The astroturf on the old football field has turned a dark greenish black, and holes tear through its surface. Daryl steps over one now as he strolls alongside Judith to check their targets. "Think I won this time," he says. He won last time, too, but she argued her way to a victory.
"No. My group is closer."
"Yeah, closer to the ring outside the bullseye."
"The shots are closer to each other."
Her shots are a full ring off the bullseye, but they're all right on top of each other, tearing what looks like a single hole into the paper. "Good group." Daryl pats her hat down on her head. His Little Ass Kicker is not so little anymore.
She tilts the hat back up. "So I won?"
Daryl shot a handgun for the first time when he was eight, with his father's rough hands over his, and the man's cruel voice in his ear, but he was still getting comfortable with the kickback two years later. He couldn't shoot with Judith's accuracy until he was thirty. She clearly does not suffer from Rick's bad aim. "I'll give ya the handicap, seein' as yer ten."
He returns to the firing line and begins to collect the spent brass from the ground and slip it into his jacket pocket. The Hilltop doesn't have the stores of ammunition the Kingdom discovered in an underground bunker last year, but they do have a number of dies, casts, and reloading presses from that run to Cabela's. They make their own gunpowder from saltpeper, charcoal, and sulfur. They manufacture the saltpeper from horse urine and other manure soils, sometimes even bat guano. The charcoal they make by putting wood in a metal drum and setting the drum in a piping hot bonfire for hours. And the sulfur they got by raiding garden stores.
"Uh, technically…that brass belongs to the Kingdom," Judith tells him.
"But ya ain't gonna tell no one," Daryl says as he slips another handful into his pocket.
Judith raises an eyebrow.
"Pretty please?" Daryl says. "With a cherry on top?"
"Well, we don't need it as badly as you do," she concedes. "You're not even allowed to have range time anymore, are you?"
"Plenty of range time. Outside the gates. Shootin' walkers and game."
As he walks her back toward the center of the Kingdom, he says, "Ya know…you might could play with R.C. more."
"All he wants to do is play dumb baby games."
"Like?"
"Chess."
Daryl huffs. "Sounds more like a smart adult game. He beat you? 'S that why ya don't want to play with 'em?"
Judith glowers, which Daryl takes as a yes.
"He's afraid of shooting a gun, you know," Judith tells him.
"Well, 's only six. Might could change."
"Mom tried to show him how, and he just screamed when it went off. She says she's going to give it a few more months before she tries again. How am I supposed to play with a little kid who's afraid of guns?"
"Used to want my big brother to play with me somethin' awful. But he never seemed to have the time. 'N that always made me feel like shit."
Judith's face scrunches up as she seems to consider this possibility.
"Just sayin'," Daryl tells her. "Wouldn't kill ya."
Later that evening, after dinner, Judith takes Daryl's advice. While Michonne and Daryl sit at one of the picnic tables finishing up their meals, the kids abandon their empty plates and slip off to play chess on an overturned barrel in the courtyard.
Michonne stabs a green bean with her fork and asks, "Where's Henry? I heard he came with you, but I haven't seen him."
"Dippin' his wick."
Michonne chokes down her bite as she laughs.
"'S the way Carol puts it. Think he's still in Jessica's trailer. Havin' a private dinner."
"Ah. Well, she is pretty."
"Pretty dumb," Daryl mutters.
Michonne chuckles. "She's not the sharpest tool in the shed. But she's sweet. I hear men like sweet."
"Sweet ain't half bad." Carol's always been sweet to him, except, of course, when he's honestly needed a slap upside his head. "But dumb gets old fast. And Jessica ain't got no real skills. Couldn't kill a walker to save 'er life."
Michonne glances over to where R.C. is moving a chess piece across the board. "Yeah, well, sometimes I'm afraid that's going to be the case for R.C. He's too sensitive. That part of Rick is in him…but the tougher part…" She shakes her head. "He didn't get that."
"Rick was only tough when he had to be. Maybe R.C.'ll be that way, too."
"I hope so. But I don't know that he will."
Daryl glances over his shoulder at the boy, who has just shouted, "Check!" triumphantly, before looking back at Michonne. "Kid's damn smart. Smarter 'n Rick was. Smarter 'n you. Hell, smarter n' you and Rick put together."
"Tell me about it."
Daryl takes a sip of his sweet tea and sets the pewter pint glass down on the picnic table. "Reached a point now, we need engineers more 'n killers. Ain't no shortage of killers in this world. Pretty damn big shortage of engineers."
"Maybe you're right." Michonne sighs and crosses her arms on the table. "Do you sometimes feel like you're the last of your kind?"
"Hell, felt like that my whole damn my life."
[*]
Early the next morning, Carol sits down on the edge of Hershey's bed and presses her palm to his forehead.
He throws his quilt off. "You're not holding me home again are you?"
She smiles. "Most kids wouldn't be so eager to get back to school."
"Staying home is boring. I want to see Gracie and all my friends."
"Well, you seem fine. I'll make you some oatmeal and then I'll walk you over."
Hershey, wearing red flannel pajamas littered with fire trucks, bounds out of bed. "Can i have raisins in it?"
The Hilltop grows grapes, which they then dry and preserve. "Just a few."
After Carol drops Hershey at school, she asks Barbara to pick him up and watch him until Daryl gets home. Then she heads for the front gates of the Hilltop. A surprised chorus of, "Mayor?" rises from the team of eradicators when she joins them just inside the fence line.
Rosita has just finished pumping, and she hands off the filled bottle and hand pump to Eugene, who is holding a squirming little Gene on his hip. "There's three more in the cooler at home," Rosita tells him. "Clean that pump."
"Don't you need to express additional liquid refreshment on the DL in the course of your day to keep your mammary - "
"I have another pump in my pack," Rosita interrupts Eugene. She ruffles Gene's thick, dark hair, which curls in the back. "I can't wait to wean you, little guy," she coos. The toddler smiles. His eyes are a warm brown, and his skin is just a shade darker than Rosita's, which has caused the town gossip to narrow the father down to a potential three men, all dead now. "Be good for papi."
"Mamá, Mamá, Mamá, no Mamá Mamá pway wes wes wes, Mamá," Gene blubbers.
Rosita leans forward and kisses him on his forehead."Let's roll!" she announces to her team, and Bertie slides open the front gate.
Carol puts a hand on the hilt of her knife and feels a sudden jolt of adrenaline course through her veins. She can't wait to do a little walker slaying. She's going to have a pile of untouched papers to go through tonight, but it's well worth it.
[*]
Daryl glances at the sun in the sky. "Wastin' daylight, Henry," he calls. He's anxious to get back to Carol. He's pretty sure he's getting laid tonight, since he didn't yesterday or the night before. He's figured out that she doesn't typically like to have sex two nights in a row, but she also never makes him go more than three days without it. She claims he gets grouchy if she does.
Henry kisses Jessica one last time before drawing away from her and heading toward his horse. The strawberry blonde giggles and waves goodbye to Henry with her finger tips, and Daryl can't believe she's twenty-nine. She acts more like she's seventeen. "Don't stay away long," she tells Henry.
"I won't." Grinning, he vaults onto his horse.
Before them, Michonne swings open the gate. "Tell Carol and Hershey I said hi," she says as Daryl rolls his motorcycle near her with his feet.
"Carol wanted to come," he tells her, "see ya 'n the kids, 's just – "
"- I know. It's hard for the Mayor to get away for an overnight. Maybe I'll come see her sometime."
Daryl nods, starts his bike, and whirs through the gates of the Kingdom with Henry galloping behind.
[*]
Carol returns in the evening feeling invigorated and covered in walker guts, and she washes up at the bathhouse and changes her clothes.
When she gets into her little cabin, Daryl is sitting in his arm chair by the fireplace and fiddling with his crossbow.
Hershey is setting the table while Henry tends a pot of stew. "We got started on dinner," Henry says. "Barbara said you were out with the eradicators, and we didn't know when you were getting home."
Hershey gets an extra place setting for her. She's impressed they've taken it upon themselves to feed themselves. "Good to have my boys back safely." Carol walks across the wood floor to bend down and kiss Daryl. He tastes like wild black berries. He probably snagged some on the trip home. She draws back and asks, "Bring me anything?"
"Tequila," Daryl answers.
"Are you going to make me a margarita later?"
"If yer good. "
Carol smiles. She knows he's joking, but they do have that dwarf lime tree in the greenhouse. It wouldn't be impossible. "How is everyone in the Kingdom?"
"Zeke shaved his head 'n beard," Daryl mutters.
"What?"
He tightens the new string he's just replaced on his favorite crossbow. "Looks like a man baby."
Henry takes the pot off the wood stove, sets it on a hot pad in the center of the table, and begins dishing the stew into bowls.
Daryl leans his bow against the side of his battered, worn, but comfortable black leather arm chair – a chair he picked up from some house on a supply run three years ago and which Carol decided wasn't worth arguing over, even though it doesn't match the rest of the furniture at all and looks as ratty as a junkyard dog. He heads for the table.
Carol follows him, asking, "Why would Ezekiel do that?" She sits down opposite Daryl at the small, four-person wooden table.
Henry takes his seat opposite Hershey and answers, "Because he has the hots for Michonne."
"What?" Daryl and Carol both reply simultaneously.
"You heard what she said, Daryl," Henry replies. "She told him they looked like brother and sister with the dreads, and the next day he shaved them all off."
"Oh." Carol says.
"Oh what?" Daryl asks.
"Do you want to explain, Carol, or should I?" Henry asks.
"Grace first," Carol says.
Daryl guilty swallows the spoonful of stew he just put in his mouth.
Hershey and Henry immediately put both of their thumbs up and chorus, "Not it!"
Carol puts her thumbs up, too, as Daryl sets down his spoon. "That means you have to say grace, Pookie."
"Ain't fair. Had my hands full."
"Because you were eating before we said grace," she scolds playfully.
"Fine," he mutters and bows his head. Quickly, he intones, "J.C., thank ya much for this food we's 'bout to enjoy and for the beautiful woman who prepared it."
"Uh…" Henry says when Daryl looks up again. "I prepared it."
"Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Reflex." That's his usual grace, because it's usually Carol who's cooking.
Carol picks up her spoon and explains, "Ezekiel doesn't want Michonne to think of him as a brother."
"Because he has the hots for her," Henry adds.
"Nah," Daryl says.
"I'm a bit surprised he'd go for Michonne," Carol says, "given how much they used to disagree with each other back in the war, but I can't think of any another reason why he'd shorn those gorgeous locks after she said that."
"Gorgeous?" Daryl mutters. "Gnarly things." He slurps his stew off his spoon.
"I wonder if Michonne is interested in him," Carol muses.
"Doubt it," Daryl says.
"Why's that?" Carol asks.
"Hell is there to be interested in?"
Carol decides it would not be judicious to answer that one, and she's glad for Hershey's excited interruption: "I got to be the quarterback in the soccer game at school today!"
"There is no quarterback in soccer," Henry tells him.
"Oh." Hershey gets a confused expression on his face, and for a moment, Carol thinks, she can actually see Glenn. "Well, who's the most important guy?"
"Center midfielder?" Henry speculates.
"Yeah! I got to play center midfielder."
"Make any goals?" Daryl asks.
Hershey frowns into his stew. "No."
"Ya will," Daryl assures him. "Ain't no one can run faster than you. Ya got speed like yer daddy."
"You don't run that fast," Hershey tells him.
Daryl swallows hard and looks at Carol. Of course Hershey never met Glenn, but Maggie died just over two years ago, in the War with the Whisperers. Until then, Daryl and Carol were Uncle Daryl and Aunt Carol to Hershey, and that's what Hershey continued to call them after he moved in with them.
"Daryl meant your biological daddy," Carol explains. "He could run really fast. He helped us all out of a few jams that way."
"Oh."
After dinner, Henry disappears to go hang out with a friend, and Daryl and Hershey play checkers on the living room coffee table while Carol pours through the day's notes on her rolltop desk. Aaron has emptied the week's suggestion box into a folder for her, and there are twenty total, six of them from the same old, meddlesome woman they took in two years ago from Alexandria. Nearly all of the suggestions are petty complaints to which Carol has to write a politely dismissive response, though one, from one of the farmers, is actually a helpful suggestion she'll bring up before the Council tomorrow.
As she writes, she listens to Daryl and Hershey's quiet conversation and the sound of the checkers clicking and clacking across the board.
Daryl says, "Don't think ya wanna make that move, son."
He throws in two more sons before the game is through, just to make sure, Carol thinks, that Hershey knows full well that Daryl is just fine being the boy's daddy.
They're folding up the board when a plaintive howling arises from behind the cabin.
"It's getting cold now that it's October," Hershey says. "Can we start bringing Merle in from his doghouse at night?"
"Yeah," Daryl says. "Go get 'em."
Hershey returns with the big black dog, a mutt that is at least part labrador and they don't know what else. But he does a good job retrieving both birds and small game. Merle runs barking into the cabin, chases his tail around the bear skin rug in front of the roaring fireplace opposite the coffee table, bounds over to Hershey and licks his face, attempts to sniff Carol's crotch only to be pushed away, and then barks his way to Daryl, who is sitting in his arm chair. Merle rears up on his hind legs, sets his paws on Daryl's knees, and lets his tongue loll happily out of his mouth while Daryl scratches his head and says, "Good boy, who's my good boy?"
Merle barks once, loudly.
"Ya get John's bitch pregnant yet?" Daryl and one of the other hunters have been trying to breed their dogs. "Ya knock her up good?"
Merle barks three times.
"Good boy!"
"I wouldn't trust Merle's word for it," Carol tells him as she slides out a fresh sheet of paper.
Hershey claps his hands together. "Here, Merle! Here!" The dog looks from Daryl to Herhsey and back to Daryl and then to Hershey, as though his loyalty is deeply divided.
"Go on!" Daryl tells him and pushes the dog off his knees. Merle bounds over to Hershey and knocks the boy, laughing, to the bear skin rug before assaulting him with long strokes of his tongue.
Carol smiles. "A boy and his dog," she says, and then she gets back to work.