AN: Here we are, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

"I don't want to ask how you are," Carol said, "because I know it's a stupid question. But I don't know any other way to check on you, and I'm worried about you."

They weren't very far from the others. They were just at one edge of the established camp. Night was wrapping around them quickly. Soon there would be no light beyond that which the moon, stars, and fire provided. At least it was a full moon, so it provided a decent amount of light for the night.

"Ain't no need to worry about me, woman. I'm just—thinking."

"Penny for your thoughts," Carol offered. She let Daryl have the few ticks of silence that he needed to get around to speaking again.

"I don't know that he's alive," Daryl said. "But—I can't accept that he's dead. I ain't ready for it."

Carol rested her hand on Daryl's shoulder for a moment to simply remind him, physically, of what he already knew. She was there. She felt his muscles tense, as she expected, and then relax. She stepped forward, then, and Daryl dropped his arm around her and pulled her close to him in a hug. He kissed her forehead affectionately, and Carol smiled to herself.

"You don't have to accept something like that," Carol said. "Not yet. Not you…or Andrea. Like Shane said, Merle's been gone less than forty-eight hours. That's still just a missing person."

Daryl hummed to himself and tightened his hold on Carol, pulling her into a hug again. He pulled away enough to reach for her face, and she found him in the failing light. She kissed him, wishing that, somehow, she could kiss away his pain.

They would never turn their back on Merle—that wasn't the Dixon way—but they'd always kind of figured that Merle would get himself killed, one way or another, because of his addictions. Carol could fully admit, though she wouldn't say anything to Daryl at the moment, that they had never once imagined this might be the way that things happened.

"I come over here because I thought I heard something," Daryl said. "Thought it was maybe Merle coming back. Can't find a damn thing. Not even an animal, from what I can tell. Just wishful thinking."

"Andrea said that earlier," Carol said. "She thought she heard him. She said she thought she heard him speak to her—she almost answered him."

"Shit," Daryl mused. "Andrea—shit…you think we oughta split up for the night? I'll stay with Soph an' you stay with Andrea? Just to be sure…"

"You don't think she'd do anything…" Carol said.

"She saw her parents turned into them creatures," Daryl said. "Never really resolved shit with them over Merle. Now we don't know where the hell Merle is or when he'll get back to the damn camp—if he ever does."

"She has Amy," Carol offered.

"And you know as good as I do that Amy ain't never been no good for takin' care of Andrea's feelings," Daryl said. "Especially not when it comes to Merle."

"You might be right," Carol ceded. "I'll talk to her. After dinner. When everyone's settling in. I'll bring it up that I'd like to stay the night. Just for comfort."

"If she says no, she says no," Daryl said. "But at least—if Merle does find his way back—we can say we offered. He'd be pissed to know she was just left alone with Amy."

"Come on," Carol said. "You didn't finish your dinner. You need to eat. You know how voraciously everyone eats around here. There might not be any left if you don't get back to your portion."

Daryl laughed.

"They eat all that deer, and they've done something," he mused.

Carol tugged at Daryl's arm and he resisted only a fraction of a second before starting the walk back toward the fire where everyone was eating and talking. Things had been tense since the group's return, for obvious reasons, but everyone was starting to relax. The volume of conversation rose even as Carol and Daryl walked the short distance back.

Before they'd reached the fire, they heard the first scream.

Carol's very first reaction to the scream—the voice she couldn't identify—was to freeze with the cold shock of an unexpected noise.

The second scream rang out almost immediately afterwards.

"Andrea!" Daryl barked, recognizing the voice.

Carol was already moving forward, her body practically moving without even having input from her mind.

"Sophia!" She screamed. Her daughter was with the rest of the group—among them—eating food and talking to the other children. Carol hadn't brought her with her to check on Daryl because it seemed like something ridiculous. She was perfectly safe with the rest of the group.

Now Carol wasn't so sure.

"Mommy!" Sophia yelled.

It was dark enough, now, that Carol couldn't really see much of the people around her beyond darker outlines against the darkness of night. She could identify Sophia's body, though, in the darkness. She heard her and ran toward her.

"Sophia! Sophia!" Carol called out, wrapping her arms around her daughter.

"Mommy!" Sophia cried, burying her face against Carol.

Carol didn't know what was happening, but she knew it was bad. She could hear screaming. She could see the scramble of people as they ran, confused, in different directions.

Finally, her brain isolated one word when she heard Daryl yell it, announcing it to any person there that hadn't yet identified the threat.

"Walkers!"

Carol hadn't carried Sophia in some time, and her daughter was more than capable of standing on her own two feet, but Carol wasn't going to take the chance that she might become somehow frozen with fear when she most needed to move. Carol heaved Sophia up and, holding her against her, she looked around to try to identify the safest direction in which to move.

There were gunshots. There were screams. There was more confusion than Carol could practically process.

She screamed and slammed an elbow back when she felt herself being grabbed from behind. A hard hand anticipated the movement, though, and blocked her.

"Take Sophia—head for the RV. Get inside! Don't you come out 'til I come for you!"

"I love you," was the only response that Carol could think to give. She heard the same words in return as she followed Daryl's orders and carried Sophia as quickly as she could to try and take cover.

1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

The longest hours were the hours spent waiting for the sun to come up—hours spent waiting to survey the damage with the light of day.

They didn't dare to light a fire out of concern that the fire had drawn the Walkers and would draw more. They didn't use flashlights. They didn't light camping lanterns.

It was best to sleep—those words were tossed around a few times by different people—but nobody slept. Carol had held Sophia, rocked her like she was a baby again, but she doubted that the little girl was actually sleeping.

Carol sat on the ground, her daughter cradled in her arms as much as her body would allow, and leaned against Daryl. With his arm around her, and his head sometimes leaned against her, he kept silent vigil with her. Like everyone else, they were waiting for the morning to survey the damage.

Like some of the others, they were waiting for the light to bury their dead.

A few feet away from them, Andrea sat slumped on the ground with her gun resting on her knee. The red dot that appeared when Shane had tried to talk to her earlier—to offer to do something about the body—let them all know that she remembered the lesson about removing the gun's safety, and she wasn't in the mood to talk.

Rather than try to force her to talk, Carol and Daryl had simply let her know that they were there—a few feet away—and they would be there when she was ready to talk to them. They would be there when she wanted to let someone else into her world.

Amy had been the first bitten. Andrea had been with her when she'd died, at least, though that was little consolation.

Through a somewhat twisted game of something like Marco Polo, they'd identified that a couple of people who had joined the camp had also been bitten and killed. At that time, they'd risked the only lamp that they'd dared, and Daryl and Shane had gone around to find the bodies and to drive something into their brains to be sure that they wouldn't come back as Walkers and create more chaos—and a rising body count—in the camp.

Andrea would not allow them to touch Amy, and Daryl had finally gotten Shane to back off of her with the reassurance that he would remain awake and keep vigil over her. The moment that the younger sister tried to come back, he would take care of her if Andrea couldn't.

Carol knew that Sophia probably wasn't sleeping—she doubted that anybody actually was—but she was being still and settled. That, at least, might mean that the little girl had some rest before morning. When Carol asked her if she was asleep, she didn't respond. When Carol tried to test her, she got no response. Either Sophia had drifted off, or she was playing possum pretty well.

"What do we do?" Carol whispered to Daryl.

"When we got some light on our side, we're gonna—handle the bodies, first. I think that's the most important thing. Shane agrees."

"We bury them?"

"Move them off from camp some distance," Daryl said. "Burn the Walkers. Bury our people. We'd be diggin' all day to try to bury all the Walkers."

Carol nuzzled her face against Daryl's shoulder. She breathed in the smell of him. He'd changed his shirt to get rid of the one that had been covered in Walker muck. This one smelled like sweat, and dirt, and Daryl.

"Shane said it was the car alarm," Carol said. "Do you agree with him?"

"I don't know," Daryl said. "Like Dale said, hard to pinpoint the sound. Would've been hard for them to know exactly where it was comin' from. I don't know if they coulda followed that noise all the way here. More'n likely—I'd say it was a little of everything. A culmination. All the comin' and goin' today. We been in and outta here a lot. We still don't know how they work. Could even be like ants. Send out scouts or some shit like that. Maybe we got a lot of attention earlier with the ins and outs, and it took 'em this long to get here. Or—if that ain't it…maybe we just been too loud."

"We didn't hear them," Carol said. "And there were so many of them."

"So many of 'em means—maybe it weren't nothin' we did. Maybe they were just sorta passin' through. Could've even been some kinda migration after Atlanta. One damn thing I do know is we're gonna come up with somethin' better to circle the camp. We shouldn't have been stupid enough to think some string and tin cans was gonna be a good enough warning system—not that spread out, at least."

"What do you have in mind?" Carol asked.

"Bein' honest? I don't got shit in mind right now. But I'll have something after I take some time to think on it and we all discuss it. Pool our ideas." He sighed. He turned his head and found Carol's face. She felt his lips press against her temple. She smiled and used her one free hand—the one not going to sleep under her daughter's body—to find his face with her fingers. She kissed him, and he kissed her back warmly. "Don't worry about it no more tonight, woman," Daryl said, his voice very low and gravelly. He was trying to calm her with just his tone, and it was working. She felt a wave of relaxation wash over her in spite of herself. "Just lean on me. Close your eyes. Try to get a little sleep."

"Daddy," Sophia said, her voice cracking with the sound of sleep or near-sleep.

"What's wrong, Soph?" Daryl asked.

"Are the monsters going to come back tonight?" Sophia asked.

Daryl reached over and patted Sophia where she rested in Carol's lap.

"I don't think so, Soph," Daryl offered. "But—don't you worry about it. If they do? Your Ma and me are right here. And we got you. Now—same as I told your Ma, don't worry no more. Close your eyes. Get some sleep. We'll work everything out in the morning."