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XXI

"Mommy, where are we going?" Dale asked, for the fifth time since I had strapped him into the car seat, which was sadly in the front seat. Yes, yes, I know, never supposed to do that, whatever. But if we needed to get out quickly, I definitely wouldn't have time to get to the back to grab him, and if we were in a wreck, better he die of a head injury then come back to life for me to kill him. 

"Virginia baby. Uncle Morgan, you remember him right? He left us a message, he wanted us to meet him up in the capitol, or as close as we could get. So we're gonna try. You wanna see the capitol right baby?" I asked, glancing over at him. He's adorable, honestly. Whenever I drive, he drives his hardest to stay awake with me, and to do that, he plays with a rubix dude I found a few towns ago. Of course he's too young to understand what to do with it, but he makes games with it. Trying to get a certain color in one specific spot. 

"Ooh, I love Uncle Morgan. How long until we get to the cap...  i... tal?" He asked, struggling with the new word. 

"Capitol, baby. And I don't know. A few weeks maybe. Maybe a few days if we're lucky. But I'm sure we'll get another message from Uncle Morgan before we get there, telling us where to meet him." I said with a small smile, looking over at the little boy. 

Morgan had been very clever in leaving us messages. He would leave tall posts or sticks, painted yellow every two or three hundred feet of a road for about a mile, and then the last one, always would have a red top. Dripping with red paint. We were supposed to stop, get out, and walk one hundred paces into the woods, and he would tie a letter to a tree with a big ribbon, or string, and one time he even used a weirdly patterned duck tape. 

But he would leave us messages, asking to meet somewhere, or simply informing us on what was going on. And if it wasn't a request to meet, he would leave a pen and an extra piece of paper, and I was to write a reply, and leave it there for him to find later. 

I normally didn't write back much, simply a 'Hello, we are alive, we love you' and leave it at that, since I didn't know if he had stayed with Daryl and the others when I left, and I didn't want them to be able to find me. 

Morgan though... I don't know how he was able to find us to leave messages. Maybe he put them on multiple roads leading away from wherever he knew we were last, or he just knows me extremely well. But either way, he leaves at least one note a month. Which is normally the amount of time we stay in one place, since I try to give Dale the most stable life I can. 

We hadn't been up past Virginia though. And I hadn't gone into Florida. We really just stuck mostly to the Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama. We only ventured into Mississippi for one month, and I hated it there, so we left pretty quickly. 

Honestly, Morgan could be following us, that could be why he knows where we are, and when we're going to be leaving somewhere. He could be just attempting to give us the illusion of being alone, since he knows that's what I need right now, but is still there if we need him. It's not an unwelcome thought if I'm being honest. 

"Mommy can we play the iSpy game?" Dale asked, breaking through my thoughts, and I forced a smile to form on my face, before I answered him. 

"Sure babe, you wanna go first?" I asked, never taking my eyes off the road in front of us. 

"I Spy with my little eye... something green!" I let a chuckle slip out, and glanced over to see him grinning. 

"Is it a tree?" I asked, and he shook his head. 

"Nope!" 

"No? Really? Hm, okay... is it your toy?" 

"No!" 

"That car?" 

"No!"

"Uhm... I don't know babe, what is it?"

"Your eyes Mommy!" I grinned over at my son, and it was then that I saw it. 

The bike. 

Daryl's, no, Merle's bike. Just sitting on the side of the road. 

It was surrounded by other cars, and it didn't look like there was an accident, it looks like they had been put there on purpose, but it's definitely Merle's bike. There's a sticker on the side of it, two lightning bolts in a circle. That's his bike. 

"Alright baby. We're gonna play the quiet game okay? And we're gonna take a little detour, I don't think this road is safe. So until I say, we're gonna be a little more careful, and be quiet okay?" I asked, slowing down and doing a U-turn to  turn the car around and I floored it, heading back the way we came so I could take a different road. 

If the bike is here, either they're scouting here, and they are off in the woods somewhere doing something, or the hospital fell, and they're looking for something new and are in the woods somewhere, OR the hospital fell, they're looking for somewhere new, and they ran out of gas. In any case, I couldn't continue down that road, just in case they were on it. 

I'm not ready yet. Who knows if I ever will be, but I definitely am not ready now.