She wonders about her garden.

It's the only thing she cares about, really, other than Sophia. She doesn't even put herself into that category: "Things She Cares About". She doesn't care about herself, not particularly. She retains personal value due to one thing: Sophia. To care for her. To protect her. From whatever the hell is happening now. From the world. From her father.

There is always so much to do. Cooking, cleaning, washing, keeping an eye on the children. And oh, yes. Staying alive. Because, as the book of Revelations always warned, the dead are now walking the earth. The dead, who now reign, with the clouded orbs of their eyes, and the dulled, worn crowns of their teeth.

They picked up with the group from Atlanta, Ed grudgingly agreeing they could do a lot worse than fall in with the brawny, handsome Shane, who exuded a rough-hewn, untamed masculinity under his "Shucks, ma'am," small-town cop veneer. Something in him spoke to Ed and screamed silently at Carol. He would protect them, oh yes. For his own purposes. All they had to do was relinquish power, and fall in line.

No problem there. She has no power. Wouldn't know what to do with it if someone handed it over in a big, wrapped box with a bow.

So. Now she has three masters: God, Ed, Shane. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The triumvirate.

She is afraid of the mobilized dead, but she has lived with fear so long, she absorbs it more readily than some of the others. She looks at the other women, with their long, shiny hair and shell-shocked eyes and furrowed brows and envies them. This has been a terrible, horrifying shock. For her it has been...

Well...

Dare she admit it? Exciting.

Yes, that's the word. Excitement is when fear meets the awe-inspiring, no? The fear that Carol has lived with, for so long, forever, it seems, has been the fear of the known. The fear scrubbed into worn, dirty, linoleum floors of her pale kitchen, the fear clutched in the greying stubble of her shorn head, the fear in the metallic snicking sound of Ed's key in the lock when he came home at 3 in the morning, reeking of cheap draft beer and another woman's sweat.

The fear was still there yes, of course. But now, there is a little tug in her mind, a shred of string she forgot existed, pulling on her. This idea: that things could be different. That things could change. Until that day a few weeks ago, when she turned on the television, her Bible in one hand and Sophia's fingers wrapped around the other, Carol thought she knew the plot of her life, an unwavering, continuously greying line towards death, and salvation, with the occasional sunburst of happiness that was her daughter. It was all there, stretched out before her.

But then...change.

Fermentation.

Dead and living things, reconfiguration, mixing to create a new composition of the world.

Carol thinks again, of her garden. She grew the flowers because their beauty lightened her heart; she grew the vegetables, the herbs, because she wanted to feed her family. Once the most precious thing she'd ever grown was out of the house every day, in school, she needed something to do. Ed refused to let her work, and it never crossed her mind to challenge the idea.

But her caregiver's soul needed to tend to something, and plants had a better chance of surviving Ed's temperament than a pet did. (Of course, she never questioned that if she felt a cat was unsafe, why not her daughter?)

The real revelation came when she started her own composting. Not only did the buried, information-seeking side of her relish in learning something new, but her compost pile was magic. Scraps, bits, worms, dead things – combine them correctly, and you created something that encouraged, aided, growth.

As Carol scrubs at Sophia's favorite purple t-shirt, bending in easy, inexplicable camaraderie with these other women, these shocked but bruiseless women, smiling cautiously at them, not sure of how to respond but absorbing their words, and possibly, their friendship, she thinks of her abandoned garden.

Pictures, clearly, the first tomato, gleaming scarlet on the vine.

Wonders if it would taste the way life does right now, a combination of the utterly expected and something new, richer, exotic and strange.