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SlumberingVoid — Unfortunately it's only the alliance of two for now with Alexandria being on lockdown. Though, we mustn't forget about Oceanside... though sadly I feel like the show forgets about Oceanside quite often. Poor fishy folk.
Jenny came bounding up to the Queen's carriage before her, Henry, and Rhys could make it out the gates of Kingdom. She was out of breath and carrying a box that was rattling violently.
"Take him with you!"
"Jenny," Rhys groaned.
"Come on... he misses you."
"He hates me."
"That was years ago."
Rhys leaned forward on his saddle, peering into the cat cage Jenny held out in front of her at arm's length.
Pumpkin hissed at him.
Rhys sighed.
"Please!" Jenny cried.
Rhys nodded begrudgingly, gesturing to the back of Carol and Henry's wagon. Jenny thanked him, and Rhys quickly realised why; the cat hissing at her, too, upon being slotted into the back with some supplies and bedrolls.
Rhys rode behind the wagon as they passed through a town that boarded close to where the bones of the Sanctuary still stood, and that definitely wasn't on the same roads he took to get to the Kingdom. But Rhys knew that Carol knew she was going the wrong way for Hilltop, so he kept quiet.
Henry clearly didn't realise that she did because he cleared his throat and peered at the map in her hands. "You sure this is right? Wasn't the turn off to Hilltop a few miles back?"
"We're not going to Hilltop," Carol told him. "Not yet."
Rhys chuckled to himself as Henry glanced at Carol with a perplexed look before grimacing and scratching his nose against his sleeve as he looked back at the map. Rhys had learned a long time ago that Carol doesn't tell you these things. You find out when she needs you to.
"Help!"
The woman's scream was piercing and desperate and close by. Maybe too close.
They all looked around for the source.
Henry snatched the reigns from Carol's hands and pulled for the horses to stop. The screaming continued as Henry leapt down from the wagon with his staff, flying in its direction.
"Wait, Henry!" Carol yelled, but he was already sprinting. "Henry, stop!"
"Henry!" Rhys barked, too.
"Shit," Carol hissed, grabbing her bow from the wagon's rear.
"Oldest trick in the book," Rhys grumbled to himself, following Carol after Henry with his own bow.
The two followed his tracks across a stretch of grass sprouting up from a factory loading bay and down an alley, and two more after that — each time, watching Henry disappear behind far corners as they turned others. On the third corner, they found the woman... accompanied by three men. She was holding a harpoon gun to Henry's neck. The men had axes and rusted machetes.
Carol and Rhys both aimed their bows, strings drawn to their chins with sharpened arrows nocked.
"Drop it," Carol ordered, stepping closer to them. "Drop it."
Rhys recognised her. It was Regina, one of Negan's old generals. In the last few days before Sanctuary fell, when Sasha tried going back to pull things together, she had been at the front of one of the mobs, screaming about justice for Arat.
A sliding metal door groaned and squealed open on the building behind them. Rhys and Carol both spun to point their bows, but there were four of them. Jed stepped into the alley's light.
"Now see, I was never too good at math, but I'm pretty sure there's more of us than you." Jed grinned wide when he recognised Carol, a match stick between his yellow teeth that he chewed like a toothpick. "Hey there, Boss Lady!"
Rhys and Carol lowered their weapons.
The Saviors took them.
The three of them were marched back to the wagon where Jed and his people searched through their stuff.
"For what it's worth, kid, you didn't stand a chance," Regina told Henry, pointing her harpoon gun at the three of them. "We had you pegged a mile down the road."
Jed whistled loud and out rolled a wagon, only it was pulled by several walkers, not horses.
"So," Jed said, arms swinging, "sorry for the inconvenience. See, this really ain't my bag, but times have been tough ever since Sanctuary went bust."
One of the men, a giant with long hair and Carol's bow on his back, picked up Pumpkin's cage from amongst the supplies in the wagon, peering inside and grinning at the growling animal.
"Hey!" Rhys barked at him. "That's my cat."
Jed shook his head. "You're the kid that broke my nose, right? Back on the bridge."
Rhys didn't look away, but he didn't say anything to piss him off, either.
"Shit," Jed chuckled. "You must be a man now! Still look like a kid, though."
Jed turned to his walker wagon, bags over the heads of the ones in the back, rope attaching them all together.
"This is all we have in the world," Jed told them. "We used to have more horses, but we got hungry."
"Could've joined one of the other communities," Carol pointed out.
"You still can," Rhys said coolly. "Put the weapons down, come with us back to Hilltop... I'll talk to Jesus... make sure you get a chance."
Jed scoffed at them. "That ain't really my bag, either."
They all laughed like it was funny.
"Listen..." Jed stepped closer to Carol, lowering his voice, rolling that match between his teeth. "You spared me back in the day, so I'm gonna offer you the same courtesy. Keep your wagon, your horses, your lives."
Regina smirked as the others unloaded everything from Carol's wagon to their own.
"Shit, you can keep your damn stick," Jed said, stepping back and kicking the propped up staff to the floor beside Henry. "'Cause what do I need with a stick?"
He turned back to Carol. "Everything else is ours, and that'll make us square."
"Fine," Carol said quickly. "Take it and go."
"As for you," Jed smirked at Rhys. "It took me a long time to get over you breaking my nose. I'm not a bad guy, so I won't kill you or beat the snot out of you like I would have back in the day." He grinned wide with his yellow teeth. "But that cat ain't yours anymore... like I said, we get real hungry."
His blood boiled, but they were outnumbered, and these people were just waiting for a reason to kill them. Rhys nodded bitterly, glancing at Henry when he heard him grinding his teeth.
Jed's eyes flicked down to Carol's wedding ring.
"Think I'll have that rock on your hand, too."
Henry suddenly kicked his staff into the air, caught it and jabbed Jed in the chest, knocking the wind from him and sending him back into Regina, the both of them falling and the harpoon firing in the air.
"Henry, don't!" Carol screamed.
They surrounded him. Rhys tried stepping in, but the giant moved in front of him. Jed jumped up and knocked Henry to the floor before he could take another swing. Carol dived on top of Henry, pulling off her ring and shaking it at Jed as he towered over them.
"Here," she hissed. "Take it!"
Jed's eyes flickered to Henry, angry and embarrassed.
"Take it!" Carol yelled at him. "It's yours!"
He took a deep breath before taking the ring and sliding it onto his dirty pinky finger. "Pleasure doin' business with ya."
Just before they left, Jed turned back to her.
"I meant to tell ya, I really like what you done with your hair."
He touched the silver ends of it, and she smacked his arm away.
Rhys sat outside the wagon by a campfire in the middle of a road, the moon shining brightly in the sky and the stars burning beside it. He listened to Henry and Carol talk in the back.
"I don't get it, Mom. You didn't even try."
"There's no point."
"That's bullshit."
"Henry!"
"No... there's right, and there's wrong. You stand up for what's right and you fight what's wrong. You taught me that. And I remember when you did. What happened?"
"You," she answered softly. "Someday you'll understand."
Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, Carol climbed out of the wagon and sat beside Rhys at the fire. Rhys was still listening. He could only hear the sound of Downy Beardy's gentle breathing on the grassy pasture off to one side of the road and Henry's light snores from the back of the wagon.
"Always wondered where they went," Rhys said quietly.
"They've given us grief before," Carol sighed. "A caravan here or there getting robbed. They never hurt anyone too bad."
"Where are we going?" Rhys asked then.
"To see Daryl," she told him. "His camp's not far."
Rhys thought about why for a moment, figuring it out fairly fast.
"Are you going to ask him to come down off his mountain?"
"His mountain?"
"That's what Tara calls it..." Rhys smirked. "Says he's like some monk. The only person in the world that hasn't pissed off any of the communities."
"Well, yes... that is what I'm going to ask him to do." Carol looked back at the wagon. "I can't stay, not with Kingdom like it is. I want someone at Hilltop to keep an eye on Henry."
Rhys nodded.
"Jed left us the fuel I brought," Carol said, looking at the pale line on her finger where her wedding band once sat. "I was going to trade it at Hilltop for some parts to fix the boiler."
Rhys watched her.
"I'm going to go kill them all now," Carol said in a calm and ghostly voice, like it wasn't really here, and he couldn't really hear it. She poked one of the logs with her knife, orange flames licking against the blade and sparks crackling up into the night sky. "Henry's a deep sleeper."
Rhys stood up, still looking at her. "I'm a better tracker than you."
They found Jed and his group a mile away. Carol slit the lookout's throat. Rhys took his bow back off the woman's body as she wriggled like a fish, clutching at her opened jugular. The rest were all sleeping soundly in a small construction yard, a little hut with no roof to stop the moonlight creeping in. Carol poured the gasoline while Rhys grabbed Pumpkin's cage and Carol's bow, and the rest of their things. He had found a small Russian doll in a pile of stuff that wasn't from their wagon, but Carol clearly recognised it. Rhys found Carol's ring on a milk crate beside Jed's sleeping body. He took the match from between Jed's teeth, too, and handed it to Carol, standing beside her by the door.
Jed woke up.
Carol lit the match against a wall.
"Wait," he gasped, smelling the stench of gas on his clothes.
"The ring I could let go," Carol told him. "But that stuff belonged to people I knew. People who went out and never came back."
"We found that stuff," Jed said, his voice shaking. "We didn't do anything."
"You hurt my son," Carol told him menacingly.
Jed's eyes flickered in desperation to Rhys, who was holding Pumpkin's cat cage.
"I told you..." Rhys said. "He's my cat."
"I swear you'll never see us again."
Carol nodded. "I know."
She tossed the match into the pool of gas at their feet. A blue circle of heat rushed out from the lit stick, followed by a swelling of flames that engulfed the last of the Saviors.
Rhys and Carol walked away from the screams.
Back at the wagon their campfire was still burning, Henry was still snoring. They'd been gone less than an hour.
Rhys untacked Downy Beardy from the post he was tied to in the grassy spot just off the road.
"I'm gonna head back to Hilltop now," he told Carol. "I'll take Pumpkin with me."
Carol scanned over him with her eyes, working out if he was upset over killing those Saviors. When she realised he wasn't, she figured out the rest.
"How long has it been since you've seen Daryl?"
Rhys shrugged as he petted Downy Beardy's mane.
"How long has it been since you've seen any of them?" Carol asked.
"The old gang?" Rhys asked.
Carol nodded.
"Apart from you, Tara, and Sasha?" Rhys sighed. "Long enough to go home tonight."
"Will it bother you?" Carol asked. "If I bring Daryl to Hilltop, will it bother you?"
"No," Rhys answered. "It'll be nice to see him. Just not tonight."
"We'll see you in a few days."
After affixing Pumpkin's cage to the back of his saddle, Rhys climbed up Downy Beardy's back and settled into his seat.
He paused.
"You know I'll look out for Henry at Hilltop..."
Carol stayed still, silver eyes watching him in the dark.
She thought for a moment.
"I can't ask it," she said then. "Not of you."
"You wouldn't have to."
"But I would be," she whispered. "If I didn't ask Daryl, I would be."
Rhys nodded, understanding why.
Carol sighed a sharp breath. "I'm sorry it had to be fire."