Chapter 4 – The First Rule

"I don't like this plan," Stevie declared, sulking in the back of the Humvee with Bruno's big head in her lap. "We should be avoiding people, not driving straight toward a dense population center that's getting denser by the minute."

Mama sighed, one hand resting lightly on the wheel and the other propping up her head, which was definitely lolling after yet another hour of being stuck in a traffic jam outside Atlanta.

"And following Shane?" the teen continued. "That's just nuts. Dude's nice eye-candy and a decent meat-shield, sure, but he's totally aggro, not to mention a literal chauvinist pig. Plus, he'll be way too busy shielding Lori and Carl to give a shit about us."

"Stevie," Mama admonished weakly, glancing at the distracted preteen in the front passenger seat to ensure that little ears had not overheard the mild swear.

Sure enough, Stevie's sister remained oblivious, said little ears covered in headphones and most likely listening to a book on tape while her little hands fiddled with a pile of string. As part of physical therapy, Stevie had learned all sorts of crafts requiring finger dexterity. Her sister had learned alongside her for moral support. Thus far, the younger girl enjoyed friendship bracelets the most and had become an absolute fiend for new materials and patterns.

Needless to say, Stevie had an extensive and very much treasured homemade jewelry collection and was rarely without adornments on both wrists and ankles.

"I just want to understand your reasoning," she insisted. "Please tell me you're not trying to hit that."

"Stephanie Candace," Mama hissed, tone, mien, and use of the full name combining to indicate that the teen had crossed a line and should tread carefully.

But, well, she'd never been very good at exercising caution in her words or actions. "I'm pretty sure the widow Grimes has already called dibs," she continued, "And the only thing worse than getting involved with a man like Shane would be getting involved in a love triangle over a man like Shane."

"I'm not trying to hit that, as you so eloquently put it," the woman finally groused. "I recognize the wisdom of sticking with a group of adults I know and trust, even if I don't particularly like them."

Stevie huffed but didn't argue further. She knew that nothing she said would change her mama's mind, and the attempt had been more out of boredom than any real hope of success.

A few hours later, while they watched Atlanta burn, the teen wished she'd been more of a bitch about staying far the hell away from it.

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Stevie liked the Dixons, and they seemed to like her. Well, Merle did, probably because she'd responded to his initial lecherous greeting of "Well, hel-lo, jailbait," with "Sup, meth-mouth."

No one else had been at all amused. In fact, there'd been a lot of expressions that read downright appalled, and Mama had looked distinctly murderous. But when the man had just laughed uproariously, Stevie had known that she'd made a friend. A perverted, old, racist, junkie friend. (Well, he certainly wasn't her first. She really hoped that Dave and his flamingos were doing alright.)

Merle's brother, Daryl, didn't like people but did like Bruno, who was gaga for guts. And Bruno's esteem was inexorably intertwined with Stevie's presence, so the hunter just had to put up with and gradually became accustomed to it. The process was like desensitizing a skittish and standoffish stray cat to human interaction: it's slow and suspicious and involves a lot of adorable hissing, and then one day, you end up with a lap full of purring fluff-ball.

(She definitely was not to the latter stage but was certainly getting there (or the Dixon equivalent) at an alarming rate.)

It probably helped that one of the jobs Stevie assigned to herself, going through abandoned cars along the highway near the quarry campsite, often yielded cigarettes, all of which she was happy to give to Daryl. She just asked that he didn't smoke them while he was in camp or near her in general. The first time, when the man started to get upset about the caveat, she gestured to her scarred face and explained, "Mama's piece of shit husband was a big smoker. I still hate the smell."

Daryl had absolutely zero additional grumblings and later that evening wordlessly handed the teen a bandana full of rather tasty wild berries.

"The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club," Stevie quoted to her gaggle of charges, secure in the knowledge that not a single one was old enough to get the reference. Mining the highway was something she did on days when Glenn went on runs; that way, she could catch a ride out with him in the morning and back whenever he decided to return. On days when Glenn stayed in camp, Stevie generally did as well and watched the four younger kids throughout the morning, doing her best to tire them out so that they'd relax or nap during the hottest part of the afternoon and then sit still for (pointless, stupid, utterly irrelevant) schoolwork afterward. It was a good system, and the moms, including her own, appreciated the help.

They likely wouldn't have been as enthused if they'd known what Stevie was teaching the munchkins.

"What's the second rule of Fight Club?" she challenged the brats lined up before her with eager but solemn looks on their grubby little faces and improvised melee weapons in their grubby little hands.

In tandem, said brats chimed, "You DO NOT talk about Fight Club!"

She nodded, not feeling the need to impart the other six rules, which didn't apply to the current situation. Instead, the teen declared, "I'm showing you how to do this because it might save your life one day. However, if you're confronted by walkers, even just one, your first choice should always be to run and hide. If you're near something tall and steady, climb. Walkers can't climb. If not, find a car to lock yourself in. Heck, hop inside a dumpster and close the lid. A few hours in a stinky box are preferable to confronting undead diseased cannibals, nearly all of which are going to be bigger and stronger than you are. The bottom line is that killing walkers is something you do because you have to, not because you want to. It's not fun or cool. It's disgusting and dangerous and to be avoided whenever possible. Understand?"

The foursome agreed quietly, each clutching a hockey stick for the day's lesson. Stevie had found that hockey sticks were light, had excellent reach, and worked well for knocking down geeks—although such items weren't quite as good at actually dispatching geeks. Well, ultimately, she wanted the brats working in teams of two, one to knock down the opponent and the other to swoop in and put it out of its misery. Teaching the kiddos in a way that enforced the buddy system couldn't hurt, right?

"The curved part of a hockey stick is useful for tripping," she explained, using her own stick to demonstrate the maneuver on a dummy she had hanging from an overhead tree branch. The glorified piñata was just a set of male clothes that had been deemed too ripped and bloodstained to be salvaged; she'd snatched said set out of the rag/burn pile, tied off the arms and legs, duct-taped the shirt's hem to the pants' waistline as well as all the tears, stuffed the resulting sack with dry leaves, and topped it with a half-deflated soccer ball. Stevie hadn't gone full Cast Away and used her own blood to create a goofy face; she had, however, used a Sharpie to create a snarling face and named the monstrosity Wilson the Walker.

(Again, the kids didn't get the reference. The adults would probably be too angry to ask about it if they ever discovered what she was doing. Alas, her humor and wit would forever remain unappreciated.)

"You want to be behind the attacker if possible," Stevie continued. "That'll keep you more out of range of the teeth and arms. Getting grabbed will lead to getting bitten or scratched, so you need to stay out of grabbing distance, and behind a geek is the best spot for that. Well, other than just far away. In front or behind, your two main motions with the hockey stick are gonna be hook-" she demonstrated on the floppy ankles "-and jab-" she followed up with a blow to one of the limp, swaying knees. "A fresh corpse is a bit tougher to knock down, so don't be discouraged if you have to hit it multiple times. The important thing is to keep calm and keep some distance between you and it. Maybe all you'll be able to accomplish is knocking it down or disorienting it, but if that lets you run like hell and get to safety, then that's really all you have to do. You don't win by killing the walker. You win by staying alive. Everybody following me so far?"

There was a round of nods, the munchkins wide-eyed and worried but attentively copying her motions with their weapons. Once the kids stopped looking clumsy and uncertain, she had them step up one at a time to try the moves on Wilson. It wasn't anywhere near the same as bashing an actual walker, which she made sure to repeatedly point out, but Stevie certainly wasn't volunteering herself to get smacked around. A busted ankle or knee would be difficult to explain, difficult to treat, and possibly a death sentence. Trying to catch a specimen just for practice very briefly crossed her mind before being dismissed as lunacy (at least until the kiddos had a lot more training under their belts).

Carl and Eliza confidently and roughly battered the macabre piñata, but Louis and Stevie's sister were more hesitant. That wasn't surprising but didn't bode well for Stevie's buddy-system plans. After all, a kid who couldn't even knock over a walker certainly wasn't going to be able to kill it while it was down.

"Alright," the teen finally called, "Good job, guys. Take a water break, and then we're gonna practice climbing the rope again." She'd determined early on that one of the best ways for the kids (or anyone else, really) to get out of danger in the camp was to climb a tree. Unfortunately, none of the surrounding trees had very good handholds for climbing, and Lori had thrown a pissy little shit-fit when Stevie had started hammering planks into a trunk for a ladder (something about treehouses being far too dangerous for precious baby Carl, who'd looked ready to die of humiliation throughout the ordeal.) So, instead, the teen had hung a tire swing about every ten feet along the tree line. The adults hadn't asked; in fact, they'd just seemed mildly amused by her endeavor, which they seemed to think was purely recreational. And, well, the younger kids and even some of the grownups did enjoy the swings, so there was that. She'd just also made said kids swear to learn to climb a rope as quickly as possible in exchange for the makeshift playground equipment. It wasn't that hard, and the practice was definitely improving their upper body strength. She'd drilled them in other contingencies as well—like fire drills but for attacks by undead cannibals. If (when) the camp was invaded by geeks, the kids would (hopefully, please, any deity listening) have the knowledge and skills to save themselves.

The adults, not so much.

She was thoroughly disappointed in the adults, honestly. The majority of them sat around doing nothing most of the time and seemed to be pretending or to actually believe that they were just on a camping trip until the government showed up to save the day. Some, like Lori, were active deterrents against others' (not even just the kids') learning of survival skills and sensible planning for the bleak future.

Stevie had no delusions about being rescued. The government had bombed Atlanta (and probably other major cities as well); if there was any semblance of government left, it certainly wasn't concerned with or capable of aiding civilians. But when she'd tried to point that out, she'd been basically patted on the head and told to let the grownups take care of things. Even Mama had fallen into old habits, allowing herself to be guilted and cowed into staying in camp and scrubbing the men's dirty undies instead of doing anything useful. And she'd handed over the Humvee and the trailer of supplies (minus only Stevie's meds) to Deputy Dipshit, aka Shane "Bet His Badge Is Plastic" Walsh, who'd allowed the vehicle to be stripped for parts and the months of food to be chewed through in just a few weeks of nonexistent rationing. Most of the remaining meds had disappeared as well, probably carried off by one of the smaller groups that hadn't stayed long in the quarry.

Fuck that.

Although she and her mama had rebuilt some trust over the years, there would always be a sliver of anger and doubt and disdain between them, a little voice that reminded Stevie, She didn't protect me. She didn't protect my sister. She didn't even protect herself. She can't be trusted to keep any of us safe. For all the woman's bluster about not letting Stevie out alone, Mama hadn't put up more than a token protest over the highway jaunts and certainly hadn't offered to go with; no, she had too much laundry to do. Stevie didn't think she needed a chaperone (having Bruno to watch her back was far superior), but the fact that no one had offered was kind of maddening.

"Ok," she called out to the kiddos, gathering them back from their short break and leading them toward the tire swing, which was exactly the same as all the ones she'd hung in camp (no use practicing on different equipment). "Who's first?"

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If you didn't notice thus far, this story was kind of an experiment in shorter chapters to encourage me to write and post more often. I tend to get stuck in places where I either know what the next scene is but don't want to write it or know where I'm going but don't know how to get there. Thus, this fic might seem a bit abrupt—because I'm fully just skipping shit I don't want to deal with. I'm liking it, but let me know what you think. Also, only one person has guessed at a hinted-but-hopefully-not-super-obvious plot point that will come out in the next few chapters. Take a crack at it. I dare you.