Chapter Text
Daryl roared down the highway on Merle's old chopper. These days, he took the lead in the caravan because it was easiest for him to stop, swerve, and turn if they encountered trouble. He was the early warning system that gave everyone else time to adjust. Rick suggested the arrangement after they lost Dale.
It had been ten days since the CDC exploded. They escaped by the skin of their teeth, thanks to Carol. Daryl had heard of the mythical mother's purse, how its depths housed everything that could possibly be needed when it was needed – tissues for a runny nose, bandaids for a skinned knee, a brush for tangled hair, sanitizers for dirty hands, pens for doodling, a snack in times of hunger – but a hand grenade, well, that was a new one to him. All his mother's purse ever seemed to contain was cigarettes, a lighter, a flask, keys, and, on a really good day, $5 in cash.
It had been nine days since they'd returned to that nursing home to camp out for the night, only to find everyone slaughtered execution style. Andrea had made fun of him for using the word observant, like he was some kind of backwoods hick, which, well, he was, but that didn't mean he couldn't read. Carol told him not to be bothered by it, that Andrea was still depressed over her sister's death. Yeah, well, he'd had a sibling too. Maybe he and Merle didn't get each other little mermaid pendant necklaces for their birthdays, but that didn't mean he was fine with Merle being gone.
It had been eight days since Dale, who was driving the RV at the head of the caravan, had turned a blind bend in the road and suddenly run into a herd. Fortunately, someone had stunk up the RV pretty awful – and no one wanted to accompany Dale. Everyone else had been in the church van, the jeep, or the pickup. The RV was surrounded almost instantly when it rounded that bend. They'd had to leave that poor Henry-Fonda-hat-wearing bastard to be consumed. After that, Daryl took the lead on the motorcycle, while Shane took up the rear in his jeep. If anyone was getting picked off from in front, it might as well be the redneck asshole with no one to mourn him, and if anyone was getting picked off from behind, it might as well be the asshole cop who had fucked his best friend's wife. Not that Daryl was supposed to know about that, but, well, it had been kind of obvious to anyone who didn't have his head up his ass.
It had been seven days since they had momentarily lost Sophia. They'd stopped to siphon off some gas when a herd had started roaming their way, and they had to hide under cars to avoid them. Sophia fled some walkers over a guard rail and down into a creek, and Rick went after her. Then, in his infinite wisdom, he hid her in an alcove in the bank beneath the roots of a tree and just fucking left her there while he drew off a couple of walkers. Two. Two fucking walkers.
He could have just stabbed those ugly bastards with a sharp, broken-off tree branch or brained them to death with a rock. Hell, that's what Daryl would have done. Actually, Daryl would have shot them with his crossbow or stabbed them with one of his two hunting knives, because he didn't run around in a goddamn apocalypse with no weapon at all but a loud-ass revolver. But barring that, he would have found another way to kill them that didn't involve leaving an eleven-year-old girl alone under a tree. In fact, Rick did eventually brain one with a big rock. But only after he'd left Sophia a quarter mile behind. Alone.
The girl got scared of course, just sitting around waiting to be a walker's appetizer, backed into a corner, with nowhere to run but forward. So, she crawled out of that hole and tried to get back to her mama. But then there came another three walkers after her, so she'd had to turn around and scurry up the bank to flee them. The kid had, as luck would have it, found a treehouse some other kids had built in the forest before everything went to shit. She climbed the wooden rungs nailed to the tree and hid out up there. The walker couldn't climb up after her.
After the herd passed on the highway, Daryl spent two hours tracking her. He found Sophia up that tree, terrified of the grasping walkers below. He killed them all and brought her back to her mother. Carol was grateful. She'd thrown herself at Daryl and hugged him until he'd said, "All right, already" and pulled her arms off his neck.
He couldn't remember the last time a woman had hugged him. His mother, maybe, when he was little, before she passed out with her box wine on the end table and a cigarette in her mouth and brought the whole damn cabin down with her. It hadn't felt bad, Carol's hug. It had just felt strange.
It had been six days since they'd arrived at Fort Benning, only to find it mostly cleared out. The soldiers had run off with the tanks and the armored cars and most of the guns and ammunition and MREs, though the group had managed to scavenge a handful of things. They stayed for two nights, feasting on MREs. Andrea got some kind of "I'm going to be a badass" bug and asked Shane to teach her to target shoot with a rifle. She flirted with him shamelessly like she didn't know he was in the bag for Lori. Shane responded like he wasn't just trying to make Lori jealous. Daryl argued that they couldn't stay long in some place without a source of fresh water nearby, so they moved on.
It had been four days since they'd looted that pharmacy, and Lori had taken a pregnancy test and then tried to pass the baby off as Rick's. She'd succeeded. Or at least, Rick had pretended to believe it. But Daryl had a feeling this baby was going to be premature.
It had been three days since the jeep got a flat tire and Daryl had suggested, instead of changing it, they just leave it. They had to conserve gas, and it wasn't like you could store much in the thing. Besides, Shane looked like an overgrown putz of a frat boy in a Barbie jeep. Shane had reluctantly joined Rick in Daryl's old pick-up truck, which now took up the rear of the caravan, with Daryl in front on the motorcycle, and everyone else in T-Dog's van.
It had been two days since Lori had asked Shane and Rick, "Do either of you have any kind of a plan? Where are we going? I can't be running from place to place eight months from now, when I'll be about to pop."
It had been one day since Carl had suggested they go to Fun Kingdom Amusement Park. Sophia enthusiastically seconded the motion, saying, "I've been there! It was the only time we ever took a family vacation."
Hey, at least she got one, Daryl thought.
Lori immediately shot the kids down, saying, "This is not fun time."
Carl protested, "But listen, Mom. Remember how it was temporarily closed when things started to go bad? Because of that woman who fell out of that roller coaster?"
Daryl remembered hearing that news. She was so fat the bar wouldn't close all the way, and instead of telling anyone, she just left it loose. And when that coaster got going...well...Merle had laughed about that story for days. They'd shut down the park for "safety renovations" and were going to open it with even more attractions, they claimed.
"So?" Lori asked, not putting two and two together.
"So that means there won't have been any people in it!" Sophia explained, backing her buddy. "It could be walker-free!"
"It's out in the middle of nowhere off the highway, way back in the trees," Carl said, "so there will be plenty of forest for Daryl to hunt in."
"And it's already got an iron fence all around it to keep out any walkers at night," Sophia added. "It has that little fishing pond, where you can feed the ducks, and that lake by the Ferris wheel. It also has a creek under the bridge that leads to the King Racer Coaster. That stream goes through a tunnel under the fence to more fresh water somewhere I'd guess."
Sophia was pretty helpless, Daryl thought, but at least someone other than him was thinking of freshwater sources.
"And since they thought they were going to reopen soon," Carl agreed, "there's probably still lots of snacks in the stores and maybe even canned food in the restaurants. And they had all those First Aid stations spread through the park, so we'll have medicine and bandages and stuff."
Shane laughed. "It's actually a really good idea, kid." He reached out and ruffled Carl's hair, which caused Rick to frown.
"Yeah, it's a great idea, Carl," Rick agreed. "Good thinking. All in favor of checking out Fun Kingdom and seeing if we can make a decent camp there?"
Shane held up his hand. "I could seriously use some cotton candy."
Carl laughed, Shane smiled back at him, and Rick clenched his teeth.
"And I could use a beer," T-Dog said. "That place had that beer garden. At least, that's what they called it. There wasn't actually anything on tap. It was all cans and bottles. I used to take the kids from the church youth group there every year in the van."
"To the beer garden?" Glenn asked.
"No, to the amusement park! But the kids were junior high school age. They didn't need me breathing down their necks. So I might have slipped away for a drink."
Everyone agreed it was a great idea, except Andrea, who merely accepted it with a shrug, saying, "It doesn't much matter to me where we choose to sit around and wait to die."
"Please," Lori told her. "Do you have to be so negative in front of the children?"
Andrea turned and walked back toward the van. Raising a fist in the air, she shouted, "Fun Kingdom or bust!"
And now? Now it had been about fives minutes since they'd seen the billboard that read "Just 55 miles to your fantasy of fun!" with a picture of the entryway castle to Fun Kingdom.
What a dumbass slogan, Daryl thought.
Fun Kingdom was at hand, but the sun was starting to sink, and the group certainly didn't want to clear something as enormous as an amusement park after sunset. So, they pulled into a two-story hotel situated just off the frontage road, a good eight miles from the last town they had passed, the kind of hotel where you stopped when you were being too cheap to stay in town, but not quite so cheap as to stay at a motel.
The hotel appeared to have been temporarily closed down for some internal renovations, and so it was uninhabited except for a few walkers who had once been painters, plumbers, and repairmen. Andrea and Shane stood guard over Carol, Lori, and the kids with rifles while the men entered the lobby. After her target practice at Fort Benning, Andrea actually knew how to use that thing now – mostly. The men cleared the bottom floor as quickly and quietly as possible.
They checked every room downstairs. All of the doors were missing their handles, as the locks were apparently being switched out. None of them latched fully, and so they needed only to kick against the wood to send the doors slamming open to reveal any walkers inside. Daryl cut his arrow-recovery time in half by the end of the project, and Glenn was becoming far less skittish about sliding his bayonet into walker's brains.
They dragged the bodies out of a side door and left them piled by the construction dumpster. There might be more walkers on the second floor, but as the staircases were both at the far end of the hallway and between solid metal exit doors the walkers could not possibly get through, the men didn't bother to clear the upstairs.
When Rick gave the "All clear!", they unloaded the bed of the pick-up of what loot remained from Fort Benning and left it in the lobby. They made sure the lobby doors were locked, and then they dragged furniture in front of it to blockade it, just in case.
T-Dog and Glenn took a luggage cart and collected a dozen, free-standing battery-operated work lights from among the workmen's things. They put one each in the men's and women's bathrooms in the lobby. "The toilets might each still flush once," Rick said. "But they won't refill. So only flush if you do a number two. If it's yellow, let it mellow."
"Ewww…" Sophia crinkled her nose, and Daryl was surprised such a thing could still disgust her, after all she'd been through. Kids were weird.
"And don't forget to use the hand sanitizer in there," Lori warned Carl. The boy rolled his eyes, but only once his mother had turned away.
They claimed seven interior rooms (one to be shared by the Grimes family, and one to be shared by Carol and Sophia), all along the same hallway. They brought a work light into each room and dropped their packs. The beds were completely stripped, but there were linens in the closets. After making their beds, they met again in the hallway to confer.
"Being in this empty motel reminds me of The Shining," Glenn said.
"Now why would you go and say that?" T-Dog asked. "Now I'm going to feel like I'm living in a horror movie."
"We are living in horror movie," Andrea told him.
"Mom, can Sophia and I have a sleepover tonight?" Carl asked. "Please!"
"No," Lori said. "We aren't going to be having any mixed-gender sleepovers, Carl. Absolutely – "
"- I don't know," Rick interrupted her. "If Carol doesn't mind, why doesn't Carl sleep in her room?"
"What?" Lori asked.
That poor man wanted to get laid something awful, Daryl thought. And Rick wanted to do it without having to stay quiet and buried under the covers so as not to wake the kid.
Rick looked at Lori pointedly. "Carl could sleep in Carol's room."
Lori was not taking the hint. But Carol did. "Carl's more than welcome to sleep over in our room," she said. "There are two beds in there. Sophia and I can sleep in one and Carl can sleep in the other. It'll be fine."
"I appreciate that offer, Carol," Lori told her. "But I really do think Carl should stay with us."
Both Rick and Carl's faces fell.
Sophia's stomach growled, so loudly that it sounded like a lonely bear. They hadn't eaten since breakfast.
"See if we can rustle up some grub," Daryl said as he headed down the hall toward the continental breakfast room.