A.N.: I do not own The Walking Dead or any character, plot piece, etc., from the TV series or comics.

. . . . .

This house is big and white and maybe looks kind of like Hershel's farmhouse did. Can't really remember. Not important. Rick kicks open the front door – really, they're two small doors – and goes in. T-Dog's right behind him. I hear the sound of a walker and then the sound of a gunshot – a gunshot? Can I call it that? It's not a bang, not with the silencers we have now. It's the sound of a speeding bullet breaking open a skull. That's what a gunshot sounds like these days. Through the doorway, I see movement and hear a head split again. That's T-Dog's work, I think. My dad's going inside now, kicking one of the doors open wider on his way, maybe just for good measure. And then it's Carl and me. Him first. It's his turn to lead. He has his gun in front of him, low but ready, and he's a good shot, but I've nocked an arrow anyway and my finger's on my release trigger. Can't be too careful.

The house? It smells like rotten wood and rotten flesh and rotten food. It looks like a house. They all look alike, don't they? This one now has two walker corpses sprawled in the entryway, in front of a set of stairs, but I don't pause to examine them, or anything. I don't check to see where Dad's gone, where T-Dog's gone. Carl's following Rick, and right now, I have to follow Carl. My steps are silent as I do.

Rick leads the way into what may have been a dining room at one point. There are two doors in this room, close together, in one corner. Rick gestures at one door – Carl and me, we nod – and then goes through the other. Carl's feet edge into our doorway before he springs through it, his gun up. I'm right behind him, tensed, but Carl's already relaxing. No walkers. Just a kitchen, thin and long, lit by gray sunlight through dirty windows. The room's messy, scattered, the counters littered with empty cans and bottles and trash, which tells me that we won't be getting much food from this place. No problem. Not like my stomach's eating itself or anything.

Carl steps over the mess, the dirty floor. I spin on my heel, check our backs. We're good. Carl's heading to the other side of the kitchen now. There's another doorway here. Through it we go, right into darkness. Near darkness, I should say. It's not so dark that, just as I step next to Carl and into the little room, I can't see the slumped figure already here. There's shallow, hissing breath, and then the figure's turning, and by the time it has, there's a pistol I once helped steal – now joined with a long, thin funnel that keeps things quiet – and a carbon arrow – stained with the blood I can't quite get off – aimed in on its head. The walker doesn't have time to snarl before its brain is splattered across the curtain behind it. It slumps to the ground, my arrow sticking out of its forehead like a tree, a bullet hole just an inch below that. I step forward, press my boot into the used-to-be face and tug, tug, yank, and my arrow's free. My dad, he always made that look easier than my eleven-year-old muscles find it to be. I turn, feeding the arrow back into my bow, not bothering with cleaning the thing right now. Maybe later.

This room was once a pantry, I think. It's in as bad a shape as the kitchen. Whoever abandoned this house – or whoever raided it before us – didn't leave much of anything behind for our group. Which doesn't seem fair, since there's a good chance those other people are dead by now, just judging by the way the world seems to be these days.

We go back in the kitchen, and Rick's here. Rick. He's looking out the window, his lips parted, his eyes distant, like usual. Carl steps up next to him, wearing his hat, and Rick glances him over, glances me over, and says nothing. The door next to Rick, a door leading outside, opens up, and Glenn comes in. Then Maggie. Glenn has some sort of long gardening tool in his hand. It's bloody. The outside perimeter's secure, then. Carl's gone to sifting through the trash on the counters, looking for scraps, a forgotten can of soup, something edible. I look around once more as Rick and Maggie and Glenn head out of the room, back towards the front doors, probably, and then I take my arrow from the bow and slip it away with the six others in the quiver on my back. I loop my arm through my bow and keep my fingers wrapped around it, going through the junk on the counter with my right hand only. All the new places we go to, and I still can't stand new places. Still can't separate myself from the weapon on my shoulder, or the one tucked into my waistband, or the one clipped to my belt, or the one tucked in my jacket pocket, or the one hidden in my boot.

I hear sounds from the entryway. A whistle. Footsteps down the stairs, heavy ones, Dad or T-Dog. Dad and T-Dog.

And in here, I find an empty milk carton, a shiny potato chip bag filled with bugs. The lid of a Sippy cup.

In the other room, I hear one thud, then another. There are lots of types of thuds, but the thud of a corpse being dropped has become very familiar to me, and I know that's what I'm hearing. They'll be removing the bodies, or at least stacking them out of sight.

I switch to the counter behind me. Stained napkins, a spilled container of plastic forks, a pickle jar with a jagged edge because the lid's somehow broken off.

And now it's quieted down in the next room. They're all hungry, they'll all hope for more food than the snacks we have stored away for non-emergency purposes, and it ain't an emergency until someone's dying, pretty much. In fact, in the past eight months – eight hungry months – the only time we've dipped into the ever-tempting reserve bag of imperishable real food was after Carl and I got lost for three days after a snowstorm. Carol made us each a bowl of chicken noodle soup after we got back. Ah, chicken noodle soup . . . My mouth waters and my stomach cramps. I give my head a little shake. Focus, Sydney. My release is still on my wrist – like always – and my index finger plays with the trigger as I scan over the kitchen again with the kind of hope you know is really hopeless. Hopeless hope. Hm.

Carl's going through a cabinet to my left. I turn to him, hopeless hope still blowing through me, just in time to see his hand draw out a yellow can with a fluffy little dog on the front. The can's unopened. Carl looks at me. I sigh, shrug. What the hell? Carl nods and takes out a second can, and that's all there is.

Out into the entryway. The two corpses are now stacked on top of each other and the front doors are closed and locked. Carl and I take a right, through a wide archway that leads us into a living room. The others are there, all of them – Carol and Lori and Beth and Hershel have come in with the bags – some of them sitting on the floor, some on the furniture. Rick's standing by a window across the room, next to a fireplace. My dad's in a chair, and he's plucking the feathers from an owl. Must've got it somewhere in here.

Dog food and an owl. Not better than chicken noodle soup, but better than starving.

Carl goes to his knees right when we've crossed through the archway. He's to the right of Hershel and the left of Beth, who's next to Lori, who watches as her son places two cans of dog food in front of him, as he gets out a can opener and goes to it, and Lori, she rubs a hand over her huge belly and doesn't say a thing.

The baby . . . Could be here any day. I wish I could say I'm excited. I should be.

I don't sit. There's a sideways bookshelf to my left, behind Lori and Beth. I move to it, my fingers grazing over it and leaving lines in the dust. A single book remains. I take it, look at the spine. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Lately I'm pretty easy to please when it comes to books – whatever I can get my hands on, I'll read – but this is what my mother would call an exception. I put the book down and make my way across the room, to my dad. I sit on the floor next to his chair and lean my head on his leg. He drops a handful of feathers into my lap and I play with them absentmindedly.

A sharp clang scares the hell out of me – I feel Dad jump, too – and has my hand halfway to an arrow. But no, no danger. Just Rick, standing by the fireplace. What? I look harder. A flash of color is just visible in the back of the ash-covered pit – yellow. A yellow can. My empty stomach gets heavy in a bad way and I turn to look at Carl. There's only one can of dog food in front of him now. He makes no move to open it, his eyes on his father. Until they drop to the floor in a way that makes me ache.

Just the owl, then. One owl, eleven people.

Screw the owl. Dad and I should go hunt, this house is right on the edge of a forest and we have plenty of time till nightfall, we could get something if we –

"Psst."

T-Dog. Over by a window, standing up. Gripping the iron fireplace poker he's taken to lately. His lips in a thin line.

Damn.

The rest of us are moving now. All this work for nothing, but that ain't anything new. I jump to my feet and grab a bag at random. Dad passes me, his crossbow in hand. He leads the way out, Dad does, through the house and out the back door Maggie and Glenn came through before.

There are walkers out here, closing in. A herd, not huge, but big enough. T-Dog was right to give off the warning, they could give us a fight not worth having. But damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it, I'm tired.

The days are getting warmer, but there are still plenty of brown leaves that crunch under all of us as we jog to the vehicles. I'm heading to the truck, this light-colored truck we got just last month. I reach it, I throw the bag in the back, I open the door, and I check to make sure my dad's gotten to his motorcycle before I slam myself into the safety of the cab. Two seconds later, Carl's jumped in beside me, and then Lori pulls herself into the passenger seat. She turns to give Carl a tight smile. He ignores it. T-Dog finally gets here, turning the key before his door's even closed. We drive off after my dad's bike and the two other cars, and I don't look behind us, I've seen it all before.

I put my quiver in the floorboard, my bow in my lap. My fingers run over the bowstring, my stomach rumbles, and I wish we had gotten to hunt.

Or I wish Rick had let us have the damn dog food.

But this is how it is now.