Just to let you guys know, this story is winding down now.

"Ashley, Ashley. Are you okay?" I hear Angel asks as she shakes me awake. The constant throbbing in my head is making it hard to hear.

"Ugh." I groan out as my hand shoots to the back of my head. Yep, there's a knot there.

"Are you okay?" Angel asks me again as my eyes flutter open. The light hurts them.

"I have a concussion." I whisper, hoping she would follow my lead and lower her voice.

"How do you know?" She questions, lowering her voice.

"I just do." I assure her, trying to sit up.

"Maybe you should lay back down." Eric instructs me, trying to put a hand on my shoulder. I flinch and shoot up.

"Don't you dare touch me." I tell him, holding a hand up between him and myself.

"Ashley calm down." Angel whispers.

"How can you tell me to calm down? He just assaulted me!" I say almost hysterically as Eric inches closer to me.

"I hardly assaulted you Ashley." He half chuckles. Oh this shit funny?

"Eric, I swear that once this pounding in my head stops I'm gonna-"

"Ashley stop trying to prove you have the bigger balls and just hear him out please." Angel says, pulling up a chair so I could sit down. I take a seat, never taking my eyes off Eric.

"You have five minutes." I tell him coldly. He nods and smiles as he pulls up a chair across from me and Angel leans on a nearby table.

"I'm not a bad guy." He starts. How convincing. I roll my eyes as he continues. "I'm just like you Ashley, I want to fix what they did. I want to make everything right again."

"How do you know what they did exactly?" I question with a raised brow.

"I was here." He replies quickly.

"What? What do you mean you were-"

"Room 511." He cuts me off.

"No." I say as I shake my head. "There's no way that you-"

"There is." He nods. "My mom was on the research team that your mom ran." He says, half smiling at a memory in his head. "She didn't want me to be apart of it." He shakes his head. "She begged me not to actually. But I'm stubborn and I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to be apart of something special. Don't you understand what would have happened if the serum had worked?" He asks with wide eyes. "Cancer...gone. AIDs...gone. No more common colds, no more anything really." He shakes his head. "Mankind wouldn't have had to worry about any of that stuff anymore." He pauses and sighs, standing and walking around his chair. "But I guess mother nature decided against that plan." He half chuckles.

"My mom would have never allowed you to take part, you were only-"

"Fourteen at the time." He nods. "Right. Your mom didn't know. Like I said, I had to beg my mom to be apart of it."

"That still doesn't explain-"

"Why I'm here and how I found you?" He finishes my sentence for me. "I've been following you since you left Atlanta. We set up camp there."

"We?" I question.

"My dad, about thirty or so army soldiers, and myself. That was who you heard me talking to." He clarifies.

"Why?"

"Ground zero." He shrugs.

"We were gonna rebuild, or at least we were trying to figure out a way to rebuild."

"So you're the ones that trapped all those walkers int the fences at Gwinnett center?" I question.

"Yeah." He nods and smiles proudly.

"What exactly were you going to do with them, seeing as though none of you knew anything about the cure at the time?" I question with a raised brow.

"We weren't sure yet." He shrugs. "We figured we'd keep them there until we figured it out. At least we'd be able to scavenge Atlanta without worrying about the walkers."

"Well you missed two." I throw out angrily. Remembering the two walkers that attacked Aiden.

"No we didn't." He shakes his head as he comes back around his chair and takes a seat.

"What?" I sit up straight, my brown eyes fixed on his green ones.

"We needed you to figure it out." He starts, glancing over at Angel before he scoots his chair back from me.

"What do you mean you needed me to figure it out?" I ask through gritted teeth. I glance at Angel who looks decidedly scared. It's like she can't figure out whether to stop Eric from saying whatever he's about to say or to come and hold me down.

"Ashley we were right there, we were gonna step in if you couldn't figure it-"

I let out a shrill of a laugh, cutting right through Eric's words. "You have got to be fucking kidding me!" I shout, standing up from my chair. "You sent two walkers in to attack my best friend so I could figure out that my blood was a piece of the cure puzzle?"

"It's more complicated then-"

"And Spencer? What about Spencer! Did you left go of Rebecca on purpose?" I question him and I suggest he chose his answer carefully.

"We needed to move-"

"I'm gonna kill him, I'm gonna fucking kill him." I lunge for him but Angel catches me, stopping me from reaching him.

"Ashley I knew what your blood could do and so did you. Spencer was never truly in danger."

"But you're gonna be." I tell him through gritted teeth.

"Ashley you just need to calm down and let him finish." Angel tells me as she backs up.

"You know Eric, I could kill you right now." I smirk as I sit back down, scooting my chair closer to his.

"Ashley we both know-"

"No." I shake my head. "I'm faster, stronger and smarter than you Eric. Maybe not book smarts, but I've seen more shit in the past year then you've probably seen in your entire life so right now, I want you to think very carefully about how you answer this question." I tell him with narrowed eyes. "Are you here to steal the cure from us to take back to your camp?"

"No." He shakes his head. "I told you, I was sent here to help Ashley. We have no intentions of stealing anything. We just wanna help. We all want the same thing; to rebuild. To get things back to normal, as much as possible."

"Then why keep your identity a secret?"

"I wasn't sure if you'd believe me at first. I had to show you that I wasn't a threat. That I didn't want anything from you. I just wanted to help." He chuckles. "And then I kinda fell for Kyla and..." He trails off when he sees the look on Angel's face. "Anyway, once the cure is done I'm heading back to Atlanta, you guys are more than welcome to join us at our camp. There's plenty of room. We also have the means to get this cure circulating." He adds.

"So that story about your dad it was-"

"A way to get you guys to let me in. My dad's back in Atlanta." He explains. I could kill him right now. I could.

All the secrecy and for what?

"How do I know you're not lying?"

"I guess you don't." He shrugs. "But I haven't done anything to make you not trust me Ashley, have I?" He questions with a raised brow. I mean technically he hasn't but he could just be really good at his job.

And that job could very well be to get his hands on the cure any way he can.

"I don't trust you." I tell him bluntly.

He smiles a small smile. "I understand."

"But now that we see we're all on the same side, can we not fight anymore?" Angel asks, causing Eric and I both to turn and look at her briefly. I turn back to him and nod my head, rolling my eyes a bit.

"Fine."

"Yeah, okay." He nods along with me.

"Great." Angel claps her hands together, walking closer to us. "Let's go tell the group our new found revelations, shall we?" She asks, putting a hand on each of our backs.

We both nod before we all head back down to meet up with the rest of the group.