One Month Later
June 3

1:05 PM
Manassas, Virginia

Gavin carried the last heavy cooler from the trading post and slid it into the bed of his pick-up truck before lifting the tail and clicking it into place. He nodded at Dianne, who was at the Coalition's Manassas trading post with Jerry to trade for the Kingdom. She wandered over and looked at his score in the bed. "I think they gave you more fish than they gave the Kingdom. And we supplied two escorts."

The inhabitants of Hallowbrant Outreach had been successfully settled at Oceanside a month ago. It was a good camp, Gavin thought. Unlike the Sanctuary and the Kingdom it lacked electricity, but it was designed for rustic living, with wells, hand pumps, and camping cabins. The fishing in the Bay was good, and the place was isolated and easy to defend. He was finally getting paid for helping to provide security and transportation of goods along the way. "Well, I think they're still happy I got rid of Simon."

"I believe the people down south got rid of Simon," she reminded him.

He shrugged. "That I toppled the syndicate in general, then. Speaking of the people down south, I overheard some interesting traffic on the CB."

Dianne raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"I'll tell you all about it on the way to the Sanctuary, if you agree to come stand guard for me for a few days."

"I thought you had enough trained guards now," Dianne said.

"I do, when everyone's in town. But DJ wants to go back with Jerry and spend some time with his sister in the Kingdom. Take his place for a few days? It's day shift. Nights off."

"And am I getting anything in return for this work?" she asked.

"You'll get three squares a day and a roof over your head."

Dianne smirked. "I've got that already at home."

"And I did manage to locate another bottle of that scotch you liked so much last time you were there. What we don't drink while you're there, you can take home with you."

Dianne seemed to consider the proposal. "It's a deal," she agreed. "Though I think DJ's more interested in seeing Amber than in seeing his sister."

"I didn't think she'd stay a widow for long," Gavin said as he opened the driver's side door of his pick-up. "Though I assumed she'd go for a knight and not an ex-Savior."

Dianne slipped into the passenger's side and cranked down her window as Jerry lumbered over. She explained to him DJ would be taking her place for a few days at the Kingdom.

"Okay," Jerry told her. "I'll let the boss know."

She kept the window down, and her bow and quiver leaned between her legs, as Gavin drove his truck across the Manassas battlefield, through a gap in the wooden fence, and onto Route 29, where he picked up speed.

"So? What did you overhear?" she asked him.

"Apparently they've got another camp, besides Egypt and the fallen Woodbury and the fallen Paris, wherever that was," Gavin replied. "A hospital. They didn't slip up enough to say where the hospital was, but they were communicating pretty freely because that camp ran into a problem and was calling Egypt for help."

"What kind of problem?"

"They're apparently completely surrounded by the undead - they call them walkers - and trapped inside, and they're pushing on the glass doors and some boarded over back doors enough that within a day the weight will likely shatter them and they'll flood inside. The people in the hospital have a certain amount of firepower to thin them out near the doors from the upper windows a bit here and there, but they just keep coming from around the city."

"City? So Atlanta?" Dianne ventured. "Given where Woodbury was located?"

"Or Macon. It's about the same distance from Woodbury. Anyway, Egypt is sending help to draw off and dispense with the herd."

"A massive herd, in a city? They're going to dispense with it? Just like that?" Dianne snapped her fingers.

Gavin shrugged. "They seem to think so. Anyway, if they succeed, it sounds like they're rolling everyone and all the supplies back into Egypt. And it sounds like they're taking three trucks, including the eighteen wheeler they got off the Saviors, so that hospital must be well stocked. My hope is they have a lot of excess insulin there. For Tina. She's only got a year's supply left, and without it…" He shook his head and sighed. "It's like air to a Type 1 diabetic. She'll die without it in short order. So, I'm going to try to contact them in a couple days. See if they lived, if they survived, if they have insulin, and if they'll trade me for it."

"You really think they'll give you their location so you can go down there and trade?" Dianne asked skeptically.

"We could meet at a spot somewhere outside Georgia." He navigated the truck around a bumbling walker in the road way. "I have to try, at least."

"You're a good man, Gavin. To do that for a woman who's not even in your camp anymore."

"Well…I'm also thinking Dwight might agree to help me out at the Sanctuary for a few weeks if I succeed. How's Sherry doing? With the pregnancy?"

"Except for the morning sickness, pretty well."

Gavin looked intently out the windshield. "And Frankie? How's she doing?"

"Well."

"She's happy? With the wonderkid?"

"Don't torture yourself," Dianne insisted.

"So what made you break up with Daniel? You said you dated him briefly?"

Dianne slid her seat back a little to be able to more comfortably position her bow. "Would it make you feel better if I told you he was terrible in bed?"

"A little."

"Well, sorry, I can't say that." The left side of Dianne's mouth curled ever so slightly. "He was pretty damn fantastic."

"Screw you!"

"He did. Three times in one night once."

Gavin turned his head to glower at her, and she chuckled.

"The problem with Daniel," Dianne said, "was when he would open his mouth. And talk. I couldn't have a real conversation with him. I don't know if it was the age difference, or a personality difference, or what, but I got bored very quickly. Did you ever feel like that with Frankie? I mean, she's a good fifteen years younger than you, isn't she?"

"Jesus Christ, how fucking old do you think I am? Try ten years."

Dianne looked him over almost scientifically. "Well, you're not graying much, but you are thinning out a little in the back."

"I'm not paying you for your commentary," he replied. "And no, I didn't feel that way with Frankie. I liked talking to her." He watched the road for a moment, as the truck thudded in and out of a pothole, and thought about it. "But we didn't really talk all that much, come to think of it. It was dangerous, to say too much in Negan's shadow. And then we were apart so much, when we were together...well, we had other interests besides talking." He glanced at Dianne. "What age difference? Daniel can't be more than four or five years younger than you."

"You flatter me. He's thirty-one. And I'm about to turn forty-two."

Gavin looked at her in surprise and then jerked the steering wheel to steady it when he began to drift. "No way you're a day over thirty-six."

"Eyes on the road there, sport."

1:28 PM
Atlanta, Georgia

T-Dog shouldered the rocket propelled grenade launcher. Rosita slipped a match from the matchbox she held, ready to light the long fuse that would detonate a string of TNT. Carol prepared herself behind the machine gun mounted on the armored vehicle. Glenn, Maggie, Rick, Andrea, Noah, and Oscar stood with rifles readied, while Michonne effortlessly drew her katana from the sheath on her back and bent her elbows in a readied position as the afternoon sun glinted off the metal of the blade.

Before them all lay a cratered gap in the concrete of the bridge on which they stood – a yawning hole created when the military bombed Atlanta to control the spread of the disease. Thin strips of pavement, about three feet wide each, lined either side of the massive crater in the bridge. Rosita had walked cautiously over one of those strips to lay the explosives, testing its firmness, and then back over the other strip. She'd told Carol, "I think Daryl and Dixon can make it over."

I think.

That wasn't quite the assurance Carol had hoped for. She watched with tightened chest as Daryl began to ride his motorcycle slowly onto the bridge from the road on the other side. Dixon pulled up parallel to him on his sports racing bike. Music blared from the speaker Tom had attached to the luggage rack of Daryl's bike and wired to a portable CD player. The Rolling Stones were singing, "Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes…Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown!" Carol was pretty sure this was more like the twenty-first time she'd had her heart thumping in her throat in the past year.

A herd of gnashing, hungry walkers lurched after the sound of the music, having been lured by Daryl and his nephew for miles from Grady Memorial hospital. Daryl and Dixon were letting those walkers get awfully close to them. One reached out and almost had a hand on Daryl's shoulder. The two men weaved apart from one another, to the left and the right. They began to pick up speed as they crossed the bridge around the crater. Dixon sped over on the right-hand side with little difficulty, but as Daryl's heavier bike crossed on the left-hand side, the asphalt began to crumble beneath his rear tire.

He revved the engine of his motorcycle and shot forward as the asphalt deteriorated behind him, popping up onto one wheel as he crossed the last two feet before slamming his front tire down again on the more solid side of the bridge. Daryl raced to the others and skidded to a stop. He dismounted and rapidly swung his crossbow from his shoulder. Dixon had already dismounted and readied his rifle.

As the Rolling Stone's "19th Nervous Breakdown" faded to silence, what followed was a symphony of destruction – the cracking, snapping dry bones of walkers as a dozen or more fell through the gaping crater to the hardened street below; the boom of the TNT exploding and taking out about thirty more; the machine gun rat-at-tatting, rifles popping, arrows wooshing, katana slashing, and the grenade launcher thumping before the grenade cut a trail of hissing fire through the air and set two dozen walkers ablaze.

Carol's body jerked as she let loose with the machine gun, and she wondered how the lithe, young Beth had managed to control the thing. It took all her strength to remain targeted, but she did. Those walkers that managed to lurch their way across the thin strips of pavement on either side of the crater were slashed, knifed, bayoneted, or shot or stabbed by crossbow bolt.

By the time they were done, a sea of the undead lay on the other side of the bridge before them and on the street below. A few bodies also lay at their feet. They waited, exhausted and hearts thumping, for the last of the stragglers to lurch toward the crater, some falling blindly in, the rare few making it over, the last six putting enough weight on the left-hand strip of the bridge that it finally crumbled in its entirety, hurling them to the ground.

They'd now cleared an exit route from Grady Memorial and bought themselves enough time by killing enough walkers that they should be able to load up the people, equipment, and supplies. They were vacating Grady Memorial at least two months earlier than planned. Some of the patients would have to continue their recovery in Fun Kingdom.

The group turned quickly from the destruction and made its way via a back route to the hospital, in a caravan that contained the two motorcycles, the armored vehicle, two military trucks, and the battered eighteen wheeler they'd gotten from Simon's crew. At Grady, they had to dispense with the few walkers that had lingered instead of following the music. Over the next several hours, as they loaded up supplies, more walkers were drawn to the hospital - little by little - three or four here, five or six there - and were dispensed with by Tara and Zach from upstairs windows and by Rosita and Rick on guard on the ground.

Tom and Milton had not participated in the slaughter of the walkers, but they had come along, and they now worked to dismantle and load up the solar panels, batteries, and generators that were powering the hospital to use at Fun Kingdom.

Carol, meanwhile, helped Dixon, Noah, and Andrea to pack up food in the hospital cafeteria. As she worked, she listened to the boys chat as they packed up the storage closet on the other side of the cafeteria.

"You sure you want to risk it?" Dixon asked Noah. "Richmond is a long way, and I don't mean to be a downer, but the chances your parents and brothers survived this..." Dixon shook his head.

"I have to know," Noah told him. "You'd go looking, wouldn't you, if you'd been somewhere other than where your mother was when it started?"

"Yeah. Yeah I would. But Beth doesn't want you to take that risk. And I hate seeing her worried."

"Beth's sweet," Noah told him. "But it's not Beth's choice."

"Then I'll go with you. I'm better at slaying walkers, finding food, hunting..."

"Okay, Mr. Perfect," Noah told him.

"I'm only stating facts. And Beth would be relieved if she knew you weren't going it alone. Go it alone, you don't come back, She never knows what happened to you."

"Well, if you don't come back, that's even worse," Noah observed. "You're her boyfriend."

"I'm coming back," Dixon insisted.

Noah taped up a box. "Why are you volunteering to help me? I thought you didn't like me?"

"I like you just fine. I was just worried you liked Beth a little too much. But I can't blame you."

Noah snorted. "Beth's a friend. But she's not really my type. Trust me, even if it weren't for you, I wouldn't be interested."

"What?" Dixon asked doubtfully. "No way you wouldn't be interested if she didn't have a boyfriend. She's gorgeous. And she's got a beautiful singing voice. And she's brave and kind and - "

"- Beth's great, but I like geeky girls."

"Not sure too many of those survived the apocalypse," Dixon told him. "But good luck."

Carol was distracted from her eavesdropping by Andrea, who walked over to where she was adding a cannister of oatmeal to a box and asked, "How fun was that? The machine gun?"

"Pretty fun," Carol admitted. "But we need to start being more careful about how much ammunition we use. We didn't stop to collect the brass, and we can only reload so much."

"We're still pretty well stocked on ammo. I took down at least ten of those things with my rifle myself. I bet Shane would have been impressed."

Carol looked at her warily but wasn't sure what to say to that.

Andrea sighed. "I know he was dangerous in the end. I know that. But he did a lot of good, too. He trained people…all over, apparently, to defend themselves." She shook her head. "Granted, a lot of those people from Terminus are dead now, but some helped fight off the Saviors. And the ones he trained in the north, they defeated those Saviors. He wasn't all bad, you know."

"I never said he was. No one is all bad. And…in a sense, Shane saved our lives, me and Sophia, at the start. It was his idea to get up to higher ground when we met in that traffic jam on the highway. He got us safely to that camp. He built something there."

"I love Milton," Andrea said. "He's good for me. There's no stupid teenage dramatic bullshit with him. But I miss Shane. And I hate the way he died. I know Sophia had to – "

"- Of course she had to," Carol said, a little more sharply than she intended.

"Michonne didn't have to do that, though. Lie and tell him Judith wasn't his. That was spiteful."

"He threatened Andre," Carol reminded her. "You don't do that to a mother."

"it's a shit way to die, believing you died for nothing."

"He did die for nothing. He didn't have to do any of that! He could have talked to Rick. Told him he wanted to be a part of Judith's life. Rejoined the camp. He tried to take us over!"

Andrea sighed. "I just…you're right. I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around it all. Because I loved him once. And it's hard to think I loved a man who could…become like that."

"Look at the world we live in," Carol told her. "We could all become our worst possible selves. Which is why we have to look out for one another. Prop one another up. Have each others' backs. Be a real community. So we make sure we get to be our best selves."

Andrea nodded and slid a box off the countertop.

By sunset, they were all packed up. They'd be driving in the dark, but at least they should be out of the city before the stars came out. They would be taking the one functioning ambulance, the van converted to an ambulance, and two of the cop cars with them as well as the now full trucks. Some of the patients had recovered. Others had to be carried out in wheelchairs. One came on a gurney rolled into the back of the ambulance.

Carol now saddled Daryl's motorcycle behind him at the front of the caravan and wrapped her arms around his waist. He let his own arm fall down over hers and squeezed. "You were pretty damn impressive on that bridge, Miss Murphy."

"Yeah?" she asked, her lips close to his ear.

"Made me kind of horny."

She chuckled. "Everything makes you kind of horny these days."

"Guess I just had to find the right woman."

"Well, there's a bed waiting for us at home. So we better see how fast this thing can go," she teased, and the engine roared, and she yelped and tightened her grip as the motorcycle shot suddenly forward.