The first sounds Bella was aware of the next morning were footsteps. In that initial moment of total panic, she sat bolt upright, reaching out to grab onto anything she could find, any sort of weapon. She found nothing, but as her fingers closed on air she remembered where she was, and that, inexplicably, Edward Cullen had found her dehydrated and half starved and brought her back to this strange refugee camp on an island. It had to be early, just past dawn most likely, but the air inside of the tent was already warm, and the spot where Rosalie had slept was already empty.

Whoever was walking outside of the tent was a male and tall. Bella was relieved to note that he walked with long, smooth strides and not the uneven, lurching gait of the living dead. The man could have been Edward, his silhouette was about the right height, and Bella stayed inside the tent until he had passed on his way. It was only after the sound of the footsteps had died away that Bella rose cautiously to her knees and leaned forward to unzip the tent flap. The fresh, marginally cooler air that breezed into the tent when she opened the flap brought a happy sigh to her lips. Her scalp was still damp with sweat, testament to a night spent stifling in the confines of Rosalie's tent, but she had slept deeply nonetheless, locked in a series of tormenting nightmares.

When she finally emerged from the tent, cautiously, feeling oddly like the new girl on the first day of high school, most of the other survivors, with the exception of Edward and Emmett, were gathered around the camp fire. Nora smiled warmly at Bella, and Rosalie acknowledged her with a curt nod. Jasper Cullen, who was carving up a fish with practiced, vicious strokes, looked up from his labor to grin at Bella.

Jasper, the third Cullen brother, was the youngest and the closest in age to Bella. Despite that, she didn't remember him very well. He had dropped out of school sometime in his sophomore or junior year, and even before that he had been absent constantly. She had caught a glimpse of him the night before, sitting at the campfire in between Edward and Emmett, but strangely enough, Bella found it difficult to focus on either of Edward's brothers when Edward himself was around. Each brother was attractive and magnetic in his own way, but it was Edward who drew her gaze as though she were bewitched.

But enough about Edward, Bella thought, scowling when she couldn't get the thought of her green-eyed savior, the tormentor of her high-school self, out of her mind.

Like his brothers, Jasper had matured nicely. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and leanly muscled in all of the right places. His shaggy blond hair was streaked with dust and in need of a trim, but despite that he was incredibly good-looking. Emmett was dark-haired and dark-eyed, with an enormously powerful build and a wickedly charming smile.

Now that she seen all three of them, it was all flooding back to her. Back in their small hometown, the Cullen brothers had been the resident hell-raisers. After her parents' divorce and before her mother's remarriage, Bella had gone to live with her grandmother and attended her first two years of high school in her grandmother's small town. Edward, the oldest of the Cullen brothers, had been on his way out of high school just as she was on her way in. God, how could she ever have forgotten? Those had been hard years. Later, in college at Stanford, Bella had gone on to find her niche, socially, but back in Delray things had been a lot more difficult. Intellectually oriented and quietly ambitious, dreaming of college and a career as a writer, Bella had felt horribly isolated. Some of the local kids had made an effort to befriend her, but eventually all of the attempted friendships had fizzled out; Bella was bored by the constant stream of pep rallies, Friday night football matches and church BBQs, and her new companions had been frustrated by her thoughtful introversion.

Her first few months in Delray had been marked by a gradually deepening isolation, until Bella found herself a virtual outcast. She wasn't tormented, that was one mercy, she was just, forgotten… Even by her parents, neither of whom were adjusting to divorced life very well. The existence of Edward Cullen had filtered slowly into her consciousness, as gradually and imperceptibly as it would later fade from her memory after she went away to college.

She couldn't remember exactly when she'd started thinking about him, only that suddenly he had been there, a powerful presence at the back of the classroom, and at the back of her mind. He had been gorgeous even as a teenager - he'd been leaner then, less filled out, but he was already tall and broad-shouldered, powerfully strong, possessed of vivid green eyes and a lazy, angry drawl. His tone ranged from bitingly sarcastic to quietly menacing, but something about all that anger so tightly leashed, all that emotion contained in eyes that were at once startlingly beautiful and frighteningly cold, had struck her as poetic. He was the one she looked to, when she grew bored of the endless stream of sports games and bake sales. There were moments when she had felt like he was the only other person in school who was really alive. The others were just mannequins, there to take up space and live the high school clichés that had already been beat half to death by the teen films of the '90s. But Edward, he was alive. He was angry, uncivilized, crude and sometimes frightening, but he was also wonderfully, exhilaratingly alive.

She hadn't realized it at first, but she must have started staring at him, watching the way his jaw clenched when the teachers reprimanded him for his many absences, watching the way his gaze flicked restlessly over the students around him. He was bored. He felt caged. She could empathize - at least at first. Then, suddenly, she found him looking back at her. That had frightened her. He was 18 when she was 15, and when her curfew was 10pm he was living with his brothers in an RV parked out back of the local pool hall. Bella had never really gotten the full story about what happened to the Cullen parents. All she knew was that they were gone, and the boys lived with their father's half brother, a young man just ten years older than Edward himself. Carlisle's reputation was not much better than those of the brothers themselves; together, the four of them created more gossip for the local rumor mill than the other 9,000 residents of Delray combined.

Bella had started to avoid his gaze, to turn away from his searing eyes when she sensed that they were fixed on her. She withdrew into her notebook, where she alternately sketched her classmates and scribbled the early outlines of her plans to escape to college. But his gaze had pursued her, relentlessly, and gradually she began to feel that some of that legendary anger was directed at her. She still remembered his mocking laughter, the way he would sit next to her in class, closer than he needed to, until she almost thought she could feel his body heat burning through her clothes to her skin. She even remembered the night when -

Abruptly, Bella was jolted from her reminiscences as Edward himself, the grown, present day man, appeared before her, hunting knife in hand. For a moment her post-apocalyptic fear reflex got the best of her and she jumped backwards at the sight of the weapon. A moment later, Edward slid it into the sheath at his hip, and she realized that he'd been in the process of putting it away after cleaning it. Embarrassed at how jumpy she'd become, Bella looked down at her own feet, avoiding looking at him. She could so clearly envision the mocking expression that he was probably wearing at that very moment.

"Some things never change," she heard him murmur, and then he pushed past her and walked away. She waited until he had taken a few steps before she turned around to watch him. He had joined his brothers and another man. It took Bella a moment, but then she realized that the fourth man was Carlisle, the uncle who had taken Edward and his brothers in. So all four of them had survived. That was a mercy. So many families had been torn apart by the epidemic. So many parents would never see their children again, so many siblings had been separated and so many spouses widowed. Unbidden, the memory of her grandmother's face slipped into Bella's mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out all thought of the old woman she had come to visit for the summer. She couldn't think about her grandmother now; she just couldn't. If she allowed herself to remember her grandmother, then she would have to remember what had happened to her, and that was more than Bella could bear without slipping into madness. Psychologists may have advised against repressing trauma, but there were some memories that just had to be buried.

Rosalie and the Cullen brothers seemed to be in consultation over by the cars. They had a map spread over the hood of the car they'd driven Bella to the island in, and there was some kind of argument going on. Feeling awkward, but unsure what else to do with herself, Bella drifted over to listen in.

"I don't think it's a good idea," Carlisle was saying.

Edward shook his head and his jaw clenched. "We can fight our way through. There are bigger stores there, bigger warehouses, better supplies. We're going to start running out of essentials pretty soon."

"Bigger stores mean bigger towns, and bigger towns mean more people. More people means… more of the undead." Carlisle pointed out.

"We could scout it out first," Jasper suggested. "A couple of us scope out the edges of the town. If we keep quiet, stay on the fringes and bring enough weapons we should be safe." His voice was a lot like Edward's, a slow, sexy drawl.

"I don't like the idea of you guys going anywhere without me," Emmett crossed his arms. "I think you should wait until I'm back in action."

"Believe it or not," Rosalie told him, "we can function without you." Emmett's eyebrows shot up in surprise, but he seemed more amused than angry at her comment.

"I think we should hold off," Carlisle interrupted calmly. "There are a few more less-populated areas closer by that we haven't been to yet for supplies."

"Every day we hold off, we risk that others will get there and loot the place before we can pick up supplies." Edward argued.

"It's a risk we have to take," Carlisle said. "Emmett's out of action, we nearly lost Jasper last night and I'm not prepared for anyone to go tearing off on what might end up being a suicide mission. Not until we've exhausted some other options and given the matter a little more thought."

"Fine," Edward said. "If that's what everyone wants to do." He stepped back from the truck and walked away.

Carlisle watched his nephew walk away with his eyebrows raised. Rosalie shook her head. "I hope he doesn't go off on his own," she said. "He's in a really shitty mood right now."

"Yeah," Emmett agreed, and then, unexpectedly, his gaze shifted to Bella. There was something heavy in his eyes, something meaningful, but what he was trying to communicate or what he was thinking she couldn't tell.

Rosalie watched Edward's receding back for a moment before turning to Bella. "Do you know how to clean fish?" she asked.

"No," Bella admitted.

"Well," Rosalie said flatly. "Come learn."