Chapter Forty-five
The heat in the upstairs bedroom is even hotter than the kitchen but Rick refuses to let Erin roll away from him. Half asleep, he tightens his hold and glances at the window on the far wall, where dawn is breaking with soft strokes of gray and pink against a dark blue canvas. She snuggles her cheek back into his chest and his arm continues to rise and fall in the gentle rhythm of her steady breathing. His sleepy fingers glide softly against her shoulder, feather-light caresses upon her warm skin, back and forth and forth and back until he fades away to join her…
He looks up at a bright blue sky, the perfect kind that shines so clear that it's easy to imagine a heaven full of loved ones looking down upon you. A large pasture stretches out on his right, hitting a river on its eastern border and woodlands to the north, the forest full of autumn colors so vibrant that they could only be painted by the hand of God Himself. The wind is calm but the air holds a gentle chill, a pledge that a new season is coming and with it the chance for redemption and possibility; a time to heal old scars and the faith to dream again.
The sun soaks into the dark navy tee shirt covering his back as his faded blue jeans rustle with every stride, a soft whisper on the path as he follows Erin toward an enormous oak tree. The massive trunk stands eight feet tall and then wiggles to the right a bit before several thick arms reach out to the sides, supporting a million branches of all lengths and widths. A large knot in the shape of a fat lopsided heart sits about six feet above the roots.
Reaching the tree, Erin loosens her grip on the blanket in her arms and a gentle breeze awakens to unfurl it over the grass. Rick watches it spread into a bed of red and black squares divided by thin green and white lines. He helps to stretch out the edges until it lies in a perfect rectangle beneath the branches, its hem touching the base of the tree. Kicking off his sneakers, he sits down in the crook of two giant roots spread like fingers clutching the earth and disappearing deep into the grass.
Beautiful in a teal colored scoop-neck top with wide cuts at the shoulders that leave them bare, Erin steps between his feet and turns to face away from him. Giving him a wonderful view of her rear, encased snugly inside a pair of white Capri jeans, he guides her hips as she lowers herself to sit between his raised knees. She adjusts her seat upon the plaid blanket and he wraps his arms around her upper chest, pulling her gently to lean back against him.
He looks up to the thick branches spread out above them, crisscrossing in an assembly of vees and dotted with leaves that are waltzing with indecision between gold, green or red. "This is one huge tree that Carl dreamed up," he says, tightening his arms around Erin as he lowers his chin to rest against the silkiness of her hair.
"It really is the one he'd dreamt of, isn't it?" she asks. "The first night we made love, right?"
He thinks of the fat lopsided heart, now knotted just a few feet above his head. "Yeah, it most certainly is."
"I love it. It makes me feel safe," she replies, kicking off her sandals and squirming her feet against the blanket. "And I love how soft this blanket is."
"Mmm, it's nice, just like you." He presses his lips to the back of her head. "And like you – it also looks very Scottish."
"Yeah, it's a lot like the one my grandmother got for me when I was in the hospital. She said it reminded her of our family tartan and hoped it would give me strength."
"That's sweet." He squeezes her tightly as his throat thickens, thinking of the young girl who had to suffer through that terrible disease. "I'm so glad it worked," he says softly before pressing another kiss to her ear, imagining how empty his life would be if she hadn't survived her illness. He never realized just how much he was missing until they'd met. Sure, he'd lived his life and laughed a lot, but it was more a matter of going through the motions. He couldn't see it at the time, but his heart wasn't really in it, there was always something missing. The birth of his son had filled a big part of the emptiness, but there was still a hole that went untouched until Erin stepped inside it. And if he lost her now, he wouldn't be much different than all the walkers stumbling around with their listless bodies and stagnant hearts.
A soft quack echoes from a small nearby pond, pulling him out from his thoughts. In the circle of his arms, Erin turns her chin toward the sound.
"Hey, is that our little friend again?"
"Sounds like him," he replies with a deeply contented sigh as he inhales the scent of her presence. "I guess he followed us here."
"Where is here, Rick?"
"I don't know exactly. But I'm sure it's the farm that Carl dreamt about."
"I like it. It's very peaceful here."
"It sure is, sweetheart," he replies and the duckling offers a robust quack in the distance, as if agreeing with them wholeheartedly.
Rick flips the sun visor up after making a right turn onto Old River Road, leading them east once more after backtracking the last ninety-three miles. After spending hours and hours to get near the coast, they'd made it all the way to Broadfield, a tiny town that sits on the bay, but the few bridges that weren't washed out completely were still too damaged to risk crossing. So they'd gone back sixty-eight miles to Baxley and then another twenty-five miles westward until they hit Hazlehurst, where they headed north and crossed the Altahama River on the two-laned blacktop of the Uvalda Highway.
His foot moves to step gently on the brake, again, when he sees the red lights brighten on the back of T-Dog's jeep. Turning the wheel slightly, he peers around the jeep to see Daryl's motorcycle circling around a fallen tree. Again. Rolling the van slowly around the obstacle, he can see Carl clearly in the back seat when his son pops up and turns around to wave a hand at him. Rick waves back with a smile and then with a twirl of his finger, commands the boy to face forward once more. A warm touch on his arm turns his attention to the woman next to him.
"I'm surprised you let Carl ride with T-Dog today," Erin says.
"He was so excited when Duane asked if they could, I just couldn't say no. I was about to, but he doesn't get to do any fun stuff these days," He glances across the console at her. "How could I say no?"
"I know. But it kind of goes against your control freak nature, doesn't it?"
"Oh yeah," he replies tightly. "But who's to say that he won't be safer in the jeep today than with us in the van? One thing's for sure, T-Dog will take care of him."
"Oh, no doubt. And it really did make Carl happy," Erin agrees, giving him an encouraging smile with a tender touch on his shoulder. "He'll be fine."
"I know. But Dale on the other hand, is not," Rick says, watching through the rearview mirror as the new RV, a thirty foot Class A Winnebago, tries to make its way through the narrowed space between the fallen tree and a telephone pole. Leafy twigs slow the progress of the large camper as they scrape and scratch the fender, but it's the thick branch buried inside the jumble of twigs that stops the camper in its tracks.
Rick taps the horn to emit two short beeps, alerting T-Dog and Daryl to stop. He shifts the van into park and climbs out to help with the obstruction as Erin steps out to keep watch. After retrieving his hatchet from the cargo space behind the third seat, he jogs toward the camper as Dale and Amy step down from the large vehicle.
A resounding chorus of doors opening and closing fills the air under the late afternoon sun, an all too familiar sound as the refugees leap from the vehicles stuck behind the trapped Winnebago. Morgan and Michonne jump out of the Honda and hustle into the yard of a small house across the street, ready to defend the caravan against the two walkers shuffling toward them from the back yard. Glenn follows Jesus into the driveway of the next-door neighbor to take care of another pair coming out of a detached garage; one tall middle-aged male with cloudy eyes and an ornery disposition stumbling forward as its mate, a white-eyed female with long stringy hair festooned with leaves and dirt, slithers along the blacktop, its hands grasping the ground and pulling the torso of its legless body along the asphalt. The incredibly shabby and sullied dress dragging on the ground looks to have been a bright cheerful yellow at one time, but now, covered in carnage and filth with deep dark bloodstains distorting the design, and shredded at a hemline that may have hung to her knees if she'd had any, it is hard to say exactly what the dress would have looked like with the price tag still on it. On the opposite side of the street, Daryl shoots an arrow into the snarling mouth of another putrid creature as it bumps innocuously along a white picket fence, its blackened brain unable to tell its ravaged body to step around it.
Rick reaches the downed tree just a moment before Aaron, who is armed with his own sharp axe. "Alright," he yells, just loud enough for his team to hear without alerting more walkers to their position. "Let's get this tree cut so we can keep moving!"
They've performed this ritual enough times today that they've gotten it down to a science, working together like a well-oiled machine; Erin keeps watch with Amy from the roof of the camper while Eugene sits at the table inside perusing alternate routes on the map opened up before him. Morgan, Michonne and Jesus team up with Glenn and Daryl on active duty, with the hunter staying close to the two vehicles between his motorcycle and the Winnebago – the two vehicles that are carrying the most precious cargo – while T-Dog, Aaron and Dale help Rick to clear whatever burden is blocking their path.
The fact that their merry band is growing is a good thing, but it does have its pros and cons. There is definitely strength in numbers, and those individual numbers that make up their group have proven incredibly valuable, but with such a large caravan of three SUV's, two huge campers and a big van, it also makes the travelling much more cumbersome, slowing down their progress greatly. It is especially slothful when maneuvering through streets ravished by a hurricane, the asphalt literally pulled up in places where tree roots were forced to release the earth and break through the surface of the roadway. But they've made it this far and Rick won't stop until they hit Savannah. He'll keep his group moving over whatever hurdle has been put in their path.
Two hours and several hatchet jobs later, the world is free of a few more walkers and Rick feels like they are finally making some headway on their journey. The landscape rolls by as they pick up speed, pushing the speedometer to fifty miles per hour as the road stretches out before him. Driving north on Kennedy Bridge Road, he is looking to make a right turn onto Old Manassas Foy Road toward the town of Adabelle, where, according to Eugene and a brief lesson on homonyms and the correct spelling of the town as opposed to the street – they can pick up Ada Bell Road to head eastward. With a huge wheat field on one side of the street and nothing but tall pine trees on the other, Rick eases off the gas as the road twists slightly to the right, and then closes in on the fifty mile per hour mark again when it lays long and flat once more. Through the back window of the jeep, he can just make out the very top of Carl's head, listing a little to the left and most likely asleep.
Maybe he'll stay asleep until they reach the coast, which should only be another hour or so. That is if the roads are perfectly passable. The way things have been going, there will be more trees to clear and floods to navigate, making the trek much longer than usual. But maybe only twice as long as opposed to quadruple that since the storm damage seems to be less severe up here. It looks like the towns south of St. Catherines took the brunt of the hurricane.
"It looks like this area didn't get hit as hard," Erin says and Rick smiles in her direction, taking comfort in their connection once again as she seems to be tuned into his mind. "Maybe we'll get to Savannah by the time Carl wakes up," she adds, echoing his thoughts exactly.
"It's definitely clearer up here. Maybe we'll get lucky the rest of the way," he replies just before the Jeep's brake lights blink a few times in front of them.
"Or not." Erin shifts in her seat, leaning closer to the windshield. "Looks like he's stopping again."
Rick taps on his own brake pedal to stay a safe distance behind the jeep. He coasts along the pavement waiting to see the steady shine of T-Dogs brakes, signaling the site of another blockage. But when the jeep maintains its slow but steady speed, he knows that the motorcycle in front of it is just slowing down the lead. "No, Daryl is just looking for that turnoff. We've got to be getting close now."
"Oh good."
Less than a minute later, he applies the brakes as they near a sign standing at the corner of a wide two-lane road that reads Old Manassas Foy. "There it is." He hears Erin breathe the sigh of relief that he himself had been holding. He steers the van onto the back country road that cuts through a heavily wooded area, and then watches his rearview mirror to make sure the rest of the caravan has followed along. As soon as Glenn makes the turn with the pickup truck, Rick presses harder on the gas to catch up to T-Dog and Daryl. So far the street looks clear, the trees set back far enough from the roadway that the ones that had fallen victim to the storm are still well beyond the shoulder.
Easing back up to fifty miles per hour, he presses the switch to lower his window another two inches, bringing it to just about halfway open in hopes of stealing some more fresh air from the countryside. Erin coughs softly next to him, not a throat-clearing cough, but a small inconspicuous attention-getter. He glances over and sees her half-drawn window rising two inches in its frame, putting back the space he had taken.
When he hears a familiar tune emanating from behind the teasing smirk on her lips, he bites back a retort about busting his chops and can't help but grin at the off-key humming of Springsteen's 'Rendezvous', reminding him of their little excursion to the cabin. He reaches over to firmly squeeze her knee with teasing affection and she hums louder, making him wish they hadn't left the CD in Morgan's Honda. He opens his mouth to tell her just that, and closes it with a teeth clashing flinch as he slams the brakes, the echo of a gunshot raging in his ears as he watches the jeep carrying his son swerve drastically before flipping over and over in front of him, rolling in a stir of twisted metal along the back road of Adabelle.