Title: Middle of Nowhere
Author: PlasticCandy
Fandom: The Walking Dead
Rating: Mature readers
Warnings: violence, language, possible sexual situations
Summary: The team reaches the CDC, but things never go as planned, do they? Another straggler joins the team.
Notes: A few things bugged me when they got to this part, and I'm pretty sure I made it evident in the first chapter.
Disclaimer: The Walking Dead and its characters don't belong to me. They belong to their rightful owners.
Installment 1 - In Which They Find Amanda
The CDC is quiet. It's peaceful, and it rings in their ears, the same as a rock show. They're in, the doors are closing behind them, and then there's the cocking of a slide-action shot gun. Jenner has a gun pointed at them, the guests, and in return he has at least six weapons pointed back at him.
To his credit, he doesn't even flinch.
Amanda drops to the floor opposite him, jumping off a landing that leads to the second floor. She is un-armed, but that doesn't seem to matter when a few of those guns swing her way. She holds her hands up, takes a step forward.
"You want to live, you won't move."
This from the guy with the crossbow trained on her. She does a quick double-take, makes sure it really is a crossbow and that she isn't dreaming, and takes a deep breath.
She waits, impatient, as Jenner questions them. One of the group, a tall skinny man in a cop uniform, answers for them, and Jenner agrees to let them stay on the condition they submit to a blood test. Amanda sighs, turns away even though that crossbow is still trained on her and every instinct in her gut is telling her not to face away from him.
She takes the elevator down and waits, impatient, in the kitchen for everyone. She knows Jenner will feed them once he takes their blood, and the lab is right down the hall.
There's a loud commotion, and she sighs, turns to the stove and starts cooking.
Things just keep getting better and better.
Amanda paces frantically in front of the stove as people trickle in one by one. The blonde is first, held up by another woman. They settle into some chairs.
"Smells good."
"I try."
Amanda sets a pan back on the stove, flips the meat in it and checks it.
"What's for dinner?"
Amanda ignores them as they come in, sliding into chairs and breaking open a few bottles of wine. Someone finds a bottle of whiskey somewhere, and then there's the beer. She has a bad feeling about tonight.
She finishes dinner and sets out plates and silverware, then makes herself scarce. The mixing of men and alcohol always makes her a little shakey, and there's more than enough of both to make her more than uncomfortable.
On her way out, Jenner passes her, and he motions for her to follow him. She sighs, doubles back into the kitchen, where everyone's busy getting food and feeding their faces. She watches, patiently, as everyone eats their fill. Twice, she has to cook again to make sure no one leaves the table hungry.
She sits back, finally, as they finish scraping their plates. There's a quiet murmur of thanks in her general direction, and she shrugs them off.
Then there's the dark-haired one, who looks like he might be a firefighter or something except the emblem on his shirt says he's a cop. She looks at the skinny guy and pegs him for a cop, too, since he's wearing the uniform. Amanda busies herself figuring everyone out, and while she does that, she listens to the toast given by the skinny one. Then the questioning starts, mostly about why this place is empty.
Amanda doesn't tell them about the work she had to do, hours after she had arrived, hauling the dead bodies out of the building before Jenner sealed the doors.
Finally, Jenner shows them to the living quarters, or what passes for them, and she sets to doing the dishes. There's a distinct lack of hot water that tells her that everyone possible is taking a shower, and she sighs, shuts the water off and dries her hands.
"Hey."
She turns, startled. She sees a pair of jeans and a shirt, bare feet, but no head. Whoever it is, he's digging around in the freezer for something.
"Help you?" she asks, folding her arms across her chest and leaning back against the counter.
He looks around the freezer door at her, and she blinks.
"Well, if it isn't Mr. Crossbow."
He smiles then, one corner of his mouth turning up in what Amanda thinks might be a friendly gesture, holds up a second bottle of whiskey.
"I got it." He closes the freezer door and turns to walk away, then stops. "You don't say much, do you?"
She cocks her head to the side. "When I need to." She sighs, pushes away from the counter. "I'm Amanda."
"Daryl." He holds out his hand, and she shakes it quickly. The smirk on his face isn't lessening her apprehension about that bottle in his hand. "Where you from?"
"All over."
He raises an eyebrow, and she sighs. "Middle of nowhere. My daddy was rich, we lived in a mansion."
He looks around. "Why are you here?"
"I'm military. Or, I was. I got here just before the doors sealed. Been stuck here with my brother-in-law ever since."
"Jenner?"
"He married my sister."
Daryl nods, looks down the hallway. "How long?"
"Too long." She offers a smile, gets up to test the water again. It's hot, so she starts on the dishes.
There's silence behind her, and she turns to find the kitchen empty.
She's just finishing the dishes when there are footsteps behind her, and she turns, her hand tugging her knife out of its pouch on her hip in one fluid movement. She lowers it as the dark-haired woman, she thinks they called her Lori, comes in and offers to help.
"I got it. Thanks, though." Amanda smiles, slides the knife back in its carrier. "Everyone showered?"
Lori nods. "Yeah." She smiles, gets a cup from the shelf and pours herself a glass of soda. "Jenner hasn't explained anything yet."
"He will." Amanda looks down. "We haven't had any interaction with anyone in a while. It'll take some getting used to."
"Are you two..." Lori trails off, not sure how to finish. She blushes.
"No. Jenner's my brother-in-law." Amanda shrugs, sits down across from her. "He married my sister."
Amanda feels strange, having to explain this to anyone, let alone repeat it. She fidgets nervously, twisting the hem of her shirt with her fingers until Lori sets her empty cup on the table.
"You should get some sleep," she says finally. "I know you're all probably really tired."
"Really tired doesn't even cut it," Lori agrees, and she washes her cup and goes to bed.
Amanda sighs, slides off her shoes and kicks them in the corner. She's going to be working all night, she knows, and she'll be much more comfortable without her shoes. She pads into the computer room, what Jenner calls the Big Room, and settles in at a computer for the night.
She is startled awake by Jenner's voice floating down the hall behind her, and she sits up, rubbing her neck. She mutters a few curse words at the screen, even though it can't answer her. She glances at the clock in the corner.
Four hours lost in sleep. She sighs, leans back in her chair and proceeds to try to work the knots and kinks out of her neck while Jenner leads the group into the Big Room. She sits, silent, at a computer near the back of the room as they file in, and Jenner pulls up the video of TS-19. She cringes.
Close to the center of the room, Cop One (Amanda thinks his name is Shane but she can't be all that sure) asks about the lights, and Amanda waits for Jenner to do his layman's terms explanation of synapses in the brain.
"It's a person's life-experiences, memories. It's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you. The thing that makes you unique and human."
"You don't make sense ever?" Amanda turns to see Daryl standing behind her.
"Those are synapses, electric impuses in the brain-"
"Shut up, Jenner. I got this." Amanda takes center stage, nudges Jenner out of the way and watches the screen.
"The 'lights' as you call them are electricity. That's how your brain talks to itself, to the rest of your body."
"Vi, scan forward to the first event." Jenner tries to take more control, but Amanda narrows her eyes at him.
"Scanning to first event." Amanda shudders at the sound of that electronic voice.
"It invades the brain like meningitis. The adrenal glands hemmorage, the brain goes into shut-down, then the major organs. Then death."
"Didn't I say shut up?" Amanda crosses her arms and looks at Jenner. "The adrenal glands aren't in your brain, dumbass." She steps in front of Jenner. "It invades your brain, shuts it down. It essentially over-stimulates a lot of the glands in the brain, including the Pineal gland-the one that monitors your sleep cycle. It shuts down your organs and makes you sleep."
She pauses, waits. "Vi, scan forward to the second event, please."
"Scanning to second event."
"The resurrection timese vary wildly. We've had reports of it happening in as little as three minutes. The longest we've heard of was eight hours. In the case of this patient it was two hours, one minute, seven seconds."
Amanda faces the screen so no one can see the tears rolling down her face.
"It restarts the brain?"
"No, just the brain stem."
"It activates more than that. Motor functions work well enough for movement, the sense of smell..." Amanda takes a deep breath.
"Yeah, we know about that one."
"Vision is available for a short time, but after a while the eyes begin to..." She hesitates. "Deteriorate. Decay. The flesh isn't living-just the brain." She watches the screen as the red light continues to pulse at the center of the brain, sending out shocks every now and then.
"Basically, it gets them up and moving."
"But they're not alive."
"You tell me."
"It's nothing like before. Most of that brain is dark."
"Dark. Lifeless. Dead. The frontal lobe, the neocortex, the human part, that doesn't come back. The you part. Just a shell."
Amanda has a hard time watching the next part, and she turns away from the screen and lets Jenner field a few questions about potential causes, communications, whether there's anyone else doing research.
"Man, I'ma get shit-faced drunk, again." Amanda watches Daryl walk away, rubbing his eyes.
"Dr. Jenner, I know this has been taxing for you and I hate to ask one more question, but that clock. It's counting down. What happens at zero?"
"The basement generators run out of fuel."
"And then?"
"Oh, you don't want to know that," Amanda says, and a few heads swivel towards her.
"Why?"
Lori sees Amanda's face has gone pale, and she shakes her head at Rick.
"Vi, what happens when the power runs out?"
Vi answers. Facility-wide decontamination.
"What does that mean?" Rick looks at Jenner, then at her. Amanda can't hold his gaze and she looks down, tears in her eyes. "What does that mean?"
Amanda watches Jenner walk away, and she sighs and follows him.
"What the fuck is your problem?" She grabs his arm, spins him towards her. "They deserve an answer. They have less than an hour to get out, and you're not answering their questions and you're not helping."
"They shouldn't have come here."
"But they did." Amanda is fed up with Jenner's issues. "You lost a wife, I get that. But for fuck's sake, Jenner, she was my sister. My sister. Stop running away from your problems and face them."
"I did." He's in her face now. "I'm the one that killed her, or have you forgotten that?"
"And then you cut her open and used her for science." She smacks him, pushes him back to get him away from her. "Did you ever care for her, Edwin? Did you? Or did you just want to be close to her for advancement? Because she was smarter than you, better than you?"
She doesn't know what's happening until it's too late, and she holds her hand to her face and stares at him, more surprised that he got the jump on her than from pain.
"They deserve an explanation, Jenner. A chance. We don't have that, but they do."
She walks away, leaving him to explain everything as the power starts shutting down, and then she feels the air cut off, hears the motors stop spinning. She sighs, doesn't know what to do.
They're gathering in the Big Room again, following Jenner and badgering him with questions. She can hear it from where she's standing. She heads to the kitchen, tugs her boots on and laces them up.
"Open the fucking door!"
Amanda can hear them, but when she heads to the Big Room to see what's going on, she realizes she's locked out. There's thudding coming from the other side, the scrape of metal on metal. She pounds on the door from the other side.
"Jenner, open this fucking door right now, or so help me, I will beat the shit out of you!"
Her palms are stinging from slapping the cold metal, but she doesn't care.
It takes a few minutes, but the doors finally slide open and she stumbles back, almost falls. Daryl grabs her arm and steadies her as he yells back to the others, and she's leading them out to the front room.
She searches her pockets for her security key, realizes it's in her office upstairs. She rushes up the stairs, takes them two at a time as everyone floods the lobby, and she hears the thudding of the axes on the heavy-duty plexiglass. She grabs the key from her desk, runs back down in time to see the woman with the short hair, Carol she thinks wildly, hand a grenade to Rick.
"Hey! Don't set that off in here!"
"We don't have a choice-"
"You'll have more deaths than will be helpful if you set off a frag grenade in here. Are you fucking stupid?" She shoves Rick out of her way, slides her key through the key pad on the door and punches in a number, then another set of numbers. The doors slide open.
"Out, now!"
She is busy ushering everyone else out, not paying attention to the time. Dale and Andrea come running from the big room at the last possible second, and Amanda holds the doors open for them before running out herself.
She glances back once, twice, then shoves Dale and Andrea behind a stack of sandbags just as the building explodes. She doesn't have time to hide herself, and she is picked up by the ensuing shockwave and slammed against the side of the RV.
She groans. "Shit."
She hears the door to the RV open, and someone above her yelling to "Get in!"
She watches Andrea and Dale climb the steps, and she's trying to follow, struggling, then arms are pulling her up and guiding her to the nearest available vehicle, the pick-up truck. She groans again, tries to get her feet under her so he's at least not dragging her.
"Get in," he says, and she opens the door with fumbling, bloody hands, and slides into the truck just as the caravan pulls out. She slams the door as the truck starts moving.
"You are one dumb bitch, you know that?"