The Wolf You Feed

Chapter 31

Rick stood next to Daryl, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and feeling next to useless as he watched the other man inspect Rick's freshly scrubbed porch. It was painfully obvious that whoever or whatever had scared Carl and Enid the night before had come back once the couple was gone and taken every precaution to erase all evidence of their existence. Daryl and Rick had already checked around the house. They found a few muddy boot scrapes. But the grass was already well trampled by Rick's large dog and the other residents of his home. There was no was to distinguish the intruders footprints from those of anyone else in town, not even for a tracker as skilled as Daryl.

"...least we know it's someone from town," Daryl mumbled. Rick nodded. He found it doubtful that a stranger would be careful enough to come back and wash their muddy bootprints off his porch. But Daryl had another good point. "Only someone we know would be worried that we would rec'nize their bootprints," Daryl added, lifting his hand to his mouth and nibbling at the side of his thumb as he pondered who he thought might have been Carl's peeping tom.

"Maybe Reg was right," Rick suggested, "maybe someone just came by to talk to one of us..."

"...and stayed to watch two kids gettin' it on," Daryl finished with a scowl on his face. He didn't care for the idea that someone in town had a wandering eye and in the back of his mind he was counting up in his mind all the times that he and Rowan had sex outdoors. Out by the lake. Near the firepit at her trailer. In the back gardens. Rowan's carefree nature had helped to bring him out of his shell, but Daryl was still a private man. It made him angry and a little sick that someone might have been watching him and his wife in their most intimate moments. And Carl was just a kid. That made whoever was spying a double nasty pervert as far as Daryl was concerned.

"There's nothin' we can do about it now," Rick concluded. Daryl grunted his displeasure but nodded his head to indicate that he agreed with the man. There wasn't much they could do to find the person. But he was going to start with closing his fucking curtains and regulating his and Rowan's sexual activites to their bedroom for the time being. Her entire body had gotten covered in mosquito bites the last time they were naked outside anyway.

"Still want to make the run today?," Rick asked. Daryl nodded again, this time with more enthusiasm. He had been feeling a little restless lately. Going out on a supply run felt like just what the doctor ordered.

The two men quicky gathered the supplies they needed from their homes. Neither were aware of the other's activites but both were surprised not to find their significant others anywhere in sight when they went to say goodbye. Once the men rounded the corner and headed up the road that would lead them out the front gate they saw why.

Rowan and Michonne were camped out on the trunk of the car the men were going to be taking out. Michonne was sitting on the edge of the trunk with her legs crossed. Rowan was leaning back, her body draped across the back windshield. Rick smiled, assuming that Michonne had come to see him off. She wasn't the most outwardly demonstrative woman when it came to showing him her feelings and for a moment he was touched by the fact that she was waiting by the car to wish him good luck on his run. But his feelings quickly changed when instead of approaching him to wrap her arms around his neck she and Rowan both got up and climbed inside the car with Rowan's large black dog between them.

"And just where in the hell do you think yer pregnant ass is going?," Daryl asked, leaning forward to yank Rowan's car door open. Rowan beamed a beautiful smile up at him, ignoring the coarseness of his words as was her habit.

"With you," Rowan told him, grasping Daryl by the shirt and pulling him down to press her lips against his. After a few soft kisses she released him and showed him the gun she had strapped to her hip. "I even have a gun," she announced cheerfully. She didn't think it was necessary to mention that she had taken all the bullets out of the gun and tossed them under the seat of the car.

Daryl sighed, knowing that he wasn't going to win this fight. And the truth was he wasn't sure he wanted to win. Logic told him that his pregnant wife ought to stay safe inside the walls of Alexandria but in his heart he felt they were always safer together. Rowan had proven that she was a worthy partner when she and Enid saved him and Carl from those crazy women. Pregnant or not he no longer considered her to be a fragile flower that he had to protect. She was a formidable force to be reckoned with. Even if the gun on her hip probably wasn't loaded.

"You load that gun back up and you kin come," Daryl agreed, laughing when Tank barked in response. The big dog was all healed up from his encounter with the tiger and he appeared even more ready than Rowan was to get out and have another adventure.

Rick sighed, knowing that since Daryl had agreed to let Rowan come, it was going to make telling Michonne not to come just that much harder. She was already glaring at him with her arms crossed under her ample breasts.

"I don't think both of us should be away from the baby at the same time," Rick said, feeling rather lame but still hoping that the thought of leaving the baby alone might be enough to get Michonne out of the car.

Michonne's approach was not Rowan's. She didn't kiss Rick or baby talk him. She wasn't even sure what his response to that sort of manipulation might be. And she didn't care.

"If you ever want to have sex again," she threatened, "you will get in this car and not say another word to me about it." Rick weighed his options, ignoring the fact that Daryl was laughing at him from inside the car as he lit up a cigarette. Even if he and Daryl ordered the girls out of the car, there was a chance the two of them would go off on their own. And that scared him more than taking them with him. So he did what Michonne asked. He got in the car and shut the door without another word, smiling when she leaned up from the backseat to wrap her arms around him and press a kiss to the side of his face.

"Rowan's dad and stepmom are watching Andy and Judith," she whispered, just to put his mind at ease. Michonne knew if they were out too long that Nokake would even nurse her baby for her. And while Rowan's father was a strange sort of man, unlike her previous son's father, Grey Wolf would die before he let anything happen to her children. Rick smiled as he fired up the car, thinking that things really had some full circle when the man that had once led a brutal attack against their town was now the man he trusted most to keep his son and daughter safe while he went on a supply run.

Eugene opened the gate for them. He had also made them a map of all the agricultural supply warehouses in the surrounding area. Rowan handed the map up to Daryl, his hand lingering on hers for longer than was necessary for them to pass the small folded piece of paper between them.

Rick turned the radio up and they rolled the windows down. The day was warm and sunny. In the old world it would have been the perfect day to call in sick to work and take off to go to the lake. Michonne let her hand hang out the window so she could feel the breeze as they drove. She hadn't realized how cooped up she had been feeling in Alexandria until she was outside the walls breathing the sweet air of freedom. Aside from walking the perimeter of the walls, she hadn't been outside of town since before she was pregnant. And since she had her baby she hadn't even done that. Getting a fresh view of the world felt exhilarating. She enjoyed living her new life but she didn't want to let herself forget how to survive.

They got lucky at the first supply store they stopped at. So lucky that they left the car hidden inside a garage and piled inside the cab of the truck they found loaded not only with at least six months worth of supplies but with a full tank of gas. Rowan had waited until Daryl wasn't looking and snagged a tube of toothpaste from the full box, stuffing it into the pocket of her jeans. She could feel the sharp corner of the tube in her pocket, poking into the meat of her thigh.

Rick decided they would take a different route back. That way they could check a few more stops that Eugene had marked on the map for them. Daryl rode with Rowan in his lap. Michonne sat on a box between the seats of the truck, sharing the small space with Tank. Her hand rested in Rick's lap and she gave his thigh a gentle squeeze, smiling up at him. The truck had been a good find and their spirits were high.

Michonne noticed Rowan moving Daryl's hand around on her stomach and she took her hand from Rick's lap to reach over and try to feel the baby kick for herself. Rowan wasn't pregnant enough for the kicks to be strong yet. She was more at the stage where the baby moving felt more like little bubbles or flutters inside her. But Michonne still wanted to feel it. Rowan had felt Michonne's baby kick, resting her pale tattooed fingers against the dark skin of Michonne's swollen belly. She had hung a sewing needle on a bit of thread and dangled it over Michonne's stomach, insisting that the direction that the needle swung in would reveal the sex of the baby.

"Stop there," Daryl said, pointing to an abandonded gas station they were about to pass by. Rick pulled the truck to a stop, looking curiously at his friend. The gas station wasn't marked on their map, and it looked like it had been ransacked about ten times over. Daryl eased Rowan from his lap and hopped out, heading directly for a beat up vending machine.

While the men wrestled the vending machine, Michonne and Rowan took Tank inside the gas station with them to take a look around. Anything edible was long since gone. But Michonne found a display of magazines and comics that she started pulling from, sticking the comic books and crossword puzzles into her bag. Rowan spun a rack of sunglasses around, taking a few pairs she liked and tucking them away. She put a large silly looking pair of white framed glasses on her face and stuck her tounge out at Michonne, causing the woman to laugh at her.

Flipping the glasses up onto her head, Rowan peeked outside to see how the men were coming along. Rick had chained the vending machine to the truck and was attempting to flip it over. Tank was standing next to Daryl, barking out his encouragment. Rowan waved at them through the dirty window before joining Michonne at the magazine rack. Rowan liked to read, but there weren't any real books to be found. She grabbed a few coloring books, thinking she could take them back for some of the kids in town. But then a row of magazines caught her eye. They had strange pieces of cardboard covering them up and when Rowan pulled one out from behind the shield she gasped and dropped it on the floor. Snatching it back up she flipped the magazine open and stared at the pictures inside with her mouth hanging open.

"Michonne," Rowan hissed, nudging at the other women with the tip of her shoe to get her attention, "there's nothing but naked pictures of women inside this magazine." Michonne snorted out a laugh.

"It's a dirty magazine Rowan," she answered, "what did you expect?" Rowan didn't answer. Instead she started from the beginning and flipped through each page of the magazine, her big hazel eyes getting wider and wider as her cheeks got redder.

"What kinds of people read a magazine like this?," Rowan asked, tilting her head to the side to get a better look at the pages that had unfolded out from the center of the magazine. Not only were the women inside the magazine naked, they were also very strange looking. Their breasts appeared too large for their bodies and they were bent and twisted into all sorts of strange and uncomfortable looking positions. Rowan understood that people enjoyed looking at the naked human form. She had even posed nude once for an artist friend of hers. But the pictures in the magazine seemed different somehow. The women looked like fake plastic dolls.

"Men," Michonne answered, "men like to look at magazines like that. I suppose some women like them too." She guessed there were some women that did, but naked pictures of other women had never done anything for her. But all the men she had ever known had at least one hidden titty magazine somewhere in their bedrooms. If not that then they were looking at the same crap on the internet. Rowan turned the magazine around, holding up a picture of a very trashy looking blonde woman with breasts so large they looked realy to pop like a balloon with too much air in it.

"You think Daryl likes girls that look like this?," Rowan asked, looking back and forth from the girl in the magazine to her own much smaller breasts. She had never given the size of them much consideration before. In fact Rowan had always been glad to be small enough that she wasn't forced to wear a bra. At least before she got pregnant. But compared to the women in the magazine her chest seemed to be severely lacking in size. And now that Rowan thought about it, Daryl had been paying her breasts a lot more attention now that they were rounded and swollen from her pregnancy. It made her feel bad about her body for the first time in her life.

"Daryl loves you," Michonne said as she tried her very best not to start laughing. The mixture of concern and disgust on Rowan's face was really too much. She knew the woman had grown up in a unique environment but she had no idea Rowan had been sheltered to the point of never having seen a nudie magazine before or even knowing that such a thing existed. "Put that trashy thing away and quit looking at it," Michonne suggested.

Rowan flipped through a few more pages before she did as Michonne suggested and stuffed the horrible magazine right back where she found it. Once Michonne turned her back Rowan grabbed the magazine back up and rolled it up tightly, stuffing it down into the very bottom of her shoulder bag.

The loud and very sastifying clank of the vending machine tipping over sounded loudly from outside the building, drawing the women to the doorway to watch as Daryl and Rick picked through their newfound treasure. Daryl held up the item he had been looking for. A can of orange soda. He hadn't been looking for the orange flavor specifically but he had been looking for soda pop. Rowan had never had soda before and he wanted to find a can for her to try. He stuffed the two cans he found into his backpack.

"Got some chocolate for you too baby," Daryl called over, reaching into the machine and pulling out a king sized pack of peanut butter cups. Rick reached in to grasp a package of Michonne's favorite candy when suddenly he was hit from behind. Not hard enough to really hurt but hard enough to send the candy flying back down into the bottom of the machine.

The hair on Tank's back prickled up and Rowan clapped her hands, calling the dog to her side. The man that had run into Rick was standing with his hands up. Daryl and Rick had their weapons pointed at him. If they decided to shoot at him, Rowan didn't want her dog getting shot. The man said he was running from the dead, but Rowan her her doubts. He didn't look out of breath or frightened.

Rick lowered his gun first, introducing himself to the strange man. But Daryl kept his bow up, not liking the way the man's eyes lingered on Michonne and Rowan. Something about the guy just seemed off to him, and that was before he introduced himself as Jesus. They had been making a lot of noise. Between flipping the vending machine and Tank's barking if there was a small herd of walkers in the area they would have already seen them. He was a fucking liar. There were no dead after him. When Jesus turned to Rowan and Michonne to ask the girls their names that was the last straw.

"You don't fuckin' talk to her," Daryl hollered, taking a few steps to the side and positioning himself between the women and this strange masked man. Tank growled, the noise rumbling low in his chest as he picked up on the mistrust in the timber of Daryl's voice. The large dog moved forward, taking up a defensive stance next to Daryl, his growls getting louder as he bared his teeth menacingly. His slick black fur was standing on end, making a mohawk down the center of his back. It only took one bark to send the stranger packing. He ran off the way he had some, around the back of the building.

The sound of gunshots rang out from the direction the man had gone. Michonne ran after Daryl and Rick with her sword drawn, leaving Rowan standing alone in the front of the building. She gasped in surprise and fumbled for the gun at her waist when the stranger dashed back around from the other side of the building, the opposite direction that her friends had gone. But he wasn't looking to do her harm. The man ignored her completely and made a run for their truck, jumping into it and firing up the engine. Before she could even think to do anything about it, the truck was speeding down the road with the vending machine dragging behind it.

"You shoulda shot his ass!," Daryl told her, his face flushed with anger.

"I'm not going to shoot someone over a truck," Rowan spit back. Aside from the fact that she still didn't even really know how to shoot or aim a gun, she wasn't willing to murder someone over a truck full of supplies even if she could shoot straight. Tank had made his way over to the edge of the road, growling as he watched the truck disappear. He barked once before he took off like a rocket in the direction the truck had gone, a few stray dry leaves kicking up behind him like a tiny tornado. Rowan didn't wait. She grabbed her shoulder bag to keep it from bouncing around and took off running after her dog.