Who else died at the first two-minute clip of ep 9? Got some glimpses of Mr. N. Reedus the other night at his LA collective opening, so that was fun, now on with the update:
It was decided that they would stagger the run, head out in small groups in different directions. For certain making the run as a larger mass would make them more formidable against any hostile groups they might encounter, but it was discussed and decided traveling together all as one would likely draw more trouble than repel — better to be quick, and stealth, and small. Better, if it should come to it, to lose some than all. They sorted themselves into threes: Peter, James, and Michael; Simon, Rob and John; with Beth, Daryl and Tom making up the third. No one is to stay behind at camp, it would be too difficult to defend under attack with just a few there. If confronted with any formation of walkers greater than a cluster, if confronted with anyone living, it would necessitate an immediate evacuation anyhow (if one could be managed), so, better then to leave the camp, to chance and to the walkers, and afterwards to return with caution to discover what remains.
James Peter and Michael have the furthest to go, heading south-east to a town they suspect might be worth the risk, in balance of what it might have to offer. With the most miles to cover, and potentially the biggest haul to bring back, it is they who take the bikes. Discovering something more about the camp's defenses and resources, Daryl and Beth had learned the camp keeps four mountain bikes hidden in the brush, positioned – one in each direction – not too far from camp. The idea being, should they ever have occasion to flee or get somewhere in a hurry, they can. Two can ride on one when necessary, but not on a run, not when the point is to bring things back to camp. So three bikes go with them as does one pair of the night vision goggles.
Sorted and organized they said their goodbyes, meaningful enough to matter, and to last, if this does happen to be the last time they meet, but light enough, and candid and joking enough not to hang a heavy pall over their enterprise; no one wants to be morose. James hugged his cousin, holding him tightly round the neck and kissing the top of his head, and then shoved John back with a smirk and a nonchalant air. Michael hugged everyone, twice, even Daryl. Tom and Rob kidded back and forth, never saying a 'goodbye' or 'take care' or even 'good luck', but meaning it. Simon had tried at playing it cool, as the three groups splintered off, but it was in his eyes, and the others knew the youngest of them was anxious at their parting.
As James Peter and Michael head south, making strong purposeful athletic pedals as they ride standing upright, crashing through the forest growth with speed, John leads his group northward, making towards a little farming town, not unlike the one Beth was raised in. They carry with them two handguns, poorly loaded, four knives and the second pair of night goggles. They carry with them also a shovel, a compact one, reaching just to their hips if stood upright, carried slung round John's back with his pack, kept as a weapon as much as a tool. Heading west, on the lower ground, Tom leads the way as he Beth and Daryl course their way to a small suburban town he and the boys have dipped into once before already. Tom has a knife, a good one, and he carries in his back waistband a pistol with two rounds. Slung back across his shoulder is an aluminum baseball bat he fixed with 4mm nylon rope. Beth carries her knife in her belt and another in her boot. Daryl has his knife, and the crossbow. Rob wasn't eager to give it over, and Daryl would have understood if he hadn't, the bow is not his to claim, but what it came down to was: the suburb they're heading to stands more of a chance of being overrun than the farm town, and Daryl had more than proved his prowess with the bow. The ruling had been made logically and without passion; the weapon went with who could use it best and to where, by best judgment, it would be most needed.
The three groups set out early. After a large breakfast and an equal division of provisions and the thorough filling of canteens they said their goodbyes, and got on their way. In the morning hours Tom leads them first, walking through the woods with the sun behind them, still not risen above the trees. They pass walkers as they travel; the ones closest to camp have all been killed already, left by one member of the group or another to rot and ingloriously decompose, which is what they are doing. They never risk burning them, the fire might burn past their control and burn them all out, and even if not, pillars of smoke rising above the tree line does little to maintain a low profile. The carcasses are left to continue their decay without animation, as should have been the case for them all from the start. The stench as they pass is awful and could only be worse if the day were warmer, but they move quickly and do not linger.
They eat while they walk, not sparing time for any unnecessary stops. Through the day each takes turns leading the march, keeping the pace steady when another starts to lag. Beth tries at conversation a couple of times, nothing sticks for long as they walk, but they do talk a little. Tom tells some about his life before, and a little of his journey to Georgia after. He moves on from there, keeping them amused, eliciting a few chuckles; he has an off-kilter, wry absurdist sense of humor and somehow the absence of anything funny in the last years hasn't squashed absolutely the presence of mirth in him. With all said though, he is not a fool.
They talk some about the coming winter, about what they hope to find in town, more about what they should look for, what they should prioritize. They talk some of strategy, they don't know each other well enough to manage a run without some orchestration. Though Beth can read Daryl without signal or sound, and he her, they do not have this with Tom. They set a plan, and they review signals. They set a contingency plan, and formulate a back up to that. Before they parted the three groups had established multiple meet up points, the camp is only one locale at which they might all reconnoiter; if it is not safe there are other locations to try; they review these too, but mostly they move in silence.
Mostly they slip past the walkers they encounter though a few times they had to engage, another two times they had to run. Early mid-afternoon Beth saved Tom; he'd broken formation, by no fault of his own, and was getting closed in on, forced back further and further away from her and Daryl. Beth completed her kill, yanked back her knife, and drove it immediately inwards and upwards through the neck, into the skull of one of those in deadly pursuit of Tom. With the blade in she released the hilt from her grip and shoved the thing forcefully, with all her might, into another one, pushing it off its course, away from Tom. She then yanked another one to her, and into the dank hollow eye socket of its skull plunged in her second knife, taking it down, thrusting it aside and stomping powerfully on the head of one Tom was wrestling on the ground. By that time Daryl was free to shoot the other down and Beth extended her hand to reach down and help Tom to his feet. They stood, they caught their breath, he wiped his face, Daryl wordlessly glanced over Beth, and they moved on.
They walk, through shadows, through brush, over train tracks and back roads. They keep moving, chasing the light, trying to make their destination before dark. They pass by several tableaus of past violence, pain and death. Camps bloodily abandoned, vehicles smashed and burned, corpses killed before they ever turned. It's too much to discern the stories, to translate the pain, they let them be, the past has claimed them, the souls in those stories have found their peace or not, they cannot attach themselves to what's gone and was never theirs to lose. Eyes forward, pace steady, minds focused, they walk. They have to. There's nothing else to do if they'd wanted.
Topics of conversation drift in and out, for the most part their journey is quiet, they focus on the walk, focus on the time they're keeping, focus on the energy they're exerting, focus on the task ahead. All of them had talked it over the night before, made lists in their heads, specific lists. Lists of what to look for and where to look for what, what to take, what to leave behind, what to prioritize, what not to bother with, which location is more likely to yield which items. They talked everything from garden hoses and peppercorns to bleach, batteries and pillow cushions. They talked plans and contingency plans, all the while knowing nothing anymore ever plays out in accordance with a plan. They have to stay loose, alert, and in the moment. They have to rely on the others they're with and make decisions in the moment.
As their approach draws closer Beth again follows Tom, and Daryl behind her as they navigate the thinning woods toward town. It is not winter yet, but every day the air grows cooler. So crisp that waking in the morning and breathing in sometimes cuts one's breath halfway in; though the distance is long, Beth is glad for the exercise, this is the warmest she's been in days. (Strange to reflect in the light of all those weeks and months Daryl and she had spent overheated and sweltering.) Though traveling most of the day over mostly rough terrain with no cut path, the journey is easy; they've been conditioned for this, and Beth and Daryl's days in camp have left them revitalized and strong.
When they make it into town it's under the fall of darkness. Stepping out of the tree line Daryl finds himself missing the advantage of the military grade night vision. As much as they can see, there's little movement; no sign of walkers, no sign of the living. It cannot be this easy they know, but this is what they've come for, so alert and with great stealth they push forward. Tom keeps his senses keen, scanning for the dead; Daryl moves with precise caution, looking not just for signs of walkers, but of anything that moves, many crack of light that might betray a concealed encampment. Beth is attuned, and alert, and moves with weapon at the ready, looking for signs of which houses have likely been raided before. Meaning not to waste time on buildings already ransacked and emptied, they move through the first streets, being cautious not to move too deep into town before they know what they're facing. Tom guides them some, recalling off-hand which structures he remembers hitting last spring. Save for the moon, which is near full and low and yellow, the streets are dark. They'd held off on the run a few days to time it with the light; with only one still-working flashlight between them it was an essential measure to take. The darkness is constant, no trace of light creeps through at any point.
"If anyone's here—" Daryl's gruff voice mutters low as he turns round on his spot in the desolate street, making a 360 sweep, the crossbow armed, raised, and at the ready "—they're packed in tight f'r the night." The strain in his ready biceps lessens just fractionally, "We're either gonna find 'em or not."
It's decided then, they move in — the quicker they scavenge and get what they need, the quicker they're back on the road. Daryl moves ahead, Tom and Beth follow in cover, and he kicks in the first door. They move from house to house in muted silence under the cover of darkness. They gather blankets, winter clothes, batteries, kitchen knives and bludgeoning tools. They grab matches, what rolls of toilet paper they can find, a bottle of aspirin, a shovel. Beth scores a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, Tom finds a water filter, which he almost just lets be, Daryl finds a carton of bullets, but no firearm to match. There's more, a hand-crank coffee grinder, because they still can't find a pistol and mortar, though Beth is certain there must be some around. Rope, or wires, they even venture into some easy-accessed attics and tear down some insulation. They work into the night, creeping through houses, moving quickly, without sound and without light, using nothing but the brightness of the moon and their alerted senses to navigate.
They smell for walkers, they listen; they take out more than several. They feel for what they're looking for, not risking drawing in the attention of the living, not risking the giveaway of their flashlight light unless deep with the structure of a house. On occasion they allow themselves quick flashes of glow sticks when needed, when deep inside dark rooms; last year the boys thought to clear a party store, and though there was little there of use — paper plates with no food, plastic clothes with no warmth, rubber masks upstaged by every monstrous walker outside — they did walk away with a large stash of glow sticks and glow necklaces and every other stupid piece of jewelry a factory in China could possibly create from glow-able plastic tubing. The glow sticks prove effective for exactly this kind of work – their light is low and dim, illuminating just what it's held over but throwing near no light beyond.
Though their eyes have adjusted to the dark it is frightening work. At each new door they the introduce some noise, something to announce their presence and stir up anything that might be lurking in the shadows before they insert themselves within them, but each new doorway remains an opportunity to be beset upon, another risk of stumbling into a nest of theretofore stagnant walkers, to walk head first, blindly into death. Their heart rates never settle. The whole night is breathless comfortless coursing adrenaline, never paralyzing them with fear just thundering through them, pushing them on. Searching houses is the gamble they agreed upon, and now they must see it through.
They work efficiently, like practiced burglars; the mental lists they built and reviewed serve them well, as as rushed as they are, and faced with so many mundane luxuries they've had to forego, in the moment it tests them to leave behind what earlier they might have taken. Survival is an ever changing game, requiring the retraining of the mind not once, but continuously. They are selective in what they take. A lot of what Daryl would have grabbed on a run when supplying the prison or while back on the farm now gets left behind. Creature comforts no longer make the cut, and now that they're foraging they're own food, cooking outdoors, some things are more vital than they were — tarps, trash bags, plastic sheeting, mosquito netting, chalk, wind chimes, tin foil, salt, every shaker and packet and carton they can find. It's warm clothes, weapons, tools, medicine, and food, if they can find any. They pack backpacks and duffle bags, Tom finds a shopping cart. They pack in what they can, gather what can be carried, prioritizing ruthlessly, and leave the rest behind. They take no more books, Beth finds no art. It isn't that they can't think about those things, or appreciate them, but that it feels safer, cleaner, to stay light, and unburdened. What the boys keep reminding them is, what's kept them alive is their willingness to walk away from their home in the trees, and it's best not to make it too hard to walk away from.