14. The Q.U.A.D Squad

Michonne jumped, startled out of her sleep beside her Rick woke up with a start too. A loud computerized voice speaking over the intercom system that had been installed in the hotel rent their peaceful slumber apart: To all residents of the Peach Blossom Hotel this is a mandatory evacuation notice. All residents of the Peach Blossom Hotel must vacate the premises immediately.

"What in the hell, is this real?" Rick asked.

"Sssh!" Michonne hissed.

Do not stop to collect any items from your apartel. If you are not in your apartel do not return to your apartel at this time. Find your floor captain. Your floor captain will direct you to your designated safety room. You must stay in your designated safety room until an all clear has been given.

The announcement kept going, but Michonne was no longer listening to it. She leaped out of bed and began pulling her clothes on. Rick quickly followed. They both had one thing on their mind. Their children. She hurried into the hallway to see that Carl was coming out of his room with his sister in his arms.

"What's going on?" Carl asked.

"We don't know yet." Michonne said and reached out and hugged Judith and then Carl. She was glad that he always had the presence of mind to lookout for his little sister.

"Carl can you get Jude dressed quickly and then meet us in the living room." Rick asked.

Once he was gone Rick turned to Michonne "Whatever this is we'll get through it."

"I know we will."

Rick took her hand and lead her into the living room. They sat side by side on the couch holding hands and waiting on Carl and Judith.

"Hey open up it's me." Shane called from the other side of the front door.

Rick got off the couch and open the door to let Shane in.

He stepped inside suited up in full riot gear.

"What's going on?" Rick asked.

"The city of Calbert is out there attacking the fence."

"Is it a riot?" Rick asked.

"Let me rephrase that, the undead city of Calbert is attacking the fence."

Michonne gasped. "The whole city is infected?"

Naw, only about a third of the city, but still."

"How?"

"From what I heard someone got bit at the high school and the army went over there in it's undead meat wagon to collect the body, but something went wrong and the biters they already had in their armored car got out and the shit hit the fan."

"What can I do to help?" Rick asked.

"The Master Sargent wants us at the fence line."

"I'm there." Rick said.

"Wait! Michonne grabbed Rick's wrist. "You can't just leave without talking to Carl and Judith think of how scared they must be."

"You're right Sorry I wasn't thinking."

When Carl and Judith came into the living room Rick hugged them both.

Carl brushed off his father's hug and asked Shane. "Do you know what's happening?"

"Biters." Shane said. "They're out at the fence trying to tear it down."

Carl drop suddenly to the couch as if his knees had given out on him, and Michonne noticed that he had turned noticeably paler.

"They're here?" He asked.

"Don't worry your dad and I are gonna get 'em."

"No!" Carl shouted. "When you got shot you almost died, and now you want to try to kill those things so you can die, no way."

"Carl." Rick said his mouth fell open and stayed that way. He stared at his son as though he suddenly morphed into someone else.

"You just want to leave us behind."

"I'm not gonna leave you behind. I would never leave you behind. Carl where the hell is all this coming from?"

"We gotta go." Shane barked. "C'mon."

Rick ignored Shane and walked over to Carl. "I'm trying to keep you safe. I'll be back." He said. "Until then I want you to listen to what Michonne tells you and look after your little sister."

"OK." Carl said. He stood with his arms folded across his chest and refused to look at his father.

Shane lead them into the hallway and they merged into the flow of human traffic. For the first time ever the military was in the hotel. Soldiers lined the walls. A few of them had dogs. All of them were holding guns and none of them were smiling.

Michonne shuttered and kept her eyes forward and her arms wrapped tightly around Judith.

There was a young woman at the door of the safety room who scanned their badges with a bored look on her face.

Rick walked them over to a secluded spot so that he could say his goodbye. "I love all of you. Sit tight until I see you again." Rick said. He kissed all of them once again.

"Let's go!" Shane ordered. "You gotta suit up."

"Gotta go. Gotta do this thing." Rick said to Michonne.

Michonne pulled him back and kissed him like her life depended on it. "You're coming back."

"I will, for my family, you know I will." Rick told her and then walked off to catch up with Shane who'd impatiently left him behind.

Michonne watched them both until they disappeared out the door. "Are you OK Carl?"

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course it does. Carl you can come to me for anything."

"Really it's fine. He's out there now and there's nothing that I can do about it."

Michonne pressed her lips together. Carl was always so worried about losing his father, but she knew that there was nothing that she could say to him that would make him feel better.

"Michonne!" From across the room Amy waved at her and made her way over.

"Where's Rick?" Amy asked.

"He's been recruited to help out with the biter situation."

"Oh wow, that's crazy."

"Rick will be all right."

"Right. I'm over there with Annalise and Carley." Amy told her. "We're all hanging out in the common room, want to join us?"

"Of course." Michonne said.

"Amy turned to Carl. "Duane and your other friends are there too."

"Can I go over?"

"Go ahead, but stay in the common room." Michonne said to Carl.

He nodded and went off to meet his friends.

"How's he holding up?"

"I think he was scared senseless even before Rick went off to help at the fence line, but he's trying to be tough because Rick is being tough."

"Poor little guy."

"Do me a favor and don't ever let him hear you call him that."

Michonne walked with Amy to the common room and found the others sitting and watching TV. Judith squirmed in her arms and Michonne set her down. She climbed up on the couch and pulled some of her zoo animals out of her pockets and began to play with them. This was just another day in her life. Michonne hated what Judith was having to become used to.

Carl sat off in a corner with his friends. Duane was talking to Carl and whatever he was telling him he seemed to be agreeing with because he was nodding a lot. Keisha sat on the other side of Carl with her arm around his shoulder.

At least he had some sort of support system outside of her Michonne thought . She wished it was her that he would open up to, but she understood why he didn't always.

"You know, this attack has got me wondering, what happens if what went on at that rec center went on here?" Morgan asked. "If there is an attack on this place and we do survive, what next?"

"Rick and I have been talking about making plans in case we'd ever have to leave this place, but I think we should all collaborate and make plans together. Now more than ever we need to become allies."

"I think we do too." Tyreese agreed.

"So what, we're forming a squad?" Carley asked. "We all stick together no matter what. I like it. I'm in."

"I think I'm a little too old to be in a squad let's say we're forming an emergency preparedness committee." Morgan said.

"We could be called the quad squad though." Tyreese replied happily.

"Should we like all put our hands in or something?" Shawn asked. "You know, to make it official."

"Yeah we should definitely symbolize our partnership some how, but let's wait till Rick and Shane are here." Tyreese said. "We need the whole squad."

Please let them get back safe. Michonne prayed. Rick always thought he needed to protect everyone else, but who was protecting him? She wanted to, but he acted as if the weight of the world was his responsibility alone.

"So now that we're an official squad do you think we could manage holding a meeting once a week?" Michonne asked.

"Good idea, and let's have our children sit in. They need to be informed as well." Annalise said.

"We'll have the meetings in our suite." Tyreese volunteered.

As time went by they made more and more plans for their weekly meetings, which they would hold on Sunday. Michonne tried to keep her mind on the plans, but she kept thinking of Rick out there killing biters. Why had she let Rick go? She should have made him stay. She didn't want to pigeonhole him, but she didn't want him dead either.

Three hours later everyone was finally released from lock down. They were three of the longest hours of Michonne's life. After leaving the safety room everyone was escorted directly back to their apartels floor by floor.

It was a quarter til six when the trio got back home. Judith was asleep in Michonne's arms. She'd have to put her to bed knowing it would throw off her sleep schedule, but there was nothing she could do.

"Well I'm glad that's over." Michonne announced once she was ensconced in the security of home. "Thank goodness there were no casualties. It's the only good thing to come out of all of this." Michonne told Carl. No injuries. No casualties. No deaths. Rick was safe.

"You forgot about school being canceled for the rest of the week." Carl reminded her.

"You can still learn. How about sitting in on my next tutoring session with Sarah?"

"OK, I saw Sarah during lock down she looked tranquilized or something."

"Her father probably gave her a sedative so that she wouldn't panic, but I don't think his being so overprotective of Sarah is doing her any favors. She's a lot smarter than he gives her credit for."

"Dad can be like that sometimes. He acts like I'm still at the age I was when my mom died."

"He can be overprotective at times, but your dad is so afraid of messing up again that sometimes he can't see the forest for the trees. He sees you as the little boy he needs to protect, but he can't see how you've grown into someone who can protect them self."

"I wish he would. I wish he wouldn't keep things from me because he thinks I can't handle them."

"What things?" Michonne wanted to know.

"Never mind it's not important." He said and then disappeared into his room.

Michonne watched him go and wondered what things Carl was talking about. Did he know about his father killing biters before now, or was he talking about something else? If he did know she wondered how? No one would have told Carl about bite club, so how could he know? Perhaps she was feeling paranoid because of the attack on the fence line. She would feel much better once Rick came back home and they were all together again.

When Rick finally did come back home Michonne ran into his arms. She was so happy to be able to hold him. So happy that he'd return to them unharmed.

"Everything is OK Rick said into her ear as he hugged her tightly. To Carl he said. "Told you I was coming back."

"Did you kill any of those things?" Carl wanted to know.

"I did. I had too, but as much as we want to think of them as things, they were once people."

"How did you know how to kill them?" Carl asked.

Michonne looked at Rick. Would he lie to Carl or tell him the truth?

"I didn't it's something I had to learn."

Not a lie just an omission. A HUGE omission.

"Will they come back?" Carl asked.

"No Carl, they're gone. They won't come back."

Neither Michonne or Rick felt like cooking so they had leftovers. After a quiet picked over dinner Carl took the trash to the incinerator and then slumped off into his room. Rick washed the dishes and Michonne dried , and as she dried them she thought of how best to bring up her suspicions about Carl to Rick. There was no time like the present to start flexing her wifely muscles.

"Have you talked with Carl lately?" Michonne asked Rick.

"No, why?"

"I think you need to. He's getting older and he's getting better at finding out when you're hiding things from him."

"What am I supposed to do tell him about killing biters?"

"No, but you're not supposed to lie to him either." She set a sauce pan on the draining board. "I'm not going to lie to him, not anymore."

"He knows now that's enough." Rick responded.

"He knows that you're not telling him the whole truth. Don't let him find out on his own "

"He's only thirteen" Rick said and broke down and sobbed. He dropped the pan he'd been washing in the sink and a wave of soapy water splashed over the front of his shirt. "He was just getting his childhood back, and now it's too late. We can't stop this." Rick sniffed his tears away and wiped the front of his shirt with a dish towel. "How do I tell him that this is the end of the world and not all of us are going to make it?"

Michonne held him as he cried. "You don't, we do." Michonne assured him. "We tell him that we're going to do everything we can to survive, but that we might not, that he might not."

"If there hadn't been so many of us those biters would have broken that fence down easily. Biters might not be a problem on their own, but in a large group they're dangerous. I killed them, but I was scared Michonne. It's like the tides have turned and now we're on the bottom of the food chain."

"Did they repair the fence?"

"As best they could. For now they've put extra patrols. We 'll be safe." Rick kissed her forehead.

"Let's go to bed and when we wake up tomorrow it'll be the first day of our vacation." Michonne bribed.

Because their wedding was coming up at the end of the week the both of them had been given vacation time. Amy and Deann would run the daycare for Michonne, and Shane would have a temporary partner until Rick came back. As a wedding gift they'd been granted the use of the top floor penthouse suite for their honeymoon.

Despite the bliss of lounging in bed all day tomorrow neither she nor Rick could sleep. They tossed and turned in tandem

"OK, this is counter productive, Michonne finally said. "This sleep thing isn't happening. I'm going to check in on Judith she'll probably be waking up soon."

"Right behind you."

Michonne made the bed, they wouldn't be returning to it anytime soon.

Carl and Judith weren't sleeping. Both of them were sitting at the table in their room playing pop the pig.

"We couldn't sleep." Carl informed them.

"Can we play?" Rick asked.

"We can all play!" Judith cried.

Rick brought in two chairs and they sat down to play pop the pig.

"I want some cereal, can we have some cereal?" Carl asked.

"I don't see why not." Rick said

"Can we eat in here." Judith asked.

"Of course." Michonne agreed.

In the kitchen everyone picked out their favorite cereals and bowls and took their horde back into the bedroom to play pop the pig at 1:33 in the morning.

Michonne opened her front door, saw a notice taped to it, read it, and groaned.

"What is it?" Rick asked.

She pulled the paper off the door and handed it to Rick. "Another damn mandatory meeting. You know I'm getting really sick of all these meetings."

Rick tossed the paper in the kitchen trash. "Come on it's not as bad as all that, at least we're on vacation."

"I don't care after being locked up for three hours yesterday I don't want anything else to have to do with The Master Sargent."

"Do you think this meeting has something to do with the attack yesterday?" Rick asked.

"If not the Master Sargent has some really uncanny timing."

So, like so many times before, Michonne and her family schlepped to the convention center to be unwilling members of a captive audience. They sat in the same row and the same seats they always did, as did most people. They didn't have assigned seats, but they assigned themselves seats anyway.

The Master Sargent was back to his old tricks. Without any niceties he dropped the bomb on them. "We have been handed down orders from homeland security to vacate the city of Calbert. The residents of Calbert never wanted the Q.U.A.D in their city in the first place, and relationships have been tense ever since, and as you can imagine the attack on the rec center did zero in the way of improving relations. Therefore at the end of next month all of you will be given new housing assignments.

"Where ya moving us this time, a dumpster?" Shane shouted. "Ya can't keep moving us around like we're sheep."

"We don't want housing assignments we already have homes to go back too!" Shouted an angry voice from the crowd.

"If we can't go home we shouldn't have to leave here. This is our home too." A woman in the midde row shouted. Her voice was high and shrill. "This is our home!" She cried over and over. She clutched at the sides of her head as if she wanted to rip her hair from her scalp.

Others in the room picked up the chant. The chant seemed to give people the power to act, all around her people began to pop out of their seats like toast from a toaster. "This is our home!"

Michonne quickly picked Judith up off of the chair she was sleeping on.

"Grab on to my waist band." Rick told Michonne. "Carl grab on to Michonne's waist anything starts to go down we move for the nearest exit."

"This is our home!" The room began to chant louder and louder. "This is our home!" All over the auditorium people were standing up and joining in on the chant. Everyone in the row directly behind her stood up and their chairs pushed into the back of Michonne's knees.

"The world is in an universal state of emergency. You have no homes to go back to!" The Master Sargent shouted into his microphone.

"That's bullshit! We don't know how bad things are out there, we only know what you tell us." A tall muscular man two rows behind Michonne stood up and shouted. He was gripping the chair in front of him so hard that his knuckles had turned white.

Michonne prayed that he wasn't going to throw the chair across the room.

"You wouldn't be in here if you hadn't seen how horrible things were getting out there. Yesterday's attack is an example of how bad things are. I know that you are all upset, but there is no alternative. The order has been given and you will be moved into the overflow housing in the self-contained town of Shetland. I'm sure you'll find once you all become settled in that the town is very nice.

No one wanted to hear what the Master Sargent had to say. They had already been promised happiness once. An explosion of angry outburst broke out.

"We won't move again!"

"You can't keep doing this!"

"I want to see if my home has been looted, and bury my pets you forced me to leave behind."

"Yeah!"

Every second that passed got the crowd more and more riled up. Their anger crackled like electricity around the room. People had been pushed to their limit and Michonne wondered how much did the army think they could take?"

With one simple gesture from the Master Sargent the soldiers who'd been standing still as statues against the wall now stepped away from the wall, their guns were drawn and they turned and aimed them at the crowd.

"Please make no mistakes in your understanding, it is our prime objective to maintain your status as noninfected members of the population, but you are still under martial law and any threat against us will be handled swiftly and completely.""

The tall muscular man sat down without another word.

Not again Michonne thought. They were losing their home again. Their apartel may not have been their home, but she felt secure there. She had settled in there, in a way it was like her first home with Rick and the children. Though she hated to admit to herself she was afraid to move and face the outside world. She didn't really want to know how bad things had gotten. She didn't want to know how far removed from normalcy the world was.

Rick reached over and picked up her hand and squeezed it. Michonne squeezed his hand back. She looked over at Carl, who was holding his sister on his lap, and he didn't look upset. He looked like some years older who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The meeting had left Michonne, Rick, and their friends so worked up that they all decided to hold their first official emergency preparedness meeting. Since it was the very first meeting and they had no real plans yet, they let their children sit this one out. Carl disappeared into Keisha's room with his group of friends.

The adults gathered around the dining room table.

"So how official do we want to be?" Annalise asked. "Do we appoint officers, count minutes, take records?"

"I'll take notes. I don't mind." Michonne offered."

"We also need someone to direct our meetings." Annalise said.

"You seem to be doing a good job, I nominate you." Carley said.

"Well if no one else objects, I'll do it."

No one else did so Annalise became in charge of directing their meetings.

"So what should be the first order of business."

"The Move. I say fuck the move to Shetland." Shane said. "When they're transporting us we break the fuck loose."

"Shane be logical." Carley placed her hand on his chest. "Where would we go, we can't just escape without no place to go."

"We could meet up at my house." Tyreese said. "We got generators and enough room for everyone."

"Do you have enough food and water?" Michonne asked. "What about medicine or doctors?"

"Michonne has a point." Rick said. "We've got to think about Carl and Jude, We can't just drag them out into the world with the way things are now."

"I don't want to take my son out of these walls either, but I'm also afraid of what will happen to him under the governments' control." Morgan put in.

It was a catch 22. The world was in a worst case scenario, and every choice they made now was likely to have some kind of dire consequence.

"Well that crazy big man that kept yelling at that meeting did have a point." Shane said. "We don't know just how bad things are out there."

"Listen whatever you've been seeing on the TV the reality is ten times worse, besides the little news feeds we get, there's pretty much been a media blackout on the subject. It's just like with the Spanish flu." Carley spoke up.

"I'm scared to even ask, but how much worse are things?" Morgan wanted to know.

"If you're scared that means you're paying attention. I was working on blowing the truth about this virus wide open before I got jailed in this place, but hippa laws prevent me from doing any real digging, that and I kept getting stonewalled by the CDC."

"So, like what did you find out before you got locked up in here?" Amy asked.

"Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this so close to Rick and Michonne's wedding, and this isn't the kind if thing they want to hear about."

"No, no I rather hear the ugly truth than a beautiful lie, Michonne said. "Wait, she picked up her glass of wine and downed it, OK now tell me."

"All right, but remember you asked for the truth, Carley reminded her, all of us, and I do mean all of us are already infected with this virus."

"No way, how can that be?" Amy asked.

"It's like the shingles virus. The virus is already inside of us and when we die the virus turns us into a biter."

"How can you possibly know this?" Annalise asked.

"I talked to a lot of sources, a lot of them sounded like conspiracy theorist, but you talk to every source and one of them is bound to be right."

"How did you know your source was right though?" Michonne questioned.

"I know because he worked for the CDC and he went through a lot of trouble to tell me what he did."

"I can't believe it." Michonne said. "I can't believe we're all infected with the virus, so no matter how we die we'll be come one of those things?"

"I'm talking too much." Carley said and started rifling through her purse. "Damn! I really need a cigarette. I swore I would stop, and then I found out about this damn virus. Now everything is ka-blewy!" Carley shook and waved her hands. "Look if it's any consolation if someone destroys your brain before you die you won't come back as one of those things." She set her purse on the floor after she'd given up her search for a pack of cigarettes.

Michonne didn't say anything. She felt sick to her stomach. Becoming one of those things was her worse fear, and now she knew when she died her worst fears more than likely would come true.

"Are you OK Michonne?" Carley asked. "I feel awful. I should have just kept my big mouth shut."

"No I'd much rather know than not know."

"This virus has been going on for a long time. There was a particularly large outbreak in Vietnam that went ignored until the virus started reaching English speaking countries before anyone cared to start to combat it."

"It's like their still ignoring it. Jacqui didn't even mention how this virus brings people back from the dead. She didn't tell us that we're already infected with this goddamn virus."Michonne snapped.

"Jacqui didn't say anything because she doesn't see the point." Carley said. "It's that bad on the outside. I told you no one bothered to try to stop this virus until it started killing white people in the same rate it was killing brown people, and by then it was too late."

"We need to forget worrying about what we can't change, and plan for what we can." Michonne said. "I think we should plan on moving to Shetland, but also plan a way out in case we need to get out."

"Smartest woman in the room" Shane said.

Carley flicked Shane's ear.

"You deserved that." Michonne told him.

"My father's farm is close to Shetland." Shawn said. "If we have to run away we can all stay there. My dad will welcome everyone with open arms."

"You're still welcome at my house." Tyreese said.

"So we have two meet up points incase we get split up." Annalise said. "We need to map out routes of both those places and make sure everyone knows how to get to them."

"What else should we plan for?" Amy asked.

"I've been saving back a little bit of our rations every month, and right now It's enough so that when food starts getting scarce we'll be able to eat fairly well." Michonne confessed. "All of us should start saving our food back."

"We can make emergency backpacks that we keep buy our front doors." Annalise said. "Just in case we ever have to leave in a hurry again."

When the meeting ended Rick and Michonne collected their children and headed back up to their apartel. Michonne was not one for procrastination, and began packing everything they didn't need right now away.

"It's our vacation Michonne, you don't have to do that now. We'll do it later." Rick said.

"What later?" Michonne asked. "We've got a wedding coming up, two kids, and now weekly meetings to plan for. If we don't pack now it won't get done."

"Point well made." Rick said and started to help her pack.

Within five minutes of Rick's "helping" Michonne could see that packing was not Rick's strong point, and packing was not a project they would be doing together. He put bathroom things in the box clearly marked kitchen, he wrapped all their breakables in only one piece of newspaper, but the final straw was when he taped her hand to a box. Not wanting to hurt Rick's feeling and tell him how shit he was at packing, Michonne gave it up only to resume packing later that night when Rick was snoring away in dreamland beside her, and she couldn't sleep.

She started in the living room packing up books and bric-a-brac. She fell into a comfortable pace fueled by her own deep burning thoughts, but when Michonne heard Carl screaming she was up and running into his room before she even had a chance to fully realize her body was in motion.

Carl flipped on his bed side light as she entered his bedroom. He looked pale, sweaty, and shaken. His blankets were strewn all across his bed, and his comforter lay on the floor.

"Carl are you all right?" Michonne went to Carl's bedside and felt his cheeks and forehead. He wasn't running a fever.

"I just had a bad dream."

Michonne sat down on the edge of his bed. "Do you want to talk about it?" She asked.

"No."

Michonne nodded. Sometimes nightmares, like dreams, were just too personal to talk about.

"Could you stay though, you know just until I fall back asleep."

"Sure thing kiddo, would you like me to get anything for you?"

Carl shook his head. "I didn't even wake Jude up. I swear she can sleep through anything."

"So can her brother." Michonne said and gave Carl a playful shove. "Seems like forever since the two of us have had a chance to sit down and talk to each other."

"Yeah, everything is crazy with the wedding rehearsals and all." Carl said.

"I know things are changing, but that doesn't change things between us, you can still come to me for anything. Even if you're in trouble you can talk to me, OK."

"I was really hoping that we were going to be able to go back home, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. I've gotten used to this place but I don't think it will ever feel like a home."

"We might be able to go back home one day, but things will never feel the same again." Michonne warned him.

"We'd be home again though, when my mom died the house stopped feeling like a home, but when you started staying with us it started feeling like a home again, and now that it is gone. I don't know, I guess I never knew how much I liked having a home."

Michonne hugged Carl. It tugged at her heart strings every time she heard Carl wish for simple things. All he really wanted was stability, but every time he got a little bit it was taken away. She was thankful that they could still have their talks. At the very least that was some form of stability for him. She didn't give birth to Carl, but she loved him like he was her own son, and she loved Judith like she was her own daughter, and one day she hoped to give them a brother or sister, maybe one day when they had a place to call home again.

"You'll see your house again. I promise you."

"You can't promise something like that."

"Yes I can, because I just did." Michonne said and covered him with blankets and turned off his bed side light. "In the meantime we'll just make our next place feel like a home, you'll have your own room, and that's already an improvement."

"Jude can sleep in my room until she gets used to sleeping own room again if she wants to." Carl offered.

"You're a good brother, Michonne said. "I know you put those zoo animals in Judith's pocket, your dad and I don't say it often enough, but we're so proud of you."

"Michonne?" Carl called out sounding as if, to Michonne at least, that he was about to confess. Perhaps he was going to tell her what is nightmare was about.

"Yes."

"Nothing, I'm just glad you're my step-mom."

"I am too." She said but he didn't reply. Michonne waited a few minutes before calling his name, but he didn't answer, he had fallen back asleep.

Michonne sighed slowly and wondered which would happen first. Would Rick talk to Carl, or would Carl confront Rick? Whichever way it happened it was just the start of the winds of change that was stirring the storm that she could feel coming in the distance.