A/N: It was never my intention to leave this sitting for as long as I did but truth be told between struggles with my mental health the last 2-3 years and work it's just been a nightmare that I could not wake up from, and lemme tell ya, working for a bank with the way the economy has been is nerve-wracking. We just had a massive round of layoffs and I survived that by the skin of my teeth. I've been working with a therapist for the last year and I'm finally in a place where I'm feeling better and motivated to write again. Hopefully this momentum keeps up for awhile because writing has always been a huge outlet for me and it's something that I love doing.

Chapter 12

"You can only stay strong for so long Daryl, the longer you keep it in the more it'll hurt when you are finally ready to let it go."

"Told ya woman, ain't a damn thing wrong with me and if ya don't stop your damn nagging then I'll make ya stop!"

Claire found out from Merle and his big mouth that today was the anniversary of my mom's death and kept pushing for me to make peace with what happened by going to the cemetery. Merle also told her that she died in a house fire after passing out on the couch with a lit cigarette. The way our old man beat on her caused her to become reckless to the point that she'd pop pills left, right, and center just to take the edge off and she'd also mix it with a bottle of wine on occasion. After they finally managed to get the fire out and they wheeled her body out it didn't take long for the autopsy come back as being accidental. They found both the pills and alcohol in her system which didn't come as much of a surprise; the shock was that they found her lungs full of smoke and that she likely died from breathing in the smoke from the fire.

She huffed in frustration as she shook her head and finally dropped the subject much to my relief. We were watching some re-runs of an old t.v. show when her phone started buzzing around on the table like crazy. I watched as she leaned over to glance at the screen to see who it was, glancing up at me I guess she could tell that I was still annoyed so she picked up the phone and went into the kitchen. Seconds later, a blood curdling scream filled the house and the phone fell to the floor. By the time I got to the kitchen to find out what happened Claire was on the floor in hysterics and a voice on the phone kept calling her name. It didn't matter to me who was on the phone so I hung it up and sat down on the floor with her until she calmed down enough to tell me what happened.

"My best friend Marie, my god-kid's mom, she was hit head-on by some guy running from the cops after he robbed a gas station; they don't know if she's gonna make it or not. She's in a coma and has brain damage. That was her husband, he said they're in the middle of a divorce right now and if she doesn't make it wants us to take the kids." She sucked in a shaky breath and wiped her face a bit with her hand, "Marie's been my best friend since we were twelve, she's the closest I have to a sister; we promised each other that we'd wind up in the same nursing home together and have wheelchair races in the hall."

Marie was a good person and when the two of 'em got together it was like watching me and Merle, except they were drinkers and we weren't. The few times she did come over I'd watch the kids while they clucked away in the kitchen over the stupid shit they'd get into when they were younger. Compared to what I did it was pretty mild but then again they didn't have the problems I did, they didn't have their dads wailing on 'em.

After a while, the reality of everything was starting to sink in and I watched as Claire finished wiping her face, her features turning from confusion, panic, and fear to anger, determination, and something that looked like 'what the fuck am I gonna do with three kids?'

"Will you take me to the hospital? I need to see for myself how bad off she is, I know how fucked up it sounds but I need you to do just this one thing for me, please."

I nodded, chewing on the side of my thumb as I watched her eyes plead with mine. I dropped my hand from my teeth and stood up, then helped Claire to her feet. Together, we walked out of the house and to the truck; the drive to the hospital was quiet until we got to one of the lights on Main Street. The street was taped off and there were at least half a dozen cop cars hanging around. It was safe to assume that this is where the accident happened. The hoods of both cars were mangled and pushed up, there was blood on the windshield of the Chevy that I had seen parked in Marie's driveway and a white sheet draped over the other body that hung out of the windshield of the Mercury.

"I don't think we should take the kids."

"Huh?"

"They're all living with his parents; we shouldn't take the kids if Marie doesn't make it. They already have a home, it'd be wrong to take them from that."

Our light had finally turned green and we were thankfully pulling away from the scene. Claire's got enough on her mind with her asshole boss and my pissy moods and we aren't in a position to take on three kids even if we were rolling in riches. At least she still had sense enough to realize that, plus, like she said, those kids already have a home with their grandparents, it'd be wrong to take 'em from that.

"Want me to go in with ya?" I asked, as the truck squeaked to a stop in the hospital parking lot after about ten minutes. Damn, I really need to get the brakes replaced.

"It'd be nice, I don't know what to expect but you don't have to if you don't want to."

Hospitals were not my favorite place to be so I just decided to wait in the truck until she was done. Marie's in-laws didn't like me anyway despite the kids always wanting to wrestle around outside. I sat in the truck for at least a good ten or fifteen minutes just smoking one cigarette after another when the passenger door wrenched open and slammed shut. A shrill scream escaped from Claire's throat and I was almost a little scared to ask what happened.

"I fucking hate that husband of hers! He wants us to uproot the kids from the only home they've ever known because he's fucking around behind Marie's back with the goddamn babysitter and she wants him to not only kick his parents out of their own house but she wants him to more or less abandon his kids, that selfish cow wants him all to herself with no fucking strings attached! You can bet your bottom dollar that if Marie ever wakes up from the coma that I'm gonna tell her everything. I don't care if she believes me or not, there is no way in hell we are ripping those kids away from their grandparents."

Shit, and I thought we had problems.

"What'd the doctors say about Marie?"

"It's a 50-50 shot that she'll wake up, Roger said that she was thankfully wearing her seatbelt which is probably what saved her life but the impact caused the airbags to deploy and you can just imagine the damage that did. They've got her hooked up to all kinds of tubes and lines it's hard to tell if there's a person underneath all of that. They're still running tests on her but all we can do is sit and wait. Roger said the guy who ran was killed almost instantly in the crash."

"Wanna head over to the bar and grab a bite? Promise, if ya wanna drink while we're there I'll try to stay outta trouble but if I see that prick Marie's married to I'm knocking his lights out. If he wants to leave his family for some 19 year old with a sugar daddy on the side that paid for her boob job that's on him but like ya said, he's not dumping his kids on us because he don't want nothing to do with 'em."

"Not really in the mood to eat but I know if I don't tomorrow's hangover will be worse."

That's the way that it went for almost three weeks, every couple of days after we both got off work I'd take her to the hospital so that she could check on Marie and every time I asked how it went afterwards. It was always the same answer, "still in a coma, but slowly improving" until one day Claire came back to the truck crying, I stiffened as she threw her arms around my neck unsure of whether I should ask the question or not.

"She's finally awake!"

I let go of the breath I was holding and slowly started to sink back into my seat, freeing my neck of the vice grip she had around it.

"Ya gonna tell her about what that prick's been doing?"

"I think it might be best to wait until she gets discharged, just because Marie is awake now doesn't mean that she's completely out of the woods yet. The doctors still have tests that they need to run to make sure the accident didn't mess her up too bad. Yeah, the cuts and bruises are healing fine but ya never know what they may find."

Days dragged into weeks, weeks turned into months before Marie was finally able to be discharged and sent to a rehab facility. Turns out the accident did a fucking number on her and she would need at least six months of physical therapy before she could go home. To make matters worse, Claire told her everything that her husband's been doing and now the babysitter was knocked up. Marie was fuming when she found out that piece of shit she was married to wanted to dump the kids in our lap and swore that she'd call her lawyer to prevent that from happening. I think she mentioned something about "nailing his ass to the cross and squeezing every last fucking penny from him! He's not gonna touch my kids!"

Little did we know though that son of a bitch had been hurting his kids, and not in the ass-whooping kinda way neither. Marie was still in rehab when Claire got that phone call courtesy of her former fuck buddy Shane Walsh. Even though he was now working for King County he thought Claire should know so that Marie and the kids had at least one person they could talk to. The sick fuck rented a room at a seedy motel a few towns over and the front desk got real suspicious when one of the neighbors called saying a little kid was crying for him to stop. Walsh happened to be the one to answer the call and found the kid stripped down to nothing, crying. After the scumbag was arrested it didn't take long for the news to pick up the story, claiming that he'd been hurting his kids for years. Needless to say, the divorce judge was quick to finalize their case and ordered that Marie get her kids some help as quick as she could.

He didn't last more than a couple of weeks in jail before the other inmates got their hands on him, jailhouse justice at its finest if ya ask me. It's a damn shame though the guards got to him before the inmates could finish him off.

There's a special place in Hell for people like him.

I never thought I'd live to see the day when Shane fucking Walsh finally snapped and showed everyone who he really is. He took Randall and broke his neck, how he did it I couldn't be too sure but the real shock came was finding that he had turned. There were not bites on him that I could see and we all knew that if you got bit, you turned. So how could he turn if he wasn't bit? I was fighting myself on that one hard until a gunshot rang out somewhere and drew my attention back to the farm. The growls echoing into the night as screams started filling the air.

The fires roaring out of the barn, people scrambling to get away from the horde that had descended on us and the only thing I could think to do was to get on my bike and hope the noise from the motor was loud enough to distract them in another direction. Maybe if I could get them back into the woods and down in that creek bed where I found Sophia's doll it could give everyone a chance to run for it. If I sent the bike over the edge maybe the others would think I died and I could use that as my one shot at getting Claire out of that house she was holed up in. Hell, who knows if she'd even wanna see my face but sometimes you just gotta try.

But just as I was ready to put my plan in motion I saw Carol being chased down by walkers and something in me just said that I couldn't let her die. Once she was on the bike we took off down the gravel path towards the main road and I couldn't help but look in the direction Claire's house was knowing I had to leave her behind. Maybe come morning I could go back for her, if she's still there and if she's still alive.

It seemed like me and Carol had been riding for hours before we could finally see something up ahead, familiar cars and familiar faces painted in shock, terror, and tears as they tried to take in what just happened and the realization that we'd lost the farm, the only place we actually felt safe even if it was for a short time. Questions and confusion poured out of everyone as we tried to find the answers until one voice spoke out, silencing all of us.

"We're all infected."