Chapter 9

All Shall Fade

I started loosing track of the days. Near the beginning, I had a pretty steady count of every day that had passed since that first day when we left the city. Every day was it's own story, each was different and dangerous and memorable. Since then the days have started to blend together. Not that they were no longer memorable; every second with Annie was another good memory that kept me going. Yet the routine was setting in. It became harder to tell one day from the next.

No routine lasts forever.

I remembered some things, forgot others. The little details didn't always stick. It wasn't entirely a bad thing though. Living in hell, it's often a blessing to forget the details.

Likewise, I sometimes remembered the details I would rather forget. I doubted that I would ever forget the people I had lost. The ways I lost them. But it stopped being quite as painful. I was finally able to cope, to think but not become overwhelmed. As usual, Annie helped a lot in that respect.

So in the end, I didn't really care if I forgot. I was finally able to let go.

Over time, we were able to gather some supplies to test Xavier's theory. We made a few trips into town, although they weren't quite as eventful as our previous ones. We were able to avoid the walkers much more easily and get in and out quickly. We were able to find a lot of the medications he specified in local pharmacies; no one had really thought to loot all the mood stabilizers when the world had been ending.

The next step was to find a test subject. Or rather, test subjects. Xavier had come up with several different mixtures, and the plan was to test each of them to see if they were viable treatments.

Since I had been involved with the project, albeit loosely, he decided to take me along. We also brought along Angie, Annie and Pablo. We set out around mid-morning, moving towards the road that led into town.

When we reached it, we found the perfect test subject. There was a walker buckled into one of the cars. As we passed by, it moaned and gnashed it's teeth at us. It obviously hadn't left the car since it had turned, and wasn't going to any time soon. It was badly decayed, and the t-shirt it wore had been reduced to strips of cloth clinging to it's upper body. The seats were covered in substances I didn't even want to try and identify.

Cautiously, I opened the car door and Xavier got one of the syringes out of his pack. Angie kept her weapon at the ready, making sure she would be able to put the walker down if it became a threat. Pablo and Annie stayed on the lookout.

Making sure to keep well away from the zombie's biting mouth and scratching hands, Xavier injected the fluid in the syringe into the zombie's body. After about half a minute, it stopped scrabbling so much. It's movements slowed, and the creature looked a bit more dead than it had before. "It's working!" Xavier exclaimed.

Unfortunately, it only worked for a minute or two. Soon the undead thing was flailing just as much as it had been before, if not more so. Xavier sighed with exasperation, but not defeat. "Come on," he said. "We still have a few more combinations to try."

However, before we could walk away, we heard a click behind us. We turned to see the walker somehow undoing it's seatbelt, struggling a bit but succeeding all the same. Thankfully Angie reacted quickly and decisively, chopping it's head clean off before it could get out of the car.

Xavier moved over to the head and examined it for a few minutes. "Fascinating," He said. "It seems that something in the serum I administered increased the level of cognition in the zombie. Somehow, I caused it to remember just enough that it knew how to escape." He got up, ignoring the astonished looks we were giving him "We ought to be on guard in case a similar situation occurs with one of the other test subjects. That being said, let's go find one!"

Numbly, we followed him down the road, looking in the windows of all the cars we came across. As we searched I was tempted to keep one eye on Annie, but I knew that she could handle herself. At some points I could have sworn I saw movement among the cars, but whenever I turned to look there were no walkers to be seen. Eventually, we found another zombie, but the results were the same as before, and stayed the same with each "test subject" we found. Eventually Xavier decided to pack it up and head back. "We have enough data for now," He said. "Now I just need to modify my approach based on the data."

He said it would take a few days to "modify his approach". In the mean time, we kept things running around the farm as usual. We still had the patrols going, which is why we had some warning before the attack. Still, it wasn't much.

The warning we got was a bullet to the head. Aaliyah and Nate were on patrol. Most of us heard the gunshot, and a few of us saw him fall. Aaliyah was right next to him. Thankfully, she had the presence of mind to run back to the house, taking cover as she went.

The ambush came from the woods. Thankfully they were far enough that they didn't hit anyone else immediately, but they were closing in fast. It was impossible to tell how many there were, but it seemed like a lot.

I was over by the barn with Annie when it happened. I knew we would have to act quickly if we were going to survive this. "Weapons free!" I shouted. "Grab your guns and open fire! Drive them off!" Then I took Annie so that we could grab our weapons. I grabbed my shotgun, planning on getting in close. Annie picked up her assault rifle; we had agreed that if we ever needed to, we would defend each other and the group in battle, fighting at each other's sides.

The others came into the barn to grab their weapons. Rachel and Miguel stayed by the door, ready to use their melee weapons on anyone coming in. The rest of us moved to windows or cracks in the wooden walls so that we could take aim at the invaders.

I could see though the window I had chosen that the group members in the house had already taken up their weapons and opened fire on the attackers. Some of them had noticed that we had a position in the barn as well, and started shooting at the windows. I ducked, narrowly avoiding a rifle round that whizzed by my head. As the bandit reloaded, Annie fired off a quick burst at his position.

As the invaders moved up, I started firing my shotgun more and more frequently. The sounds of gunfire around us were almost deafening. At one point, Angie lobbed a grenade at their position, taking out no less than three of them. Unfortunately it was her last one, but we did a pretty good job of driving them back.

Of course, that was when things started to go bad. One of the stray bullets hit a gas tank near the base of the barn. It exploded, sending a wave of pure heat and force up the side of the barn, blowing out a large portion of the wall. Annie and I scrambled back. "Xavier," She whispered. He had been in the lower part of the barn, the part that had taken the worst of the blast.

Unfortunately, there was no time to mourn him at the moment. We tried our best to evacuate the barn, which was burning all around us. This left us open to enemy fire. On the bright side, there were only a few enemies left. I ran towards the barn, taking out several of the bandits along the way. Then Annie took the lead. She cut through them like butter, mowing them down with long bursts from her rifle. Pablo was also fighting hard, firing off his twin pistols and, once they were empty, his SMG. We did a lot of damage, keeping to cover as we made our way to the farm house.

Only a few of us were injured, and only Nate and Xavier had been killed. Still, we had other problems on our hands. "Every walker for miles around will have heard that," I said. "We need to leave, and fast."

"Leave to where?" Carrie said. "We can't just pack up and go without a plan!"

"I have one," Pablo said. "My brother Danny is staying up in Vermont with a friend. We can go up there to stay with him."

I glanced over questioningly at Annie. She nodded. "Annie and I are with Pablo," I said. It's at least worth having a look. Anyone else have any input on the matter?" Nobody seemed to, so we all went to pack up for the journey. Aaliyah also got Julia, Kevin and Bella to help her dig a grave for Nate. We would have done the same for Xavier, but there wasn't much left of him.

Thankfully most of our supplies had been in the house when the barn blew up. Still, we lost some of our stuff in the explosion. Half our sleeping bags were gone, along with most of our personal effects that we hadn't carried out with us. We gathered up what we had, salvaged what we could, and headed off down the road.

We knew it would be a lot harder than it was getting to the farm, since we had little idea of where we were going and no maps. However, we did find a compass in the house, which we were able to use to discern which way was north. Once we knew that, we planned to just keep walking until we wandered into Vermont, or an adjacent state, and work our way over to Danny's location from there.

We followed that pattern all day, keeping to the woods as before, and when we were all tired out, we settled down to rest. There were a limited number of sleeping bags now, so more of us were set up on watch. I took the first watch with Annie, Pablo, Angie, and a few of the others.

Annie came and sat down next to me. "Now that Xavier's gone… how are we gonna find a way to end this madness?" I could see the dread on her face. I put my arm around her to reassure her.

"Don't worry. I'll figure something out." After a few hours, we woke up the people for second watch, and then used the remaining sleeping bags to try and get what little rest we could.