six weeks after finding glenn.

Even though we'd all hoped to find one of our people at Grady, I think we were all still shocked to see Glenn there. We were overjoyed, of course, but some of that same joy petered out when he explained to us what had happened at Terminus after we arrived back at the house that night

They were cannibals, apparently, kidnapping people so that they could either force them to join in their lifestyle, or die. I thought I was going to be sick at first, when Glenn told us how they lined them up and intended to slaughter them all. They'd revolted, of course, and made an escape, but…

"We got seperated," Glenn had said. "There was bullets, and gunfire, and blood. Maggie and I were trying to make an escape through the back gates, but I went back for Bob. He was cornered, and I ran to help him and suddenly, I was alone. Bob and I tried to run for the fence and climb it, but they started shooting at us. Bob got hit, he went down, and when the bullets hit me, I just… laid there, pretending to be dead. I must've been there for at least ten minutes before I got up, made it to the fence, and climbed over. I tried looking for Maggie, for anyone, but I was still bleeding, I didn't have anything on me, and I just blacked out on the side of a road somewhere. When I woke up, I was at Grady, and I'd been there for two weeks or so."

I didn't know Bob well, but the way Glenn talked about watching him crumble to the ground made my chest hurt and my eyes sting. Even though so much time had seemed to pass, losing people from the prison and having their deaths confirmed still scratched at something inside me.

"Do you… do you know who else is dead?" I asked. It was something I hesitated on, but in the same way, it was something I needed to know. It was the same question that was on all our minds, but I had to fight to keep my throat from closing up long enough to say it.

Glenn sighed, dropping his head. "A man named Abraham," he told us. "It's… you didn't meet him, but he helped us. Helped me. And… and Rick."

There was a sharp intake of breath beside me, from Beth, and I went stiff-solid. Somehow, the idea of Rick being dead seemed… impossible. Time and time again, Rick had beat the odds, coming out of the worst situations alive. He was almost invincible, like a superhero. And yet-

"Rick's dead?" I repeated, and Glenn nodded, still avoiding eye contact with us. When I could manage to tear my eyes off of his defeated form, I glanced over at Beth. She seemed about as shocked as I felt, and when she turned, we made eye contact. Nothing was said, but I think that in that moment, we just understood each other.

There was another question rattling around in my head, too, one I was afraid to ask. I could feel it, sitting on my chest, like it had a physical weight to it.

"Carl?"

Glenn shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "Last time I saw him, he was with Maggie. As far as I know, he's alive."

At that, I let out a breath, leaning back against my chair. As far as I know. It wasn't the best news I could have gotten, true, but… it meant he could still be alive. Really, at the moment, that was all I needed.

Having Glenn back, no matter what news he bore, was still uplifting in a way. For three quarters of a year, we had been tearing up Georgia trying to find any of our people, and it turned out that for nearly that whole time, he'd been at Grady.

"How long were you there, anyway?" Tyreese had asked him.

He shrugged. "I'm not sure. A couple months, maybe? I was in a coma for a while."

"Why didn't you try to escape?"

"When I woke up, my legs were weak," he answered. "I couldn't really walk right away. For a while, I was even in a wheelchair, before they finally started me on crutches."

It made sense. Since we rescued him, Glenn had been moving around either with support or using the aid of a crutch tucked under his arm. According to him, he was starting to feel better, but it was odd watching him hobble around. To his credit, though, he was able to start walking on his own well enough about a month after the escape.

Besides Glenn, we'd also been joined by a woman and a man on our way out. I didn't recognize either of them, since they both said they'd been taken after Beth and I had left, but they seemed nice enough.

The woman introduced herself as Christine. She was outspoken, loud and funny, and the kind of person you either like or hate right away. The man told us his name was Michael, but some people just called him Mike. He was quieter, more withdrawn than Christine had been, but they were polite, and nice enough.

We caught Glenn up on everything we'd done in the past nine months. Considering how long it had been since we'd seen each other, there didn't seem to be as much to tell him as I thought there would have been. He didn't seem very pleased about the idea that we'd looked for so long with so little results, but he tried to stay optimistic about it. For Beth and I, along with the kids, finding Glen had lifted all out spirits. Not only that, but it gave us hope that if we had found him this late, we could find the others, too.

Having Glenn with us, our plans changed. It had given us too much hope to pass up on, and had helped Beth and I convinced the rest of the group to give us more time. It hadn't turned into an argument, but the discussion did get a little heated, all of us debating the merits of trying to find several people we may never find, or going after a single person we knew we were almost sure to find.

In the end, Beth and I had made a strong case, using Glenn as evidence, and we'd decided to suspend putting a time limit on how long we would stay in Georgia, at least for now. We were still planning on going after Noah at some point, or heading up that way in the very least, figuring that a good way to pick up more people and expand our group would be to head towards D.C. and the surrounding area.

It was good to have Glenn around. I'd always liked him, ever since we were camping outside the Atlanta area at the beginning of the outbreak. It felt familiar, having him there to joke around with, and not only was I grateful for it, but so was everyone else from the prison. Having another familiar face was good for Luke and Mika, Tyreese seemed glad to have another actual adult from our group, and Beth's smiles came easier, more relaxed. Even Judith managed to recognize him, letting out a squeaky squeal and demanding to be picked up. He played board games with the kids, watched over Judith, and spent time plotting out paths he knew would be good supply runs, or places the rest of the group might be hunkered down. After all, Glenn was one of our front runners, along with Daryl and Michonne, so he had the best grasp on these things out of all of us.

Having him on our side again not only boosted everyone else's spirits, but it lifted my own determination. Now, I was doing my best to go on every run I could, to the point where the rest of the group was constantly telling me to sit out. Every moment I wasn't out, I was either spending time with Judith and the kids, or trying to find something else productive to do. I convinced Tyreese to continue teaching me to drive beyond what little knowledge I already had, and even got Glenn and Alice to help out. Despite the fact that I didn't know Alice that well, she was a willing teacher, patient and funny, and I found that I really liked her. On top of that, she was also incredibly positive, despite the state of the world and our circumstances. I found myself turning to her first when it came to driving lessons, and in turn, she begin to try and get me to cut back on the runs I was doing. I did, to a very minor extent, going on one every other day or so, but it seemed enough to please her.

Considering the good amount of ammo we had, I also begin carving out time to teach the kids to shoot. With my newfound driving skills, I would pack the three of them into a car and drive out a mile and a half, maybe a little more, before setting up cans or bottles or whatever else I had to use as targets. I was determined to get both these kids well acquainted with weaponry, because even if I hoped they wouldn't have to use it much, there would certainly come a time, at least once, where they'd have to.

Sometimes, Beth would come with us, trying to improve her own aim. She'd learned a while ago, a little bit before the outbreak and a considerable amount more afterward, but she hadn't had as much practice as the rest of the group, and while she was competent, she was also confident that she room to improve. She wasn't bad, not at all, but I enjoyed having her there with us, and who was I to tell her she had no right to practice and improve? The kids liked having her there, too, until it got to the point where she didn't always come with us to shoot, but to help watch the kids. It was a nice routine, even if we often found ourselves getting sidetracked with conversation and not paying as much attention as we should have been to the children which we had handed guns to, but nobody's perfect.

As the kids got better with handguns, we started working with rifles, too. They didn't pick those up as easily, especially Luke, and required a lot more hands-on help with those than they had with pistols, but it didn't bother me too badly when I knew that training them could be the difference between life or death for them, or somebody else, one day. It wasn't too much of a burden with Beth helping, as well, and the more time we worked with them, the better I felt about it.

Together, Beth and I also started doing a running tally of inventory. We enlisted help from the others, but convincing them wasn't hard, and with the help of Michael and Jay, we worked on organizing the room and taking a careful count of what we had, adding to it after every group that came back.

I still kept going on runs, though, energized by the idea that we might be able to find more of our people soon. Some days, I would convince everyone to split into two seperate groups, the majority going out to scavenge through some mall or superstore, while I would grab another person or two and go cruising through the neighborhoods surrounding that Terminus place Glenn had escaped from. We never strayed to close to it, the very idea of what it had been making me queasy, but I was tempted to sometimes, to scan the bodies and see who was left over. Part of me was desperate to know who I would find, but part of me was scared, too. If I was honest, the scariest idea might be that they would be so far beyond recognition that, even if I saw one of them, I wouldn't be able to tell who it was, even if it was Carl. Without his cowboy hat, the one I had now taken to wearing, what if he had lost any other unique marker? It was always possible that he could have been horribly marred by walkers, or so decayed, that I wouldn't be able to point him out, and putting him down would be just as easy as any other geek. The idea that I might be able to take him down so easily frightened me, and I couldn't help but be reminded of the nightmares I got at the prison, the ones that would cause me to wake up screaming.

To be honest and fair, the nightmares were infrequent, but they didn't stop. The only difference was that now, when they woke me, my eyes would shoot open to the darkness of our room at night, no screaming and, sometimes, no movement, just the slight jerk my body made as it came to consciousness. This, of course, was a good thing, considering that while I used to share a cell with Carl, and Carl only, I now shared a room with Judith, Beth, and Mika, the last of which I shared a bed with. The last thing I wanted to do was wake them all with a shout, or move too fast and jostle the bed enough to wake Mika.

Still, I wasn't always as quiet as I tried to be. There were some nights when, after waking from a nightmare, I would do my best to slip out of the room as silently as possible, a flashlight and book in hand. These efforts weren't always successful, because there were several times when, a minute or two after I padded into the living room to curl up on a couch and read, Beth would come down after me. She would always tell me she'd still be awake, had just gotten up to pee or something of the like, but I could tell it was likely a lie, and that she was just a light sleeper that I had managed to stir. No matter how much I tried to convince her to go back to bed, she almost never did. Instead, we would sit together in the den, either talking or reading or telling stories.

Our time after escaping Grady seemed to bring Beth and I closer. Sure, we'd been friends at the prison, but almost distantly. She spent a lot of time with her sister, or Zach, or helping out with Judith, while I tended to spend my own days with Carl, and sometimes some of the other kids, or even Daryl or Michonne. Beth and I had interacted, yes, and we were friendly, but we hadn't been close. Now, I often found myself drifting towards Beth in a room full of people. It made sense. Besides Jay, she was the closest person to me in age, and it was refreshing to have her around. I felt like I could share things with her, like I could talk to her, and since the prison fell, I'd forgotten what that was like, to be able to actual enjoy someone's company. I'd been so focused on survival, for both myself and the kids and the group, that I hadn't had time for friendships. Having Beth around changed that, and I found that I didn't mind it at all.

Still, life began to get pretty regular, falling into a routine. Every other day, I'd go at searching, and I'd spend the off days doing something else around the house. Days and weeks slipped by, and before I knew it, it'd been a month since we found Glenn. Not anybody else, though, but I refused to be deterred.

The rest of the group, however, did convince me to swap out some of my searching-for-people adventures for supply trips, and with a little bit of reluctance, I did. To be fair, it helped me start to better relationships with the other half of our group that hadn't come from the , we'd been together for the past nine months, and I had grown to like some of them, particularly Alice and Jay, but I began to realize that I'd been doing by best to close myself off from the others, and not unintentionally. As such, I'd been distant from several of the others, like Jaime and Smith and Sylvia. In the time I spent with them, and the others, I began to work on fixing that, and soon, I had a least somewhat of a bond with most of them. The only ones I had trouble with were Abbott and Michael. The former just seemed to have that way about him, but I'd also seen his barriers come down several times around Cheyenne, and it was clear that no matter how gruff he was, he had a definite soft spot for his niece.

Michael, though, was just… hard to get a read on. Sure, he laughed at Jaime's jokes, and he grinned back if you smiled at him, but it always seemed shallow, surface level. Even though I tried, it seemed impossible to form any sort of a real connection with him.

For the most part, though, our life was starting to straighten up. I was still hopeful to find more people, and the others were, too, but we were also beginning to accept our lives as they were. Even if it was a little mundane and repetitive at times, I found that, at times, I was enjoying myself, actually having fun with the kids, feeling like a useful member of the group. I wouldn't have called it great, or amazing, but for a while, our lives were almost… good.

It changed a little over a month and a half after finding Glenn.

Normally, my body tended to wake me up on it's own at a decent hour, but when that didn't happen, somebody from my run group would come stir me, or one of the kids if I had promised to take them shooting that day.

However, when I opened my eyes one morning to find Beth leaning over me, I was thrown off. Before I had even blinked away the sleep, I could see her eyes, big and wide and way concern looked on her face made me uncomfortable, like I wanted to change it right away, and I sat right up in bed, tossing off my blankets.

"What's going on?" I asked, and without saying anything, she grabbed my hand and tugged me to my feet. I went without protest and, still holding on to me, she pulled me down the hall.

"Alice woke up this mornin' and ran into Michael," she started to explain, still tugging me along as she spoke. "She said he was actin' real weird, and then he went outside and she heard a car drivin' off, and when she looked outside, he was gone. And then when we checked the supplies-"

She came to a stop outside the storage room, where several other members of our group were gathered. Jaime was pacing along the hallway, his expression grim, and Sylvia was nearby, speaking in a soft voice I couldn't hear. Smith and Alice both seemed just as nervous, the same way Beth did, and she bit her lip when she turned back to me.

I knew why they were panicking.

"How much did he take?" I asked. I could feel my heart rate picking up, and when she reached out to push open the door to the supply room, I froze, my lips parting and my eyes widening.

Every drawer in every dresser was open, and from first glance, I could tell maybe sixty-five, seventy percent of them were empty. There was a gun here of there, and ammo scattered about, but the damage was noticeable in an instant. The room had been ransacked, and overnight, we'd lost more than two-thirds of everything we'd collected in the past ten months.

For a moment, I just stared, until pressure on my wrist brought me back to myself, and when I glanced down, Beth's hand was still wrapped around my forearm, but once she had my attention, she dropped it.

"Sophia?"

I blinked, opening my mouth to say something, but nothing came out at first. With a sigh, I allowed myself to lean against the nearest wall, reaching up to rub at my face.

"This is- we're in deep shit, aren't we?" I asked, and from a few feet away, Jaime give a bitter laugh

"Yeah," he agreed. "You can say that again."

(It didn't even hit me at first, but when it did, I pushed myself off the wall with a gasp, catching the attention of everyone else in the hall.)

"We need to go, now," I stated.

Beth's brow furrowed. "I mean, he stole from us, but why would we need to leave?"

"Think about how many guns he took," I explained. "Even if he was being greedy, he wouldn't need that many for himself, it was way too much. If he's taken that many guns, then-"

"He could be arming someone else," Smith finished, and Jaime swore, rather loudly.

"Get everybody awake, now," he called out. "We need to pack, and then we need to go."

As I raced down the hall to wake Mika and start throwing our things together, Beth hot on my heels and my heartbeat starting to pound in my chest, there was moment, just a second, where I was almost grateful.

(After all, if I was as scared as I was, at least it meant I still had something to lose.

Right?)

hey guys, i'm back. i've been working on this story during quaratine, because despite the fact that i started the original story almost seven years ago (i believe! wow, how much better my writing is now) i can't get these characters and this plot out of my head. as a result, i will be carrying this story on to the end. i have several chapters already prewritten, so please stick with me for the ride! -c.s.