AN:

Another chapter for you! I have no idea how long this is going to be :) I'm really have fun with this so it's coming easy to me right now :) I would love it if you let me know what you think :)

I do not own or profit from The Walking Dead

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Chapter 6

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"Zombies or Walkers or whatever...still doesn't explain how I ended up in my own version of Planet of The Apes."

Daryl huffed sitting on his bed arms crossed he felt almost like a petulant child with his arms crossed.

He must be stoned. He was on some psychedelic trip. That ring must have been laced with LSD, some fucking leftover shit from Merle's hippie days.

"I'm tripping on acid." He muttered to himself.

"You're not tripping on acid, and I have no idea what you're talking about as far as Planet of The Apes I have no idea what your talking about? I never saw the movie or the remake. I was never a fan of Mark Wahlberg." She muttered

"Who the fuck is Mark Wahlberg?" He growled.

"Not important, when I was at the CDC, after the government fell, Dr. Jenner gave me something, something highly classified that had been discovered at a meteor crash site. It was a material, that by accident was discovered to alter or bend magnetic fields in such a way, that if you were touching the material to your skin you could in fact jump through time. I built the containment room here after years of study and experimentation so I could control the jumps, direct the jumps to where I wanted them to go. I made rings from the material, it worked best when the material was in a loop." She said proudly.

"You did it?" He said gaping.

"Seriously? Out of all of this story the fact that I'm a women and a genius is what bothers you?" She asked rolling her eyes.

"Naww, I just never knew a genius before." Daryl muttered. Fucking hell you walked into that one dipshit.

Carol gave him a dirty look then pulled her glasses out of her pocket and put them on. Sweet Jesus, she was cute. They were horn rimmed. All of his naughty librarian fantasies were flying through his head as she went to a white board in the room and picked up a marker.

She drew a picture of a stick figure at one end with loops surrounding it that gradually got wider and bent upward, she then started to draw arrows through the loops, until it reached the other side of the board. "You can jump only one way. But when you go to the past, there's like a critical build up. Eventually it's like a boomerang. They have to come back. They have no choice." She said turning to him.

Daryl, I did not abandon you.

The words of his momma's letter, she hadn't wanted to leave. He didn't want to believe any of this, but she hadn't wanted to leave. She hadn't committed suicide. A thought struck him then.

"What about if you jump forward?" He asked his voice barely a croak.

"Honestly, if you had asked me, a few hours ago I would have told you it was impossible to go back. But anything is possible, we just found out one of the jumpers didn't return because of brain cancer... Maybe." She paused "maybe in a few years you'll go back." Her voice was thick.

"Maybe?!" He growled.

"I'm sorry...there's no more rings." Her voice was barely a whisper as she stared at him, eyes filling with tears. "I'm so sorry, is there anyone waiting for you? In the past?"

Daryl threw his forearm over his eyes as he processed everything she was telling him.

"No...I have no one." Except that apparently he wasn't tripping or dead, and his momma was alive.

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He'd been silent for a long time. She was beginning to get worried.

"You still haven't said why...why are you sending people back? "

She thought for a minute that maybe she was imagining him speaking. "We're trying to find a cure, to the disease that causes the Walkers...err Zombies. There was a group of soldiers at the end of the 30's they were exposed to the chemical, a very specific chemical. Some developed illness but others developed a very specific genetic mutation. Alone, that mutation would not be enough. But paired with a newly discovered genetic mutation that provided an immunity to rabies , theoretically, you would be immune to the disease. If two people one with each mutation passed it on to a child, then that child would be immune. We could synthesize a vaccine from the blood of this person. The only problem is, those soldiers were all dead, and most of their kids are dead, and tracing their descendants now that the government is no more is impossible." She sighed, squeezing the bridge if her nose.

Daryl was in shock, he remembered his daddy used to carry on about how unfair it was some of the men in his unit, we're getting disability for exsposure to a chemical spill, and he wasn't just cause he never got sick.

A memory of his mom, chasing of a dog that had scared him when he was five. His dad had been furious saying the animal had been foaming at the mouth. She'd brushed off like it was nothing.

His momma was from the future, she'd come back to have a baby with his daddy; him. None of this made sense, but it all made sense at once. He needed to tell her who he was.

"Carol..My name is..." He started to say but stopped as the door flew open. Did no one fucking knock in the future?

"Carol! Their is activity on the monitors in containment. Someone's coming through.!"