So we've gotten to Chapter 6. There's a couple things I want to get off my chest here. First off, I'm sorry for not responding to the latest reviews. If it seems like I don't care about them, nothing could be further from the truth. Your insight is much appreciated and I am so glad to have dedicated followers like you. I don't always respond as often or as promptly as I should, but never think that I don't appreciate your feedback.

Second, I need someone that I can bounce off ideas with, someone who can double check my double checked grammar, someone who can assist me. I have a general plan for this fic and a definitive ending, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to finish it because I'm not sure about the middle part.

So, in short, I would like a beta. I'm not the best about responding, but I promise to be as prompt as I can, and the fact that someone else is in on it is probably just the kick in the ass I need to get really working on this.

If you would like to be a beta for this story, please shoot me a PM.

Now, with that said, now on to Chapter 6. I really hope you enjoy it. Things are starting to pick up just a bit.

Chapter 6: Back to the Grind

(Late Summer, Pacific Northwest)

Amanda crept through the underbrush. She kept low, meticulously studying every detail of her environment. The trees pressed in around her, vines, thorns, bushes, fallen leaves, and fallen sticks crinkling quietly under her feet with each step. Leaves and branches whispered over her jacket as she moved, rifle poised in her hands, braced against her shoulder. She saw another one of Ellie's bloody footprints and carefully stepped around it. Droplets of blood trailed between each print. Each one she found felt like a knife in the chest. But it also gave her hope. She was on the right track. The problem was that Ellie wasn't. She wasn't heading toward the highway. Each step brought her closer and closer o Ghost Town.

As evening fell over the valley and the deep golden glow of the sun pierced through the autumn leaves, Amanda came within sight of Ghost Town. She crouched low and peered through the underbrush, rifle pointed at the nearest building. She could tell the tracks lead in that direction, but she wasn't taking any chances. If Ellie popped her head up in one of those boarded up windows, Amanda would breathe a sigh of relief. If a clicker or one of the soldier's men appeared, she'd shoot.

She was glad she had made this preparation instead of blindly running up to the building. A runner, a young woman with bloodied hands and mouth, staggered out of the front door, its strangled moans and screams carrying over to her ears. She took aim, lining the creature up in her sights. Usually at this range she would have no problem. But her left-hand fingers screamed at her in blinding pain any time she pressed them too hard. She had to cradle the rifle in the crook of her elbow, her lack of experience in using such a stance making the barrel sway oh so gently. Her finger slid silently over the trigger as she debated whether or not to squeeze it.

"Is the shot worth the risk?"

Her father would always ask her that. Of course, when he was teaching her to shoot, she had always thought it was worth it and would squeeze the trigger. Half the time she would miss. Half the time she wouldn't. It stayed that way until her father started wagering little chores he normally did himself. One or two wasn't so bad, but with the amount she had normally missed, it seemed almost punitive. She began to take more careful shots, began to take in to account the wind, the distance, the type of weapon in her hand and the caliber of the bullet in the chamber. Once she became familiar with it, she became more and more accurate until her father had to make tricky, convoluted bets in order to get her to do any of his little chores.

The memory brought a tiny smile to her lips. But it also made her think. She had to weigh the risk versus reward. She had two bullets and she needed them for emergencies. If she pulled the trigger, every infected in the area would hear the shot and come running. She hadn't seen any on her trek here, but that didn't mean they weren't nearby. If she did shoot, she would kill the runner if she hit it, but that was a big if. With the way her rifle was wavering, she wasn't sure she could pull off the shot. If she missed, the runner would be the first to get her. Amanda may have strangled a few of them in Jackson, but if a bunch of them swarmed her, she didn't have the stamina, the ammo, and the strength to fend them off.

She decided it was too risky to take the shot.

Amanda removed her finger from the trigger and watched the runner as it staggered down the street in the general direction of Jackson. She knew why, too. The soldier's tank had blown the belltower to pieces and the great boom that came with that that explosion echoed all across the valley. The infected loved loud noises. This one's a bit late to the party, she thought wryly. She thought for sure she would have gotten used to seeing that lurching gait and hearing those eerie screams the runners made. But it was still unnerving. They were always unnerving.

When it was gone, she crept forward until she met the edge of the forest, peeking out from behind a tree. Ellie's bloody footprints led to the same building the runner had shuffled out of only moments ago. Amanda felt ice flow through her veins, the hairs standing up on the back of her neck.

Don't be dead. Please don't be dead.

Shivering, she crept out of the woods onto the street, standing up. No threats in sight. She continued forward, stepping across the broken pavement stained with Ellie's blood, each step closer leaving her colder and colder. She got to the front door of the building and froze. Her hand instinctively drew her pistol from the waistband of her pants. She held it in front of her. Before her, the interior of the building was dark, and the foul stench of rotting flesh wafted out the open, broken door, accompanied with the buzz of flies.

"Psst! Ellie!" she hissed, hoping that Ellie had hidden inside.

No response. There was only one thing left to do.

She stepped into the building.

The sight that greeted Amanda was a familiar one, a sight that she had seen more times than she could count. But the fact that it could be someone she cared about tied her guts in knots. There were bloody footprints in many directions, all over the old tile floor. Ancient bloodstains mingled with fresh ones, confusing the scene. A ravaged, dry corpse sat in the corner, skeletal hands clutching a badly rusted knife, eyeless sockets staring at the bloody floor. This place had been a shop, once. Of what Amanda couldn't tell. Frozen yogurt or ice cream, maybe, or sandwiches. But that was trivial. The centerpiece of the room was not the bare counter, but the tables. A few had been pushed together to make a single, long one. Blood coalesced into a massive pool at one end, the sides of the table dripping, viscous and black, pooling below the table. A stained saw lay discarded in the pool.

And on top of it all rested...something, something that stunk like death, something that was buzzing with shiny green flies. Amanda stepped closer, heart pounding. The swarm of bugs seethed over their prize. She swiped it at the flies and they scattered in a cloud. What the flies had been dining on was a foot, black and stinking with rot, oozing thick black, viscous fluids from its ankle, white maggots glistening and writhing in pockets of flesh. The rotting skin was ragged where the saw's teeth had bit into it, but the cut was straight. The foot itself hid inside a black sneaker, the center of both foot and shoe sporting a ragged hole, stained with darkening blood. Amanda felt a chill down her spine.

Jesus Christ, Ellie. What happened to you?

Within a few moments, the flies returned to their feast. Amanda stepped outside, feeling bile rise up in her throat. She sat down in the doorway, letting the nausea and fear wash over her. She blew air out steadily, in and out, in and out.

Oh God, Ellie, what happened? What happened?

She wished she had some alcohol, something to wash down her fear.

Where's the rest of her?

Amanda paused. Infected didn't generally eat once the fungus overrode that part of the brain. Only those infected within a week or two still had any appetite at all, and with their high metabolism, they were ravenous enough to drive them to...to...

A horde of tents, white snow and red, gunshots, shrieks, her father screaming at her, "Get out, Amanda! Run!" More gunshots, screaming, tents burning, people running, scattered in the cold night, the howl of infected. A girl's hand sticking up from between writhing bodies, her face white with terror as the infected, four of them, tore her apart. She screamed and screamed and screamed, "Help me! Help meeeeeeeee!" Amanda fumbled for her gun, dropped it in the snow, snatched it up. Her wild shots made one turn, its teeth clenched around an intestine, blood dripping into a greying beard.

Amanda held her nausea in check long enough to go to the side of the building before retching. She shook as her gut spasmed over and over and over again. Little more than bile came up. She sank to her knees, shaking, holding her belly, tasting the acid in her mouth. She wiped her lips with a trembling hand when she finally stopped heaving. She pulled her water bottle from her backpack and dumped a little water in her mouth, swished, and spat before taking a long drink. She knelt for a long time, her forehead pressed against the cold wall.

Get it together, Amanda. Count to ten. Remember? Count to ten.

She counted to ten, slowly, feeling her quaking limbs slowly still. With each count, she breathed, in through the nose and out through the mouth. By the last number, she stood on her own two feet, ready to face the building again. Amanda tried to go over facts, what she could conclude from the scene, following the tracks closely from where they left the forest.

So, you ran out of the woods and into the shop. You were scared. Nothing was chasing you, but you were running. You didn't even slow down to check. You probably didn't even know that you were injured yet.

Amanda made her way to the doorway, meticulously following each step to puzzle out the story of Ellie's flight, and what transpired inside the building. The first print inside the building was more well defined.

You stood for a moment, maybe taking in your surroundings. Or you looked down and saw you were injured. You went around behind the counter. You were searching for something, but you were hurrying. What were you looking for?

Amanda followed the tracks to the back, noticing a bloody handprint on the door. The place had been ransacked, every little piece thrown about. There wasn't much, if any, dust on the debris, meaning they had been thrown from their resting places recently. There were dust lines that indicated as much. However, the destruction only went back so far, and the bloody footprints turned and went back to the counter.

You were looking for something, but you were panicking. You found what you were looking for and you returned to the front.

Amanda went back out to the front. The tracks became a little more confusing, as they overlapped and seemed to go in numerous directions.

If you had what you needed, why do all this pacing?

The drag marks beside the tables pushed together gave her the answer.

The tables were separate. You pushed them together. Why?

Amanda looked at the foot, buzzing with flies, looked at the discarded saw, covered with blood, and suddenly understood.

Your foot was injured. You didn't think you could save it, or it got infected running through the muck of the woods. Probably both. So you cut it off. You were looking for a saw, bandages, maybe something to help you stand after you were done. How did you leave?

There were no drag marks. It was as if Ellie had cut off her foot and disappeared. Amanda studied the marks on the tile carefully and found strange, circular rings of blood, each pair growing less pronounced as they neared the door. Little droplets of blood lay in between them favoring one side, a bloody footprint favoring the other. Like the rings, it became less pronounced with each step, but the droplets continued on.

Crutches. That's how you kept going. You cut off your foot, tied off or bandaged the stump, and left.

Amanda breathed a sigh of relief. Ellie was alive. But that was not enough. Ellie was seriously injured, crippled, and out there alone. If Amanda didn't find her, she most likely wasn't going to last long. She's strong, though. She's smart. And she's got spirit. Amanda searched the rest of the building carefully, but found nothing of use. She followed the tracks out of the building. They turned down the road. She began to follow when she saw something else.

A bloody print, the sole of a big boot, trailing behind Ellie's tracks.

Someone started to follow her.

The thought filled Amanda with dread. She picked up the pace, wondering whether she'd find Ellie at the end of the trail...or Ellie's corpse. Either way, she knew she had to hurry. Night was falling and Amanda wanted to get a bit more distance before the sun set completely and plunged everything into darkness.

When night fell, so did rain. It was a light sprinkle at first, which gave Amanda enough time to find shelter in a gas station, but soon the rain began to pour out of the sky. The roof had numerous holes, so water began to pour from the leaks. She swore under her breath. The rain would wash the tracks away and she would lose the trail. There wasn't much to go on anyway, she realized, but that doesn't mean I'm gonna give up. The only truly defensible place in the station was an office. At night, and with no windows, it was truly dark and secluded. She turned on her flashlight, checked the inside for infected, and, finding none, shut the door tightly before shoving the heavy desk in front of it. It was the only way in. Or the only way out, she thought darkly.

But now she had more pressing concerns. She stripped herself of her jacket and examined her bandages, she saw that they were old and. needed changing. When she pulled the ones on her finger off, pain lanced up her fingers and down her arm. The dirty cloth stuck to the wounds, but she had nothing with which to loosen them, forcing her to simply rip them off. She ground her teeth when they finally came free. Where her fingernails had once been, only red, glistening, pulpy masses of flesh remained. Fresh blood began to stream from the wounds and she went to work, dousing them in alcohol and bandaging them up again. Each time she dripped the alcohol on them, she had to suppress a scream, the tender flesh burning under the cleansing fire. After she was done cleaning and bandaging her fingers, she went on to her other wound, the gunshot. It had bled a lot and was already clotting when she'd bandaged it in Jackson, but that proved to be a problem when said bandage clung to the wound like a child refusing to leave her mother. She had no choice but to rinse the bandage in alcohol before peeling the bandage away. I should get a sturdy stick to bite down on, she thought as she narrowly avoided chomping off her own tongue in agony. Cleaning and dressing went better, and after it was complete she pulled her jacket back on.

Amanda had a flashlight dinner of canned green beans. She lay down on the floor, an ancient and rotting carpet that seemed to have lasted the test of time, stinking of the last twenty years. She took off her cap and placed it in the corner of the room before resting her head on her backpack, her rifle leaning in the corner over her cap and her pistol tucked under her backpack. If anything came up, she'd be ready to go at a moment's notice.

Laying down on a floor in the middle of nowhere, her jacket substituting a blanket, Amanda, for the first time in a long time, felt truly alone. Yet it took her less than a day to fall back into the old routine. It was...alien to her, yet it was also entirely predictable. Since the beginning, she'd always been on the move, always alone, never stopping. She'd been all around the country, trying to find some place that the infection hadn't touched, a place where everything was the way it had been when she was a girl, a place that might hold something for her. She had never stopped looking, but she eventually stopped hoping. It had become harder and harder not to eat a bullet, but every time she felt the need, she looked at her baseball cap. It seemed to tell her, "You'll find it. Just keep looking."

She couldn't remember how she got the baseball cap, but she was certain she had it when she was a girl. It, along with her father's compass, was her last reminder of home. What bothered her the most wasn't what she could remember. It was what she couldn't. Her parents faces. She couldn't remember them. Her high school classmates. They were all a blur. But she did remember certain things.

Every Fourth of July, her parents had a cookout in the back yard. It didn't matter that it was a hundred and five degrees out at the best of times, her father always grilled up some burgers and invited the neighbors. He made moonshine, and when she was little she would always beg for a cup, but all she'd get was a sip. She remembered it being especially bitter, enough so that she'd spit it out, coughing as their neighbors laughed goodnaturedly. At night, she would play with sparklers, light off black cats, and cover her ears and watch as the mortars flew up into the sky and boomed, the explosions shaking in her chest. It was her favorite holiday, even better than Christmas.

It was getting harder and harder for her to remember those times. Other memories she wished would disappear, but they were as fresh and as real as if the events were still happening.

A man, stumbling down the street, twitching, shivering. Sweat running down her brow, hand in hand with John, her high school sweetheart. A strangled scream, the man charging them, John throwing her aside, the man pouncing on him, grabbing, snapping, snarling like an animal, shrieking and moaning like he's in pain. She grabbed the man, no, thing, pulling and pulling. It gnashed its jaws, teeth missing her by inches. John shoved it off her, grabbed her, and they ran, pounding feet behind them. Police sirens, someone shouting, "Get down!" one, two, three gunshots. The man fell, twitching. Paramedics around John, looking at his arm. A bite. He smiled as they took him away to the hospital, never to return. It was the first day of the infection.

Years later, a cold night, alone, shivering in the woods, pistol in hand. So easy to turn it toward her head and pull the trigger. Days and days of no food, cold rain, just one, insane hope kept her going. A town, a few days away, filled with people, building a community, bringing things back to the way they were. She wouldn't last long enough to get there. A river, rushing, swollen with rain. She trudged onward, up a hill. A dam came into view. Lights, shouting, guns drawn and pointed at her. She sank to her knees, crying. She found it. She finally found it.

Amanda shivered. That was the night she found Jackson. That was the night she felt that her search was finally over. I was stupid to think it would last forever. Nothing good ever does.

Smiles, gentle voices, soft kisses. Hands on her shoulders, her sides, touching her. Clothes falling, flesh against flesh, a breathy moan, "Joel," A hardwood floor, cold against her back, lips on her neck, a tickling beard against her skin, her fingers clawing at his shoulders, tugging his hair as she breathed his name. They rolled over. Hands on her hips, eyes staring up at her with love, "It's been so long," She said it and so did he. They slept in his bed, together. The next morning, bare feet on hard wood, Joel's shirt around her, eggs sizzling in the skillet. Ellie making jokes, trying to hide her discomfort, Joel nearly choking on his eggs from embarrassment. Smiles all around, a real family at last.

I never told him I loved him, she realized, I never told her I loved her, either. It was her last thought before she fell into a fitful sleep.

Amanda awoke to voices outside. She groaned quietly and sat up. There was something else, too, something she hadn't heard in a long time. An engine idling.

"Come on, Mark, we're wasting fuel running the jeep like this. What do you think he would do if he found out we were fucking around with gas like this? Let's just get to the rendezvous point. It's literally just up the road."

"You get hit on the head when we were pulling out of Jackson? You know he's just gonna have us go back down there and do scavenger hunt for that little girl. There's no fucking way I'm going back. If ever see that prick again, I'll put a bullet in his head."

The soldier's men. Her heart sank into her gut. It was likely they were the ones in the jeep at Jackson. I suppose it was too much to hope the infected pulled them all out of the jeep. She hoped they would leave soon, but considering how her luck was going, they probably wouldn't any time soon.

"Okay, that's just nuts, Mark. You know what he does to people that piss him off. And even if we don't go to the rendezvous, we'll still need every ounce of gas we can scrounge up if we want to head back to Chicago."

"Fuck Chicago. That's halfway across the country from here and we sucked every car dry on the way here, especially for his fucking tank."

"Well, where did you have in mind, Mark?"

"Seattle."

"Seattle? You actually BELIEVED that nut's story about Seattle?!"

"Hey, if I don't have any bullets the next time we see that son of a bitch, how about you tell the soldier you thought the Seattle story was bullshit, see how well that goes over. Maybe he won't pull ALL of your nails off before he blows your brains out."

Story? What story about Seattle? Immediately this new information intrigued her, but she chided herself. Everyone is hoping for that miracle, that place where things can go back to the way they were. But it won't happen. It will never happen. Not anymore.

"Fuck you, Mark."

"If you want to turn the engine off, then whatever. Just means it might not turn back on when the infected find us. Besides, I won't be long. There's nothing here, but I'm gonna check that office, just to be sure."

Oh, shit!

Amanda realized that, in her curiosity, she left her guns and her gear on the other side of the room. She scrambled to her pack, slinging it on, her rifle following right behind it. Her cap went next, with her perching it securely on her head. Her pistol was the last thing to pack and she moved to tuck it into the waistband of her pants, but stopped. She couldn't waste precious moments fumbling for it. She slid the slide back, making sure a round was chambered. There was. The handle of the door turned and the door nudged up against the desk. In her haste to train the pistol on the door, she released the slide and it popped back with a snap.

She froze. Her breath caught in her throat and she held it, not daring to breathe. She tightened her grip on the pistol, wincing at the minute shifting of metal. The door did not budge. There was nothing, nothing but the engine idling outside, faint and distant, almost like a memory.

BAM!

The door shook with the first pounding blow, Amanda nearly jumping out of her skin. By the time the second and third landed, Amanda knew that whoever was out there had heard her and was determined to come in. The desk budged inch by inch with each blow, and finally a sliver of light cut through the darkness, the shadow of someone's boot slamming into the door.

There was a brief pause when she heard someone say, "Here, Mark, let me try," and then the door burst open, shoving the desk aside. The man who came through was young, maybe thirty at the oldest, a clean shaven face and bright eyes. He was tall and broad, but thin as well, looking at home in the blue tattered military uniform and black combat vest, an assault rifle hanging from a strap around his shoulder. She made her aim adjustments accordingly as he swept the room with his gaze and his eyes fell on her.

"Oh, fuck!" was all he had time to say before she pulled the trigger.

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