A/N: 01/07/2015 Tomorrow will be the last chapter! Is anyone else a little sad? :(

wildcow258: Yep. It all centered around that chapter. I'm glad you appreciate it, and I hope you enjoy this one :D

Oncelived: Ohmygosh your review, I loved it. I am SO happy you liked my writing for the previous chapter, and even happier that you think I conveyed emotions well enough to cry (even if metaphorically). Thank you! Lovex3 to you too! :)))

Poppy P: Wow! Thank you! I was worried it wouldn't be that good, but I'm glad to hear otherwise! lol, 'kaleidoscope of emotion'. I love your wording XD Yes, it would be a terrible thing for the writers to do that to us. And aw, please, girl. We ALL live for those Caryl moments! We're all just a group of pathetic foolish saps for love between a widow and a hillbilly in an apocalyptic setting :)

Reading time: 7 mins.

Disclaimer: I do not own The Walking Dead.

Chapter twenty-two: Gone~

Strangely enough, they'd survived the drop.

He'd been so sure they were going to die, so sure, and yet here they were, alive. Pretty much the exact opposite of dead. Carol was a little worse for wear, but she would live. She'd tried to hide it, but he saw. Her collar bone was broken, and she needed his assistance in getting away from the wrecked vehicle. But she'd be fine. She always was. They always were.

After the bridge incident, they'd stuck to the surrounding buildings and kept off the streets. It was only smart; too high a risk of running into walkers or the people that took Beth. And apparently, they weren't the only ones who thought that.

While making their way across a skywalk and over into another building, they'd been robbed and stripped of their weapons by some young punk.

You guys'll make it. You look like you can handle yourselves, he'd said.

He'd been right, but that didn't make him any less of a punk. And so they went their separate ways, he and Carol killing any walkers that might have gotten in their way with the spare knives they still had.

He wasn't quite sure how, since they'd gone into one building and he'd gone into another, but they crossed paths again with their thief some time later.

It started with an arrow he'd spotted lodged into a wall - one of his arrows from his crossbow - and ended with he and Carol accepting him into their group, if only temporarily. He wasn't sure how it happened, really - the little prick had almost gotten Carol killed, and in turn he'd almost killed him - but he said that he knew where Beth was, and that was all he needed to hear. He wasn't about to blow their only chance of rescuing one of their own.

The kid's name was Noah.

He was alright, for the short duration he'd known him. He was still a little irritated over the whole crossbow thing - no one took what was his if he had anything to do with it - but overall, the hatchet was buried.

Beth, Noah had said, was being held captive in a place, a hospital, called Grady Memorial. It served as a place of refuge for a group of cops, a witch of a woman and her deputy underlings. They'd go out, find people who needed help, take them to the hospital, and then make them stay in return for 'saving' their lives.

They didn't do it to be 'evil' - the people they saved were always put to use with cooking or laundry or gardening or what have you. Whatever they wanted you to do, really. But they were strict about making you stay, and you'd be sorry if you ever tried to leave. Noah had barely escaped himself, and that was only because Beth had helped him. And now here they were, on their way to save her.

Daryl, Carol, and Noah walked leisurely along the sidewalk of the empty city, keeping close to the buildings so as to avoid being too out in the open.

He was quite surprised that there were no walkers around, what with it being an inner city and all, but he supposed they were just where he couldn't see. So he kept his guard up, keeping his crossbow at the ready just in case.

They came to a shaded part of concrete thanks to the overhang of a building that went out far enough to require pillars to hold it in place, and Carol skipped ahead to the end of the sidewalk to look for signs of walkers or people.

She trotted out into the street to cross, apparently satisfied, and he almost opened his mouth to tell her to slow down so they could catch up, but two seconds later he never got the chance. He wished he could have savored those two seconds, because within them everything had been just fine.

There was a blur, the screeching of tires, a loud crash that rung in his ears, and suddenly Carol was on the ground, unconscious and nearly lifeless on the pavement.

It only took him enough time to blink for the panic and dread to wrap around his heart and grip it with all the strength of a vice, and he ran to her unmoving body with a singlemindedness that would have kept most people from stopping him. But Noah knew better. He caught up to him just in time, wrapping his long, thin arms around him and dragging him behind one of the nearby pillars to hide. And just in time, too. Not a millisecond later the people who had hit Carol got out of the car.

They were cops, probably from Grady Hospital.

They slowly moved towards Carol to inspect the damage they'd done, and Daryl struggled against Noah's grip to keep them from touching her. She was so still. It scared him.

Noah whispered countless words of comfort to him, but all he really heard was an unending stream of background noise as he watched the two men get out a gurney and carefully lift Carol onto it.

Daryl tried once more to wrench himself from the hold he was under, but in his grief was unsuccessful.

"There is nothing you can do for her!" Noah whispered. "They'll take her to Grady! They have medical supplies there, medicine! She's gonna be okay!"

The words were heard but not understood, and Daryl weakly reached out to Carol as hot tears rolled down his face.

Seeing that it wasn't getting them anywhere, Noah released his hold on him, spun him around, and shoved him against the pillar to get him to listen.

"Listen to me," he hissed, dead-serious. "If you go out there now, they'll kill you. And then she won't get any help, and then she'll die! Is that what you want?"

That got his attention.

Daryl listened to the sound of rolling tires and a fading engine, and he knew that they'd taken her.

And just like that, Carol was just...gone.

"What's it gonna take to get her back?" he asked, looking Noah dead in the eyes. The tears had stopped coming, and whatever hurt he'd been feeling was now replaced with vengeance.

"A lot," he replied, not bothering to sugar-coat it for him.

She was gone.

"They have...people."

Gone.

"Yeah?" he scoffed.

Gone.

"So do we."

Gone...

By the time the word had sunk in, truly wrapped itself around his brain and forced him to understand what had just happened, and what he had to do now, he was already making his way to the nearest working car and dragging Noah back to the group with him. He was going to get her back. He wasn't losing another person. He wasn't.

Noah was silent as they drove back towards the church, and Daryl didn't blame him. He was probably wondering how he'd gotten himself into this mess, but it didn't really matter. It didn't matter how. What mattered was that he did, and now he was in just as deep as the rest of them. And besides, he needed him if he ever hoped to get Beth or Carol back. And he planned to do both. There was no going back now.

Carol was gone.

And he would accept that.

But he was also going to bring her back.

And that he could accept even more.

A/N: Up next: Home.

Though I plan for this thing to be finished tomorrow, I HAVE thought about keeping this 'open' for more Caryl moments in the remainder of the 5th season. We'll have to see ;)

See you all at the finale tomorrow!