Daryl's Angel: Saviour (Book Two)

Chapter 26: Red Poncho

Daryl and Aaron move through the woods, leaves crunching beneath their boots. Daryl's eyes roam the forest floor, laser-focused on the trail of footprints pressed into the dirt. They're old. The edges are softer, rounded out from erosion, but they point further into the woods.

"Someone came through here a while ago," Daryl says, pointing out the tracks to Aaron.

"If we see them, we hang back, set up the mike, watch and listen," Aaron says.

"For how long?"

"Until we know. We have to know."

The trees thin out into a shallow gulch. The tracks are deeper here, sunk into the mud. Daryl kneels, lightly touching the edge of one print. Still soft. Whoever they are, they set out early this morning when things were warming up.

"You've sent people away?" Daryl asks as they make their way across.

Aaron purses his lips. "Yeah."

"What happened?"

"It was early on. It was three people. Two men and a woman. Davidson was their leader. Smart as hell, strong. I thought they'd work out."

Back into the trees they go. Daryl shoves a low branch aside. The brisk crack of dried, dead wood echoes briefly, rustling the leaves as it collapses.

"They didn't," Aaron says. "I brought them in, and I had to see them out. So me, Aiden, and Nicholas, we drove them out far...gave them a day's worth of food and water and left them."

Daryl's still watching the tracks, but he hears the genuine pain in Aaron's voice. The guy's nice, but he knows when to own his mistakes and do the hard things. It's a good quality. Rick used to be like that—still is, in some ways.

Another question lingers. "They just went?" Daryl asks. He can't imagine people leaving someplace safe without a fight.

"We had their guns," Aaron says. "We had all the guns."

That'll do it. Try anything and you're dead fast as they can squeeze a trigger.

He exhales. "I can't make that kind of mistake again."

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Finally, through the trees and tall grasses, Daryl spots their mystery person: a man in a red poncho with a black backpack, dirt smeared over his cheeks and forehead. Aaron and Daryl hunker in the tree line, watching the man as he stoops to grab something from the ground, a flash of leafy green as he snaps the stalk in half. He rubs his gloved hands together vigorously over the stalks before smearing them across his face. He heads off in the opposite direction.

Daryl smirks a little.

"What's he doing?" Aaron asks.

"Wild leeks," Daryl says. "Son of a bitch knows how to keep 'squitos off him."

Aaron raises an eyebrow. He's got the listening device out, big black headphones covering his ears, and Daryl grunts.

"Come on."

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How in the hell do you lose track of someone wearing a bright red poncho? Daryl tries not to be pissed. It's just a hell of a lot harder to track someone over concrete.

They find themselves near a giant concrete building just off the main road, and it grabs Aaron's attention immediately. Daryl follows him to the chain-link fence surrounding a building labelled "Del Arno Foods." A few walkers wander the courtyard, but what gets them is the truck in the distance—a transport truck, possibly teeming with untold riches.