Chapter 15: Livin' on a Prayer
Daliah's family had set up camp in a little hotel southwest from their original position. At least that was what Castiel saw in her mind. It was less than sixty miles from the ship, but it might as well have been six hundred. In a good day, they would have reached their destination in a matter of hours at the most. Unfortunately, they'd encountered a few setbacks that had stretched several hours into several days.
The worst setback was the herds. There were a lot of them, large and small. Even Castiel wasn't keen on fighting the dead in large numbers, and by Carl's reckoning, the guy could probably take down walkers in his sleep (if he ever slept, that is). They found out the hard way that it didn't matter how physically strong someone was: a large number of walkers could and would get past them.
Carl had to admit that they probably wouldn't have survived long without Cas, not in this environment. Their group wasn't the most battle-ready even if they didn't have the younger kids to worry about. Carl got by well enough and Jake was a six-foot beast with a crowbar, but that was about it. Claire was injured and out of practice, Mikey never had much to begin with and Enid had always survived through stealth and avoidance. Scott relied too much on his brother.
"I'm better with a gun," Scott had explained after seven consecutive strikes finally brought the walker down. In spite of his dark complexion, Scott visibly blushed.
"You won't always have a gun," Castiel told him frankly. He had watched Scott with the same critical once-over he'd given Carl in the warehouse. He killed off the last walker and then said, with a decisive nod, "you'll practice."
Apparently, that meant all of them. They had their first training session in a secluded little spot on top of a hill. Claire hummed the Mulan training song the entire time.
It was kind of fun, in Carl's opinion, even if none of them actually managed to land a hit on Castiel (in fairness to them, walkers were much slower). The class ended when the three younger kids rushed at Castiel, all at once, and managed to knock him down (in fairness to him, he probably let them). Judith then waddled over and plopped down on top of their human(ish) pile. That, along with Cas' bewildered expression, had set Carl laughing for a solid minute.
While they ate canned beans and vegetables (and Castiel didn't, because apparently, that was another thing he didn't do) they decided to try and hide from the approaching herds instead of running from them. Avoiding them entirely was next to impossible - there were simply too many walkers.
Castiel could hear a herd coming (walkers were loud) in time for them to stop the van, cover the windshield and windows, and hide until it passed them by. Then they needed to wait some more until the walkers were far enough to not to be drawn back by the van's loud engine.
It wasn't the most pleasant experience. Daliah and Annabelle looked frustrated but they knew better than to make a sound. Oliver, the adorable creepy kid that he was, just plopped down in Claire's lap and immediately fell asleep. Carl ended up only having to worry about Judith, who could easily start crying and give away their presence.
His fear was almost realized when he saw her looking up at him with that all too familiar pre-tantrum look. She opened her mouth, ready to let loose, when Castiel put a finger on her forehead. She instantly calmed down, mouth snapping shut. She looked at Carl and Castiel both with wide, wet eyes.
"What did you do?" Carl hissed, barely audibly.
Castiel looked at him sadly. "Explained."
If they got lucky, they managed to wait out a herd inside an abandoned house instead of the cramped back of the van. They found a Trivia Pursuit cardboard game in one such house, which led them to two important discoveries: one, the answer to the question "which state has the highest population density in the USA?" was the state they were traveling in right now. Two, Cas really sucked at Trivia Pursuit.
Their second setback was that all the roads were heavily jammed. The van, bless its gas guzzling heart, was not exactly an all-terrain vehicle. They avoided the highways as much they could, but the side roads were almost as bad, as the many people who had tried to escape the cities had undoubtedly discovered.
Most of those roads were now graveyards to rusting, desolate automobiles, and actual graveyards to the many occupants who'd died inside of them. Somehow those poor dead bastards were still scratching at the windows in their attempts to get at the living. They stared at them with empty eye sockets, eyeballs melted off long ago, their blackened skin peeling away with every jerky movement. And the smell…
"Missing balloon-man yet?" Claire said to Enid from the van's driver's seat.
"Apples and oranges," Enid replied from her perch on top of the slowly moving van. She then called out, "on my right, coming around the red convertible."
"It's pink," said Jake, who was the closest. He tripped the walker with his crowbar before braining it, then gave the definitely red convertible a once-over. "This one's tapped-out, too."
There was one foolproof way of finding out if a car had already been siphoned: no survivor ever bothered putting the gas cap back on.
"Keep looking," Carl told him from the other side of the road. All the cars on his side had been sucked dry as well. They were running low on fuel thanks to all the detours they had to make (third setback: collapsed bridges).
"Yeah, yeah." Jake gave a limp handed salute.
They had a routine for traffic jams, too. Castiel was at the front of their odd little team, using his considerable strength to make a path, sometimes even tipping cars on their sides. The guys stayed close to him: Carl and Mikey were checking the cars on the left for fuel and supplies, and the twins did the same for the ones on the right. Enid acted as a lookout while Claire slowly inched the van down the cleared lane.
If their outdated map was to be trusted, they were about to pass by a thumbnail-sized town by the name of Clansworth. They usually got a clean stretch of road once they got away from what used to be a populated area. At last, they made it to the end of the traffic jam. Claire parked the van, tapping the metal outside her window to let Enid know she could come down.
"What's the haul?" Enid asked when her feet hit the ground.
Scott shook the gas jerrycan, the rattling giving away that it more empty than full. "Not much, somebody already sucked this place dry."
"Same," Carl said. He didn't like the idea of moving ahead on foot. The van offered a safety barrier for the younger kids. Plus, they'd have to carry Judith, who wasn't a tiny baby anymore (and didn't always like being carried).
Claire stuck her head out the driver's side window. "Might mean there are people nearby. We're not that far away from Daliah's place." She turned to Cas to ask, "can't you, like, spidey-sense if anybody's alive out here?"
"No. I'm not a bloodhound," Castiel replied, not even bothering to ask what a spidey-sense was (and really, Claire was just doing it on purpose). Carl wondered if that meant he was getting worried.
"As long as we don't have to make another detour, we should have enough to make it to Daliah's camp, right?" Carl asked. "Let's hope they'll be grateful enough to gas us up. Shut up, Jake," he added when the other boy opened his mouth to make an undoubtedly dumb joke about passing gas.
Their luck seemed to be looking up. The clear stretch lasted longer than they thought it would. It was hard to see much beyond the hilly roads, but the brake was still sudden enough to send them all scrambling on the van's floor.
"Sorry guys," Claire said sheepishly. She put the van in parking. "Take a look at this."
They all got out. Up ahead they could see why the last stretch of road had been so open. There was a long line of cars, parked in parallel across the road and well beyond the shoulders. The row of cars created something of a barrier, not enough to stop a herd, but enough to slow it down for sure. As it was, there were no pile-ups of undead trying to get past the barrier. The community was far enough away to be out of ear and eyeshot of the walkers. Up in the distance, they could see traps as well, barb wire stretched between two poles, wooden beams aimed to skewer any unlucky walker, trenches dug in the ground.
"That must've taken them a while to set in place," Enid said after a slow whistle. She looked down at Daliah, brows furrowed. "I thought Cas only saw your family. How many people do you have there?"
Daliah, of course, didn't reply.
There was a sign next to the road, one that said. "McLaren Township, 3 miles". And underneath it, in handwriting, "Safe Zone".
"Those who arrive survive," Carl recited quietly, remembering the message that brought him and his group to Terminus, the cannibals' community. Strange how people and things kept trying to eat him. "How do we know we can trust them?" Carl asked, all too aware of Judith's weight in his arms. He looked at Daliah as well, "it's gotta be your group, right?"
Jake sighed. "She doesn't understand you."
"Yes, she does," Castiel said all of a sudden.
Daliah seemed to freeze. Castiel gently took her hand, leading her a few steps away to give her a bit of breathing room. She wasn't a tall girl by any definition, but he still needed to look up when he knelt down in front of her. It wasn't unusual behavior, Castiel had been the only one who could speak her language, except that this time, he spoke English.
"I understand," Castiel said, looking at the girl levelly. "You're cautious. I imagine many people haven't been very careful in their speech around you before." He waited a moment to allow her to respond, and when she didn't, he continued, "you've allowed me into your mind, that speaks of trust. You know we are not your enemies. Will we find any enemies beyond this point?"
Daliah's lower lip trembled. "No." Finally, she spoke, shaking her head. "The soldiers will recognize me. They won't hurt you," she said in perfectly accented English, then sniffled. "Sorry. I'm sorry, it's just what I'm supposed to do. My mom runs the hotel in town, it's where they put all the new people at first. We're not supposed to speak English there. Sometimes that's how we find out if somebody's bad."
"It's the whole town? How many people do you have?" Enid repeated the question.
"I don't know. A lot. There are a lot of soldiers, like my dad, but lots of families too. Kids started disappearing a few months ago, and then I woke up in Gan Eden, but they weren't there anymore." She looked at Claire. "Ellie and Josh and… and Maria. Do you remember them?"
"Yeah," Claire said sadly. "They didn't make it."
"I'm the only one left," she said, her eyes wide. "Do you think their families will be angry with me?"
"Oh, sweetie, no," Claire said.
"You must never blame yourself for surviving," Castiel told her gently. Then he cocked his head, staring at the hill where the safe zone was. He stood up, brushing the dirt from his knees, and took Daliah's hand in his.
"They know we're here," Castiel told them.