It was the news nobody wanted to hear at that time of the day.
Randall had escaped, and he was armed.
It hit the group like a ton of bricks, most noticeably Rick. He stood beside his son, in some way comforted by the fact that they had time. There had to be a solution to this. After all, the kid was injured, he couldn't have gone that far.
"Are you okay?" Carl asked shakily, noticing the blood on Shane's face, just as he approached them.
"I'm fine. Little bastard just snuck up on me." Shane assured the boy. He was speaking quickly, clearly in a rush to get the words out. "He clocked me in the face."
Rick was ready for this, immidiately springing into action. He had to protect his group, even if that did mean hunting this boy down like an animal. Of course, he'd be locked up again, and sent out like planned.
"All right, Hershel, T-Dog, get everybody back in the house." He pointed to the two men, putting them in charge of the many men and women of the group. "Glenn, Daryl, come with us."
Daryl's fists were involuntarily clenched, his eyes darting from Shane's grave face to Rick's worried one. With furiously fast and experienced hands, he loaded his crossbow.
He could never be too ready.
Hell, if that kid brought back his group, they wouldn't stand a chance. He'd heard the story straight from Randall's mouth, just days ago. Those thirty men would arrive, guns drawn, and take this farm.
As the hunter of the group, he knew it was going to be up to him to find and take down this kid, if the situation called for it. It was always Daryl who managed to handle all of the dirty work, and he had a feeling this was another calling for his tough approach.
T-Dog and Hershel began ushering the group members back inside, many staying where they stood to see the rest of the conversation, including a pale-faced Amy.
From the corner of Daryl's eye, he saw that same tiny figure that had been hovering around him all day.
Daryl had always been the watcher, the observer. He was always lurking silently in the corner of the room, being overlooked by the majority of the group. He was used to that. He would even go as far to say that he liked it, the solitude that came with hunting by himself, being by himself, without the unnecessary drama that seemed to waft around the camp like a bad smell.
And still, he always seemed to be affected by it in some way or another, no matter how hard he tried to avoid it.
It was thanks to many years of hunting and tracking as to why he had the keenest sense of sight and hearing in the group, something that aided him in his endeavour to survive.
Lately the only subject of his attention was that one girl, that one annoyingly conversational ex-prisoner, and it exasperated him to no end.
No matter where he was, she would always follow. And even then, he would often find his eyes glued to hers when she wasn't looking.
It was a curse, and many times Daryl would have to remind himself that there were more important things to be looking at than her face.
To him, she was obvious, readable, even. The spoilt brat from Philadelphia, who probably lived her life in some huge house, with someone by her side to aid her with her every need. She could barely do a thing by herself, barely stand for herself, and Daryl hated that.
But still, Daryl couldn't keep his eyes off of her.
There was something about her stubborn, yet strangely talkative attitude, the way she'd look down at the ground every so often, the flush that would draw the soft redness from her cheeks whenever Daryl would say something cutting, and her dimpled smile, that kept him somehow oblivious.
She stood beside Carol, who had started to shuffle towards the house. Her clouded grey eyes were wide and frightened as the situation unfolded. Daryl couldn't help but wonder what exactly she had to be afraid of. She had been ensured safety from the beginning, yet that scared look on her face always lingered.
"T, I'm gonna need that gun." Shane charged up to T-Dog, who immediately held the weapon out to him.
"Just let him go. That was the plan, wasn't it, to just let him go?" Carol asked, her voice sounding panicked.
"The plan was to cut him loose far away from here, not on our front step -- with a gun," Shane argued back at her, his tone of voice much too aggressive for Daryl's liking.
"Don't go out there, y'all don't know what can happen!" She said weakly. Daryl knew she was talking indirectly to him, but as usual he avoided her plead and continued to glance around the tree line.
He didn't like the way she respected him, the way she put him high on a pedestal and expected the best from him, the way she cared for him. Daryl didn't need to be cared for, and he certainly didn't need any woman's crushed expectations on his shoulders.
"Get everybody back in the house. Lock all the doors and stay put!" Rick ordered, turning back to the forest. The rest of the group began to mill back inside as soon as he'd said those words, knowing now was not the time to disobey.
But there Amy still stood, one of three people still standing outside the house, alone with Maggie and Hershel.
"Go!" Daryl demanded, his voice hoarse. He was always gratuitously sharp around the woman. To Daryl, it was not hard to be sharp around her, as she was everything Daryl was forced not to be as a child; weak, emotional and vulnerable. Those were just some of the characteristics the Dixon children had learnt to hate and ridicule in others.
She blinked at him, her lips pursed, with an innocent expression on her face. He could feel his temper rise, as the woman just stood there, silently challenging him.
He knew if he was caught acting like she did, especially around Merle, his ass would get a good stomping. He could only imagine his brother's reaction to him teaching this hopeless woman to fight.
"She's got you on a leash, brother!" His poisonous laughter echoed in his head.
Glenn was beside him, pressing Maggie to go back inside.
He didn't want to look like he actually cared about Amy, which he didn't, but Daryl needed to start looking and she needed to get back to safety. They both just didn't have time to waste.
But again, they were both too stubborn to walk away. Again his icy eyes met her grey ones. There was something stirring about her eyes, startling to many at a first glance.
He was about to throw an insult her way, when they were both distracted by Andrea.
The strident blonde turned back to Maggie and Amy, calling out from the porch, "Let's go, get back in the house!"
Without another word to the infuriating woman, Daryl turned away, following beside Shane as they walked towards the forest with haste.
"I saw him head up through the trees that way before I blacked out." Shane pointed to a single direction.
Purely on instinct, Daryl had already begun tracking the ground below him, eyes scanning over every inch of the area. But there was nothing more than a few old scuffles through the leaves, that looked to have been there at least a day ago.
"I'm not sure how long," Shane continued, as he kept walking forward, his steps determined.
If the kid had come this way, it would've had to have been days ago, and that just wasn't possible.
"He couldn't have gotten far," Rick stated, "He's hobbled, exhausted."
"And armed," The oddly quiet Glenn added.
"So are we," Rick assured the young man, who was quickly losing faith in finding Randall before sundown. "Can you track him?"
He turned to Daryl, who was still scouring the floor for any footsteps, or any traces of a cover-up. He doubted Randall was even smart enough to cover his tracks anyway.
"No, I don't see nothin'." Daryl mumbled, still focused on the ground.
"Hey, look, there ain't no use in tracking him, okay?" Shane said loudly, distracting him briefly. Daryl looked up at the man, whose blood had now seeped down his neck and into his shirt. "He went that way. We just need to pair up. We spread out, we chase him down. That's it."
"Kid weighs a buck twenty-five soakin' wet. You tryin' to tell us he got the jump on ya?" Daryl narrowed his eyes at Shane, sceptical about this whole story he'd cooked up. Hell, if he couldn't find some wounded kid's tracks on the forest floor, then there was simply nothing to find.
"I'd say a rock pretty much evens out those odds, don't you?" Shane retorted, his nose even more crooked after being broken for the second time.
"All right, knock it off," Rick intercepted what was about to become a shouting match. "You and Glenn start heading up the right flank."
Glenn looked to Daryl, relieved to be with the archer. He was armed with only a crowbar, something that would be very hard to defend himself with if the time called, especially against a gun.
"Me and Shane'll take the left," He continued, "Remember, Randall's not the only threat out there."
The two pairs separated on different paths, Daryl taking the right with Glenn, like he'd been instructed. He continued to search for prints, or anything to prove that someone had been there, but the natural light was becoming dimmer and dimmer.
It seemed that Glenn was just as useless as Amy at keeping his steps to a minimum, accidentally snapping every twig he could with his big feet. It was too dark for Glenn to actually see Daryl's glare, but he got the gist when a bird fluttered from its nest when he stood on a particularly brittle twig.
"This is pointless. You got a light?" Daryl asked, turning again to Glenn.
With a flick of a torch, the ground was illuminated once again.
The visibility had improved slightly, thanks to the aid of the torch light. Daryl stood to the spot, following the light of the torch as he looked around the small clearing. He let out an audible groan as he walked across the clearing. There was nothing to see, just as he'd expected.
Still, Daryl needed to keep searching. He couldn't let this kid rally up his thirty men, knowing the he could've done something.
The two men continued to look for tracks. Daryl was actually peering about, and Glenn was following him, not really focused on anything at all.
"We're just back to square one," Glenn noticed, as they crossed the same log they had been standing beside at daylight.
"If you're gonna do a thing, ya might as well do it right," Daryl grunted in reply. He kept walking, ignoring Glenn's frustrated breath.
That's when Daryl noticed them.
There were large scuffs in the leaves, not big enough to be an animal's, but not small enough to be a single person's. Some of the footsteps swayed off to the right, others digging deeper into the soil than the others.
"There's two sets of tracks right there," Daryl noted. He may have looked an average redneck, but he did have some intelligence about him. "Shane must've followed him a lot longer than he said."
As they continued walking, the beam of the flashlight showed a dark spot on the trunk of a tree, which immediately caught Daryl's attention.
"There's fresh blood on this tree," He pointed out, looking closely at the splotch of dark substance. "There's more tracks. Looks like they're walkin' in tandem."
Shane's story was looking less and less likely to both men, as they continued to slowly follow the tracks.
Something stirred in a tree above their heads, catching Glenn's attention. He snapped his head in the direction, whilst still walking behind the hunter.
With a loud thump, he hit into Daryl's hard shoulder.
"Sorry," Glenn breathed nervously, even though he was sure it hurt him more that it hurt Daryl.
He was honestly freaked about being in the dark, this late at night, with an escapee on the loose.
Daryl shook his head and kept following the tracks, certain that he was about to find something of more importance.
Tracking meant looking around for long periods of time, just to take in every detail of his surroundings.
It was a long and tedious experience, but it found him things that nobody else would have noticed, which was probably how Daryl found his ability to just sit back and observe. It meant he could actually see what was going on with an outsider's eye, in a way that was untainted by involvement.
"Yeah, there was a little dust-up right here." He pointed to a gathering of snapped twigs, upturned leaves and exposed soil.
"What do you mean?" Glenn asked, looking down to find a bunch of leaves on the dirt. Nothing unusual.
"I mean something went down."
"This is getting weird," Glenn muttered, clutching tightly at his crowbar. The faint seed of suspicion had been planted in his head, one that started to question Shane's story altogether.
"Had a little trouble." Daryl used his crossbow to point at a long strip of fabric, which Glenn identified as Randall's blindfold.
He picked up the strip, holding it out for both of them to see.
A twig suddenly snapped from behind them, alerting the two men to hide behind something.
It could have been Randall, and he was armed.
Glenn found refuge behind a tree, Daryl taking the one beside him.
Over his shoulder, Daryl could see what looked to be a walker, wandering aimlessly through the fog. He quickly whistled to Glenn, before tossing him the flashlight.
He was ready for his, prepared, as the footsteps came closer, the creature sniffing the air loudly.
Glenn stepped out from behind the tree, only to come face-to-face with a familiar escaped prisoner.
The now reanimated Randall let out a primal growl, one that he could never have made if it weren't for his damaged vocal cords. His skin was a freshly-dead purplish colour, also tainted by the bruising on his face that Daryl had given him two days before. His head swung limply on its side, held up by his shoulder.
Glenn went to kill him, raising his crowbar. Before he could get a good swing at his head, Randall jumped at him, aiming for the poor man's neck, reaching out with his stiff fingers.
There was a short and silent struggle, as Daryl prepared to aim down his sights. With Glenn lying on the ground, the walker lost interest, turning to Daryl instead, after hearing his heavy breathing. He was prepared to shoot, but the creature had caught him by such surprise that he had to hold it back.
He was pushed against a tree, audible grunts escaping his lips in puffs as he tried to untangle himself from the damned strap of his crossbow, while also struggling to keep Randall away with his outstretched knee.
He just needed to reach for the knife in his belt, but he couldn't even do that.
Glenn pulled the creature back, breathing through his mouth as he did so. It struggled in his tense arms, as Daryl untied himself from his weapon. Glenn fell back again, Randall on top of him now, struggling to keep his limp head from taking a bite of his arm.
Daryl prepared for the shot, aiming down his sight again, but Glenn already had it covered when he was about to shoot.
He rolled over with the walker, so he was sitting on Randall's thighs as he slammed the crowbar into his head.
Randall sighed slightly, a strange sound coming from the lips of a walker. It sounded to Glenn like he was relieved to die, relieved to be fully dead, and not just a walking corpse.
"Nice." Daryl patted Glenn on the shoulder in very discreet appreciation. It was about the most thanks anyone could ever receive from Daryl.
He bent down to examine the body, rolling Randall's limp head to the side.
"Got his neck broke," Daryl said gruffly, the torch focused on the body's face.
Of course, he knew what this meant.
He knew from the get-go that Shane had something to do with Randall's disappearance. Why else would he lie about where he had fallen? Not to mention the fact that he had them tracking in the complete wrong direction.
Daryl shoved the corpse onto its stomach, pulling up the shirt to check the boy's back for any cuts or scratches.
"He's got no bites." He shook his head.
"Yeah, none that you can see" Glenn pointed out, looking down at the body too.
"No, I'm tellin' ya, he died from this." Daryl pointed to the body's neck, which was incredibly bruised and inflamed.
"H-How's that possible?" Glenn questioned.
He remembered back to the first night the prisoners had spent in the shed.
"D-Did you make sure he can't come back?" Amy had whispered. Her face was hidden, so Glenn couldn't tell if dehydration was making her delirious. Glenn remembered wondering what she had meant by that.
If her brother died from a bullet, he wouldn't have been able to come back... Right?
Glenn had always thought the only way a person could turn was from a bite or a scratch from the infected. That was just they way it was, and always had been.
Daryl jumped to his feet, a determined look in his squinting eyes. They had to get back to camp, and they had to tell the others what had happened. He didn't know what his meant, but he sure as hell was going to find out.