Daryl wakes up late the next morning, and feels like shit. More precisely, he's pretty sure something has taken a shit in his skull. It is really the only reason he could feel this awful, and have his mouth taste so astonishingly bad. And his hand is a gory mess, split knuckles having bled all over the place and then scabbed disgustingly to the point where he can't really close it all the way. He's an idiot.
Other than the hangovers, the day starts off business as usual; Glenn's long gone before he wakes up. Lori is taking Carol and the children down the nearby stream for laundry and Andrea's with them to fish and Rick to stand guard. Shane is prowling the perimeter of the farm restlessly, Dale and T-Dog sitting atop the RV, watching the road for Glenn or walkers. Daryl, alone in the house, heads into the forest and does not think at all.
The days are getting shorter, and the thought of being in the woods at night alone but for the walkers is enough to give even Daryl the creeps. He leaves the forest earlier than usual, heads straight back to camp, squirrel for Rick be damned. It still feels like he is too late by the time he's done gutting the rabbits and cleaning his arrows, though. The whole group is gathered in the main room inside the house, sitting around the table or on couches or on the floor. All of them except Glenn, which isn't right because the kid is always back by sundown, and it's not more than half an hour off right now.
…Not that Daryl has been paying attention to Glenn's comings and goings.
Much.
He approaches just in time to hear T-Dog asking the essential question, "So, do we go after him?"
"You don't know where he'll be, or whether going looking will help him or stir the walkers up more. He could just be waiting for a herd of them to move on, and more of us would just mess that up. Glenn's clever, he's good at this. If he's not back by morning then we have cause to be worried," Andrea says. Though this is more than she has spoken at once in weeks, since the CDC, there remains an air of apathy about everything she says, and it makes Daryl bristle. She's a liability like this; if you're living, then damned well live and if you don't want to feel free to die. Self-pity and apathy will get her killed and that's her business, but she's going to bring them with her if she stays with them, and he's not got enough sympathy for her to let her do that.
Lori seems to take issue with it, too. "Glenn's barely more than a kid. Sure, he's good at getting in and out safe, but he doesn't know this place like he knew Atlanta, and all he's got is one little gun, and who knows what could be happening. He might need help and waiting 'til morning could mean he dies. He's only been out after dark once before, and that was," she trails off, looking to Rick.
He steps up from beside her chair to address the group. "He saved me when I needed him; my vote is for going after him right now. We don't know what's happening out there, but he shouldn't have to deal with it alone."
"It's stupid that he's still going in alone. Should be two, and it'd help if at least one of them could shoot for shit," Daryl contributes. "I'll come. Not too many more, it'd just attract geeks." Andrea chooses this moment to perk up, and Rick opens his mouth but Daryl beats him to it. Thinking of something tactful to say takes Rick a while, and Daryl doesn't bother. "Not you. You can't shoot, and I ain't trusting someone with a death wish at my back."
That leads to some awkward silence, but Daryl is unrepentant. They were all thinking it; he's just the only one with the balls to say it. And hell, her glaring at him is more animated than she's been in weeks. Now things have been decided and he wants to be leaving already. He feels like there are ants crawling up and down his spine, little feet aflame and burning and he just needs to go. Now.
Shane steps forward, "Well, I'll come then. If we're going it has to be now, before the sun sets completely."
Daryl has never liked Shane as much as he does in that moment.
They park the pickup truck next to the car Glenn took, half a mile from the centre of town, and walk the rest of the way. The sun is setting by the time they reach what could be called downtown, if you were using the word frivolously. It's a tiny little town, barely more than a truck-stop along a meandering country road. Houses, shops and a Wal-Mart line the main road, more houses spreading out along the side streets that extend out from the main street.
There are few enough walkers that they probably could have brought the car in much closer without too much trouble. Quiet and careful and on foot, they draw even less attention. Despite that, to a man they have fierce, white-knuckled grips on their weapons of choice. Cities aren't safe any longer – too confined, too easy to get trapped somewhere, nowhere to run and too many places for walkers to lie in wait, looking just like the true dead. Even a place as small as this one is uneasy, the decay and abandon plus the constant threat giving the place an air of menace. The shifting, deceptive dusk-light does not help.
The only large congregation is a group of them pushing insistently against the glass doors to the Wal-Mart. "There?" Rick asks, terse and quiet.
"Makes the most sense. There'd be all sorts of shit in there, no need to check a lot of stores, quickest in and out," Shane mutters. "Of course, there're also plenty of places for walkers to hide. Probably got ambushed in there, had to hole up or run."
"We'll check here first then. If he isn't there…" Rick grimaces, trails off.
"Wasting daylight, ladies. We get in, find him and then we can get the hell out of here," Daryl says, keen to be moving and not interested in anymore pointless fatalism. And hey, it's Wal-Mart. If he's real lucky, there might just be some new arrows for the crossbow, or even a real pillow that isn't a wadded up shirt.
It's funny, the things you miss.
After a short, fierce argument over the relative merits of storming the front door or braving the darkening side-streets for a back entrance, they creep around back to the staff entrance. Only a pair of aimless walkers and Daryl is shooting one (before Rick or Shane have even noticed them he notes smugly) and Shane rushes the other and crushes its skull with his axe. Daryl thinks that maybe he should be concerned at how satisfying that heavy, wet -thunk- feels, even vicariously.
Rick opens the door cautiously, shines a light into the darkened interior, then holds the door open and motions the others inside. Inside is alarmingly dark, and silent. That could be taken as good news, as they aren't hearing the sickening dragging and scraping of a moving geek, aren't hearing screaming or pleas for help, but it could just as easily mean that the geeks are waiting in the darkness, could mean they've already gotten to Glenn, could mean the other man isn't here at all. And for a store in a tiny little town, the damnable Wal-Mart is pretty big to be searching without even second-hand daylight on their side, when it is too dangerous to shout into the darkness.
They start searching, quick and quiet, but it isn't looking good. The shelves look mostly picked clean of the useful things, and elsewhere covered in the now-familiar tessellations of blood and shocks of gore. There is the smell of the walkers, invasive and nauseating, but that permeates everything, can't trace walkers just by the stench because it's so strong you'd think they were everywhere all the time. No bodies, though, and no walkers.
Until Shane bites off a curse hurriedly in the darkness to Daryl's left, just as Daryl is surreptitiously eyeing the bedding area. He turns.
He sees the ragged, decaying forms, more than one. Registers the crouched pose, lit unforgivingly by a flashlight held in a thankfully steady hand, and he knows but does not acknowledge what it means. Notes the blood flowing on the floor around them, bright and red and fresh. He sees these things in a quick, disjointed series of eternities, a set of unending, unconnected moments, seen but not quite assimilated or processed for underlying meaning.
Daryl does not think.
An arrow appears in the back of one of the geeks' heads, and Daryl has no connection to the arms that fired the crossbow, no control over the body that is even now moving towards the crouching figures. He feels his arms going through the accustomed motions as he watches it drop, hideous and ungainly even in dying (again). The next falls. He thinks that someone is speaking to him, harsh and insistent but they can't yell and they'd need to yell for him to hear them over a sudden pounding in his ears. Then there are rushed footfalls behind him, too regular for a walker so he doesn't care. He kicks the next one, hard, where its guts would be if its abdomen weren't gaping open. His boot impacts something, ruptures something, there is a rush of fluids and the walker-stench that pervades the place intensifies. But he's already shot it and Shane is taking care of the last and the smell is secondary to him wondering desperately whether he'll be able to look at the… the body, the victim, the-
Dog?
Dog. The thought, the word, is almost a thankful little prayer. Not-Glenn.
Could be a coyote, maybe. Too big for a fox, on the big side for a dog or coyote, but the fur definitely means that it wasn't human. Too small, wrong size to be even a human child.
He breathes again. Feels guilty at his relief after finding that it was a dog. He's always liked dogs. But, the alternative.
"Daryl?" Rick says, quietly. He's still a few feet back, pistol up and flashlight beam flitting about in the darkness. "Dog," Daryl answers him, hoping that his relief doesn't leak into his voice. He's already moving, leaving the bolts behind in his need to get away from what could have been, when Rick steps forward to check for himself. He's already halfway to a new aisle when he hears the shaky huff that's almost laughter, which means that Rick's seen it, that it's not-Glenn. Daryl is so focussed on ignoring the strange, weak-in-the-knees feeling of relief that he almost doesn't hear it.
Too small, too quiet to be a walker. Doesn't sound human, though. He signals Rick and Shane behind him, creeps towards where the faint noise has come from, and then-
"Hello?"
"Glenn!" Rick is rushing forward, seemingly careless but he's still got the gun out.
Just in case.
Daryl follows, jaw clenched and knuckles white with the thought. Just in case.
"Oh thank god! Rick," he exclaims, quiet in spite of his obvious, almost teary-eyed relief. "What'd I tell you? I rescue hapless idiot in Atlanta, and here you are, saving me from… Wal-Mart zombies. Huh. Very Romero, consumer-horde," Glenn babbles, tension leaking out of him in inanities. Daryl, silent, looks him over intently. Eyes covering dirty hat over messy hair covering worried eyes down to mobile mouth along unmarked throat to unstained t-shirt stretched over tense shoulders curling in slightly towards – blood. "You're bleeding." He says it flatly, chest tight, voice even. Just in case, god help him.
A breathy, humourless laugh and Glenn hikes his shirt up. "Just caught myself on something. Running. I'm an idiot, but I'm not fucked. Yet, at least," and it's a cut. Clean, for a given value of the word. Clearly not the work of decaying teeth or rotten nails and Daryl can breathe, can relax the grip that had had him losing feeling in his fingers.
"Well that's just dandy then. What th' hell kept you, short-round?"
Glenn laughs again, less bleak this time. "You're never gonna let me live this down I just know it. But I couldn't leave them behind, not after," he trails off and turns to walk deeper into the store, looking back when they don't follow and beckoning impatiently. "Look, I'm just going to have to show you. ...And he was an irritating, obnoxiously useless little racist caricature. I am not that annoying. Asshole."
Daryl, the first to follow and walking the closest, is the only one to catch the tail end of Glenn's commentary. Bemused for a moment, he finally makes the connection, and his short bark of laughter startles them both. "Sure y'are. Why else would I call you that?"
Glenn turns just enough to flash him the finger, and a smirk.
"What've you done this time, kid? This is the second time we've had to rescue your damsel-ass, y'know," Shane calls out from the rear. When he sees the kid's shoulders knot a little harder with tension and knows that it'll only get worse if he decides to pick a fight Daryl, uncharacteristically, bites down on the urge to remind the asshole that he wasn't even there, that the first time was nowhere near Glenn's fault, and maybe to keep his stupid tongue inside his mouth instead of flapping out in the breeze where someone might cut it off. He thinks it real hard, though, and figures if Shane's skull wasn't so goddamn thick he'd probably hear it.
Glenn leads them into what was probably once the manager's office. The only window had been securely boarded across, and the door and walls and windows look unexpectedly secure for a commercial store. It looks as though someone has been living in the office; candles and a hardened mess of dried wax in a corner of the desk, piles of unopened canned food and water bottles, a few books, lots of flashlights, a mattress covered in a snarl of tangled bedding, the size of which suggests it could accommodate more than one person, though the rest of the room screams solitary survivor.
And bones. Gnawed-upon bones.
Each man notices the bones, and is turning to give Glenn a horrified stare, when something shifts in the bedding pile. Too small for it to possibly be human, and three weapons swing towards it, but Glenn dives forward protectively. Daryl almost swallows his tongue, swears to himself that he is going to have a good long talk with Glenn later about throwing himself in front of guns and-
And then whatever he'd been thinking briefly deserts him as he tries to explain what has just happened in front of him. Glenn appears to have sprouted puppies.
Notes: That's right. Puppies. I'm doing that. Also, rating is going to an M. Not for sexytimes, just some gore, etc.
