AN: Here we go, another chapter.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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The heat from the explosion wafted over Carol. For a moment it was so hot, even with the small building she ducked behind as cover, that she feared she might actually be on fire, but she feared moving or opening her eyes too much to check.

As quickly as the initial wave of heat passed over her, though, it gave way to a slightly cooler sensation and she felt the instant sweat, drawn out of her body by the proximity of the explosion rolling down her skin. She wasn't on fire. She hadn't blown up.

Slowly she opened her eyes and tried to take in what was happening around her. The explosion from the large tank had taken out a good bit of everything that had been in front of her when she'd looked down on it from the hill. There were flaming bodies moving about and she was no longer sure if they were ignited Walkers or if they belonged to the screaming and screeching people of Terminus.

Before Carol found Merle in the confusion, all the Walkers doing what they'd predicted and spilling into the half destroyed fences like liquid running into the space, the sound of gunshots began to ring out.

And this time, it wasn't she and Merle that were firing them—not unless he'd managed to make it inside without her seeing him.

Carol rose up from her position enough to have a better view of what was happening and to try to search Merle out, afraid that she'd find he'd been blown up or killed by the shrapnel she'd been protected from by the walls that had surrounded her during the explosion.

She almost yelled when she felt something grab her, and she swung around, her hand barely making it to her knife, before she heard him growling at her to keep her mouth closed.

"Let the Walkers lead us in, Mouse," Merle growled in her ear. "I'ma head in the direction of them train cars—bust the chains on 'em, turn 'em loose. If they ain't conscious, I'll get 'em out. You head in through them buildings, see if you can't find Daryl?"

"If we split up," Carol responded, keeping close enough to him that their voices wouldn't carry, even to the Walkers around them, "how are we going to find each other? How are we going to know if we've found them?"

"Don't matter," Merle said. "We'll find each other. Just like I told ya. Go through them buildings, look for Daryl. You don't find him? Head on back and get Soph. Go to the spot we picked out and wait. I'll be there. Just kill ever' damn body ya see. 'Member they was gonna kill us first."

Carol nodded her head, swallowed, and then looked toward the dwindling sea of Walkers that were still wandering around them. They'd already discussed this before. It would get her in and out the fastest. She'd do a "run through" and help take out any still living people of the good "community" of Terminus and Merle would break their people out. She'd have time, then, to double back to where they'd left Sophia and he'd make sure nobody was left following them—far more likely to follow him and their prisoners than one lone woman—and they'd meet in the woods at a clearing they'd marked.

The only part that they hadn't been sure about, really, was how they were going to get into the place—and now that was taken care of.

Still, well planned or not, it didn't mean that Carol's heart wasn't very close to leaping out of her chest. She glanced at Merle one last time and darted directly into the crowd of Walkers, her gun in her hands, and immediately changed her gate to move smoothly with the bunch of them.

As she walked, she said a prayer to herself that everything would go well. She said a prayer to herself that she'd make it out of there alive, and so would everyone else, and that she'd get back to Sophia before the girl had begun to panic.

Carol raised her gun, took aim, and shot the man that was firing at her Walker companions before he ever noticed she was among the crowd, and then she dropped the gun and resumed moving with the bunch as best she could, her eye on the buildings ahead of her.

As she moved, Carol fired at the people around her, those that would have fired on her, and took down nearly every one that she aimed at.

More than once, they fired at her too, but she was lucky every time. She reminded herself of how lucky she was each time she saw the bullet that was, without a doubt, meant for her slam into the skull of a nearby Walker and drop it so that she had to return fire and step over the body at the same time—something that wasn't always as easy as she might have imagined.

Finally, though, she ducked inside the building and pressed herself against the hard brick wall for a moment to draw in a breath and try to get her wits about her.

Outside there were still things that seemed to be exploding from time to time. The fire was spreading and it was, as it went, blowing up everything explosive that it consumed. The air was thick with the scent of scorched flesh and it nearly choked her. She had to swallow repeatedly against the thick, salty taste in her mouth to keep from retching over the smell of it—the smell of death.

And there was screaming. People were burning. The flaming Walkers spread the fire to their victims. People were being torn apart. Some, maybe, were being killed by Merle and others, if he'd managed to free anyone yet, might be killed by the people they'd come after.

The hardest thing, perhaps, for Carol to remind herself of was that these people were people, but she couldn't let herself feel for them. Feeling for them would get her killed. Feeling for them would get other people killed—people who were far more important to her.

Once she'd had a moment to compose herself and catch her breath, Carol wandered through the building. It had once been a school, a community center—maybe a YMCA. It was the kind of building that seemed to be built entirely out of concrete blocks. She imagined that whoever had built it had never imagined it would be used for what it was now.

She stumbled through a room, the first beyond the entrance that she came through—obviously set up to "welcome" people to Terminus—and got the first taste of what this place really was. Hanging from the ceiling on meat hooks, were skinned and stripped bodies.

There were tables, too, stained with blood and it appeared that she and Merle had interrupted their work. They'd been carving someone up, dropping pieces of the body into a tub just like one might do on a smaller scale if they were cleaning their own chicken for a meal.

She unapologetically took advantage of the lull around her to empty whatever contents were left in her stomach from breakfast when the thought passed through her mind that, if she dared to look to closely or think too hard about it, the body might be one that belonged to someone she knew.

Those were the kinds of thoughts that she had to put out of her mind.

She passed through the "butcher shop" without encountering anyone. There were, as far as she could see, no signs of life inside the building. Merle, it seemed, was left alone, outside, with all the living.

Still, this was her job, and she was going to complete it.

She made her way into the next room and found that it was something of a "catch all" space with tables of items laid out like at a flea market. Maybe the good people of Terminus shopped there…it was impossible to tell without a tour guide handy.

Carol stepped toward one of the tables, loaded down with weapons, and recognized Daryl's crossbow and Michonne's katana among the items left there.

These were personal items. They were stripped from the people who came into the town, believing the welcoming signs painted along the way, and then the people were slaughtered.

Carol took the crossbow and katana both. She crossed them over her back, one in one direction and one in the other, to carry while keeping her arms free to hold the gun she'd reloaded while catching her breath.

When she stepped into the next room, something that immediately appeared to be some kind of altar room, she encountered the first person that she'd seen since stepping inside.

"Put your weapon down," the voice called.

The woman had come up behind her.

"Drop your weapon," the woman repeated.

Carol's blood very nearly stopped running through her veins at the moment. She felt, suddenly, cold. This was how she was going to die.

Except it couldn't be. Because Sophia was waiting for her. She'd promised Sophia that she was coming back. She'd promised her that she'd be back before nightfall. Sophia didn't care for the dark and she didn't like sleeping alone…especially not these days. Carol couldn't leave her out there for an entire night alone. She couldn't leave her for the rest of her life. Sophia was just a child. She wasn't ready to be alone.

Carol couldn't die. This was simply a bad time for it. She had other things she had to do. Sophia was waiting on her.

Sucking in a breath, Carol set her mind for the moment. She slumped her shoulders and rolled them, making like she intended to lower the gun—but she never did.

She turned as quickly as she could, peppering the area around her, and the woman who had spoken to her fell to the ground. Even as the woman hit the ground, clearly having been shot, she fired back at Carol and Carol shot in her direction once more, vaguely aware that she was trembling and her hands could barely keep their hold on her weapon.

She wasn't a killer. She didn't like to kill. She didn't want to kill this woman.

But this woman would have killed her. She would have killed her and everyone important to her and she would have strung them up and butchered them like pigs.

Carol wasn't a killer, but she wasn't going to let someone like that live.

The woman crawled toward her, apparently trying to make some move to get at her ankles, and Carol stepped away from her. For a moment, she was thrown off guard and distracted. The woman looked like a normal person—like someone she might have known in a past life. She looked like everyone else, not like someone that Carol might imagine would inhabit a nightmare like this place evidently was.

"Where are they?" Carol asked. "Are they in the train cars?"

The woman chuckled at her, gasping slightly.

"They're all dead," she said. "You'll never find them because they're dead."

"Where are they?!" Carol barked at the woman, her chest tightening at the fear that the words might be true.

The woman laughed at her and the laugh infuriated Carol.

"You don't understand," the woman said. "We're all monsters. They were too. You are. You could be one of us…we're the same…"

Carol felt a shiver run up her spine at the words. She considered, for a moment, shooting the woman in the head and moving on, but for whatever reason, the cackling of the woman grated on her nerves to a point that she didn't want to afford her even that luxury. She made her way to the next door, pushed it open, and revealed to herself the streaming light and a renewed smell of charred flesh that told her she'd found the outside. Even as she pushed the door open, there were hands reaching in of Walkers—ones that had walked in with her, no doubt, but probably some who had inhabited this horrible place.

She pushed the door just enough to let them get a good hold on it and they let themselves in, heading straight toward the woman who had ceased cackling at Carol and had begun to scream for her life—the woman who was ringing the dinner bell and announcing herself as the main entrée just like she'd undoubtedly done for any number of potentially good people that had passed through there.

The Walkers, so enamored by the idea of the screaming meal, went straight for her and ignored Carol, who still smelled at least faintly like them, entirely. She burst into the sunlight.

Around her she could see patches of the fight seemed to be over. Much of the place was still. In other places, it sounded like fighting wore on. She found the line of train cars and saw that many of them had been opened, the chains busted to let the doors be pulled apart.

Merle had been through here already.

For good measure, and just in case, Carol used the butt of her gun to bust the locks off two of the nearby train cars, both of which hadn't been broken into yet, and pulled the doors just enough to announce her presence. When nobody came out of them, she realized that Merle had likely passed through and beat on them to find the ones that were occupied.

That meant that, wherever the fighting was still going on, he was likely not fighting alone. And since she hadn't seen anyone that she knew—anyone that she recognized—Carol had to believe that he'd found the three that they'd come in search of.

She had to believe it, but she also knew that was her sign to run in the opposite direction, back the way they'd come and back through the area she'd already cleared. It was time for her to go and get Sophia so that they could be ready to meet them all back at the clearing.

Carol marched quickly back the way that they'd come in, skipping the buildings entirely now, and killed three more people that popped out at her like they were part of some kind of haunted house spectacle. Then, sure she wasn't being followed by anyone, she started up the hill that they'd come down, not looking back for the simple fact that she didn't want to see anything else—there was nothing else there to see—and she headed through the woods, dodging Walkers as she went, toward the shed where Sophia would be waiting.