He's fuckin' crazy if he thinks we're leaving today. Daryl thought, coming back into the barn. The night before no one had felt like doing anything. They'd brought in only the necessities and had gone to sleep wherever they saw fit to make a bed. No one was stirring except Daryl, Tyreese, and Rick. Daryl was pretty sure he heard Maggie and Beth crying in the loft, but, but that was about it. This was not a group that would be leaving today.
"Man, I'm fuckin' starvin'." Daryl said to no one. Judith was crawling around unattended, apparently having decided she didn't want to stay on the pile of hay that Carol had designated as her bed. She was crying. Daryl went over and picked her up since no one else had moved to do it. "Looks like I'm not the only one." He said to Judith. She quit crying. He heard Hope start to make the squeaky little noise that she made right before she started crying.
"Daryl." Michonne called.
Daryl walked over there.
"I really don't think I can pick Hope up." Michonne admitted. Her arms were killing her from overworking them the day before and sleeping on the barn floor hadn't helped keep her from being stiff and pained. "You're going to have to help me."
"What'cha want me to do?" Daryl asked.
"You're going to have to put her on me. She can lay on me and eat. I can hold her on with my left arm, but I can't pick her up right now." Michonne said. Daryl put Judith on the floor and got on his knees. Judith was pulling at his pants and crying.
"Hang on a sec, Lil' Asskicker. I ain't forgot about ya." He said. She kept pulling at his pants." Daryl unbuttoned Michonne's shirt and carefully picked up Hope, who had officially begun to wail now.
Wincing, and using her left arm, Michonne helped Daryl position Hope on her so that she could eat. Michonne imagined this wasn't the most pleasant meal that Hope had enjoyed, but it was all that she could handle right this minute, and Hope, who was a pretty greedy eater, and therefore not too picky, didn't seem to mind much.
"Can you feed Lil' Asskicker?" Daryl asked.
"No, Daryl. Just go get some of her formula out of the car and feed her." Michonne said.
Daryl got up and picked Judith up again, who immediately stopped crying. Outside Rick was pretty much just pacing around, so when Daryl opened the back of the car to start looking for formula, he came over to him.
"Daryl…" Rick started up. "I don't think it's safe to stay here two days."
"Well, we're stayin' at least two days." Daryl said, still rifling through a box.
"What if a really big herd comes through? We can't keep them out of the barn." Rick said.
"And we couldn't fight 'em if we moved on. The way I see it is we stand more of a chance in the barn for a couple of days." Daryl said. Where was the damn formula?
"Daryl, we can't just sit here and do nothing." Rick said. "We'll run out of water before two days is up and then what will we do?"
"Listen, Rick, the best thing I can tell you right now is to take your gun, get yourself a bucket, take Tyreese and go find some water. We're stayin' here for a couple of days. We got three things that gotta be done today. Someone has gotta give the group a major pep talk, and someone has got to come up with a better plan than we're just gonna keep on goin' to no damn where while we decide in the car who will be the next person we're gonna feed to a bunch of nasty ass walkers. The third person is gonna have to take a walk with a bucket and find some damn water. Right now, I'm thinkin' you're the better man to take the bucket." Daryl said, still not looking up from rifling around in supplies.
Rick snorted, but Daryl was surprised to see that he walked away to go do just that.
"Lil' Asskicker, who packed these fuckin' boxes? It had to be Beth. Beth is no longer allowed to pack boxes. It looks like she just lined 'em up and threw shit at 'em." Finally he found a can of formula. "Got it!" Daryl sat the baby in the back of the car and put a pacifier in her mouth just before she could start crying again.
"Calm down, Lil' Asskicker, can't you see I got the can now?" Daryl actually felt like finding the can had been a great victory. He hadn't seen a bottle in any of this digging, but he figured he could figure out a way to help her drink it straight out of the can. That was until he opened the can and found out that formula was a powder. He looked at it discouraged and put the lid back on. "Come on, we ain't done yet." He said, picking the baby up with his other arm.
Daryl stood over Michonne with a can of formula in one arm and Judith in the other looking very annoyed.
"Can't you just feed her?" He asked. "You ain't usin' the other one."
Michonne laughed a little. "I am going to use that one now. I need you to turn the baby around for me." She said. "And before you ask about this one, no I'm not going to feed her. Judith wouldn't know how to feed from me, it's a skill set she doesn't have."
Daryl put Judith on the floor and she pulled out the pacifier and began to wail again. He got down on his knees and she started tugging at him again. He helped Michonne position Hope on the other side. "What kinda skill you need? You just put your mouth on it and suck. Seems to me like Lil' Asskicker's smart enough to figure that out."
"You wouldn't understand, Daryl, just feed her the formula." Michonne said, smiling.
"I don't know how to make it into formula. It's just powder." Daryl said.
"There are directions on the can, Daryl. Just measure out the powder in the bottle, add the water, and shake it up."
"Ain't got no bottle, neither. Yours is already mixed up. That could be a lot easier." Daryl said, having picked Judith back up so that she would stop crying.
Michonne smiled at the two of them. They'd often joked about Judith and her seemingly endless patience. If she wanted something and you picked her up, she would quit crying for as long as you needed her to. It was like she had learned that as long as you were holding her, she might not yet have what she wanted, but it was on its way.
"Check the back seat of Rick's car. There was a bag in there with some of Judith's stuff in it and I'm positive there's a bottle in there." Michonne said.
Daryl reluctantly started out the door again with Judith. By the time that he finally succeeded in finding the bottle and making the formula, Daryl was wholly convinced his plan had been a lot better than Michonne's in this case, but either way he finally had something to offer the baby.
"Yeah, now you gon' eat, but I ain't seen Carol attemptin' to make me nothin'." Daryl said. He carried Judith back inside and decided he needed to have a talk with Carol, who wasn't up yet. "Anyone here willin' to feed a baby?" Daryl asked. "I done all the hard stuff already."
"I'll do it." Sasha said. She was helping Michonne with Hope. Once she laid her down, she got up and took Judith from Daryl.
Daryl walked over to where Carol was lying, in the fetal position, and sat down. She wasn't asleep. She looked like she'd been crying, but she wasn't asleep. Daryl put his hand on her arm.
"I want to go back to the prison." Carol said, not moving.
"We can't go back to the prison, Carol, we gotta go forward, not backward." Daryl said.
"One day, Daryl. Hershel didn't even last one day out here before he committed suicide, what makes you think it'll be any different for the rest of us?"
"Don't think like that, Carol. Hershel didn't commit suicide, he gave himself up." Daryl said.
"It's the same thing." Carol said.
"No it ain't." Daryl responded. "Suicide is selfish, you do it just 'cause you're thinkin' 'bout you and how much you hurt. What Hershel did wasn't selfish it at all, he did it 'cause he was thinkin' that he didn't want everyone else to get hurt." Daryl said. "We gotta go on, we owe that much to Hershel. If you was to go back to the prison, you would be sayin' that Hershel died for nothin'. You gotta go on and you gotta live 'cause he gave you that."
"I felt like I could live at the prison." Carol said. "Now I feel like I'm just waiting to die, like we're all just waiting to die. It's like today it'll be me, tomorrow it'll be Beth…we're all just waiting to die."
"I reckon we are all just waitin' to die, but we gotta make sure we're waitin' a long time." Daryl said. "We're gonna go on, Carol, and we're gonna find somewhere even better than the prison." Daryl had been thinking about it, and he thought he might have a pretty good idea. He was going to present it to the group later. He was just going to present it, he wasn't going to talk to Rick about it first. Today Daryl didn't care about what Rick thought. He had sent Rick off with a bucket. Today Daryl felt like he was in charge. The only thing he cared about right now was convincing Carol to make him something to eat.
Carol sat up and wiped her eyes, looking at Daryl. There was something in his tone of voice that she hadn't heard a lot from Daryl. Daryl sounded sure of what he just said. He had said it as matter of factly as he would have told you his name was Daryl Dixon.
"Do you really believe that?" Carol asked.
"I do." Daryl said. Carol hugged him. She didn't say anything, she just hugged him for a few minutes and Daryl finally hugged her back. When they pulled apart, Daryl looked deep in thought.
"Carol…" He said.
"Yes, Daryl?"
"I think I'm gonna eat my boot in a minute." He said.
Carol smiled. "OK, Daryl, I'll make you some breakfast. It won't be hot, because I don't want to risk starting a fire, but it'll be better than your boot." Daryl got up and helped Carol up.
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"I think it's a solid plan." Glenn said. Carol had called them all together to eat what she had thrown together out of the canned goods they had. They were all sitting around eating and Daryl had revealed to them what he thought they should do.
"It's certainly better than anything we've heard so far." Maggie said.
Daryl was feeling proud of himself. The whole group seemed to not only be behind what he thought was best, but they actually seemed a little uplifted by it.
Michonne was proud of Daryl and she could see on his face that he was proud of himself. She was leaning against the wall, a little embarrassed that Daryl was feeding her bites of food at intervals. Her muscles were so tired and sore that when she'd tried to lift the fork, even with her left hand, her arm had shook badly enough to shake most of the food off of her fork.
"It's settled, then." Sasha said. "When Rick and Tyreese get back, we'll fill them in."
"Do you think Rick's gonna go for it?" Beth asked. She wondered if Rick was going to be mad that they'd all agreed on this without him, and maybe even that it hadn't been his idea. Rick didn't like to have things questioned, and Daryl's plan sort of suggested that Rick's had fallen short of the mark.
The thing that comforted Carol the most was that Daryl had answered a question for them that none of them had been given an answer to before. Rick's plan involved them going somewhere, but Rick had never really answered where they were going or how long it would take to get there. Daryl was offering them that, at least to the best degree that he could. He had given them a destination, and it felt like a goal that they could actually achieve.
"Rick don't always gotta have the last word." Daryl said.
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"So it's simple. We're scavengers now, so basically we're fine anywhere that we've got places to scavenge from. So we're gonna go until we've gone through about three towns. Then we find a place to hole up for the winter while clean out the surrounding area. Then we get up and go again until we get to another place to stop."
"I like it." Tyreese said. "It makes sense." The whole group had agreed.
"I don't think we're going to find another prison, but we might find something like a gated community." Glenn said. "We could make that safe."
"Sort of like our own Woodbury." Maggie said.
"We could maybe even have our own houses and all." Rachel said.
"A little privacy would be nice." Glenn added.
Rick couldn't really see any problem with the plan. In his mind he had seen them covering more ground than Daryl was suggesting, instead of sort of squatting in intervals, but he couldn't really see any flaw in the plan as long as they managed to find somewhere they could be protected for at least a little while. The whole group was behind the plan, so they would try it out and see if it worked. That was the best they could do.