his shoulder. He presses the tip of the bolt's arrow against the seized man's neck. "Y'all killed my brother."
Carol doesn't try to go for a gun now, not with these armed men around her. She doesn't want to get shot, and she doesn't know what these men will do if she reaches for a weapon, so she reaches for her daughter instead, gathers the whimpering Sophia protectively into her embrace.
The crossbow man pulls the bolt away from the captor's neck, and then he wraps his hand around the handle of the pairing knife still stuck in the man's stomach. He pushes and turns it, and the seized man screams. When the knife twisting stops, the seized man pleads, "It wasn't me! You can just let me go!"
The cowboy-hat-wearing Denzel Washington look alike, who still holds the man's arms pinned, chuckles. He dons green and black snakeskin boots and sports a big silver belt buckle on the brown, woven leather belt that cinches his blue jeans. "Let you go," he says, flashing a white-toothed smile over the seized man's shoulders. "That's a good one. You and your friends were about to rape a little girl. She looks about twelve."
"Not me," the man insists. "I wasn't gonna."
"We need to know where your camp is," the man with the crossbow insists.
"We want our loot back," the cowboy Denzel Washington says. "And we need to make sure you don't kill any more of our supply runners."
Crossbow Man glares at the captive and says in a low hiss, "And so I can make y'all pay for what you did to my brother!"
The Denzel look alike begins to walk backward toward the house, dragging the captive man, who has gone limp like a 1960s protestor. Crossbow Man scoops up one of the rifles from the ground and prowls after them.