Isaac kept sprinting; his chest hurt. A residual pain shot through his wrist whenever he imagined tripping over again, allowing the man to catch up with him. That's why he never let him get close—he learnt his lesson from his run in with Daryl.

He didn't know what to do. He didn't think he could keep running for much longer; the running made him cough, and the stress made it harder for him to breathe. The meds had worked, sure. He was going to live, but he was still sick. Running made him feel worse, almost how he felt the first night of the sickness.

He was in pain and starting to get dizzy from the lack of oxygen. That—alongside the fact that he was being hunted down—didn't add up for a good time. And he wasn't really having a good time. Part of him wanted to throw up, but that was the part that wasn't controlled by his obsessions, his body's basic urges that were usually wiped out by his brain in seconds.

Really he just kept focusing on the sounds behind him, he always had to listen for where the man was so he could change his direction and avoid taking a bullet in the back the way Ace did. Even thinking about it now, what happened to her, how close he felt to it happening to him—it was bad.

Part of him wished he could have done more for Ace, could have helped kill the people, but even if they had, the walkers would have been inside the fences in seconds. Isaac wasn't too sure how either enemy had found them, but he knew he was not going to let his guard down in that way.

Only because it led him to be in situations like this one, where he was running and running and running with no hope of getting out alive. But he did really want to get out of this one alive. Dying on the dirty forest ground was not on Isaac's bucket list.

"Stop!" The man yelled after him.

Isaac wondered why he was so intent on killing him; it's not like he would take back the prison alone. The Governor left the place in such a state of disrepair at the point he left that Isaac doubted anyone could live there again. Shame, too. It was the first place he believed could work.

At this point, he wasn't so worried about killing. He shot at people at the prison and he was still hyped up and angry to the point that he would gun someone down to save himself. (He was selfish like that.) But he never really got the chance, because taking the time to stop and turn around and aim his gun would leave him in the open for too long and the man would just shoot him.

He knew the man had caught onto that point as well because the amount of bullets he used to catch Isaac at a time had come down significantly. Isaac was just waiting for that click which meant the man had to reload.

Eventually, those shots came, and Isaac was able to duck behind a tree to take a breath. He looked around the corner to see the man partially hidden as he tried to change his magazine, and Isaac kept most of his body concealed as he raised the gun towards him.

"Look! Wait!" Isaac held up a hand, his other resting on his knees as he leaned over to catch a breath. "We can work this out, right—?"

Before he could even finish his rambling, neither of them realised the group of walkers until it was too late. The first one grabbed the man by the arm, and he yelled out and swung his gun around before it could bite him. Even as the first walker fell dead, the next two were so close that they were both on him before he could send off another round of shots.

Isaac straightened up and glanced off to the side to see more and more walkers heading their way. "Oh, uh, this works too."

He took a step back and spun around, sprinting away as fast as his legs would carry him. Killing the walkers would only help the man, and they were not in that place. This would at least give him some more time to get away, and maybe they'd even bite him so he couldn't follow. Isaac wasn't going to stick around to find out.

The screaming and random shots behind him made him realise what happened. He just thanked God that the walkers had seen the man first and not him, despite the fact that he was now running from the walkers instead of a guy. He was more scared thinking that the walkers might catch him, just not wanting them to get near him.

At least the walkers were easier to outrun.

Isaac wanted to stop; he was getting tired. Michonne once told him that when exercising, it was the brain that tired out first and that he had to keep pushing past that point of exhaustion. (Ace said it was something about your brain not wanting you to work out to the point of injury, and if human brains allowed them to use all their strength, muscles would tear from bones. Adrenaline overrides that process.)

When he made it to the road, he knew he needed a new plan of action. He was no longer being hunted down, managing to ditch the walkers and any people that may have been following from the prison, but he racked his mind at the next place to go.

The bus, obviously, sarcastically came the voice in his head. You told Ace to go to the bus.

That would have been the best plan, if Isaac had given it any thought. He heard multiple times at the prison that Ace had no sense of direction, saw her sitting down at a table a few times while Rick and Daryl taught her how to read a map (something that generally ended in frustration from all three parties).

Sure, maybe she'd been picking it up, maybe she was better now. He'd only left the prison with her one time but on the way to the Big Spot, she had a map in the car and seemed to be following along with her finger. Maybe she was better now, maybe she knew where the bus was going, maybe Rick had shown her on the map where to go, but Isaac didn't think it could be that easy. Ace was injured, disoriented, scared.

A pit opened in his stomach when he realised that she would probably never make it to the bus, but he had to push that thought down.

So what was his next plan? The only landmark that he knew Ace knew was the prison. Maybe more people went back after the war to see if they could take it back. So, first he would check the prison. Maybe she would go back, maybe she would look for stragglers, maybe she needed help—scratch that, she definitely needed help. And she wasn't going to find it just wandering the length of Georgia.

After maybe thirty minutes of walking, he was there. He was at the prison—or, what was left of it. The place was surrounded by hundreds of walkers, all lured in by the fighting. The fences were down and parts of the walls were broken in by shots from the tank.

The tank itself was on fire, something he could only imagine was done by his people. A survivor? He couldn't be sure. He couldn't see anyone else, but that was because of how far he had to stand away from the building to keep himself from getting spotted by walkers. It didn't matter how badly he wanted to look inside, the day someone covered him in walker guts, was the day he died.

He stood on the road for the longest time and just looked at the prison.

Isaac didn't really understand how it got this bad. He heard that the Governor killed his own army, so where did he manage to find more people? Where did he find more people who would so willingly kill a community even if it meant that no one ended up in the prison?

His eyes then turned to the things he'd seen Ace building: the guard towers, the eating area, the farm. It was all gone, basically. He was glad Ace wasn't here, seeing it now, in the state that the Governor had left it in. She'd be devastated if she'd seen what happened—what happened again.

He got it now; the conversations they had, the nightmares, the fact that she always seemed to be waiting even though she put on a happy face. There was always something behind her eyes that told him she'd seen far more than he could ever understand. And now he'd seen her kill two people, just gunned them down to save him, her people, her home.

And behind the walkers, he saw something, something that took the wind out of his chest and opened a pit in his stomach. It was Hershel, his body. He couldn't see his head, but he didn't think it was because of the angle.

Hershel was dead.

Hershel was dead, and he didn't know.

"No," he whispered. No, not Hershel.

Hershel had done so much for him; fixing his wrist, checking in on him after his mother died, helping with his obsessions as well as he could. Hershel was the best of them, and he deserved so much more than what the Governor had done to him, even before Isaac knew what any of this meant to the group.

Isaac felt his eyes well up, and he looked away.

It was getting worse now, he was starting to feel the anxiety creeping in. His determination was gone, and all he could do was stand there and cry. His hands were shaking, and he had to physically hold his other wrist still to make it stop. His shoulders bowed, and he couldn't make himself move even if he wanted to. He felt so heavy.

When he heard about the Governor, some of the stories, he didn't think it could be this bad. He didn't think anything could be nearly as bad as what those people had done to his mother. He didn't understand Ace's reactions, the anger in her voice when she had to correct him for not using his name, and her fear when they spoke about it.

Now he was going to live through it himself. Everything Ace had been fighting so hard to keep hidden, was going to be the thing to kill him. It felt like that anyway. What made it worse was how he came all the way back to find someone, and there was nobody there. He hoped he run into someone, he wanted that someone to be Ace, but he was alone.

The longer he stared the more hopeless everything felt. The prison ended in the way he expected, which is why he wanted out to begin with. He'd seen groups fall, he had no belief that a group could last forever, and he didn't know why he let himself get washed up in the idea of the prison. Actually, he did know why.

It was Ace.

Ace made him believe in a future, in a home. She was the one who made him think that maybe he could have a family, and people around after his mother was killed.

And where was she now?

Dead, probably.

But unfortunately, because of her, this was all he had anymore. The people that once lived at the prison were all he had left, and he was a fool to let himself get so close to them because now he wanted nothing more than to find out if anyone was even still alive. He remembered her words at the prison when they both needed to get away:

'You already have a chance at something here, why lose it for something worse or even . . . nothing?

All he could hope for at this point was that he'd end up with nothing because he wasn't going to let himself get carried away. If there was no one on the bus, no one at the rendezvous, then he would have to find some way to make it on his own. Isaac didn't see a future where he could successfully track down anyone from the group.

It was times like this when Isaac wished he could fix a car, or listened to more of what Ace said when she so passionately rambled about her job. He passed so many vehicles following the road the bus had taken, and it felt like he was getting nowhere. Some of them he checked, some of them had dried-up bodies inside that he would not consider sitting anywhere near, even if it meant he could have a car.

Despite the fact that he was still feeling physically exhausted, he pushed on.

On the road, he came across a sign that was littered with bullet holes, something he expected for a road like this one. As he passed it, he looked back to read what it said. HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES. As if that wasn't the most accurate thing he'd seen all day.

His chest had stopped seizing somewhere on the walk. He could still feel the sickness inside of him, but really his mind wasn't on how bad it was making him feel over waiting for his immune system to get rid of it. The meds had definitely helped though, and when he stopped for the night, he would probably find a way to heat the bottle of water he grabbed just to soothe the pain that was still there.

As he continued around the corner, the trees cleared out and the road continued, but something ahead of him caught his eye. The grey backing of a large boxy vehicle blended into a yellow colour down the sides. The rear lights and the bottom window of the door panel resembled a small happy face that grinned at him.

"Wait," he whispered to himself and smiled.

It shocked him to see that the bus hadn't made it all the way to the rendezvous, but that didn't matter to him, because he found it. He didn't spare another second to figure out why it was so strange. It was here, and he could see the shadows through the back windows of his group inside.

He sprinted forward, as fast as his legs would carry him. As he reached for the handle, ready to yank it open, someone slammed themselves against the door so hard that it made him jump and retract his hand. It was his group, the ones he recognised from around the prison. But something was wrong. A woman had her face against the bottom window, with two more behind her that clawed at the top.

They were dead. They were all dead.

How could they all be dead?

As the faces cleared up and he recognised more of the people, he saw that one of them was from the sick ward, one of the people who survived the illness at the prison long enough to get medicine. There was so much blood that he couldn't tell who had been bitten, shot, or who had just died.

His best guess was that someone who had the sickness had died. If that wasn't the case, then someone died on the road from injuries sustained from the battle. There was no way that they would stop and let a walker on board, so the spread happened from within.

But if people from the sick ward were here, that meant . . . Glenn. He desperately ran around the bus, looking in any of the windows for Glenn. At this point, Glenn was the only person he cared about. There's no way Glenn would have gotten caught up in this much death, he would have found a way out and helped people. There were too many dead people on board.

If Ace came here—if she found Glenn, it would kill her. That was the only thing he was worried about anymore. It meant that he was worried about Glenn's safety more often than he ever expected when he met them, but if it was for Ace, then it was for Ace.

Isaac went around to the side where he'd seen one of the windows pushed open, it left a small gap at the top where walkers couldn't fit through, but he could at least try and look at the bodies inside. He grabbed gloves from his bag, put them on before climbing the side, using the rusted corrugated metal as a hold. Arms came out at him, so he leaned his body back, but still had a better vantage point to see all the faces from this position.

Not Glenn. Not Glenn. Not Glenn.

When his eyes scanned every walker once, he concluded that Glenn was not there. He didn't know how. He should have been on the bus, but at this point, Glenn was not there. Isaac had his theories, maybe Glenn opened the window and climbed out, maybe he didn't get on the bus in the first place. He didn't understand how Maggie let Glenn or Beth not be on the bus, but both their absences were odd.

He hopped back down and looked around.

"Glenn!" He called around to the nearby area, but he heard nothing in reply. "GLENN!"

If Glenn had gotten off, Isaac doubted that he would stick around. To be honest, if Glenn wasn't around to be found then Isaac didn't really care where he was anymore. He was too focused on what he should do next.

Isaac told Ace to find the bus, but she wasn't there either. The problem was that he didn't know whether she'd been here already and left or whether she just hadn't made it yet. He didn't know whether she was even alive anymore.

All of the uncertainties made him unsure of how long he should wait for her. She needed help, she needed to find someone, she needed to fix her wound. But she didn't have the supplies to get that done. He didn't have the supplies to help. Even if she made it there and found him, she would just be completely screwed. But she was the only person he wanted to find, and he told her to come here.

So he waited.

Isaac sat down next to the bus, leaning back against the corrugated metal they used to block off the windows, and took off his gloves. The walkers quieted down a little, none of them able to see him anymore, but even their passive quiet groans were enough to make him uneasy, and Isaac wanted nothing more than to make it stop.

He wanted to open the door and kill the walkers. It was the right thing to do. He had a gun to do it with, but he couldn't. There was no guarantee that his shot would be good enough that he'd take them all out, put them all down. Really he just wanted to do it to make the noise stop, but the shooting would just draw more of them in and he couldn't wait there anymore.

Isaac pulled out his book, and a pencil, and started drawing. He wanted to keep at it so he could calm himself down, but his mind always wandered. What if no one shows up? Where was he going to go? Where was he going to sleep? Could he get any sleep travelling alone?

When his pencil stopped, he blew out a sigh and looked up. Part of him was conscious about the level of the sun, but it was still high enough that he knew he probably had a few hours in him. However, that was dependent on no walkers coming out to find him because if that happened, he would probably end up leaving.

The more he sat by the tyre, the more his skin began to crawl. He could still hear them, still smell them. He couldn't make himself wait by the bus any longer, as much as he knew he had to. Isaac repeated in his head over and over again. I have to stay, I have to stay, I have to stay, walkers, too close, too close, too close.

Isaac pulled his map out from inside the notebook, and started looking for his next destination. There was the rendezvous point where the bus was supposed to go, which he could check, but he didn't think anyone would be there because they would have found this place first. He picked a spot on the map, the next town or set of houses, because he knew he'd get there before nightfall.

He gripped at his hair and yanked hard, pulling his knees to his chest. I have to stay, Ace is coming here. He couldn't override the feelings, the obsessions that were telling him he needed to get away, to find somewhere better. And that nagging voice in the back of his head that told him Ace was probably dead, and would not be coming to the bus.

"Fuck!" He slammed his head back and it hit the side of the bus, but it didn't matter to him. The battle with himself was putting him in enough pain, making his chest hurt as he played with the idea of leaving.

It was all becoming too much for him, being alone, losing his entire group, Ace getting shot in front of him, seeing people die, and now he was sitting next to a bus filled with an entire group of walkers that he knew, rotting. Rotting.

If they were alive, or even gone, he could have stayed. But this? No, his brain wasn't having it, and all he wanted to do was find somewhere else, somewhere cleaner. He looked in his bag when his eyes spotted the sanitiser he grabbed.

"No, don't—" his hand was in the bag and he grabbed it before he could even get his complaint out. He flipped open the bottle and poured the sanitizer into the middle of his hand, hissing at the pain. He rubbed it in and squeezed his eyes closed, hoping the burning would go away soon, but it never did.

He heard Hershel say something about not using alcohol wipes for wounds, even if he did it sometimes. That they can slow the healing process. Isaac knew his hands would probably scar, he had some scratch like scars from before the apocalypse, but they had never gotten this bad.

He didn't care anymore—well, he did. His obsessions didn't care anymore, and they were now harder to control than they'd ever been. He chalked it up to anxiety, they always got bad when he was anxious. That's why he washed his hands so much that they cut themselves up when

I have to go.

"I can't—"

I have to go.

I have to go.

I have to go.

Isaac didn't have much fight in himself anymore, and he knew that soon he would be leaving. It was only when the familiar voice popped into his head that he knew it was over, and that he had made himself sit near an infested bus full of walkers that were potentially still infected with the sickness he had for far too long.

Don't hang around, don't do anything stupid.

He tried to remind himself that this isn't stupid, that he was here for a reason, but without the constant reassurance that him being here was the right thing, his mind constantly telling him not to hang around became the right thing. His mother's advice was all he really had anymore, even if they were just distant memories. It was the only thing he had to tell him what he should be doing anymore.

But he couldn't just leave, he had to do something.

He had to leave a note.

Isaac picked his notebook back up from atop of his bag, grabbed the pencil and . . . didn't write anything. He didn't know what to write. He thought about saying what happened to Ace, because if anyone found the bus who knew her, then at least they would know that she made it out. Even then, mentioning the shot would just worry whoever read the note. Saying that he lost her would also worry anyone, and he couldn't pretend that he knew she was okay.

The next thought was to write where he was going, but even then, he couldn't. If someone found the note who wasn't from the group, it meant that he could get hunted down by whoever decided to follow him. There was no guarantee that any prisoners would find the place.

Maybe he should have mentioned Glenn, in case Maggie found the bus, but even then he was only 50 percent sure that Glenn was not on the bus, and again, he couldn't say for certain that he was even alive.

After writing a few sentences about the bus, maybe giving people some reassurance that some people could have gotten out, he put his things in his bag and walked to the back of the bus. Across one of the metal panels was a long, thin panel that was screwed down in several places, there was enough of a gap between them that he could slip the paper underneath, so that's what he did.

He tore the page out, slipped it under the bar, and left. Isaac lived on the road long enough with his mother that he knew what he was doing. He wasn't worried about finding shelter or supplies or food and living his new life on his own, so he wasn't too bothered that no one had shown up yet. He had given up hope that many people had lived, and assumed that even less people would be heading this way. If he found someone while on the road, then he found someone.

He couldn't force himself to stay any longer.

But he should have waited, because not even an hour later, a group of people walked down the road. HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES. This time the sign was ignored by Maggie, Bob and Sasha, who trudged down the road in complete silence for a few minutes. There was a tension after the battle that none of them could get rid of, each person having their own agenda, but needing to stick with the people they knew.

Down the road was the bus, yellow and grey with the corrugated metal drilled to the side as a block for any incoming bullets. The group recognised it, remembered the work Ace had done to make it that way, and ran.

"Maggie. Maggie!" Bob and Sasha ran up to her as she sprinted towards the bus.

Maggie didn't listen; she needed to find Glenn. She didn't make it onto the bus when she discovered that Beth was gone, and wasn't able to find her sister before she left the prison. They looked, but there was only so long they could stay there and search. She lost her dad, she lost her sister and she lost her husband.

Maggie needed to look for what was left of her family,

They spent some time recovering, near a pond for a little while, Sasha from her illness, and Bob from his gunshot wound, but Maggie was willing to leave them behind if it meant that she could find her husband. Sasha and Bob unwillingly followed for a little while.

Maggie heard nothing, which made her heart sink, and she just looked at the bus for a while. When she walked around to the side that had no metal, walker arms extended outwards to grab at her. Walkers. Walkers. Glenn.

Glenn was in there.

She rushed around to the back, telling the others that they should leave, before going to open the back door.

"Maggie, stop."

"Maggie," Sasha pushed the door closed before she could open it. "Maggie."

"I have to know if he's in there," she said, with tears in her eyes.

She did, it was eating away at her that Glenn might be dead, that she couldn't stay on the bus with him when Beth ran away. If anything happened to him in there, while he was on the bus and she could have been there to help—she needed to know. It was the only thing keeping her going at this point, and if Glenn was dead here, then she didn't know what else she was going to do.

"Fine, but we do it together," Sasha said. "Smart. We'll let them out one at a time. Two of us should be at the door . . . in case they stack up against it."

Maggie took a step back and away from the door. "I have to be here. I need to see their faces."

Sasha gave a nod. "Okay."

Sasha leaned against the door, the handle grip was in her hand ready to open it, but as she looked down, she noticed something. Tucked under one of the metal panels on the back of the bus, next to a door, was a small piece of paper that flapped in the wind.

"Wait," Sasha stopped them, looking at the note. "What's this?"

Sasha pulled it out from under the panel, and went to read it, but she could see Maggie's face as she neared. She held it out and Maggie grabbed it from her, praying that it was from Glenn, that it was just saying that he was inside or he and the group had gone to a nearby building.

But it wasn't.

She read the note in her head first, before repeating it aloud:

"No survivors on board.

Don't know if anyone made it out.

Couldn't stay.

- Isaac"

Nice Isaac chapter. I'm trying to write him realistic but he can be hard to work out sometimes.

Hope you enjoyed and lmk what you thought :)