A/N

Hello there,

Not entirely sure where I'll take this story, or if I'll pick out any particular pairings to have, but I ptobably will. As with anything I write, apologies for a short first chapter, they will get longer.

Reviews and constructive criticism welcome and appreciated!

"Commander?"

"It's happened there too?"

"Yep, completely gone."

"Fuck"

About 2,700,000 minutes later

Newcomers?

Of course Grass had SEEN newcomers before, but he had never been able to pick them up himself before.

He sat atop his horse, looking expectantly at the twelve people, "Where are you idiots off to?"

The man who looked to their leader, a heavily built, scarred, middle-aged man stepped forward, "Where heading that way," pointing in the direction Grass had come from, "about ten days walk. We've been told the cure is there."

Grass did some simple maths stuff involving how fast things went and how long days went for before laughing, "There is no cure over there, I live in the place you are going." Grass then sat and thought about how bitterly disappointing it would be if he had been living with the cure as long as he could remember and hadn't realised. "Well," said the man who looked to be their leader, a middle-aged, heavily built, scarred man who stood at the front of the group, "I don't care if you live there, that is where we are going and you can't stop us."

"oh no, I wasn't gonna stop you, I was hoping you could come, I've never brought home anyone new and I can tick that off as something I've done." Grass reassured, "but I'm not letting you walk there, that's way too long a journey." Using the walky-talky he had been supplied with, he was able to contact a squad-mate who had a spare supply cart and they carried the newcomers home. A trip that took ten days on foot would be over in one because a very smart person about ten thousand years ago decided that it would be cool to ride a horse instead of eating it.

Because the carts took two horses to tow anyway, and the Scouts' horses were extremely well trained, Grass was able to tie his horse to the front of the cart and jump int the cart with the newcomers, and very vaguely explain how he and everyone he knew lived. As they travelled back to his homeland, he learnt a lot about the people he had picked up. Their leader, Hercules (not the hero it's just his name) was a policeman before the disease took hold and had gathered his family to get to the ocean, only he had survived that venture and turned around and attempted to drive back, only to run out of fuel. He had met his number-two, Diego and his family, who were mostly wiped out as they unwittingly wandered through a town full of violent gangs and anarchists. The rest of them were runaway prisoners from a drug empire that had managed to take over and rig the entire attempt of rebuilding civilisation, completely ruining the whole thing in the process, or just smart and strong people they had picked up just because. At the end of all that explaining, Hercules asked, "Why are you all so unwary? What about all the maggs that could be hiding here?"

Grass scoffed, "we bombed area out yesterday, there won't be any maggs coming here for another day at least, by then everyone will be done and home."

Maggs get their name from the origins of the disease they carry. Originally, there was a particular kind of fly that would lay an egg in a person's hair. When the resulting maggot was developed enough to move, it would crawl its way up through the nose or ears of the unaware victim, leaving a scent trailer behind it, and feed upon parts of the brain that were either dead or very close to it, before leaving and becoming flies via the scent trail they left. These maggots were almost completely harmless.

The disease many of them carried, however, was not.

This disease shut down most of the brain, only leaving the medulla, hypothalamus,and a tiny part of the bit that does the thinking, leaving the victim a mindless beast with an everlasting hunger for people.

So yeah, zombies.

In just a few years, the disease became so advanced it began building defence-systems on the body, thickening parts of the skull and sealing off the nostrils. The original flies went extinct as a result, leaving humanity with nothing to study other than the maggs themselves.

The trip seemed a lot shorter for Grass than it did for the newcomers, mainly because he didn't really stop to sleep and thus a days ride for him was an entire day, sunrise to sunrise, whereas for most people, a day of anything is about eight to ten hours. So on Grass's terms they were only travelling for a third of a day, which not only left him frustrated at the newcomers for, in his opinion, not using the term "day's travel" properly, but also left him frustrated at himself for getting his maths wrong anyway.

After a few hours, Grass pointed outward both ways to something on the ground. "That's where the old wall was, as you can tell, it is not there anymore. Some idiot knocked it over all the way to both those big forests." Quickly gesturing out and again and reminding his audience that they were moving along a wide path through a heavily forested area. "Once they got in, we evacuated a lot of people, but soon they broke the other gates and we lost a fifth of our population, and a third of our land." He recounted, "We've got about an hour and a bit left until we arrive at Rose."

"Why haven't you tried to fix the gates or the wall?" Diego asked with what could have could have quite possibly been the smoothest voice Grass had heard."

"Well," he began, "we all want to, but the government hasn't said we could anything else, our orders remain to build a new wall a hundred kilometres further out than this one, we lost our last attempt at the wall with the gates of Maria, five years ago. We probably could, but we're government funded and we don't want to upset anyone."

"Grass." His squad-mate said over his shoulder a while later

"All ears, Jean."

"We're home."

The newcomers gazed in awe at the thirty-foot wall of mesh and steel, topped with coils and coils of barbed wire. Towers containing several men and women with huge rifles slung over their shoulders were dotted equidistant along the wall. It stretched almost as far as any of them could see.

"Welcome," Grass told the newcomers, "To my homeland!"

Sorry about the 2700000 minutes thing, that's my idea of a joke.

I'll talk a bit about Grass when I come back to you. Until then, see you!