Author's note: Huge sorry, I uploaded Ch 8 from a different story, so if your update didn't make sense, that's why. Here's the real chapter 8!

Chapter 8: Hunger

Carol stared at the empty racks. Blinked.

Light slunk through the convenience store windows in subdued shades of gray. Filtered through too many layers of dust, and an old brown smear of something ugly. One of the broken panes shot rainbows across the empty racks. Once, she might have run her fingers over the prismatic reflection. Traced the colors, one transforming brightly into another with such predictability. Like no matter the ugliness of the surface they fell upon, red always became orange became yellow. They were a group you could never break up, never damage.

But right now, all they made her think of was apples. Oranges. Bananas. The green of cucumbers and grapes and lettuce. Blueberries and—

"Hey." The murmur came in low, along with the soft bump of a shoulder to hers. It was as close as Daryl ever got to a hug, she thought. Or at least, that's what it felt like when he did it. She turned, trying to scrape up a smile for him, but it came out wan. Some days, the hunger didn't even faze her, but today she felt like a thin piece of paper with a cold light shining all the way through it.

"Find anything?"

"Nah. Place is all cleaned out. Right on a main road like this, don't know what else Rick was expectin'. Found some oil out back. Good for the cars." He dropped his head, shook it, eyes a little vague. "What the hell am I sayin'? Stupid."

She shook her head, a little laugh bubbling up. "I can't string two thoughts together either. I was thinking about rainbows a minute ago."

He snorted. "And puppies?"

"Hell." She bent to check under one of the wire merchandise racks, poking at the dust bunnies. "If I saw a puppy now, I'd probably just wonder how to cook it."

He chuckled, just a deep secret rumble she might not have heard if she'd been two steps further away.

"With ranch dressing," she said and reached her hand up, because her head was whirling. He pulled her to her feet without her having to ask.

"What?"

"The puppy." She quirked a smile. "Hey, if I'm gonna dream, I might as well dream big. I'd take my roast puppy with ranch dressing dip." She let go of his hand, and as soon as she did, his face blurred a little sideways. She blinked again and caught her balance with a quick sideways step.

His brow creased. "You all right?"

"Fine. Stood up too fast."

He dug in his pocket, handed over a familiar orange and yellow wrapper. It had a clear boot heel print on the front, one side burst open.

"You been holding out on me?" She shook two peanut butter cups out into her palm. One was smashed, with bits of lint and dust clinging to it, but the other was mostly unmolested.

"Found it behind the counter. Was gonna save it." He jerked his chin toward her.

She held out the unsmashed one to him. "Thank you."

"Eat it. You're not saving it to give to Lori," he said. "You gave her your breakfast, too. I saw you."

"Three spoonfuls of corn. It's not like it's enough to make a difference one way or another for me."

"If it's not enough to make a difference, you shoulda ate it."

She waved the second half at him again, insisting. "If you don't eat half, I'm giving mine to Lori."

He snatched it and popped it all in his mouth at once, chewing fast. She took hers in six bites. "You shouldnta gave me the clean one," he said through a mouthful. "You know I don't give a shit."

"It was yours to begin with," she said, taking one more bite and wishing she could taste this for days. She closed her eyes and tried to fix it in her memory. The melting of the chocolate. The savory-salty-sweet of the peanut butter that made saliva pool in her mouth.

When she finished it, she licked her lips and opened her eyes. Daryl's eyes burned pale blue, a jolt going through her at how close he was. He turned away immediately, not even saying goodbye. But a second later, his boot heel squeaked on the floor and he spun back around. He reached out and caught her wrist.

The wrapper crinkled in her hand, her fingers closing automatically with her surprise.

"Carol," he rasped, looking so hard at her that her heart stuttered and tripped in the second before she registered he wasn't warning her of danger. He was just looking at her. But he also wasn't letting go of her wrist.

He was close close close and her body must not be getting the no-danger message because her heart was pumping like it was time to run, and all of her skin flushed hot and then cold. This was not normal. Not him this close. Not him looking at her so dead on, with urgency in more than his eyes.

He'd been odd all day, she remembered suddenly. He'd been strangely lighthearted this morning, cracking deadpan jokes that got bolder and more irreverent the more times he got her to laugh. And then he went silent this afternoon, answering all her passing comments with grunts or nothing, making himself very busy everyplace she wasn't.

"Daryl?" her voice came out weaker than she wanted, a flutter to it that was goddamn embarrassing. She was a grown woman, not some teenage bimbo.

He blinked and let her go. The next thing she saw was just his shoulders moving, all muscle under the wings of that vest as he headed for the door.

Her hand rose to her lips, pressed against them as if to tame the tingles. Ridiculous. He hadn't kissed her. Hadn't even barely touched her. But she was dizzier than before she'd eaten.

#

When they got to camp that afternoon, Daryl kicked his leg up in front and off the motorcycle before Carol had even had a chance to put her feet down. The other cars pulled up behind them.

"Going to hunt," he grunted as he passed Rick getting out of the Hyundai.

"I thought you and Glenn were going to change the oil in all the vehicles tonight. I thought that was the whole reason we decided to make camp early." Rick held his hands out. "It's barely noon."

Daryl spat on the ground. "Can't eat cars. Fuck the oil."

"You want water to take with you?" Carol called after him, but he shook his head. Didn't even turn around.

She slumped forward on the motorcycle, folding her hands across the still-warm gas tank and laying her forehead on top of them. Had she looked at him wrong? Said something? What the hell had he been about to say to her in that convenience store?

She was exhausted, too tired to deal with men and their posturing bullshit. She just wanted a friend, that was all. Someone to share a peanut butter cup with, maybe a blanket and a dark joke about rainbows and puppy cannibalism. She didn't want that extra little ripple of awareness that got stronger whenever he was within half the width of camp of her.

She didn't want to make him unhappy.

"Everything okay?" Rick touched her back. "You guys have a fight or something?"

"I'm just tired, Rick." She sat up. "And Daryl's just Daryl. He's never going to be Miss Congeniality, especially not with low blood sugar." She got up. "I can change the oil in the trucks."

"You can what?" He frowned. "You serious?"

"My dad taught me, about a hundred years ago. Ed would never let me touch our vehicles. Said I might screw them all up, so I might be a little rusty." She found a smile for him, dropping a casual hand to the motorcycle handlebars when her head started to spin from standing. "But I'll try not to break anything. Just keep the walkers off while I work."

He nodded, looking into the forest after Daryl.

#

Carol sat on the bed of the truck, scrubbing at her hands with a rag. The oil wouldn't come out of her cuticles, no matter how hard she rubbed. She could see the black marks even in the faint glow of the distant fire, though the moon hadn't risen yet.

Lori came up, hugging her coat around her. "Thanks for doing all the trucks. You should come back to the fire and get warmed up. He'll be back soon."

"That's what you said at sunset."

"He will, Carol." Rick came up behind his wife, his hand lifted as if to rest on her shoulder, but then it fell back to his side. "Come on, it's Daryl. It's not the first time he's stayed out for a night. Things come up, he has to go further than he thinks, detour around walkers. Maybe he got too big of a kill to get it home tonight. But he always comes home."

"Or he gets injured, or trapped by a herd moving through." She glared. "We're his group. We ought to be looking for him."

"Daryl doesn't need looking for."

"He's not invincible, Rick," she gritted out through her teeth. "Just because you want one less person to be responsible for, that doesn't mean you get to pretend like he doesn't need you. How many times has he saved your life, huh? Do you even remember?"

Lori put a hand on her shoulder. "You're worrying for nothing, sweetheart. He'll come back in the morning, all dirty and bloody and probably every squirrel in the forest hanging off his shoulder. It's how he likes things. He probably just needed a little space from the group, is all. Man like him, he's not used to living in such close quarters."

"You sure you two didn't have a fight?"

She threw a glare at Rick, then dropped her head into her hands, massaging her temples. "We had a…thing."

She caught Rick and Lori swapping a glance. "We don't have any batteries left for the flashlights," Lori said. "We can't go looking. At least until morning."

Rick's head came up. "Did you hear that?"

Carol stopped breathing. The crack of gunfire was so far away, she almost couldn't be sure she was hearing it. And then it was gone, before she could be totally sure.

She jumped off the truck, her hand going to her knife hilt. For the first time, she almost wished there was something close enough to stab.

"Could you tell if it was a rifle or a pistol?" she asked Rick. Daryl sometimes brought a pistol along with him when he went to hunt, because it was too hard to reload the crossbow quickly if he got swarmed. But rifles got tangled up with his crossbow sling, so he rarely brought one of those.

"Not for sure. That was far out, though. Farther than Daryl would have gone."

"He's been gone nine hours. He could get a pretty long ways in nine hours."

"Those shots might not have had anything to do with him." Lori zipped her coat up a little higher. "We're not the only group of humans left alive, you know. All the places we've been lately have been scavenged to the bone."

Rick touched her arm and she went quiet.

"It's okay," Carol said, even though her whole face felt numb. "You don't have to protect me from the truth. It's nothing I wasn't already thinking."

Rick sighed. "The world gives us plenty of bad news these days, Carol. Don't borrow trouble by imagining things before they happen. That's all I'm saying."

"Stop hovering, then." She turned her back on him, listening keenly to the darkness of the forest. But there were no more shots. If it had been Daryl, he either hadn't brought more ammo, or something was stopping him from pulling the trigger.

#

Her feet dragged through the leaves. She kept trying to pick them up higher, but they were too heavy. She had to remind herself to look up, to scan the trees. It seemed pointless. There was nobody out there.

Maggie shot her a worried look from one side.

"It doesn't mean anything," Hershel said from the other.

She squinted up at him, but the light of sunset was directly in her eyes and it made them sting. If she cried any more, she wasn't sure she could live with herself.

"It just means he went out further than our search grid," Hershel said. "I've seen how far that boy can walk in a day and a half. He'll be back. Hell, he's probably already back, sitting in camp wondering what we're off doing with ourselves."

"What about those shots?"

"You said you weren't sure they were shots."

"They sounded like shots. Too far away to be sure, but in this world, what else could it be? It's not like it was a car backfiring."

"Like I said," Lori put in. "Probably just another group, fighting off walkers. Nothing unusual about that."

Carol stared at the ground, kept her feet moving. She didn't like to think about what might have happened if Daryl had met up with another group. One like Randall's, maybe. Most people would shoot him just to get their hands on that crossbow.

"You hear that?" Carl stopped suddenly. "The moaning. Walkers. Something's got them stirred up, too."

He pulled his gun even as his mother threw out her arm in front of him on the other side. "Don't, Carl. We're almost back to camp."

"I think they're in camp," Carol said. "Our cars are there, all our gear. They must have smelled humans."

"Or Daryl's back and they smelled the blood of whatever he brought," Maggie said.

Carol broke into a run, her ears pricked for the thrum of the crossbow firing. If he was there, he'd be fighting.

"Carol, wait for Rick's group!" Lori hollered. "They're right behind us!"

She burst out into the clearing. Walkers surrounded the cars, banging on the windows. She couldn't see if anyone was inside. One had tipped over the motorcycle and was laying with its foot caught underneath, its blood-smeared track suit torn to ribbons by its tugging. She planted her feet and started to fire.

One fell over the hood. Two shots for the one by the passenger door, the window shattering behind it. Shit, if there was anyone inside she was firing right at them. She blasted off her last three shells at the walkers staggering around the hood of the Hyundai, then yanked out her knife and went for the two still banging on the old Plymouth, reaching in the broken windows now. She stabbed one in the back of the head. The other in the mouth as it turned to reach for her.

She grabbed the edge of the broken window and leaned inside. "Daryl?" Hands grabbed at her but she craned for one last look in the backseat. Nothing.

Breath hit her shoulder and she whirled, shoving the walker back as its teeth clicked closed. But it had a grip on her now, hauling her into its mouth. Her knife hand was stuck between them and she couldn't get enough leverage to rip it free. She staggered as another walker hit them from the right, grabbing her and the first walker, dragging them both toward its mouth. She kneed at one but it didn't even react to the impact.

Daryl wasn't in the car.

She knew she should be thinking about walkers, about their snapping, disease-ridden teeth, but she couldn't focus. She hadn't heard the crossbow. Hadn't seen any of his gear. If he were here, would he have left his brother's motorcycle tipped over like that?

He hadn't been here at all. He hadn't made it back.

One of the walkers head-butted her in the chin, greasy hair peeling away from its rotting scalp as it tried for a bite on her breast. She tucked her chin, using the pressure of her head to keep its mouth from reaching her, kicking out blindly sideways to knock the other one back.

Fear smacked into her, too late. She'd let them get too close, got cocky and careless.

A pistol fired and something thumped into the car frame right by her head. The walker on her side fell and a second later, blood exploded across her face as the one on front of her died, too.

It took her down with it and she nearly fell on her own knife, scrambling to roll free, her vision a jumble of Carl's scared blue eyes and the bore of his gun and the walkers coming up behind him. She dropped her knife, ripped her gun out of its holster and kicked out the empty magazine, rammed a new one and shot the walker behind Carl. A chunk whirled out of his neck but he staggered and the next shot caught him in the face.

The next few minutes were just brain rattling gunfire, people running everywhere. When it was over, she sagged back against the car, sliding slowly down to the ground next to the rotting body of a walker.

Daryl had a habit of running in at just the last minute, usually to save Rick or one of the kids. Gunshots carried far in this country. If he hadn't come, he wasn't coming.

She slumped over and stared at the gun in her hand, smeared with walker blood.

Sophia was gone. So many of their friends, gone. She had no family left. No one that thought of her first. She was third or fourth priority to all of these people, at best. Not only that, they had nowhere to go. The sun had already set and every night now seemed to get longer, colder. Darker.

She ran a bloody thumb over the pistol.

One more day. She'd give him one more day to get back, and then she'd decide.