Yep, back! I know, I know, long time. I bet you all forgot about this silly thing and all, but I'll update anyways. For my sake. ^_^
Just a reminder that Merle's racist thoughts and beliefs are not my own, but you all know that anyways. I hope.
Chapter Forty-Six: Marassa Jumeaux
**Carol**
Inside, the cabin was packed full of ammunition and supplies and as Adele and Carol wove through the stacks of boxes and crates, they came upon an old black man sitting on an half rotted stool in the middle of the path left by the boxes, holding a shotgun and humming and singing to himself.
"If it keeps on rainin', the levee's gonna break," he sang softly in a rich, sorrowful tone. "And the water's gonna come and I'll have no place to stay."
He stopped as they approached and turned milky eyes on them.
"Who's that sneaking up on me?" He asked in a drawling accent similar to both Adele's and the Lieutenant's. Carol could only assume he came from Louisiana as well.
"It's me, Charon."
"I know," he said with a small, proud grin. "You smell like apple blossoms. It stands out among the sea of fetid men outside these walls. Who's this with you?"
"This is Carol, she's a friend."
"She's cleaner than most women who arrive at our door. I can smell the soap. What is that? Dove? Smells nice. Where do you come from, girl?"
"Another group." Carol said softly.
"They know we're in the neighbourhood?" Charon asked.
"Yes."
"Good. They have time to prepare, better than most. What can my old carcass do for you ladies, Adele?"
"It's time, Charon." Adele said softly.
"We get St. James back yet?"
"No, we're doing this without him. Right now." Adele said.
The old man sniffed. "I don't know, Adele. Without that boy, could be risky."
"St. James was just our escape," Adele whispered. "We can make it without him."
"You leaving him behind, honeychild?"
Carol looked over in time to see Adele swallowing down her fears thickly. "He'd want it this way."
Charon shrugged. "Okay, sweet Adele, it's time, then. Come on, follow me."
Following him, Carol jumped back in surprise as the trap door into a cellar she had once hidden in thumped and bumped, a shoddily made chain lock keeping it from opening.
"Mind your feet," Charon warned her ominously.
From the moans and snarls and the smell of fresh death, Carol knew instantly what the men of this group kept in the cellar of the cabin and from the two walkers they had used to distract her back at the prison she knew exactly why they kept them.
Carefully jumping over the trap door, she followed Adele and Charon to the bedroom of the cabin and entered inside.
The old, blind man ran his hands down box upon box of chemicals, until he paused at a particular one. It was labelled potassium carbonate, but when he pulled a few plastic jugs out of the box, Carol saw they were labelled potassium cyanide instead.
She looked at Adele who seemed nervous about the jugs.
"Adele—"
"The women make the food, the men eat first," Adele said.
"You don't understand," Carol reasoned. "They'll come back easily—"
"When they're down," Adele went on firmly. "The women take the guns and keep them down. That's the plan."
"And you needed St. James for…?"
"Martin," Charon broke in. "Girl can't be expected to put down her own daddy."
"Unless you have a better idea how to kill that many men?" Adele suggested. "I've thought long and hard about it, Carol. Every night hiding in my daddy's tent least one of those bastards get their hands on me again. The women don't really know how to fight, but we've all learned how to cook."
Carol didn't for one second miss Adele's ill-omened sounding 'again' in that speech and filed it away for another time. Instead, she asked, "what if some of the men don't eat?"
"They will. Everyone comes in for meals, except the guards in the woods, but by then we'll have the firepower and the element of surprise."
"Nothing's ever so simple," Carol remarked.
"No, but this is our best chance. Porridge today," she said. "We'll mix it in with the oatmeal and hand out the rations to the women. Give them the signal so they know what's up."
"What if the other men come back before we can follow through with this?" Carol asked. "Find us in the middle of…doing it?"
"You said you wanted to help me," Adele insisted. "Are you going to balk the entire time? Every single one of these men is a bon rien and I'm not going to sit here one more night and patch up another woman. St. James was right, it's hard to look a woman in the eye knowing what she puts up with on a nightly basis and being unable to do anything. We're doing something now, Carol. It's happening. Daddy said it'd get better, but it's only gotten worse and…he's a son-of-a-bitch anyways. Nothing but a devil with a forked tongue."
"Still your daddy," Charon pointed out wisely.
Adele stroked the old man's hand as it rested on her shoulder. "Yeah, but Carol can do what I can't."
"Okay," Carol said. "If this is what you want, then I'll help you the best I can. But be careful, Adele. Please? No wild risks."
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**Daryl**
"What would you do? If it was your dad?"
Standing around with a few of the others, getting their gear straightened out and ready, Glenn asked Rick the question which had been hanging over the group since they found out the man leading the other group had been the Lieutenant's biological father.
Rick, who was adjusting the sights on one of the flashy assed .50 millimetre rifles they had salvaged from the Marine base, looked up from it and glanced in the direction of their Lieutenant as he stood with Vivian and Carter showing them how to properly hold a combat knife in self-defence situations.
"If my dad was a rapist," Rick began thoughtfully. "I wouldn't hesitate."
"But he's still your father," Delgado pointed out.
"Makes no difference. Back before all this, on the force, being called to the scene of a rape was always the one thing, the one thing that made me sick to my stomach. You ever see a woman after something like that? After having something taken from her, not something she can go out and buy or replace or fix, but that something. They have this look. Like shame? Like it was their fault. Like maybe they had done something, said something to deserve it. It's this look that…"
Everyone held their breath as Rick struggled to find his words, moving his jaw and lips as though working his mouth around the very thought of the evil of the crime.
"There isn't a single woman, not one female on this earth who has ever asked to have that something taken, ripped from them and yet every one I've seen, I've looked into her eyes has a piece missing. So, Corporal," he stated firmly, "there is nothing. I mean, nothing. That would make me hesitate to put a rapist down."
The men present suddenly all seemed very aware of the difference between the sexes. Daryl, for one, found himself very aware
"Could you imagine how the Lieutenant must feel?" Glenn said after a moment. "Being the child of a rapist and the woman he…you know?"
"He once told me," Delgado said. "That he feels like he's not even human some days. Everyone, most people," he amended, "were born of joy and pleasure and he came to be, because of the force of one man's strength and the weakness of his conscience. People, he said, who knew what he was, looked at him like he was the infected wound of an assault that never healed, horror and shock and mild pity, but never like he was a flesh and blood man."
"If it were my daddy, I wouldn't shoot him," Daryl snarled a sudden, almost blinding rage rising inside him, turning his blood boiling hot. "I'd tie the asshole to the back of my truck and drag him up and down the highway for a few days."
He wasn't pissed off at the old man for not being able to control his dick. He was mad because a man like Fay shouldn't have to ever feel like something less than human. It wasn't right.
Daryl wasn't a phenomenal human himself, he never really did right by anyone before the world went to shit and he wasn't no damned hero who rescued damsels or beloved cats from burning houses, but Fay never once looked at him like he was anything less than a human. The Cajun, while wary in the beginning, had treated Daryl like a long lost brother from the very first. A man like him was almost like home. Like wherever he was, whoever was with him, was home and safe.
"Fuck this Martin Deveau," he went on sourly. "And fuck his people. We're the law now."
Dolly nodded in agreement. "Shooting a man like that is too quick and easy."
"The Lieutenant's not like that," Glenn said. "Isn't he? I mean, he wouldn't go psycho on the man or anything? I've heard about Marines and soldiers having breakdowns like that then…you know turning the gun on themselves or others. Snapping."
Suddenly the realization that the Lieutenant might have more than a bullet in mind for Martin Deveau spread over the group and they all looked amongst themselves.
"No," Rick said. "That's not his style."
"Still," Merle added. "Can't tell what's in a man's mind."
"No," Delgado argued. "If anything, Sarge is duty first. Always has been. That man has no regard for his own life when it comes to saving others."
Daryl, who knew better than any of them what exactly that meant, nodded.
"Let's just hope he doesn't trade his life for ours or Carol's," Delgado went on. "He'd do it, you know. No hesitation."
Somehow that didn't settle right with Daryl. He knew how reckless the dumb assed Cajun was with his own life when it came to others and it rang true, settling heavy in his gut like cheap beer.
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"Okay," Rick said, as soon as everyone was outfitted and properly armed. "We have two hours before the team heading for the exchange gets going. I want everyone ready to move at a moment's notice."
Milling about the vehicles, everyone sighed. No one wanted to just wait around.
"Anyone know any good jokes?" Dolly asked as they hunkered down in the shade of the Humvee.
"Pace?" Vivian asked the cowboy.
He sniffed. "Alright, so there's this Scotsman, and he just gets back from a wedding and he's in a bar, or pub whatever the fuck they call it, and he's clad in full kilt and regalia, and he's drinking, getting three sheets to Mother Mary's wind and he finally decides he's had enough and staggers out of the bar into the night.
So this Scot he's bobbing and weaving his pale ass home and finally he can't go any further, so he tumbles just off the street to sleep it off on a grassy patch there.
About an hour later these two beautiful young women are walking by, heading home from a dance and they're looking pretty, you know, dolled up with lace and ribbons and all manners of girly crap and they find this man in a kilt sleeping there on the edge of the street.
So the one says to the other 'I wonder if it's true about Scotsmen and what they don't wear under their kilts' and the other gets a kind of wicked look in her eye as they kneel down by the Scotsman."
Spying Merle moving across the yard, heading for where the Lieutenant stood apart from everyone, Daryl got to his feet as well and headed for them.
"You ain't going to go all Apocalypse Now on us, are you frog-ass?" Merle demanded in his tactful way. "Maybe put a rifle barrel in your mouth or something?"
Daryl slowed his approach, moving behind a nearby truck so as not to disturb the two of them.
"Merle, always eloquent," the Cajun mused. "Naw, if there's one thing I learned from the last time I nearly died, it's that I actually have people waiting for me back home."
The two men fell silent as the Lieutenant continued to coil up a rope from the back of the SUV they were standing at. It was busy work, but Daryl knew the Cajun was trying to get his mind off things by doing something.
"That Mary Agnes," the Lieutenant said after a moment. "She's kind of sweet on you, I heard."
"Course she is, the woman ain't blind," Merle stated with a winning grin. "So, how do you bag a nun?" He asked as Daryl finally moved to join them.
"Show her you're cross," the Cajun murmured. "No, wait, that's a different punchline."
"You ever hear the one about the nun and the blind man?" Merle asked.
Daryl, hopping up onto the hood of the SUV, fished in his pocket for one of those rolled cigarette's he had squirreled away after Delgado's men offered him a couple and lit it.
"So there's this nun and she's in the bath one evening and there's a knock on the door, well she's just getting out of the tub and she's stark naked, so she calls out 'who is it?'. There's a pause before a man answers, 'it's the blind man, can I come in?'. Well, the nun figures there's no harm in letting a blind man in if she's in the buff, so she bids him enter. The door opens and there's a man standing there with a toolbox in one hand and a bundle of blinds in the other, he takes a look at her and says 'nice tits, but I'm here to install the blinds'."
"There's blinds on the windows in the convent, isn't there?" Daryl mused slyly, exhaling.
The Lieutenant beamed at the coil of rope he was now turning over and over in his hands. "Funny, cabri."
"Grace has some nice tits," Merle mused. "Small though."
"Size doesn't matter, Merle," Rick murmured.
Daryl jumped a little. He didn't even see the man standing just to the side of them with Glenn beside him. As he recalled, Lori's weren't much bigger than Grace's, so Rick would know.
"Precisely, Rick," the Lieutenant agreed. "You realize, Grande Beede," he went on turning back to Merle, "that the way we talk about their breasts, is probably how they talk about our cocks, right?"
"As long as they're thinking about mine, I don't care much," Merle said with a grin. "Means they're two steps from doing something about it."
"Women don't talk about things like that, do they?" Glenn asked.
"Don't let them fool you with their tittering and the coy fluttering of their eyelashes," Merle said. "They talk. A lot. Which means big trouble for you, Asian-boy."
"What's that mean?" Glenn demanded.
"Asians have small dicks," Merle stated. "That's fact."
"So do you, white-boy," Tyreese said, joining them from the house. "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
"Well, before we all whip them out," Rick interrupted them. "Let me remind you that we're here representing our group and should probably talk about these kinds of things back home."
"What? At the convent? In the church?" Merle demanded. "With the nuns?"
"Don't worry about us," Eve called over from where her and Delgado's people were congregating. "You boys just pull them out and we'll measure if you need an extra pair of hands!"
Beside her Dolly laughed as her daughter turned red to the roots of her hair and bowed her head in horrified dismay.
"Of course, Tyreese," Dolly said with a wink and nudge thrown to Eve, "they say tall men have the biggest. So I guess the Lieutenant would beat you all hand's down."
"On that note," the Lieutenant said, throwing the rope into the back of the SUV and slamming the hatch. "Think I'll see a man about a horse."
"No fair chubbing it before we measure!" Merle called out after him.
Daryl scoffed as Tyreese and Glenn laughed and Rick face palmed a little in embarrassment.
"It's not even four yet, Merle," Rick objected dourly.
"What? We can't get boners before teatime now?" Merle demanded.
"I'm going to wait in the house," Rick returned as the other men laughed, Daryl nearly falling off the hood of the SUV.
The laughter died then and quite unexpectedly Daryl's silent mind turned to thoughts of Carol. He wondered what she was doing, where she was. He knew she could take care of herself in a fair fight, but goddamn if he wasn't worried, almost sick to his stomach for her.
He felt that restless feeling buzzing in his legs and he hopped down from the hood of the SUV, approaching his brother.
"Hey, Merle, what's that joke about the blonde and the salami again?" He asked, in the hopes of distracting his mind. If he could distract it, then he could function properly, be more effective in getting Carol back safely.
"I got a better one," Merle said, giving the direction the Lieutenant had wandered off in a quick glance. "There's this Cajun and he's adrift in this lifeboat with a super model, an old woman and small raccoon…"
"The Cajun gives the old woman rabies," the Lieutenant broke in, returning from his excursion from behind the barn. "We've all heard that one and it was only funny the first time until you realize that rabies is very hard to sexually transmit unless you kiss on the mouth. Did you hear the one about the Cajun who bought a tortoise? He got nabbed on solicitation charges."
None of the men managed to get that joke, Daryl glancing over at Merle, before they both turned to Glenn, who shrugged.
"That joke translates better in French," the Lieutenant pointed out sheepishly.
"It's alright, man," Daryl said, "we all have our off days."
..-~-..
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**Carol**
She stood, bound by the wrists to make it look good, while Adele handed out the rations of oatmeal and cyanide to the women.
Around her the men all leered at her. They were scruffier looking than the men from her group and a lot of them looked like white trash countryfolk who – up until the end of civilization – had only lain with farm animals.
Each woman who came up for the rations was given a quiet, simple message by Adele to come into her tent later for some new clothes to be issued out to them. This was the signal that their carefully laid plans for rebellion were in motion.
She didn't like the plan, but Adele had a point, with only about seven women against thirty-forty some odd men, they didn't stand a chance with force.
Her only worries were for the handful of bikers that were missing from the head count and Martin Deveau, who had gone off – presumably – to think things over about news of his son. If they came back while the men here were dying off, then her and the other women would be dead, instantly. She didn't think the man would even hesitate over Adele, for all he seemed to care for her.
Though, a small part of her wondered. He did care enough to keep his girl away from the men, but Carol could only wonder about Adele's slip and that simple word 'again' that had rang in Carol's mind.
She could only assume at some point in the beginning of it all, some man had gotten a hold of her and thus produce Adele's state and her unwillingness to discuss it.
Maybe the men weren't exactly warned away from her by Martin, but scared off by something he did to the last man to get near Adele.
Or maybe. Maybe Adele was a willing partner in the making of the child growing inside her and Martin saw fit to get rid of the man, which would explain Adele's bitter attitude towards him.
There was a lot of conjecturing, but no real answers and as the women began to cook the oatmeal over the campfires, she decided to shove all thoughts that didn't involve the upcoming events out of her mind.
She needed to be quick and sharp, because if anything went wrong, if any sign that things were going sour she would need to get Adele and any other woman she could out of the camp and away.
Thoughts trickled into her mind, as well, of what Daryl and the others could be planning on their end. Surely they weren't going to just lie back and let things play out the way Martin wanted them to.
God help them all if things went wrong. With this many men dying, if they floundered, if they somehow got interrupted, they'd have hell and walkers pouring across Georgia and there'd be new threats spreading across their land.
Inside her, her guts were churning with nerves, not for killing the bastards, but for what could happen.
If any walkers got free, escaped them, if Daryl and the others were heading for the camp or planning something, they'd be comfortable with the lack of walkers they had lately, they wouldn't be as aware as they should be.
Maybe it was a bad idea, but it was too late.
She made her decision to stand by Adele, so she would.
Carol only prayed that God was on their side.
..-~-..
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The Voodoo Dialect
Marassa Jumeaux - The Marassa Jumeaux are children, but more ancient than any other of the Loa. "Love, truth and justice. Directed by reason." They synthesize the voodoo Loa as personification of divine power and the human impotence. Double life, they have considerable power which allow them manage people through the stomach.
The Marassa are somewhat different from standard Loa, both on a level above them, and counted in their number, they are both twins, and yet they number three, they are male and female, and both male and both female - an example of the Haitian worldview's capacity to retain two seemingly contradictory concepts. In some houses they are not channelled through possession in Vodou ritual, but served first after Legba.
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The Cajun Dialect
I felt I should explain the Lieutenant's seemingly bad joke (bad though it is in Cajun French as well) it's simply this. In Cajun French tortue is the word for both tortoise and a female's...erm...genitalia. Therefore, a Cajun who buys a tortue would be a Cajun who's technically soliciting a lady of the night or buying a turtle, I'm not one to make the assumption here.
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Claire Randall Fraser - I think so too.
Girl in a White Dress - I would love to see that! ^_^
DarylDixon'sLover - I'm trying! I promise!
Brazen Hussy - You know as well as I the potency of that sperm is a fact.
Surplus Imagination - Of course Daryl's torn up, but he's so used to bottling it up and hiding behind anger and general sulkiness.
GG - I kind of have a special place in my heart for Sister Joan too. She's almost overlooked a lot, but I think she's a powerhouse and may prove herself soon, I hope.
Guest - I'm glad you enjoyed the sperm thing. But I'm almost 98% sure it's a fact. I have to look it up, maybe google will know for sure. ^_^
Merle's Right Hand - Goddamned I missed you, lady. It's good to be back.
itsi3 - I'm actually a huge fan of Corpus Christi, I think it doesn't get as much credit for being as beautiful as it looks. It really looks like one of those peaceful, clean places.
mcmannusdixon - I'm glad you're enjoying it! Thanks for the review!
georgiapeachs - Thank you for the review! It was a treat after a long time spent away! ^_^