Angel

Chapter Thirty-Two: Angel & Daryl

Angel

Daryl was driving our SUV down deserted streets as we searched for the first stop in our run. Even though the SUV was now communal property, I still thought of it as ours. I always would. My feet were propped up on the dash as the warm air from the hot, muggy day flowed through the car. Air conditioning used up extra gas and since that was in such a limited supply these days we went without.

I had the map I had found all those months ago on my lap along with another Daryl had scrounged up. Looking through an old phone book that I saw on a shelf in Maggie's office, I had the addresses of half a dozen baby shops on my list. With any luck, we'd find what we needed pretty quickly, but I was prepared if we needed to keep searching.

Rick knew what our run was about, but we kept it from Maggie. I wanted it to be a surprise and Daryl agreed. If for any reason this didn't work out, then we wouldn't disappoint her, but we would keep looking another day. The problem was we didn't have that many days left before Maggie gave birth, so we needed to be as successful as possible today.

"We're looking to turn left onto Maple Street and it should be somewhere there," I told Daryl.

"What's this place called again?"

"Sprouts." Daryl turned and gave me a look that had me laughing. "Hey, I didn't name it and that looks like Maple coming up."

He maneuvered the car around a lone walker in the middle of the road before making the turn. We cruised slowly down the quiet street before stopping in front of the baby store. I could tell that the door was already ajar and that didn't bode well.

Daryl had his crossbow up as we approached the door and I had my gun. He looked at me to make sure I was ready before he pushed the door open. Since baby stores didn't stock normal supplies that adults needed, I had hoped they wouldn't be in bad shape. Unfortunately, this one was.

There were two walkers in the store that turned to us the second Daryl went through the door. He took out one with a bolt and I used my knife on the other one. I could easily tell there wasn't much usable here. We poked through the debris finding just a few things that we could take. There was a few unbroken toys, a couple of onesies that needed to get washed, and a stuffed giraffe. We loaded our meager finds into the car and took off looking for the next shop.

And the next one.

And the next one.

After three stores that barely gave us anything decent to bring back, I was starting to get depressed. "Daryl, we need to find more than the little bit we have in the back seat. I was hoping for a small crib, clothes, diapers anything and everything baby. Basically, we have shit."

"How many places you got left on your list?" he asked me.

"Three. The next one is in Dover. I was hoping we'd didn't have to go this far, but everything has been pretty much a bust so far. I honestly didn't think we'd have this much trouble." I guess even with the world screwed up, people still kept having babies.

But it wasn't always that the businesses were empty, they were mainly trashed and somewhat empty. That made no sense at all. Why trash baby store?

"I'm used to shit going wrong, so it doesn't surprise me. Show me on the map where we gotta go."

We were sitting safely in the SUV so I spread the map out between us and pointed to where we currently were. "And where's Dover?"

I had already circled it on the map. "Over here."

"It's a decent drive. We may not make it back tonight. Is that okay with you?"

As long as I was with Daryl, I knew it would be fine. "That's why I packed some food just in case this happened."