That stupid, stupid girl.

That's what Daryl was thinking of. That stupid girl.

He called her stupid because she obviously didn't see that you can't just go out, find a weapon and try and prove your worth in a single day.

Daryl knew about those guns. He saw them beside her whilst she was sleeping.

She had opted to find a car that was clean enough to sleep in that past night. Something that Daryl decided to do too. He wasn't going to sleep on his motorcycle, and there sure as hell wasn't any room in the R.V or any other car.

With Marley's convenient luck of finding things, she had found the cleanest car in the lot. No blood, dirt... it seemed that it was once owned by someone who had severe O.C.D.

He stumbled upon her lying form, and saw in the clear moonlight, the brown leather straps and two perfectly clean colt M1911A1 semi-automatics that he guessed had belonged to someone from the FBI since armed forces didn't tend to use them anymore.

They were old but good.

How she had found such a useful array of things, he never knew. It was just one of the things she was good at doing... or being lucky at doing.

He didn't tell anyone about the guns because she didn't. He just followed her lead in concealing them.

But now he wished he had been the snitch, and told either Shane or Rick. Maybe that would have made them think a lot more before letting her go off with them.

Maybe he should have told Andrea, who would have popped a few screws at Marley.

He wasn't used to her not being there. It had become a routine with him.

Not being someone who particularly had a set of motions he would go through every day in order to keep sane, before the end of the world. It was like he had fallen into an internal trap.

When it was just Merle, Marley and him, he got used to it. And he liked it. It gave him some sort of purpose. Something he didn't really have before.

He tightened his grip on his crossbow, trying to clear his thoughts. Focusing on the grass, overturned stones.

Not Marley!

Marley. Her stupid name, he thought.

When he first heard it, he thought that maybe she had another nickname besides Ariel. That her real name must be kept secret. That she would never really utter her real name in anyone's presence. But he thought it was kind of silly to say that she would fake a name twice. It would just be a waste of time.

And her last name. He had never heard it before.

He didn't hear a lot of Dixons around, or even at all. Sure. But Van Allan just seemed fake to him. Like she had created yet another persona to live by.

Wouldn't that mean that she despised her true self? he thought to himself.

These questions and thoughts about the twenty-year-old stupid girl normally laid in his head for a few hours before flowing away.

Daryl heard Andrea and Lori converse behind him, causing him to stop in his tracks and turn to the sheep behind him.

Lori was turned away from the group, looking off into the distance.

It was obvious to everyone that she was dwelling on the gunshot from earlier.

"We all heard it," the hunter responded, shifting from one foot to another.

"Why one?" she questioned. "Why just one gunshot?"

"Maybe they took down a walker?" he shrugged.

He knew they wouldn't be that stupid, though.

Unless... that stupid girl had something to do with it, he pondered.

"Please don't patronize me," Lori snapped. "You know Rick wouldn't risk a gunshot to put down one walker. Or Shane. They'd do it quietly"

Again, Daryl's thoughts went back to Marley being with them.

He called her stupid, but he knew she was smart. But she got scared easily... but not lately.

Daryl shook the thoughts away at the overcomplicated situation. Women were tricky in the man's eyes. Marley really took that to another level with him, though.

"But, Marley might not do it that quietly," Andrea said.

"But, it's just one gunshot, and she doesn't even have a gun," Lori counteracted, putting her hands on her hips.

"Things can happen."

"She didn' shoot nothin'" Daryl spoke up, that protectiveness rising up inside him. He had no control over it.

With that, everyone silently agreed.

It was a thing known throughout the long-gone camp back at the quarry, that Daryl knew Marley best. No questions asked. Except. maybe Carl knew her the second best.

Daryl obviously didn't know that everyone thought this. It was more of an inside joke for everyone excluding the lady in question and himself.

It went from as simple as Daryl telling anyone who asked, where she was; he knew her sleeping schedule; what foods she tolerated and which ones she detested. He didn't see anything abnormal about that. He didn't even notice it.

He was just... accommodated to her.

"There's nothing we can do about it anyway," he finally said, looking around the forest floor. His blue eyes scanning the leaves and foliage. "Can't run around woods chasing echoes."

"So what do we do?"

"Same as we've been," he said authoritatively, yet still holding that redneck twang. "Beat the bush for Sophia, work our way back to the highway."

+

After some more painstaking walking, and no sign of Sophia, or any knowledge on what that gunshot meant, the tired group decided to call it a day.

Unfortunately for them, it was just more walking, but in the other direction. But this time, their walking was a lot more quick. Less observant, and more desperate to get back to the highway.

The hunter had insisted that it was only about one hundred yards left till they got back... as the crow flies.

"As the crow flies, my ass," Andrea muttered, wiping off some cobwebs she had walked a few paces back.

Her heavy footfalls thumped against the dirt, tired.

She unknowingly had a walker on her tail, and as she walked past a tree, it fully noticed her and she fully noticed it.

Turning and walking backwards, panicked, she screamed.

The walkers hands grasped at her shoulders, and Andrea took her knife, still screaming, and stabbed it in the abdomen. This did nothing to stop it from coming after her.

The others were running to her aid as fast as they could. Andrea had wandered off quite far in her exhaustion.

Still struggling with the large corpse, she flew backwards, tripping over a log.

It stalked after her, and she kicked at it's upper body, screaming pathetically for help.

As the others got closer, two pairs of hooves got there faster, carrying a bat wielding Maggie Greene.

She waisted no time in taking out the awful smelling being, smashing its face with the end of her bat. It fell to the ground, she halted the horse, and the rest of the group just reached them.

"Lori? Lori Grimes?" Maggie questioned the blonde, whose eyes were still wide.

Maggie put her bat in a holster, and steadied her horse.

"I'm Lori," actual Lori said. The girl on the horse reverted her eyes to her, watching everyone else cautiously at the corner of her eye.

"Rick sent me. You've got to come now!"

"What?"

"There's been an accident. Carl's been shot. He's still alive but you've got to come now"

Everyone faltered in their tracks. Lori, Daryl, Carol and Glenn.

First, Sophia goes missing; the youngest. Then Carl gets shot; the next one up. It was like some sick game. And Daryl knew who would be next if someone was playing a sick joke somewhere that went from youngest up. But that's ridiculous, he thought. Something not worth thinking about.

Maggie noticed Lori falter. "Rick needs you just come!" she ordered.

Carl's mother quickly slipped off her backpack, leaving it on the forest floor and walking quickly towards the horse the other brunette sat upon.

Daryl wasn't having it. "Whoa, whoa, whoa! We don't now this girl!" he yelled after Lori, who looked over her shoulder at him. "You can't get on that horse!"

Lori was panicked, she didn't know what to do. She faltered again besides the horse.

"Daryl?" Maggie retorted, suddenly remembering what the redhead had told her back at the farm.

"Yeah!" Daryl said, a warning tone in his voice that said 'don't come any further'.

"Ariel, says it's okay."

With those words, Daryl knew, Marley was behind it.

She was far away, in an unknown place to him, and yet she was still trying to calm him down, and tell him what to do.

Not only did Daryl know Marley, but Marley knew Daryl, much better than he thought.

She knew how he would react, and she knew what to do.

Daryl nodded to Lori, Marley's message calming him slightly.

Lori hopped on behind the girl, looping her arms around the girl's waist.

"Rick said you had others on the highway, that big traffic snarl?" Maggie listed, more towards Glenn who replied a small, "Uh-huh."

"Backtrack to Fairburn Road. Two miles down is our farm. You'll see the mailbox. The names Greene."

Maggie yelped, "Hiyah!" and the horse bolted off into the forest.

She left everyone slightly curious and dazed. She had come in so wildly, and left without disappointment.

Daryl still held the words in his head.

"Ariel, says it's okay."

She could have said 'Marley' just as easily, but she knew that wouldn't convince him. Ariel had a paragraph worth of meaning to both of them. It seemed that they were both concerned about each other despite being apart.

She was doing something she hadn't done in a very long time... if she ever had.

Marley Van Allan was surprising Daryl Dixon.

His thoughts were cut short, as a loud wheezing sound came from his left.

Exasperated, he shot the walker in the head with a bolt.

"Shut up!"