The Adventures of Augment Gothic (A Star Trek SI)

by Joe Lawyer

A present-day Star Trek fan is forcibly thrust into that dimension and made anew as an Augment, a genetically engineered superman, on the whim of a mischievous god. Armed with knowledge of this dimension's past and future, he's determined to live well, have fun with alien women, and make it look easy. Elements of DS9/TNG/Voy/Ent. Originally co-written with GothicJedi666.

48. Chapter 48

Disclaimer: I own nothing related to or part of Star Trek.

Last time on The Adventures of Augment Gothic

"We don't have the food or fuel to reach Fort Benning," I calmly pointed out, taking a knee and killing multiple walkers with precision shots. "It's over 100 miles away."

"125. I checked the map," Glenn pointed out helpfully.

"Forget Fort Benning. We need answers tonight, now," Lori said.

"We'll think of something," Shane said.

"Regardless of our destination, we need to retreat from this area and regroup. We won't make it in the night," I said. "We need to make this decision when we're not in combat, so I need everyone to calm, the fuck, down. This place will be here in the morning."

"Gothic's right. Come on, let's go. Let's get out of here. Let's go. Please, Rick," Shane begged.

I heard the lubricated servos of a camera moving, but I doubt anyone else did.

"All right, everybody back to the cars. Let's go. Move," Shane ordered.

"The camera… it moved," Rick pointed out desperately, literally and figuratively.

"I saw it too," I lied, knowing how this all played out.

"It moved. It moved," Rick yelled plaintively, whose emotions did not match the urgency of the situation. I had a feeling that Rick was at the end of his rope and needed a dose of normalcy, a time free of danger to get his head on straight again, even a short one, or else he'd have a nervous breakdown.

"Rick, it is dead, man. It's an automated device. It's gears, okay? They're just winding down," Shane said quietly and calmly, trying to convince Rick to leave while they still could. "Now come on."

"Man, just listen to me. Look around this place. It's dead, okay? It's dead. You need to let it go, Rick," Shane tried again, knowing that as long as Rick wanted to stay, people would follow him.

Rick pounded hard on the metal shutters. I knew I needed to let this play out like it was supposed to. Rick's sincerity would convince the Doctor, whose name I had entirely forgotten, to open the security doors.

"Rick, there's nobody here!" Shane tried.

"I know you're in there. I know you can hear me," Rick yelled.

Shane tried to drag Rick away from the door, this time with the help of Lori.

"Everybody get back to the cars now!" Shane ordered.

"Please, we're desperate. Please help us. We have women, children, no food, hardly any gas left," he yelled, the naked and extreme emotion was hard to listen to.

"Rick. There's nobody here," Lori tried gently, perhaps sensing that her husband was at the end of his proverbial rope.

"We have nowhere else to go," Rick yelled pounding on the door again. "Keep your eyes open. Watch as we die. If you don't let us in, you're killing us! Please!"

My rifle continued to bark as I methodically killed each and every walker that approached, attracted to all the yelling that Rick was doing. My kill counter was down to 248 now.

"Come on, buddy, let's go. Let's go," Shane said gently, like Lori sensing that Rick was having a moment.

"Please help us. You're killing us! You're killing us! You're killing us!" he cried.

As the group was about to drag the nearly psychotic man off, the security doors to the CDC recessed up, overwhelming the group with a bright artificial light the likes of which they probably hadn't seen since the world had ended.

Finally. Finally I could get some answers to justify being dropped in this world.

Hopefully.

Maybe.

The Adventures of Augment Gothic

Chapter 48

Main Transporter Room. Onboard The Flighty Temptress. In orbit of Earth. The Walking Dead Universe.

"Boost the annular confinement beam!" B'Elanna shouted her order to Neela who dutifully carried out the command. The ship's chief engineer was on her back and shoulders deep inside the guts of the transporter control circuitry.

There was a brief pause.

"No effect, no transporter lock," Neela reported. "Transport failed."

"Purge the pattern buffer and try again," B'Elanna ordered.

"Transport failed," Neela reported again, though this time sounding a little bit more tired.

"We've taken into account the energy field we've detected. We've even tried beaming to places where the field saturation is practically non-existent, I don't understand why this isn't working!" B'Elanna shouted.

"B'Elanna, maybe we—" Neela tried.

"Don't even start, Neela," B'Elanna growled out. "Try beaming 100 meters off the ground, then a 1000 meters, then one kilometer, then ten kilometers, then a hundred and see if we get a successful lock."

"Transport failed, all parameters," Neela reported cooly after an even longer pause. "B'Elanna, I want Gothic back as much as anyone, but I've been awake for over 24 hours now. If we keep this up, I'm not going to be of much use when we actually can do something to help Gothic and that won't do anyone any good. I'm happy to try again in 8 hours. Goodnight."

Neela then walked out of the room.

"Fine! Give up! I'll get the captain back on my own!" B'Elanna shouted in anger at Neela's retreating back who didn't even pause in her stride.

"Neela is correct, we need all crew at their best for when we actually can offer assistance to the captain," T'Maz said, breaking the silence of the room.

B'Elanna screamed in fright, jerking up and banging her head quite hard on the transporter circuitry housing.

"What the fuck, T'Maz?!" B'Elanna shouted, rubbing her forehead ridges. It was a good thing she was half Klingon or else she may have needed to make a trip to the infirmary to deal with a concussion.

"I have been here for quite some time, B'Elanna," T'Maz unrepentantly replied, showing no empathy for her pain. "The captain has made it clear that Q is preventing transport to the surface. It is almost certainly the case that his power is preventing transport, rather than a failure in the ship's transporter technology or some unique feature of the anaphasic energy field we have detected on the surface. Any further use of your time on this endeavor is illogical and counterproductive."

"All Gothic's message said was that Q was preventing his return to the ship, not that we couldn't beam to him, or beam things to him to help him survive the dangers down there," B'Elanna pointed out snidely. "Gothic has no way to know if Q is similarly preventing us from beaming to or from the surface."

"Yes, which is why I have not prevented you and engineer Neela from attempting to learn the parameters of Q's restrictions upon us," T'Maz calmly responded. "I have monitored your failed efforts over the last 6 hours. It is now clear that Q does not wish us to assist Gothic in any way before the task he assigned to the captain is complete. That we were allowed to receive the handwritten message Gothic left for us on the surface suggests that Q is amenable to us following Gothic's orders as long as it does not involve any travel to the surface or assistance being offered to him, direct or indirect."

"I had to try!" B'Elanna angrily argued back; T'Maz just patiently listened. "Have you seen those things! What they do to the living? There are so many of them! The captain is strong, but even he's in danger down there without his armor and weapons. I, I said some terrible things to him in the last universe. He gave me an opportunity no one else would have and I'm, I'm so grateful to him for that. This has been the adventure of a lifetime and I'm getting to do things most engineers never get to do, to work with technology so far beyond anything I'd have had access to back in the Federation as a civilian. I'll do whatever I can to keep the captain safe."

Throughout B'Elanna's emotional speech her eyes had been locked on the imprint of a fist in the transporter room's duranium wall plating, remembering the shameful things she had said that had prompted the captain to lash out in anger. She wished she could take those words back.

"Have faith in our captain, B'Elanna. In his strength and skill and will to survive," T'Maz offered. "Believe in him, like he believed in you. Carry out his last orders so that when he returns to the ship we can report that we have gathered the data that he asked for."

B'Elanna nodded, now looking tired.

"While we cannot send drones to the surface, there are several still operational satellites and isolated data centers on the surface that are intact and functional. We should be able to access them remotely from the ship. Return to your quarters and rest. When you are fully rested, begin accessing the data that remains accessible. If any physical media on the surface needs to be accessed we will do so once transporter capabilities are restored."

"I will," B'Elanna replied. "Thanks, T'Maz."

T'Maz merely raised an eyebrow and walked out of the transporter room.

XXXXX

Center for Disease Control. Atlanta, Georgia. The Walking Dead Universe.

"Gothic, Daryl, you cover the back," Shane ordered unnecessarily, as both Daryl and I continued to watch the group's back for any walkers that tried to flank us, slowly backing up into the building itself. Did this guy forget that I was the only professionally trained soldier here with actual combat experience, and they were the fucking civies?

"Close those doors. Watch for walkers," Dale advised, again, unnecessarily, as we securely locked the door behind us.

"Hello? Hello?" Rick called out into the spacious, well appointed, but empty lobby of the Center for Disease Control, no bodies or walker corpses lying around anywhere to stink up the joint. In another time, it would look like a perfectly ordinary lobby of any government building.

A shotgun loudly cocked, and I resisted the urge to turn around and bring my rifle to bear on this new danger. Trusting my life to a bunch of mostly untrained civilians, people I wasn't even the leader of, rankled me on a level that was hard to describe, especially now while I didn't have the protection of my highly advanced armor, but this was my group right now, for better or worse.

"Anybody infected?" a voice asked from an open doorway, which was not an unreasonable question given the circumstances.

"One of our group was. He didn't make it," Rick immediately and honestly answered.

"Why are you here? What do you want?" the voice asked next.

"A chance," Rick solemnly responded.

"That's asking an awful lot these days."

"I know," Rick answered honestly, again.

The man—and again I couldn't remember his name—looked at each and every one of us, assessing us, probably looking to see if any of us had been visibly bitten or were injured, but there was more to his gaze than that. He was taking in a group of people who had lived out in the world the entire time that it was falling apart, while he and his fellow doctors had remained relatively safe and well fed inside the CDC, protected by hundreds of well-armed and highly trained men and women who had ultimately given their lives to protect them. He was likely trying to learn just how far the world had truly fallen apart.

As he assessed us, he looked sad, resigned even, like his worst fears had not been enough. There was a hell of a lot of guilt in that gaze too, but surprisingly little fear, even when confronted by a very large group of well-armed, desperate people that he had otherwise let into his highly secure home. He must know on some level that he stood very little chance against us if things went south. Loudly cocking a shotgun was great for intimidation value against a single, unarmed person, but against a large, well-armed group? It was an act, and a desperate one at that should someone decide to call his bluff.

"You all submit to a blood test. That's the price of admission," the doctor demanded. "Is everyone willing to pay?"

"We can do that," Rick instantly replied on everyone's behalf.

With Rick's easy acceptance, the doctor lowered his weapon, but I did not detect any relief, there might have even been a hint of disappointment. He had never been afraid. In fact, I had the distinct and unsettling feeling that this man would have welcomed death with relief, if that's how this had all had gone down. I had seen that same look on many a Resistance fighter who had lost their will to live, the will to keep on fighting no matter what, but who had no desire to commit suicide. None of us ever judged those who had lost the will to live, who then volunteered for every suicide mission that came along and were sometimes needed.

"You got stuff to bring in, you do it now. Once this door closes, it stays closed," the doctor said with a tone of finality that I don't think anyone else had picked up on, though I knew that he really meant it, that he did not intend to open the doors again before he would incinerate the entire facility and everyone inside it.

They all quickly went through the doors and followed the doctor into an honest to God working elevator. As the group looked around the working elevator in wonder, you'd think that they were all time travelers, like 16th century peasant farmers experiencing an elevator for the first time and being in total and complete awe of it.

The loud, electronic beep startled everyone, physically recoiling at the artificial sound, everyone but the Doctor and me.

"Vi, seal the main entrance. Kill the power up here," the doctor commanded, after swiping his access card and speaking into a security panel. The very advanced computer (for this time, at least), that ran the building's systems, carried out his order and the power went out in the lobby, the metal shuttered security doors sliding down and locking securely. It would take explosives to breach that security door. Thankfully, the dead were not capable of using complex tools like that. The soldiers outside might have been meant to defend the facility against the walkers, at least secondarily, but I knew that their true, primary purpose, was to protect the facility against hordes of desperate living people seeking to get into the CDC hoping for a cure, or some answers, or someone to blame given the inevitable conspiracy theories that had probably floated around at the beginning of all this. They, the living, were the greatest threat to the facility.

The elevator rattled and clanged as we descended deeper and deeper into the Earth, likely not having been used at all for the last several weeks after the military personnel had all been killed.

"Rick Grimes," Rick introduced, putting his hand out for the doctor to shake.

The man looked away before answering, "Dr. Edwin Jenner."

That was this guy's name!

"Doctors always go around packing heat like that?" Daryl asked.

"There were plenty left lying around. I familiarized myself. But you look harmless enough," he joked while looking specifically at Carl, though he threw me an uncertain glance given how tall and muscular I was, with the obvious menacing bearing of a trained soldier; he likely had seen many men like me stationed around the facility before they were overrun, and all killed. "Except you, I'll have to keep my eye on you."

Carl smiled guilelessly back at the doctor. Children wouldn't stay children long in this world, not with the many dangers all around, from both the dead and the living. They needed that innocence to be taken from them early if they had any shot at surviving. That had certainly been the case on Bajor, where explosives the Cardassians had disguised to look like toys, could be found in many places. Walkers didn't differentiate when it came to the living, and the living, well, the worst impulses in the depths of humanity's heart were now allowed to run amok. It would be decades before some kind of stability was reached again and the world returned to many of the old forms of honor, like the various tribal people in Afghanistan had adhered to for millennia. Such things could provide much needed order in a violent, lawless world.

Jenner chuckled at seeing a kid acting like a kid, though the smile quickly died when he looked away. When the elevator doors opened, he led the group down a hallway.

"Are we underground?" Carol asked.

"Are you claustrophobic?" Jenner asked, rather than directly answer.

"A little," Carol replied.

"Well, try not to think about it," Jenner oh so helpfully provided. I couldn't help but roll my eyes.

We were led into a large, darkened space, numerous computers and other displays were arranged, giant displays on the wall similarly dark.

"VI, bring up the lights in the big room," Jenner commanded aloud.

Humming and beeping resulted as the lights turned on, bathing our group in bright artificial light.

"Welcome to Zone 5," Jenner offered.

"Is this the Emergency Operations Center?" I asked, as everyone look around in wonder. "The place from which the United States's emergency pandemic response was to be coordinated, here at the CDC where the best and brightest this country had to offer and were brought together to find a cure or a solution, something, anything, to save us all?"

Jenner turned to me in visible surprise.

"Yes, it is," Jenner replied slowly. "How did you know that?"

"All those detailed emergency response plans, all the drills, all the millions and millions of dollars spent to prepare for the worst-case scenario, all the lives lost to protect you people, pretty much all fell apart in the face of human weakness and despair. Didn't it, Doctor?" I asked provocatively, choosing not to answer his question, hoping to get a rise out of the man so that I could get a measure of him.

Was there anything left in the man's soul worth saving? Or was he a hollowed-out husk waiting to die when the large, bright red numbers on the wall finally counted down to zero and this place went up in a ball of fire second only to the fire a nuclear explosion could call forth.

Silence reigned for a moment or two.

"It did," Jenner quietly and bitterly replied, eyes shamefully turned to the ground. It was a tiny bit of shame, from a little shock to oh so briefly snap him out of his personal despair, but it was a start. It told me that there was something still left inside the man, something I could potentially work with. If this world had any hope of recovery in a reasonable timeframe, it would need men like this to rebuild. Humanity couldn't start from zero again and hope to come back from this in a timeframe measured in anything less than centuries and that was assuming the walker threat didn't render the species extinct.

"Where is everybody? The other doctors, the staff?" Rick asked, trying to make sense of this great big room that had previously been cloaked in darkness. It hadn't been lost on the man that Jenner was the only person we'd seen so far while traveling through this extremely large and seemingly still operational facility.

"I'm it. It's just me here," Jenner answered.

"What about the person you were speaking with? Vi?" Lori asked.

The question made sense. In 2010 a computer that could respond to vocal commands was probably something she'd only seen in science fiction…like Star Trek.

"VI, say hello to our guests. Tell them… Welcome," Jenner commanded.

"Hello, guests. Welcome," Vi replied verbatim, just as she had been told to.

"I'm all that's left," Jenner apologized. "I'm sorry."

"So am I, doctor," I said, my voice sad.

"So, who wants to give blood first?" Jenner asked brightly, but it was a poor attempt given the mood of the room's occupants.

XXXXX

After Jenner had heard that many of our group had not had a proper meal in days, he had led us down to the mess hall where we had our first proper meal in a long while. When bottles and bottles of unopened wine were found, let's just say that the moment got away from everyone involved as an impromptu party broke out. The relief of a calm, safe space, with plenty of food and alcohol, well, the results were predictable as everyone drank freely, and laughter and joy were in the air. At least for most. Shane had a dour look on his face, looking like he was desperately trying to bite his tongue, but everyone ignored him and his shit in favor of enjoying the moment.

Dale was having a grand time playing host/bartender, maybe something he had often done in the old world, liberally refilling wine glasses with some red wine, a bright and wide smile on his face, probably being reminded of better times with old friends now gone forever. No one bothered to ask if the wine was merlot, port, or pinot grigio. That wasn't the point of all this. Amy was tucked tightly into my side as we sat on the outskirts of the group, her cheeks perpetually red from liberally drinking, after she had grabbed my arm and draped it heavily over her shoulders. Interestingly, surprisingly, Andrea had similarly tucked herself to my side, but had not draped my arm over her. She was simply just enjoying being in her sister's (and my) presence.

"C'mon, just a little," Dale tried.

"Fine," Lori said with a smile.

"You know, in Italy, children have a little bit of wine with dinner. And in France. It's normal," Dale assured the reluctant mother.

"Well, when Carl is in Italy or France, he can have some then," Lori demurred.

I suspected that it would be a long, long while before humanity was again capable of safely crossing the oceans to visit the other continents.

"What's it gonna hurt? Come on. Come on," Rick cajoled gently from Lori's side.

Dale and everyone laughed at this light byplay, enjoying this conversational respite from the kinds of conversations that had become the new normal since the world had fallen apart, conversations about death, and danger, and hard decisions that could mean the difference between life and death.

"What?" Carl asked, showing that he had zero idea what was being discussed, which was exactly the right thing to say to make the group break down into gales of life affirming laughter.

At Amy's laughter I casually leaned over and gave her a kiss on her temple. Amy's turned her gaze to me a wide smile on her face filled with happiness…and lust. Seeing our interaction, Andrea took my hand in hers and threaded our fingers together. My saving Amy's life must have really improved her thoughts about me. It had probably been a terrible shock to her that Amy, her beloved sister and only surviving family member left in the world, had come so very, very close to dying, and only hadn't because I'd quickly acted to protect her. You couldn't buy that kind of approval from a family member.

With Carl's parents' assent, Dale handed Carl a glass with barely half an inch of red wine in the bottom of the glass.

"There you are, young lad," Dale offered bombastically, like he was a professional sommelier at a high-class restaurant introducing Carl to the world of wine and sophistication.

The room practically fell silent as everyone watched and waited for Carl's reaction.

Moments after the first sip, Carl's face quickly turned into a look of utter disgust, "Eww."

Everyone erupted into peals of laughter at this wholesome response.

"That's my boy. That's my boy. Good boy," Lori said while she took his glass and poured his wine into her glass.

"Yuck. That tastes nasty," Carl said, causing everyone to renew their laughter.

Looking over to Jenner, I noticed he was one of the few in the room who hadn't reacted. In fact, he looked a little lost, like he had forgotten what it was like to be among other people. He must have been alone for quite a while.

"Well, just stick to soda pop there, bud," Shane chimed in.

Rick finally noticed what I already had, that Jenner was not enjoying the party like the rest of us were. He took his fork and tapped his glass lightly.

"It seems to me we haven't thanked our host properly," Rick stated.

"He is more than just our host," T-Dogg returned joyfully.

"Hear, hear!" Dale agreed.

"Here's to you, Doc, booyah!" Daryl enthusiastically thanked the host.

"Thank you. Thank you, Doctor," Rick said emphatically, raising his glass and taking a drink to honor their host with a toast.

Glasses full of wine clinked together after the toast.

Shane looking like he had had just enough, could no longer hold his thoughts in.

"So when are you gonna tell us what the hell happened here, Doc? All the—the other doctors that were supposed to be figuring out what happened, where are they?"

"We're celebrating, Shane. We don't need to do this now," Rick tried, hoping to get back to the joyful mood that had been present only moments ago.

"Whoa, wait a second. This is why we're here, right? This was your move—supposed to find all the answers. Instead we, we found him. Found one man, why?" Shane shot back.

"Rick, while Shane's timing could be a hell of a lot better given how little we have to be happy about these days," I said aloud, shooting a recriminating look at Shane, who looked entirely unapologetic, "Shane does have a point. I, too, would like to know what happened here. This place was one of the last great hopes of not just our little group, but all the people of this country, the whole world even."

Jenner hesitated, not even a little, before answering.

"Well, when things got bad, a lot of people just left, went off to be with their families. And when things got worse, when the military cordon got overrun, the rest bolted," Jenner answered, as if all the emotions had been stripped out of him, burned out of him by the horrors he'd seen, but was probably due to the weeks of time spent alone. Humans were a very social animal, most humanoid species, as a matter of fact, and it didn't take much prolonged isolation to do some damage. There was a reason why solitary confinement was a potent punishment in prisons.

"Every last one?" Shane asked for clarification.

"No, many couldn't face walking out the door. Walking into the horrors they knew would be out in the world. They… opted out. There was a rash of suicides. That was a bad time," Jenner replied, taking a gulp of his wine.

I hung my head in shame at what I was hearing. It was one thing to see on a TV screen, set in a fictional world, it was quite another to hear in person, in the real world. For the first time since my new life had begun, I was ashamed of my species.

"You didn't leave," Andrea asked from my side. "Why?"

"I just kept working, hoping to do some good," Jenner answered.

"And for that, you have my thanks and my respect," I said, looking Jenner directly in the eyes. "I just wish your colleagues had had the strength to see beyond their own personal despair, to find the strength to carry on and give the rest of humanity a fighting chance to make it out of this."

Jenner nodded and a heavy silence ensued, to be broken by Glenn.

"Dude, you are such a buzzkill, man," Glenn scolded, condemning Shane.

As you might imagine, the party did not last much longer after that.

XXXXX

"Most of the facility is powered down, including the housing area, so you'll have to make do here," Jenner explained, giving us a tour of the housing area where we'd be sleeping for the night. "The couches are comfortable, but there are cots in storage if you like and any living quarter is available if you've got a flashlight. There's a rec room down the hall that you kids might enjoy. Just don't plug in the video games, okay? Or anything that draws power. The same applies if you shower; go easy on the hot water."

I scoffed aloud at the idea that anyone, when presented with their first hot shower since the world ended, would take it easy on the hot water. Amy, who wouldn't let me take my arm off her shoulders, laughed too, obviously thinking the same thing that I was.

"Hot water?" Glenn squeaked out in surprise, looking around at the others.

"That's what the man said," T-Dog laughed a wide, excited smile on his face.

Both of them laughed as everyone practically ran off to claim a room and enjoy the shower each room possessed.

XXXXX

I let the hot, steaming water cascade down my head and muscled shoulders, washing away the filth of the time roughing it in the wilds. It was quite lovely, though I really could do without the soundtrack that accompanied it.

As I'd long figured out, enhanced senses could be a curse at times, especially in a world at this point in their architectural and materials technology development. The airtight nature and advanced materials of a modern starship meant that I usually didn't have to deal with listening to every person in a 50-meter radius taking a shower, or, in this case, listening to the pleasure filled moans and groans of a very enthusiastic Dale taking a shit on a real toilet for the first time since the world had ended.

I get it dude! It was nice to sit on the ivory throne and flush it all away instead of digging a hole and using leaves to wipe your ass.

I couldn't see them, only hear them, but I knew exactly what was going on.

Lori was standing under the running water, ecstatic, humming.

T-Dog, now singing, was letting the water run over his head in his shower, then promptly started laughing.

Glenn sounded like he was doing a little dance in the falling water.

Fuck, Rick had just joined Lori and they were now loudly kissing.

I put my hands tightly over my ears and tried to enjoy the moment. A minute or so later I felt small, soft hands rubbing gently down the planes of my muscular back. I turned around quickly, startled, only to see Amy naked in the shower with me, a mischievous smile on her lips.

"I thought I could help you wash your back?" she said.

"Oh, well, I never turn down help washing my back," I said.

"Turn around," she commanded playfully.

I turned around and felt a soft hand holding a bar of government issued soap lathering my back. Lord, wasn't that a sad state of affairs that I could somehow tell the difference? Thankfully, the situation made up for the low-quality soap provided by the lowest bidder.

I let Amy soap up the entirety of my back then rinse it off. She then slowly fell to her knees to soap up the back of my legs, even having me lift my feet so that she could clean the bottoms. She was taking her cleaning responsibilities rather seriously!

"All clean, now turn around and let me do the front," Amy throatily asked, still on her knees behind me.

I turned around, already aroused.

"Is that all for me?" Amy asked coyly, eyes only briefly turning up at me.

I simply nodded.

She gently started lathering me up from my toes to my knees, then up my thighs, leaving the best for last. Amy took me gently in hand with her left and lathered my cock with her right hand, taking care to really get it clean, all the while she looked up at me playfully as she delayed getting to what I really wanted. When she was done teasing me, she rinsed me off quickly.

"Are you done teasing me?" I asked with a groan.

"Just about," she relied, before taking the head of my cock in her mouth and lashing it with her tongue.

She sucked me for a minute as I leaned against the wall of the shower, my eyes closed. I reluctantly opened my eyes when I heard the door to the shower open, letting in some cold air, and in walked Andrea, naked as we both were. Her large, full breasts, bigger than her little sister, jiggled with each step.

"I knew it, you slut!" Amy joked, not looking at all surprised or angry that her time with me was now seemingly to be shared with her sister.

Andrea rolled her eyes, looking embarrassed at being called out on her hypocrisy, but not denying it either.

"Oh, shut up," Andrea said in reply, before stepping fully in, shutting the door behind her, and falling to her knees side-by-side with her sister.

"I'm not sure you can handle this beast, sister," Amy mocked.

"Amy, you have no idea what I can handle," Andrea mocked right back, as she took my cock from her sister and plunged her mouth down on it, taking half of it down her throat and bobbing her head hard. My hand unconsciously reached out and gently grabbed the back of her head, threading my fingers in her dirty blonde hair.

Amy looked pissed off at this insult to her womanly abilities. When Andrea pulled off me to take a deep breath, she pointed my cock at her own mouth and similarly plunged her mouth down on it. Eventually she tired and Andrea took her turn again.

I let out an unconscious growl that caused the two sisters to shudder in anticipation, my hands threading through each of their hair, pulling their heads back.

"Be loving sisters and work together," I ordered.

They nodded eagerly and started to work together, running their lips and tongues up and down the length of my cock, their lips meeting at the tip a time or two in a kiss that left them embarrassed and red faced.

"I'm coming," I warned.

"You take it, Andrea. It's like a drug!" Amy offered, pointing my cock at Andrea's mouth and forcing her surprised sister's head forward to swallow the head of my cock.

I came long and hard, Andrea swallowing most of it. When it looked like Andrea would waste some, Amy pulled my cock out of her sister's mouth and took the rest of it.

The two sisters looked like they were as high as a kite at the moment, so I gave them a minute to come back to reality.

Amy stood by first, sliding her wet body up mine, pulling me down to kiss. Andrea just stood and waited, wrapping her curvy body around us and waited. When Amy was done kissing me, Andrea brought my lips to her own. I reached down and kneaded their asses like dough.

Amy slid around me while her sister was kissing me, put both her hands on the shower wall, and bent over, spreading her legs and thrusting her ass out at me. She looked over her shoulder.

"Come, fuck me, Gothic," she commanded, wiggling her ass at me enticingly.

I came up behind her, my hands gently gripping her hips. Andrea pressed herself against my side, hand reaching around to gently grasp my cock.

"Let me help," Andrea said quietly, before she slapped Amy's ass. "Stop your wiggling, hussy."

"Get that cock in me, bitch," Amy whined, without any heat, though she stopped her wiggling.

Andrea ran the head of my cock up and down her sister's sopping wet slit and once I was lined up, I plunged myself inside her. Amy screamed in pleasure, and I was sure that everyone nearby had heard her.

Andrea slid around us and placed herself next to her sister, hands on the wall, ass out, looking over at her sister and smiling like she was getting one over on her.

"Fuck me too, Gothic," Andrea begged. "Tell us whose pussy is better."

"You…fucking…cock stealing…bitch," Amy ground out, as I pounded that ass.

I pulled out, lined up and plunged myself into Andrea's pussy.

"You cock blocking, cunt," Amy spat, semi-playfully, before she started slapping her sister's ass, making her squeal even louder as I fucked that ass.

For the next 15 minutes I swapped between both beautiful sisters and didn't give a fuck who heard us.

When I came inside each of them, for some reason, I hadn't noticed my chaos meter jump from 7% to 17%, then from 17% to 27%.

XXXXX

If I was a more boastful man, I might be winking, and finger gunning people left and right as I walked down the hallway clad only is a fluffy pink towel around my waist. A lot of the men in my squad had those particular tactics down pat, so I'd seen it done often enough. Andrea and Amy had left the shower supporting each other, drunkenly stumbling down the hallway to our shared bedroom, leaving me to clean up the mess we'd made of the shower room.

At this point, group sex wasn't exactly new to me, but two sisters? Had I banged two sisters at the same time before? I had…hadn't I? The Duras sisters felt like a lifetime ago at this point. Well, I guess that this was the first time I'd banged two human sisters.

Unfortunately, my good mood was somewhat soured by loud, arguing voices coming from the community rec room, so I stopped to listen.

"I'm gonna tell you a few things and you're gonna listen to me," Shane growled.

"Now is not the time," Lori replied.

"Come on. When is it ever the time?"

Dude, just let it go, I thought, having a vague memory that this moment might be important for some reason.

"How can you treat me like this?" Shane complained.

"You're kidding, right?" Lori replied, bitingly.

"No. Huh-uh."

"Because you told me my husband was dead."

I rolled my eyes at that. To be fair to Shane, what the fuck did she really expect him to do?

"Jesus, Lori. I didn't lie to you, all right? I didn't. Do you know what it was like there? Huh?"

Fuck, now he was blocking her attempt to leave. This was getting out of hand.

"Stop. Things were falling apart. They were slaughtering people in the hallways. It was a massacre. There were walkers everywhere."

"So you left him?"

"Everybody else ran. There were no doctors there. It was just me. He was hooked to machines, and I did not know what to do. I even took my ear and I put it on his chest, and I listened for a heartbeat, and I did not hear one. And I-I-I-I—I don't know why. Maybe it was gunfire. I don't know what it was, but there was no way he could've survived that. No way."

Somebody, probably Shane, banged the door.

"He did."

"Yeah, but then I had y'all to think about, didn't I?"

Fuck, it sounded like he had pushed her against a table now.

"I had you and Carl, and I needed to think about—"

"Okay. No, no."

"I had to get you guys safe to Atlanta. That's what I had to do. Just stop."

"If you thought for one second that he was still alive, would you have come? So I saved your life—you and your little boy's. That's what I did. Right?"

"And if I could've traded places with him, I would have. I would trade places with him right now because—"

"No no no. No."

"No no no. You— I love you. Shh shh."

This was like watching/listening to a car accident in progress. You just couldn't stop once you started.

"No. No. You're drunk."

"I love you."

"No, you're drunk."

"And I know there were some things that say that you love me, too. Because there's no way that you could've been with me the way that you were."

"Shane. Shane. Shane!"

"Just—Okay, Stop. Listen. You love me."

"Get your hands off me. Get your hands off me."

"I love you. There's nobody here."

"Please! No!"

Ok, it was beyond time to step in.

I wrenched open the door and took in the scene. Lori was pinned to a pinball machine wearing only her husband's shirt, a pair of powder blue boxer shorts underneath exposing a lot of leg, and white tube socks. Shane was pressed up against her, his hand between her legs as she cried in fear. I crossed the room's length in a second, kicking out Shane's knee and forcing him to a knee, gripping him tightly around the throat with my left as I squeezed his throat shut.

"Let's everybody calm down now," I said slowly and soothingly, Shane now gurgling. "Emotions are high. Shane is obviously drunk. So let's calm, the fuck, down. Breathe, Lori. I won't let anything happen to you. Breathe, please. In and out."

Lori wiped furiously at her tears and took a few deep breaths, visibly composing herself, but nodded at me in thanks. I nodded back.

I heard some wheezing gurgles, and I remembered that Shane might need to breathe, so I let up on my tight grip around his throat. He might have been trying to tear my fingers from around his throat, but I hadn't really noticed.

"We really need to have a pleasant, but blunt conversation, or else however the fuck you want to describe this bullshit drama you've got going between you two is going to end up with people dead. Let me tell you, secrets like this, and poorly kept ones at that, have a way of coming out at the worst possible times," I explained. "So, I think we should wait right here for Rick to come by, and we can talk about this like adults who had to make hard decisions under terrible circumstances that quite literally could mean the difference between life and death."

"No, Gothic, please, he doesn't need to-" Lori tried.

"He does need to know, Lori," I said emphatically. "It will come out. I guarantee it and either Rick or Shane is going to end up dead because of it. That's the #1 and #2 strongest fighter in this group, excluding me, of course. Lose either one and yours and Carl's survival chances go way, way down. Well, everybody's in the group, really. Is that what you want?"

"He'll kill me, Gothic," Shane tried from his knees, having gone right beyond angry drunk to weepy drunk now that I had so thoroughly shut him down. He was probably quite ashamed of just how poorly his meeting went with Lori and how he'd treated her while highly emotional and drunk. Getting choked out to within an inch of their life had a way of sobering a person up quick. "He won't understand, not even Lori does, and she was right there with me."

I sighed mightily at that. He wasn't wrong.

"Both of you sit down on the couches," I said, letting Shane go. Lori and Shane both sat on the two couches facing each other, while I took the big daddy recliner at the head of the room. "Yes, there is a lot of stupidity to be shared all around. Shane, I'm really going to need you to man up and stop being such a fucking pussy ass bitch. I get it, Lori and you shared something special, you kept her and Carl alive, you shared a terrible adversity together and bonded through grief and maybe you do truly love her, but Rick's back dude and Lori's made her choice. It's time to man the fuck up and try to move on or else you're going to end up dead. If this was the normal world you could spend some time apart, go on dates and bang other chicks to forget her, but instead you've got to play the part of protector and see her every day in Rick's arms. I get it, it sucks and it's not fair to you, but that's the fucking way of the world now, so man the fuck up. There are going to be many a fine ass woman in the future, maybe even a badass warrior type, who is going to love you and you alone just the way you want her to."

Lori nodded reluctantly.

"And you, Lori, you need to stop acting like a cunt," I said to Lori, who now looked offended. "What Shane did tonight was not ok. Violence against a woman is never ok. But I do want you acknowledge some hard fucking truths here. Shane bent over backwards trying to save Rick."

"He lied to me!" Lori cried.

"He didn't. Not really. At least not in the way you're insinuating, like he lied to you to get into your panties and stay there. Your pussy ain't that good," I said, trying to be provocative and insulting on purpose so that they could at least agree on something after Shane's bullshit tonight, maybe even snap them out of their current moods.

"Hey now!" Shane interjected. Lori just looked embarrassed and argumentative.

"Shut the fuck up, Shane. We both know it's true," I said before stopping and turning my head to the side a little, hearing Rick stumbling down the hallway, quite a bit drunk, which was maybe a good thing for this conversation. We'll see. "Rick, we're in the rec room, can you join us, please?"

Rick stumbled into the room, taking in the room's occupants with confusion, Lori's and Shane's strange expressions of fear and shame and reluctance probably not helping.

"Why don't you take a seat next to Lori, Rick," I advised calmly, firmly in the mediator role.

"What is going on here?" Rick asked hesitantly, eyes darting around the room, then at his wife's present state of dress, before he fell heavily into the seat next to her.

"Bottom line, we need some hard and uncomfortable truths to come out in a controlled setting if we don't want people killing others in murderous rages," I said.

"He won't understand, Gothic," Shane whined again, looking downtrodden and ashamed.

"I don't think you're giving Rick enough credit, Shane," I answered truthfully. "Rick, I want to tell you a story about you, your family, and your best friend Shane."

"What story?" Rick asked.

"Rick, when you were in the hospital, after you were shot, when the world was falling apart towards the beginning of all this shit, Shane travelled to the hospital at great risk to himself to see you, maybe even save you when he realized how bad things were getting. When he got to the hospital, soldiers were in the hallways summarily executing patients, doctors, and medical staff, just in case. He could have very easily been killed and Lori and Carl would have been on their own. He went into your hospital room and found you in a coma, unresponsive, lying on a hospital bed, hooked up to a lot of machines and tubes. Rick you were lying there unresponsive and had been for quite a while, your muscles deteriorating. It was going to be a miracle for Shane alone to avoid the soldiers killing everyone in the hallways, or the walkers all over the place; it was going to be damn near impossible to get out with your comatose and unresponsive body to drag along with him like dead weight. That was assuming that you'd even survive being disconnected from all that shit, which Shane had no reason to know. And then he put his ear to your chest and couldn't hear your heart beating."

"I didn't hear it," Shane said earnestly, looking intently at Rick, like he was begging him to believe it.

I sent a sharp look to Lori to keep quiet.

"Whether he heard it or not, the circumstances were extreme, and he had Lori and Carl to think about," I pointed out. "Rick, under those extreme circumstances, do you harbor any ill will towards Shane for leaving you behind?"

A long, pregnant silence ensued, before Rick broke that silence.

"I don't. I'm not sure how I would have reacted under the circumstances, what decision I would have made in your place, but I am grateful to you, Shane, for even trying. I'm grateful that you took care of my wife and my boy when I couldn't," Rick said emphatically. "I'll never forget that; I promise."

Shane just tearfully nodded. Even Lori nodded tearfully, smiling a little, perhaps finally forgiving Shane and recognizing that if even her husband didn't hold him accountable, then she probably shouldn't either.

"Good, good. Rick hold onto that feeling and the promise that you just made," I advised, staring intently at Rick who again looked confused. "I want you to understand the context here, because context is so very, very important. The world is falling apart. The dead are rising to kill the living. Shane and Lori believe that you are dead. Lori just learned that her beloved husband has died. Lori has no combat skills to speak of to protect herself in a much more ruthless and dangerous world, and she's got a little boy to take care of on top of all that. Normality is out the fucking window. She has no time to grieve or get her head on straight. It's constant danger, all the time, and she doesn't have time to even take a minute with Carl to even grieve you properly. You love Lori and Carl, under normal circumstances you wouldn't begrudge her finding someone else in time, right?"

Rick nodded again uncertainly, not understanding what my point was, but agreeing. It was time to quickly rip this band aid off.

"Shane is a strong man, a viable source of protection and comfort for her and her son. He is her beloved husband's best friend in a crazy and much more dangerous world. Someone she knows and trusts and understands. Under these extreme circumstances, I remind you, they sought comfort in each other, sharing their grief, started a relationship, and, well, started having sex."

Rick's head rapidly turned to Lori and Shane both to see the truth of my statement and found only guilt and shame, thus confirming the truth of my words. Rick jumped out of his seat at Shane who didn't even move to try to defend himself. I quickly popped out of my seat and pushed Rick back into his seat, standing above him.

"Context, Rick. For all intents and purposes, you are dead. Dead and probably a walker now. Lori and Carl are in constant danger, in a very bad situation, but Shane is there to take care of both of them, to protect them, when you couldn't. And he did protect them! Shared grief and adversity have brought together far less likely people. Under those circumstances, the normal mourning period doesn't apply before moving on. That's old-world stuff. Remember how you just said you wouldn't begrudge her finding someone else. Can you truly blame either of them?"

"Maybe, maybe not. But they lied to me!" Rick admitted reluctantly, grounding out the words before yelling. "Why didn't they tell me from the start?"

"A lie of omission, but yes, maybe they should have," I admitted. "But can you really blame them, they thought that you were dead, and unfortunately they were wrong. In this new world, violence is a way of life now; it's familiar, comfortable, and the default reaction to so many things. As uncomfortable as things now were now that you had miraculously shown up, alive and well, Shane is still a vital and important part of this group. That's why I'm having this intervention and sharing these truths now, in a controlled setting, because I guarantee you it would come out in the future and it's much better this way. If it makes you feel any better, Rick, Lori chose you when you came back. Unfortunately, Shane's being a bit of bitch about it and is having a hard time moving on, but hopefully he'll get there before he has to leave the group and make it weaker, hurting everyone's survival chances, including Lori and Carl's, I should remind you. Given the fucked-up circumstances and needing to see Lori with you every day, to see you being a father to Carl who he took into his heart as his own son, can you really blame him? He came to love them both."

Rick remained silent, looking incredibly conflicted.

"What now?" Shane asked in the silence that looked like it wouldn't end anytime soon.

"Stand up," I ordered, both men stumbling quickly to their feet. "If you guys want to fight, to kill each other, now is the time to do it. I promise I won't stop you this time."

Then I sat down and waited.

"Gothic, please, they'll kill each other!" Lori begged fearfully.

I stayed quiet. Rick and Shane looked at each other, a slew of complex emotions in Rick's eyes, though anger and betrayal were dominant. There was also a lot of conflict there. Rick recognized that Shane had protected his wife and child when he couldn't and almost certainly prevented their deaths, giving him something to come back to when he had rejoined the living. He owed Shane a great debt. Given how much Rick loved Lori, maybe he felt like it was to be expected for Shane to have fallen in love with Lori, just like Rick had. Personally, I didn't see the appeal. Lori was always kind of a whiny, bitchy character. She was decently hot, though, and if offered up the chance to bang her, married or not, I'd probably accept.

Shane looked guilty as fuck, but there was a hint of hope in his eyes now that the whole truth was finally out. I really hoped he could get his head out of his ass when it came to Lori. I was doing everything I could to keep him alive and this group stronger because of it.

Rick roared in anger and slugged Shane in the face. Shane took it, putting up no defense, though he was bleeding from his nose quite badly now.

"Thank you for keeping Lori and Carl alive, protecting them when I couldn't," Rick said. "But I'm back now, and Lori chose me. Are you willing to accept that? If not, then you and I are going to have a big problem. If you can, though, maybe we can have a new beginning."

It was a few moments before Shane replied.

"I- I can accept that, but if I'm going to see her and Carl every day, then it might take me a minute. She's great woman."

"She is," Rick agreed, and my chaos meter went to 35% which suggested that Shane's death at Rick's hands was not going to happen now.

A moment later they were embracing in a tight hug, both men crying into each other's shoulders. Lori, too, was crying in relief from her couch.

I had given them the best possible chance to survive; now it was up to them.

XXXXX

The lights were on and the main displays were powered up in the level five emergency operations room, which was surprising considering how much of the facility's limited power that was likely consuming. I glanced over at the large, bright red numbers on the wall counting down till this place exploded and found a little less than 8 hours was left. That was just enough for my little group of survivors to have a restful and safe sleep before the hard reality of their situation was forcibly made known to them.

Dr. Jenner was staring at the main display with a look of wonder on his face, a smile, a real smile adorning his lips, one that I had never seen in the brief time that I had known the man. Glancing at the screen, my previous training told me that it was a series of blood tests with the results side-by-side. He had thrown the kitchen sink and then some at the sample, every conceivable test had been performed, from complete blood count to lipid panels to protein tests to genetic testing had been done. It was impressive considering I hadn't provided that much blood. He'd done a lot with the little I'd given, including some tests that I didn't think even existed at this point in Earth's history.

The government really was always holding back the best for themselves, weren't they?

"You look intrigued, happy even, Dr. Jenner," I said, breaking the silence of the room.

Dr. Jenner spun around in surprise, before his eyes lit up in recognition at seeing me.

"Is that you, Mr. Gothic?" he asked, excitedly, to which I nodded.

He was practically shaking with excitement as he pointed at the main screens, turning between me and the screens.

"This is from your blood sample! You-you-you don't know what this means! How unique, how surprising this is!" he stuttered out, before trailing off, lost in thought, his eyes having a hard time now straying away from the screen with the test results.

"What does it mean, Doctor?" I asked gently, hoping to bring him back to the here and now.

"We've studied it for months, since the original outbreak, and yet we always knew that we were only seeing the symptoms, the tip of the iceberg, while so much of it is remained hidden to us in the depths. We knew we weren't seeing the whole picture, maybe not even capable of seeing it even with all our medical knowledge and the best equipment our species could bring to bear," he explained, before turning melancholy. "After all this time we still don't even know if its microbial, viral, parasitic, or even fungal, but we found markers in the blood, everyone's blood."

"We're all infected, you mean," I said, jarring him with my knowledge.

"Yes, that's right," he admitted slowly, turning to me in surprise, but perhaps also being surprised that I wasn't reacting with alarm. "Everyone we tested had the first stage dormant markers, which we just called 'infected', for lack of a better term, even people that hadn't been bitten. We didn't understand how it could have been transmitted, though. We thought it was airborne, microbes or spores in the air, or through skin contact, or a hundred different ways. We thought if we understood how it was being transmitted, even without symptoms, we could segregate people, keep them from being infected so we'd have a small shot of surviving this as a species, but we could never figure it out. The most outlandish, but unconfirmable theory that made sense, was that the undead were generating some kind of currently undetectable energy field that could infect the living, spread it, but not kill them. That made sense to the virologists amongst us. A virus seeks to spread itself, after all, it wouldn't spread far if it killed the host that quickly."

This was actually very interesting and entirely new information for me. The shows hadn't had people like Jenner available for long, someone with both the knowledge and the technical resources to learn something about how it all worked. He was only in a single episode near the very beginning of the show. That knowledge and those technical resources were lost to this world upon his death and the CDC exploding.

"Do I not have those markers?" I asked, trying to understand what he was telling me.

"You do, but yours are active, but not in the way I expected!" Jenner answered hurriedly. "A first stage infected person is normal in every way. It's only when they're bitten by a walker that those markers go active and they soon kill the host, invading the brain like meningitis, causing the adrenal glands to hemorrhage and the brain to go into shut down, then the major organs, then death. Once the host dies, within hours they become the undead, the 'walkers' as your group has come to call them, driven by only the most basic, most savage of instincts."

"When you saw those active markers in my blood sample, did you think that I had been bitten?" I asked.

"At first, yes, but none of your body chemistry was consistent with what we knew would occur from studying TS-19, from studying my wife's infection. You should have been showing signs of sickness, of weakness, but there was nothing," Jenner answered, trailing off. "I was fascinated by it! Your blood tests show a level of health that I've only seen in computer models. It's like your body has adapted to the infection, spontaneously activating the markers and using them for some beneficial purpose. I've never seen anything like it. You may be the first and only person we've found to be immune to all this!"

This was starting to sound familiar. As I mulled that over, Jenner started looking at me very strangely.

"You-You aren't acting surprised or happy," he said. "Maybe you don't understand the significance of what I'm—"

"I do understand, doctor," I interrupted. "I'm not surprised that I adapted to this, I'm actually surprised at how long it took, which tells me that whatever this is very much out of the ordinary. It was making me a little nervous! My immune system is enhanced, aggressive, normally it takes minutes, maybe a half hour to adapt to whatever I'm exposed to, but it took a full day and a night of rest before I finally felt like myself again."

"I- I don't understand," Dr. Jenner replied quietly. "What do you mean enhanced or aggressive?"

"Are you a Star Trek fan, Dr. Jenner?" I asked.

"I-I-What? I don't- What does that have to do with anything?!" he finally got out.

"Just humor me; it's important," I replied calmly.

"Yes, yes, I'm a Star Trek fan. Of the scientists that worked in this building 98% of them were huge fans of the show or maybe even credit the show with why they became a scientist in the first place. When we were facing extinction as a species, people brought their DVD box sets of all the series as part of their essential luggage, even knowing space was limited," he answered, sounding exasperated. "The other 2% were probably Star Wars fans who've got shit taste, but what can you do."

We laughed together at that statement. While I was a fan of Star Wars, too, Star Trek would always be number 1 in my heart.

"I'm assuming you've seen the Star Trek: Enterprise series and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?" I stated.

"Yes," Jenner replied. "Both highly underrated shows in my opinion."

"Don't even get me started on that subject, Doctor," I said with a bit of humor. "While we had heard about the Eugenics wars and met Khan in Star Trek 2, the Enterprise series introduced the Augments in a more substantial way."

I paused for a moment and took a breath.

"I know you'll find this very hard to believe, but I am an Augment, a genetically enhanced human, but without any of the negatives because a being like Q or a contemporary at his level, brought me from 20th century Earth where Star Trek was just a tv show. I was enhanced and put in the way of the Enterprise. I've spent the last several years of my life living in the Star Trek dimension."

Divulging my greatest secret was met with incredulous silence and a burgeoning fear awakening in Dr. Jenner's eyes that I may very well be a dangerous crazy person.

"I see," Jenner responded slowly, subtly moving his rolling chair back to put some distance between us.

"I suppose I shouldn't have expected any different, especially from a man of science," I said mournfully, moving over to the handrail next to the steps leading up to the emergency operations center. This had worked once, so hopefully it would again.

I gripped the handrail tightly, keeping eye contact with Jenner, then I squeezed. The metal screeched with that distinctive sound of tortured metal, leaving an imprint of my fingers in the hard steel.

Jenner's eyes opened wide in shock.

"Go ahead and examine it, Doctor. Please," I suggested, moving away from the handrail to give him some much-needed space, so as to not frighten him.

Jenner cautiously approached the railing and felt the warm grooves my fingers had impressed into the hard steel. He even tried squeezing a normal section of the steel himself to see if he could similarly deform the metal. Needless to say, it remained as it was.

"Your strength could have been enhanced by adapting to the infection in ways that I don't understand," Jenner tried, sounding dubious even as he said the words.

"Would adapting to the infection give me advanced technology that this world hasn't yet invented?" I asked with a smile, before I pulled up my left sleeve and tapped my omnitool, causing it to visibly light up. Tapping another command projected a short 30 second clip of me waking up in the truck before I fought off a horde of walkers. While my omnitool's sensors and other useful capabilities had been nerfed upon my placement here, projecting a hologram was still something it was capable of doing. Then I wirelessly hacked into the CDC systems and started downloading all of the data stored there, playing a few clips of Jenner making early reports, including some with his wife by his side, giving their reports together.

Jenner's eyes grew wet with tears after seeing and hearing his wife again and fell heavily into his chair, eyes wide open and locked on the hologram my omnitool was displaying.

"In the world and dimension of my birth, Star Trek was a television show. Your world, where the dead walk and hunt the living, was also a television show. The multiverse is real," I said. "I have to tell you, while being in this universe has been fun, I have been so fucking disappointed by what I've seen so far."

"What do you mean?" Jenner asked confusedly, reeling from what I had told him.

"I have sung the humanity of this time's praises to the people of Star Trek, espousing on how badass and strong we were, but then I came here. The CDC was supposed to be some grand hope of the US to get through this, instead you all succumbed to your weakness really fucking quick," I said with a look of disgust and disappointment on my face. "You told Rick and the others that the scientists in this facility were bolting out the doors to be with their families or were committing suicide in the hallways. Where the fuck was everyone's sense of duty to figure this shit out so that humanity as a species had a chance to survive?"

"My wife volunteered to be bitten and studied out of her sense of duty. To give humanity a fighting chance," Jenner growled angrily. "She begged me to keep going for as long as I could after I was gone. And I have! After she was gone, and I was the last living person wandering these damn halls for months. I wanted to give up every fucking day, to eat a bullet, but I stuck it out. I honored her sacrifice, and I can say with pride that at least I did the best I could in the time I had."

I sat down next to him and leaned forward, staring into his eyes intently.

"Perhaps my faith in humanity was not totally misplaced, Edwin," I said. "I wish I had had a chance to meet your wife."

"She would have loved meeting you too," Jenner said quietly, then smiling a sad smile, tears now falling. "She was a huge Star Trek nerd."

Jenner and his wife were the examples of humanity's past that I had venerated.

"I know what that bright red countdown means, Dr. Jenner. I know I'm asking a lot, but what if I could give you more time?" I asked intently, studying the man. "Would you even want that? Or are you so set on giving up on this life that it'd be better if I just let this place burn. What's left of humanity doesn't need even more on its plate right now, like an outbreak of weaponized smallpox on top of the dead trying to eat the living."

Silence.

"What do you mean more time?" Jenner asked, though I could tell the question was more to give him time to think on the larger implications of what I was asking, rather than on how I'd accomplish it.

"My omnitool has a unique power cell, unique even for the Star Trek dimension," I explained. "It's powered by a harnessed micro-singularity, a micro black hole. If I plug it into the power grid of this building, it would supply all the power you'll ever need, virtually forever."

Jenner looked stricken with indecision at my words.

"I'm just so damn tired, Gothic," he whispered, tears once again filling his eyes, before glancing at the clock ticking down on the wall. "I thought that in 8 hours I'd be reunited with my wife. Now you're asking me to stay here in this hellish life indefinitely. For what?"

"To give humanity and this world a fighting chance," I answered immediately and emphatically. "I have a starship in orbit, filled with the most advanced medical technology of the Federation, and three Emergency Medical Holograms. Once Q lets me back onto the ship, my blood might contain the cure for all of this. I've done it before. But even if that's the case, the world is going to need educated men like you to get through all this, to help rebuild from the ashes. We can't start from zero."

Jenner looked conflicted, unsure. I could see in his eyes that hope and despair were fighting a battle in his soul and I'm not sure even he knew which he'd prefer to win at this moment.

"Even if you gave this world a cure, everything has fallen apart. It's the strong, the ruthless, and the evil that will inherit this Earth, not people like me," he said.

Jenner did have a point there. With the breakdown of society, millennia of progress and cultural development had been lost. That was not something that could easily be regained. Might makes right would be back with a vengeance.

"I will help this world recover. Even after I've moved on," I assured him.

"I-I need to think about this," Jenner said slowly.

"You've got a little less than 8 hours. Then the decision gets made for you," I said, gesturing at the countdown. "I'm very sorry that this is being put on your shoulders, but this world is going to need good men like you and Rick."

XXXXX

I sat comfortably in my stolen office chair on the roof of the CDC building, the dark city of Atlanta laid out before me. Seeing a major metropolitan city completely dark, no lights in sight, was still a jarring experience.

The bi-pod my rifle had come with was set up on the roughly 4 foot tall, raised wall on the edge of the building's roof, the rifle's stock tucked comfortably against my shoulder. It had only taken a couple of close shots to correctly dial in the scope to where it needed to be.

As the clouds in the night sky slowly moved to allow the moon to bathe the dark area in soft moonlight, I squeezed the trigger. A loud clap was the only sound to be heard as the suppressed 5.56-millimeter match grade ammunition was sent out the barrel of my rifle, crossing nearly 300 yards to reach my target. In this instance, the target was a youngish looking man in a torn-up suit and tie, his white shirt dyed red with dried blood. He looked like an annoying finance bro you might see in a movie, which increased my joy at seeing the results of my shot. No one liked a fucking finance bro, well, maybe the Ferengis would.

The rifle round flew true, snapping the finance bro's head back as it went clean through his forehead, an irregular plume of blood blossoming behind him as he collapsed to the ground, unmoving, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. He was truly dead this time. That blood plume, though, looked unnatural. The viscosity of the blood was just wrong, and the color was off too.

My kill counter, which had started the evening at 248, went down by yet another digit. I had been killing a lot of walkers this night.

The sound suppressed rifle shot was definitely muted, but it was far from silent, the sound echoing a bit, bouncing off tall buildings in the quiet night, making it harder for the walkers to figure out exactly where the sound had come from, which was exactly why I was choosing targets so far out. Luckily, this meant more walkers were attracted to the area for me to put down, but not so many and not so close to the CDC that there would be a literal horde of thousands waiting outside the building's front door come morning. By the end of the night I wanted to have met my walker quota so I could begin the process of moving on from this dimension. After my talk with Dr. Jenner I had a suspicion as to why exactly Q had brought me to this dimension, but I would need all the resources and technology of my ship to actually confirm.

My thoughts wandered as I squeezed the trigger yet again. As I'd found many times before and during my military service and during the Occupation, I did some of my best thinking when I was in the middle of a task like this.

Thankfully, with each shot I was getting closer and closer to being able to return to my ship. While dangerous in large groups, there was virtually no danger to shooting them from a tall building that they couldn't even reach. Honestly, the walkers were less than animals. Animals at least had self-preservation instincts. They'd scatter, or flee, or hide if one of their number was killed.

No, it didn't matter how many walkers I 'killed' as I thinned their numbers with my excellent long-distance marksmanship, they'd just keep coming. Sure, they'd somewhat react to one of their fellows falling dead to the ground with a new hole in their head, acknowledging on some basic level that it had happened, but they didn't scatter, and they certainly didn't try to find cover. They seemingly could not recognize the danger to themselves and thus had no instinctual drive for self-preservation. The true danger was in their numbers and surprise ambushes.

Sigh…of course even using the word ambush implied some kind of cunning. A living human being surprised by a walker in a closed room attacking them wasn't exactly a cunning ambush, it was happenstance and maybe more akin to bad luck and a lack of caution than any kind of strategy.

Their numbers, though, were hard to beat, no matter how many advantages the living had over them. I had hundreds of rounds of high-quality ammunition ready to use. (Unfortunately, this was also ammunition the living now lacked the ability to produce more of.) Before this night was over I intended to kill at least 248 walkers in total, but even after killing hundreds of them with no true danger to myself, it was akin to removing a cup of water from the ocean…meaning barely noticeable.

At this point in the timeline the Atlanta metropolitan area alone had a 2010 population of approximately 5.26 million. The population of Earth in 2010 was around 7 billion. Without my ship's sensors to scan the surface, I had no idea of the exact number of walkers now roaming the Earth endlessly, hunting the living. Assuming at least 99% of the old human population were now walkers, which was optimistic I thought, that meant that there were probably 6,930,000,000 walkers 'hunting' humanity endlessly, with no need for food or water or rest. Of course, that was a gross simplification. During the initial outbreak many died or were taken out by various governments to prevent people from rising, but that was roughly the reality of the situation.

No, you'd need something more to truly deal with this menace if humanity had any chance to survive this, I thought. You'd need to engage in an ongoing, systematic extermination of the threat. How ironic that I had taken over just such a weapon system on Minos, one that had engaged in the successful, systematic extermination of their creator's species. It was almost like Q had had a reason to bring me to this dimension?

What this world needed were thousands of autonomous, self-replicating, weaponized drones with onboard energy weapons capable of vaporizing walkers from the safety of the air. Drones with a fusion reactor at their hearts to produce the needed power and thus as close to infinite ammo as was possible in real life. The humans of this time had nothing like that, and it would take them centuries-and surviving this calamity-to develop the technology naturally on their own.

Hmm…this might be exactly what I needed to get me to the 100% chaos I needed to leave, I thought, before I turned my focus back on the simple joy of the here and now.

There was something simple and beautiful about all this. A man and his rifle. Sure, I was using a scope, an advanced optic system by most measures, but this wasn't Star Trek level technology. I wasn't transporting a bullet through space time to reach my target. This was truly skill based. Sending a bullet from point A to point B target took skill. You needed to take so many factors into consideration to ensure you hit your target. The way you held the rifle, squeezed the trigger, the steadiness of your hand and body, the way you breathed.

Then there were the external factors to take into account, like the firing angle, distance to target, wind speed and direction, barrel temperature, ambient temperature and the expected bullet drop, amongst a few dozen other considerations that the skilled marksman needed to take into account, either consciously or unconsciously. On truly long-range shots you even needed to take into account the curvature of the Earth itself. Of course, the effective range of my current weapon was probably between 500 and 600 yards, conservatively, rather than the enhanced range of something like a Barrett .50 caliber rifle, so that last one was moot.

Thankfully, I had so many targets to ply my skills with.

A little girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old at most, wearing a torn pink nightgown, flat chest and nipples exposed to the elements, barefoot, dragging a dirty teddy bear, was put to her final rest.

An old man, moving even more slowly than most of the other walkers, his hair white as snow, his emaciated body showing that his last days and weeks alive hadn't been easy ones.

A nurse, maybe in her 30s, in blue hospital scrubs.

A soldier in body armor, maybe even one that had been tasked with protecting the CDC had required an even more precision shot to the brain stem, as the forehead (and most of the head) had been protected by a combat helmet. For that one I had had to wait a bit for him to turn his head just right to drop the walker. As it hadn't been a true head shot to destroy the brain, the soldier would likely be spending the rest of his undead life ineffectually biting into the air, his rotting body unable to move him towards any new targets.

As I took my next shot, in this case, at what looked like a gay biker in leather, assless chaps, I heard the roof access door open behind me. Turning my head I saw that it was Lori of all people, still wearing her husband's button-down shirt and those powder blue boxers. I turned back to my task and continued permanently putting down walkers.

She walked right up to the wall edge of the roof and looked down at the city below her, obviously trying to spot what I was shooting at.

"200 yards out, to the right of that corporate art in the square," I directed her quietly. "The walkers who look like they were part of a Village People cover band or something. I really wonder what their story was right before they died. It's probably really interesting."

"I-I can't see them; it's too far," Lori said.

"Use the binoculars in my duffel bag if you need them," I advised.

She followed my advice and took the binoculars out of my bag of goodies, putting them to her eyes. I gently pushed on her left shoulder to get her to turn her body to the actual area that I was currently targeting. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the wall in front of her to steady the binoculars and seemingly thrust her ass out in my direction, as if for my viewing pleasure. Now that was interesting. Was she doing that on purpose?

"I see them," she said, a slight tone of awe in her voice and maybe a touch of mischief?

"The construction worker," I quietly called out my next target. "That hard hat is probably a prop, but we'll see in a second if it can stop a rifle round."

"I've got him."

A suppressed rifle shot dropped the construction worker of the Village People, his white, prop hard hat offering him no protection from the 5.56 mm NATO round.

"Guess not," I joked.

"Ha!" Lori, honest to God, giggled. "The Indian next!"

"The loincloth, that headdress, that is some seriously offensive cultural misappropriation," I chided jokingly as I lined up my next shot and squeezed the trigger, knocking the feathered headdress the Indian Village Person was wearing right off his head, along with a good portion of his upper skull.

"The cowboy!" she called excitedly.

The cowboy met his final rest as I dropped him, less a head.

I continued to take out the rest of the Village People, though the black motorcycle cop was curiously missing. Wonder where he had wandered off to. It made me happy to think that he had survived all this shit and was even now entertaining his new survivor group with hits like YMCA Macho Man, and In the Navy.

"How are Rick and Shane?" I asked curiously, continuing to kill walkers below as we chatted. This was turning out to be one seriously surreal conversation.

Lori laughed lightly.

"Surprisingly good, actually," Lori admitted, a small smile in her voice. "After Rick punched Shane, his anger was pretty much spent. They're stupidly drunk now and crying and hugging each other like little girls for the past few hours. Shane apologizes over and over for not saving him and Rick thanks him over and over for taking care of me and Carl. I think they're closer friends now than they ever were. Any danger of them killing each other is probably past, assuming they remember most of it come the morning."

"I'm glad to hear that," I offered after I killed what looked like a smoking hot little Asian chick dressed in clothing you'd expect to see someone wearing at a rave set in an abandoned warehouse.

Her corpse was in surprisingly good condition. Beyond the obvious, trying to imagine the story behind each one of these walkers and how they had ultimately ended up here was surprisingly entertaining.

"I was so mad at you at first, for forcing the situation, but now that it's all out in the open, I can't help but be so thankful to you, Gothic. It could have gone so, so bad if the truth had come out at the wrong moment," Lori admitted very sincerely. "So, thank you."

"You're welcome," I replied sincerely, happy it seemed to be working out. Augment or not, I wasn't perfect and could make mistakes with the best of them.

Lori's smile turned downright salacious.

"When you told Rick about me and Shane, I was certain that Rick would force Shane to leave the group," Lori shared.

"And now?"

"Now, they're talking about sharing me with each other."

"Interesting. How do you feel about that?" I asked, curious how that was received.

"I'm-I'm not actually all that opposed," Lori admitted, sounding embarrassed. "Rick and Shane are both very good men. If we can make it work, if they can do that without being jealous, I'd be open to it. If it works long-term, I wouldn't even be opposed to them bringing in another woman, if they wanted."

"How modern of you!" I joked, turning my eyes to the side to look at her.

"I know? I'm the very definition of 'modern apocalypse woman,'" Lori joked.

Lori and I laughed quite hard at this unexpected bit of humor, something I didn't think she was capable of.

"Would you mind if I took a shot?" Lori asked tentatively.

"Not at all," I said, beginning to get up when she placed her hand on my shoulder and instead planted her ass right on my lap and wiggled to find a comfortable spot, holding the rifle up.

"Can you help me?" Lori asked saucily, trying to figure out how to properly hold the rifle.

I carefully guided her hands to the correct places on the rifle, tucking the rifle butt into her shoulder and wrapping my arms around her. Her sudden intake of breath suggested that she had caught my scent.

"Bring the rifle to your eye, not the other way around," I instructed, helping her find a comfortable spot. "Let the rifle lay resting, unmoving on the bipod; don't lift up on the barrel."

"Who should I shoot first?" she asked.

"I've got one I've been saving for just the right moment," I said with a laugh, then carefully guided the rifle to where the target was.

It was immediately obvious to me when Lori caught sight of this particular target.

"Holy shit, those are some nice big titties," Lori whispered.

"I know, right?" I said with a smile and laugh. "I didn't have the heart to take her out."

"Men and their fascination with big tits," Lori scoffed, unconsciously looking down the open top of the button-down men's shirt she was currently looking at, probably checking out her smaller breasts. "She looks like a stripper. Don't they call that glitter shit they apply to their skin 'slut dust?'"

Down walking on the street was a top big tittied blond wearing a black G-string and thigh high leather boots. A chunk had been torn out of her neck, but the bloodstains on her white, glitter covered skin looked almost artful. When I had assigned her a backstory in my mind, she had been a stripper and her favorite walker customer had torn a chunk out of her.

"Could have been," I speculated. "If her big titties offend you, when you're ready, line up the shot and take it."

Unsurprisingly, given the distance involved and her relative inexperience I was sensing, Lori was way, way off.

"Few things, you've got to squeeze the trigger, not pull it, or jerk it," I instructed. "Squeeze it gently and smoothly. Let it almost come as a surprise when the gun goes off."

"Ok," she whined, wiggling in my lap even more as she felt my cock harden under her.

"And quit with the wiggling," I growled as I slapped my hands down on her bare inner thighs, tightly squeezing and caressing them, running my fingers dangerously close to the apex of her thighs. Her quick indrawn breath said she rather liked that.

She took another shot and this time it was closer, maybe only a few feet off target.

"Breathing while firing the shot hurts your accuracy because it increases the movement of the aligned sights on the target. That's called the wobble area," I taught. "The best time to fire your weapon is during the body's natural respiratory pause. This is when you're done exhaling, but it also isn't something you should force. Breathing is natural, it's unconscious, so don't overthink this. And don't force air out of your lungs, that makes you contract your chest muscles. During the respiratory pause your chest muscles are relaxed, and you can stop breathing longer without feeling uncomfortable."

It probably hadn't helped that I had taken hold of her tits when talking about 'chest muscles.'

"So much to think about," she groaned, before taking another shot. It missed again but was closer.

"Try again, anticipate, at least a little, where the walker will be when the bullet reaches them, rather than where they are right now," I advised. "Ideally, wait till the Walker is moving towards us or stops for a few seconds."

The next shot was a little low, but succeeded in putting the walker down.

"I did it!" she cried, turning around and throwing her arms around my neck. I quickly grabbed the butt on the rifle to keep it from falling as her lips smashed into mine, her tongue soon trying to wiggle into my mouth. She pulled off me with a smile. "You know, Rick and Shane both suggested that I come up here to thank you. And I'm pretty sure this is exactly what they intended."

"Hopefully they remember they said that," I joked. "Take a few more shots, ok?"

Lori looked disappointed but turned around and lined up her next shot. Surprisingly, she hit her target. Good for her, a skill for sharpshooting would serve her well.

While she was selecting her next target, I put my hands under her tight little ass and pulled her boxers down to her ankles. She didn't say a word as she helped me get them off and kick them away before continuing to take her shots. Surprisingly, each successful kill, even when she had taken the shot, decreased my kill counter. Maybe it was because she was my student in this scenario? Whatever the reason, I'd take it.

My left hand took ahold of her small tit and began massaging it, distracting her a bit, while my right slid up her smooth, freshly shaven thigh into her freshly shaven pussy. Her cunt was wet and slippery as I fingered her, sliding one, then two, then three fingers inside her.

I reached down and released my cock, letting it slap against her ass, allowing her to feel the size of it. She gasped and began wiggling, grinding her ass on its length, trying to line it up to put it inside her.

Taking pity on her, I ran it up and down the length of her slit, lining it up for her, putting just the tip inside her wet heat and then stopped.

"Your move, sweetheart," I offered as she continued to kill walkers below, very wisely selecting closer, easier kills, like walkers grouped up in bunches. The distracting situation was not exactly ideal for an amateur shooter. When bunched up, even when she missed her primary target, half the time the missed shot would kill a nearby walker, which was just as good for my kill counter. This wasn't exactly like billiards where you needed to call out your shots, after all, or else it didn't count. A kill was a kill was a kill.

My words had triggered something in her as she plunged her ass down, taking me all the way inside her, her ass and thighs bouncing against my own. She obviously had not realized just how big I was because she screamed in a mix of pain and pleasure. After 20 or 30 seconds, she started moving again, twerking her ass down, my cocking plunging in and out of her with a wet squelch.

"Believe it or not, but this is not even the first time I fucked a sniper from behind while she killed people," I said with a laugh at history repeating itself. The pantsless sniper was a bit of a Resistance legend.

"God, you've got such a big cock, Gothic," she ground out breathily. "You're reshaping my pussy!"

"You better believe it, slut," I growled out. She tried to stop killing walkers, but I stopped her with a threat. "If you stop killing walkers, I'll stop fucking this hot, little pussy of yours."

Unsurprisingly, she kept bouncing her ass on my cock for several long minutes and my kill counter was down to 55 when the magazine ran dry.

Her grunts and moans along with the few missed shots that had hit things like steel mailboxes with a thunderous clang and large panes of glass that had shattered with a stupidly loud sound had attracted a small walker herd. They were bunched up rather nicely though.

"Hold the rifle," I ordered, before I stood up and bent her over the ledge, her body bent over in half as I continued to fuck her from behind, my hips thrusting, my cock continuing to plunge deep inside her.

Reaching down into my bag of goodies while continuing to fuck her with one hand on her hip, I picked up a coupled pair of 40 round magazines I'd taken from the military officers I'd looted and the thump gun, putting the strap over my head. Reaching behind me I swung the rolling office chair in front of us, propping it against the low wall on the roof's edge.

"Spread your legs wide, grab the armrests and bend over," I ordered in my full-on dominant voice. I had a feeling that Rick, for all his leadership skills, was not dominant in the bedroom. "Put your head close to the seat and don't pull your head up whatever you do. Understand?" I asked, punctuating my question with a few hard slaps to her ass.

"Yes, daddy!" she cried, causing my eyebrow to rise at the unexpected title she'd given me, one I hadn't even asked for. Was she a natural sub that had never had the opportunity to explore this side of herself, or was this more Augment bullshit at work?

Letting go of her hips, I inserted the first coupled magazine into my rifle, pulled the bolt back, and then went full on Augment on the gathering horde of walkers below us, lining up targets and pulling the trigger quickly over and over again. I cackled loudly the whole time, automatically switching to the other coupled magazine when the first ran out, then going full auto, which was wasteful, but so fucking fun.

The barrel was hot and smoking by the time I was done, my kill counter reading 25. The entire time that I had been firing I had been quickly thrusting my hips. Lori was practically insensate at this point, having come several times over.

I pulled the thump gun, flipped up the blade and leaf type sights, and sighted in on another large walker grouping. In a final crescendo of fucking, I pumped my hips frantically and came inside Lori's clutching pussy, while simultaneously pulling the trigger and sending the 40mm high explosive grenade right into the concrete at the heart of a large walker group.

The group of walking corpses was ripped apart by the concrete shrapnel in a plume of blood, guts, and torn off body parts, my kill counter going down to zero.

A simple midi-style celebratory jingle played and in old game style block font 'CONGRATULATIONS' was displayed across my vision. And that was it. More low-key Q bullshit.

Instantly, I felt my connection to my armor and nanite network re-establish, then my connection to the ship and Natasha, then to Hermione and Carl in the Star Trek universe.

'Father!' 'Father!' 'My Lord!' was shouted in my mind near instantly as the connection re-established. 'You're back!'

'I am,' I gently reassured, a genuine smile on my face. 'Stand by. I have a few things I need to do down here.'

I looked down at Lori and she looked nearly unconscious, so I pulled my cock out of her gushing pussy and tried to rouse her.

"Lori. Lori, wake up," I tried several time before I gave her ass a hard slap. "Lori!"

"Hmm, what?" Lori groggily replied.

"You should probably go back to your room, though I recommend you take a shower first," I recommended.

"Uh, yeah, I'll do that," Lori answered, walking off pantsless, thankfully the men's shirt she was wearing was long enough to cover most everything. If she bent over even a little, though, her puffy and wet little slit would be visible to everyone.

I thought about telling her to take her boxers but was interrupted by T'Maz's call on the comm.

"Captain, this is T'Maz, do you read me?"

"I can, T'Maz. How is the ship and crew?" I asked, once the rooftop door closed and Lori was out of earshot.

"The ship is fully operational. The crew have been carrying out the orders you wrote for us to find on the…pool lounger," T'Maz dutifully reported, as if it pained her to use those seemingly illogical words. "I believe that Q was preventing us from contacting you and transporting to the surface. Transporter capabilities appear to have been fully restored along with communications."

"Ha! I'm glad that you got my message. I wasn't sure Q would allow it," I replied. "Do not yet transport me from the surface. If the doctors require blood samples from the surface, they can beam them to the ship. Level 10 biohazard protocols are still in effect. No infected undead humans are to be transported to the ship. That is an order. Current evidence suggests infected humans can possibly transmit whatever is affecting them through an energy field. Natasha, please lock down transporters in line with my orders."

"Understood, father/captain," Natasha and T'Maz responded simultaneously.

"I'll contact you soon. Gothic out," I said.

Feeling whole again, I connected to my armor and ordered it to deploy. My armor deployed near instantly over the clothes I was wearing, in its silver chrome fluidic state, including the fully covering head piece. For good measure my skintight personal shield flared into visibility for a moment. Connecting to my armor's buffer inventory, I called out my rifle and jumped up onto the roof wall in a single leap, landing gracefully on the very edge.

Looking down at the horde of walkers below me, I grinned a bloodthirsty grin, my eyes sweeping over my gathering targets, more and more of them having been drawn to the area because of all my shooting and the recent explosion.

If these things could actually feel fear they would have known to run as I set my rifle to maximum power and began firing thick, bright neon blue bolts of energy down into the hordes of undead. There were no bodies to fall to the ground when their bodies sublimated to wispy ash and were vaporized, their molecules floating away in the breeze as if they had never been.

My loud evil cackles echoed throughout the area as the night was practically lit up with bright neon blue lights. If even a single iota of self-preservation had been left in their dead brains, they'd have run screaming for their very lives.

It was time to let my inner murder hobo out to play.

XXXXX

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Chapter 49: 15,837 words

Chapter 50: 17,485 words