Chapter 12
"Herd's passing through." Carl squinted through binoculars. "Big one, too. Wanna see?"
"No, I see 'em. Damn," Michonne said in a low voice. They lay on top of an old overturned semi-truck that had slid down the steep embankment behind them long ago. Vines had become to reclaim the litter of cars that had been abandoned on the winding road above, and then at some point, a mudslide dashed them away like pieces on a chess board.
Carl sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Figures. We've got a big one in there, so of course there'll be a herd."
The gun range lay ahead about half a mile or so. Michonne had scoped this place out earlier, the car graveyard provided decent cover and the advantage of lookout post.
Walkers, dozens of them, clumped in a herd. They'd usually meet up with one another eventually, traveling in a sort of pack that took no notice of one another. Just a shared group of ravenous husks. Oftentimes, the noises they made themselves were enough to draw others.
Michonne exchanged the binocolars for a smudged bottle of eyedrops, which Carl took gratefully. She peered through the lenses, assessing the group herself.
"Thought you didn't want 'em."
"Shut up."
This group had been gathering around the range- actually more stuck then gathering, by the looks of it. Tangles of overgrown blackberry bushes, untended and free to encroach on mud-and-gravel parking lot. The more walkers gathered, the more got tangled as they pushed into one another. The noise drew more of them, and more got stuck. Now they'd turned into a giant mass of shredded, rotting flesh. It stank. It stank bad.
"Dad's going to be pissed."
"Worse. He's going to want to do something about it." Michonne rolled her eyes and winced as she shifted her weight.
Carl groaned and rolled over on his back. "Yeah," he said. "But that's when he's at his best."
"Mmm." Michonne grunted, her lips tugged into a frown. "Let's head back. We're losing daylight, and this mess is only going to get worse."
/ / / / /
"It's only going to get worse."
Willow inspected the angry slashes on Redtail Tim's hand. Careless, as usual.
"My own trap," Tim said, shaking his head. "She bit me…ow!"
"Good, maybe next time you'll remember not to yank your hand out!. Cut the trap and bring it in, then I can remove it."
She couldn't tell if the alcohol in the air was from the batch she'd poured over his wound, or from his breath. Likely both. Careless injuries were up again, and not just from Tim. They'd start pilfering her medical supplies soon, in search of the strong stuff. Tim was already glancing around the tent, trying to size up where her bottles were in case he needed to come again.
Willow's home, her big army tent, was where the sick, injured, liars, or a mix of those three wandered in. Redtail Tim was only the latest. He looked like a prison inmate awaiting sentencing as he sat on a folding chair, shirtless and barefoot, black tattoos snaked up his arms and blossomed on his chest in an intricate tiger stripes of swirls and lines. They crept all the way up his neck onto his head, where they curled around his ears and up his shaved skull. He looked terrifying in battle, and could be terrifying in general, although now he was more drunk than injured, a complacent lion. Willow rooted through a frayed duffle bag in the corner of her tent until she found a horrible-smelling poultice. They both grimaced, but Tim allowed her to lather the wound and bandage it.
"The ladies won't be too pleased," he grunted, wrinkling his nose as some of the foul brownish stuff oozed from the edge of the bandage.
"Weren't too pleased to begin with," Willow said, snapping the lid back on. "You won't be missing anything now that you weren't missing before. Neither will they."
"Bitch." Tim squeezed her shoulder with his good hand and stood up. He lumbered out, pausing in the doorway. "Thank you. Lee is pregnant again, could do with some of your teas."
Willow smiled. "Congratulations, she must be thrilled." No, she isn't. "I'll stop by tomorrow morning and bring her some."
"You trying again tonight? To speak with her?"
"Yes. Are you on shift?"
"Fuck no, we give that to the young bucks now. She isn't going to see you."
Willow shrugged and turned her back to him, pretending to root through her things to take inventory. "I need to talk to her. It's worth a try."
"Probably said the same thing when they launched the Titantic."
"Why doesn't she just kill me, if I'm so offensive to her?"
Tim shrugged. "Blood is different." With that, he pushed through her tent flap, into the night. Cool air rushed in, and she heard fires crackling out into camp. Low laughter. Warmth.
She packed her bag for the night: a book, mystery of course, some jerky and a carefully wrapped basket of berries balancing on top. She thought for a moment, and shoved in some extra rags- ruining a perfectly good book with berry stained fingers…
Ruiner. Ruiner of all things.
Willow waved the memory away and stormed out into the night. She walked away from the glowing fires, away from friends (what friends?), and towards the yawning maw of a cave- the cave that they had settled outside of.
Willow nodded to the guards outside the cave, although they didn't acknowledge her, they allowed her to perch near the campfire and crack open her book. The guards did look like young bucks, as Tim had said. Sturdy young men whose facial hair finally came growing in some vague formidable way, baby fat burned away from hours of training and the slightest edge of hardness in their eyes. They would look at her with a mix of pity and disgust, the traitor daring to get this close, though they didn't say anything. She ignored them, not really but she pretended, and crouched near the light of the fire, ripping pieces of jerky with her teeth and reading the same dog-eared book she brought last time, and the time before that, and before that. The guards didn't understand, in their naïve youth and bravado (thought she was likely only a few years older).
She'd wait for as long as it took, her own stubbornness could rival- if not exceed- that of the Witch. They both knew that.
Light danced up the entrance to the cave, casting long, demonic shadows. Strange sounds echoed from within: hints of words, or gasps, or moans that echoed into one another until they because snippet bursts of sound, like animal calls. She read the same sentence over and over without comprehending it as the sounds grew louder, and more haunting. Was it a party inside, or something sinister?
Perhaps both, she thought. The two often intertwined here. She sighed and settled down. It would be just another long night, waiting and waiting for her sister to acknowledge her, if she could even call her that anymore.
Sister. It didn't seem to mean anything these days. Before, before all of this, it had meant everything.
/ / / / /
"Stop it, both of you! For god's sake, you're brothers!" Lucy shoved apart the twins, bracing her forearms against their chests. They tried to lunge forward again, like elks locking horns, but between them was an immovable force. She only had to look at the other children in the room, and they flew out, shutting the door behind them.
"Jesus, what's gotten into you?"
Blood poured from Ethan's nose, and Nathan's knuckles were scraped and bleeding. Both had black eyes and bruises, and what looked suspiciously like bite marks – human, not walker, thankfully.
They stood silent on either side of her, looking intensely at one another over her head. Their chests heaved against her hands, and occasionally one would try to move towards the other until Lucy threw her weight towards them.
They were big now, as tall, if not taller, than most adults. But they still had the hearts of children, struggling and stumbling into adulthood in a cruel and uncaring world. The twins rarely fought, they were usually thick as thieves, but when they did it was akin to guerrilla warfare. They never shared what it was over usually, either. A bloody nose, a black eye, a few hours of ignoring one another and it was back to normal.
"You guys can't keep beating the holy hell out of one another when you're pissed. If you won't let me mediate, then talk to each other, for God's sake!" Lucy grabbed both of them by the collar and sheparded them into a nearby storage room. "Don't come out until you've worked it out, and if you destroy that room, you're both sleeping outside for the next month."
She heard a massive sigh from behind the door, then silence.
Tensions were high in Littlechapel. Eyes were watching everywhere, the kids were in a constant state of unease. Patrols reported unusual findings – tokens of animal teeth scattered into bizarre patterns, dyed sticks that spelled out unintelligible messages. Lucy doubled the guards on the walls after they found a hole dug under part of the fence in a poorly-lit section. Could be an animal, could be something else. Lucy leaned towards something else.
She looked out over their home in the mid-afternoon daylight. It was getting cold now, the kids were zipped up in ill-fitting jackets and fleece hats pulled over their ears. The summer crops had long been harvested, now the fall crops were growing in. They no longer sang and laughed and teased one another at work. Now they spoke in quiet hushes, like a dozen winds blowing gently through the settlement.
Lucy stopped by Stark's workbench in the garage. He was hunched over his latest prize: a ham radio. They'd found it weeks ago on a scavenging trip tucked away in a hunting cabin, though it was coated in years of dust and had been damaged by a partially collapsed roof. The bench was littered with manuals yellowed from weather and age, scatterings of various screws and implements, and a handful of food wrappers.
Lucy smiled and scooped up the wrappers to throw them away. Stark jumped in surprise at the noise, but quickly collected himself.
"Hey," he grunted. His glasses reflected off the bright light on his workstation, giving them a whitish glow. "I need some of those – the wrappers are useful conductors in some of 'em."
"Oh. Hey yourself." She handed him the bin, and he dug through the top and took them back. Lucy looked down with feigned interest at the radio. It didn't look like much.
"How's it going? It already looks miles better than when we found it."
"Mmm. Need a part. A fuse for sure. But even if I get this thing started, the transmission radius won't be far. Well, not far enough for us, probably."
"So, no one will hear us anyways, even if we get it going?"
Stark shrugged. "Probably not. Ham radios usually have less than a 20-mile radius, according to these old things." He gestured vaguely at the manuals.
Lucy shook her head. "We're at least 30, 40 miles deep in the forest. That won't do at all if we're trying to call to the outside world."
"Yep. We need a radio repeater."
"Ah, okay. And that is…?"
Stark sighed, and took off his glasses to rub his eyes. Lucy bit back a smile, he already looked like a weary old man at a whopping nine years of age. He was used to translating the technical bits to be more digestible for others, though he still let everyone know how tiresome it was.
"It'll boost the signal, basically," he said after a moment.
"So, where do we find one of these?"
Stark shrugged. "Beats me. Maybe in an old forester outpost? The shack that held this might have one, too. They're big, several pieces of equipment that will be as big as one or two of the filing cabinets in your office."
"Sounds like they're going to use up a lot of juice."
Stark shrugged. "Probably will."
"And the truck will be crucial."
"Yep."
Shit. Did they really need this radio, just in case things got out of control? Every day, "just in case" seemed to shift slowly into a more definite world. Lucy leaned against the garage wall, listening to Stark hum as he got lost once again in tinkering. The hole under the fence, the strange oddities left behind… the Coven was ramping up for something. Last time, it was to slaughter their chickens and take their food. The weather was turning again, was the Witch ill-prepared for another winter? They were already giving them more than enough food, or so Lucy thought.
She sighed and turned to Stark. "Pack your bag, we'll leave tomorrow morning."
Stark looked up, surprised. "What? Why am I going?"
Lucy cocked an eyebrow. "You're the only one who knows what the hell we are looking for. You'd think I'd let you sit here all cozy while we bust our butts only to bring you some dicombobulating nonsense? No way. Crack of dawn, Stark. Get plenty of sleep."
With that, she left the garage, ignoring the quiet stream of swears that Stark muttered under his breath.