I had told her I was nineteen. Lying to reassure her. Nineteen was semi-adult. But I was seventeen and the presence of an actual adult, especially one with a crossbow and several knives was nearly as good for me as it was for her.

"What happened to you?" I asked because he was limping.

"Nuthin'." As explanations went, it was the best I would get out of him. "Where you two been all this time?"

"Just here."

"Here?"

"We came out of the woods, saw this place and decided it was the best place to be. I wasn't going to get us lost out there trying to find you."

"Good call. I lost your trail when you left the creek. We all went looking for you, then shit hit the fan and we all ended up scattered."

"What shit?"

He made an odd noise, like he had trouble believing in what had happened, whatever it was.

"Everyone okay?"

"More or less."

"More or less?"

"Ain't no one bit."

"Well that's good." I said, feeling my two remaining fingers and thumb becoming numb as Sophia's grip on my left arm cut off the circulation. "Where are we going?"

"Met some new folks. Farmer called Hershel. And we been holed up on his farm while we been looking for you." He made another noise and this time I could identify it as disgust. "Some people said you was gone and we ain't never gonna find you." He stopped and looked back at us and especially at Sophia. "I said I would find you. I goddamn said it!" He jabbed a finger at her and then abruptly turned back and strode on because tears had pricked his eyes. Sophia's grip managed to get even tighter.

I didn't know what to say to that. My opinion of the Dixon brothers as human beings had not been high because as capable they were, their drug habits hadn't sat well with me. I hated drug dealers and users and Merle had always been high on something. Daryl I had noticed hadn't used, or noticeably used, since his brother had been left behind in Atlanta. They were nasty, tough, capable men and not sentimental. At least I had thought so. Now I was forced to reconsider what I thought I knew. I was quite the bigot.

"Carl was shot." Daryl spoke suddenly and Sophia gasped. "He's fine. It weren't so bad. Hershel took care of it. But it messed stuff up. That's why I'm the only one who was out here looking."

I tried to figure out how Carl being shot would affect anyone who wasn't his parents. I didn't see how.

Daryl waved us both down and Sophia trembled as we watched a quartet of dead stumble by in the distance. They hadn't seen us and the long grass kept us hidden. I figured between his crossbow and knives, Daryl could have pretty much annihilated them if he wished so that limp was part of a bigger injury. Or maybe he just didn't want to fight in front of Sophia.

We let them go by and I wondered how safe this farm could really be. It seemed a little 'open' in my mind and we were still very close to Atlanta. There had been almost half a million people in that city before everyone in the state had been told to head there. If even a quarter of that number were now spilling out of the suburbs…

It was too much for me to think about. The thought we were now safe seemed to be sapping the strength out of me, or maybe it was the walk after the rough diet. Both.

Three sudden cracks made me pull Sophia down while Daryl crouched. I knew they were pistol shots and they were from the same pistol. There was a beat and then there were two more shots.

"Come on!" Daryl stood and broke into an awkward run. Sophia gave me a fearful look. Daryl was leading us to safety except now he was leading us toward gunfire with three more shots sounding as we took off after him. She held my hand tight. What was left of it. There was another shot. "Come on!" Daryl repeated, looking back and then picking up his pace.

All my natural instincts told me that running toward gunfire was a bad idea. My previous experiences with people shooting at each other told me the same thing; get out of there before you were hit in the crossfire or the police arrived to 'pacify'. But as all hell broke loose before us, with multiple pistol cracks and the distinctive crashes of shotguns, we kept heading toward it. Daryl obviously could contribute to any kind of fight but us?

The alternative was to sit tight in this open field. That was not a good alternative. I kept running. We kept running, slowing only to negotiate a wire fence.

The fields were open save for dotting trees and we reached the top of a low rise and I saw the roof of a building. A barn. Maybe someone was making a stand there and by the sound of it, kicking ass or being wiped out. The shooting was constant. Daryl had opened up a sizeable lead despite his limp and neither of us were going to catch up. We didn't have much in us. Nothing like when we had run from the highway when we had had at least one good meal in us, from the CDC. Not that we had eaten well before that.

Daryl left us completely behind but we were in a sea of yellow grass where we could see we were safe. The shooting died out and there was a deep silence as the insects remained quiet following the racket. That was worse than the gunfire.

Then we saw people again. Live people. The strange, strange thought I had was that it was good to see they were stuck wearing the same clothes just as us. It made them all easy to identify. Andrea, Glenn, Shane and T-Dog stood like a firing squad in front of a heap of corpses by the doors of the barn and they stared at Daryl as he ran up to them. Behind them were two people I didn't recognise beside a corpse… On a pole. Beside them were Carl, Lori and Rick. Three more people I didn't recognise and then Dale far behind.

And Carol.

"Mom!" Sophia released my hand and tore through the grass. I stopped completely and watched her go. Her mom half called her name, half screamed formlessly and couldn't even run to her. She fell instead and Sophia flew into her.

I was not a sentimental person, particularly where families were concerned. I knew some people loved tearful reunions. That there were videos of them on the Internet. It was too personal. Private. Not to be shared. Not with an Internet audience or a live one like now. It felt wrong to watch and see their tears.

So it was an odd relief to see Carol's joy turn to sudden rage. "Gone! You said she was gone!" She picked herself up and with Sophia clinging to her right arm she marched up to Shane who had a face like a crumbling building. "She's not gone!" Regardless of the fact he had a gun in his hand, she slapped him and it sounded like another pistol shot. It staggered the well-built man and clearly hurt her. She turned away from him and the bodies by the barn and she picked up Sophia as if she were a small child and held her tight.

One of the strangers, a waifish blonde girl broke free of the grip of a guy my age and stumbled toward the corpses. She was beyond weeping. Even from this distance I could hear the harsh gasps coming out of her as she pulled at the bodies to get at one of them.

And then she screamed as that body grabbed her hair and arms and tried to pull her into snapping teeth. All at once the frozen figures snapped into life themselves and tried to drag the two apart. T-Dog stomped on the unyielding walker and his right forearm was bandaged from wrist to elbow. It didn't slow him down but while his foot must have broken ribs; that meant nothing to the dead. I flinched as Andrea swung, of all things, a scythe. It worked though and it was silent once more.

There were questions to ask obviously. A lot of questions. But I was very tired and thirsty and all I wanted was to get out of the sun. I walked away and headed for the RV which sat beneath the beckoning shade of some trees not far from a house. No one stopped me thankfully and I made it all the way there as the yelling broke out behind me. There was water in the RV and I didn't care whose it was; I had the first proper drink I had had in a week and then noticed the RV. Someone had given it a good going over. There were fresh white flowers everywhere and the old rank smell of too many unwashed bodies was absent. It was hot inside though and so instead I lay down on my back outside. There were times when the most comfortable place was a bedroom floor, not the bed, and the loamy dirt of the campsite was welcoming.

I couldn't help but listen and I recognised Carol, Rick and Shane's voices but the fourth was new. It sounded very country to my ears and I guessed this was the farmer Daryl had mentioned; Hershel. He sounded really pissed, at Shane, and he wasn't the only one. I heard Shane yelling and then abruptly going quiet. There was no shouting. My guess was Carol had hit him again. It picked up again though, closer-by at the house, followed by a door slamming. I was just guessing but it seemed the city-folk were no longer welcome on the farm. There was some more shouting, between Rick and Shane and then silence.

I got to enjoy the peace for maybe a minute. A minute before footsteps approached and a different kind of silence pervaded.

"You mind telling us what happened to your hand?" The sheriff's tone indicated he had had a long trying day of his own.

I opened my eyes and found that he was standing directly over my head while Dale and Glenn were to my left. They didn't know what to make of me. They didn't know what to make of me before I pulled the napkin from my pocket and unwrapped the four pieces of severed fingers.

"These are the tips the walker bit off. These are the pieces I hacked off with a meat cleaver." I clumsily wrapped them back up and then unwound the bandage off my left hand. "This is my hand now." I held it straight up and the three of them leaned in for a close inspection with the old man and Glenn unable to resist the grisly sight. Rick took hold of it and turned it one way and then other, as if it might be different from another angle.

"You cut your own fingers off?"

"Yeah… Seemed like a good idea at the time." I pulled my hand from his grasp and settled back in the dirt, closing my eyes again.

"Are you sick?" Dale asked and he seemed actually concerned rather than threatened.

"No. We ran out of water. And see how you feel eating canned vegetables for days."

There was a pause and then I was bodily hauled onto my feet by all three of them. They all peered into my eyes and I stared back.

"You sure you're okay?" The old man asked. "We need someone to look at that."

I was promptly steered to a picnic table and sat down where the sheriff looked over my fingers again as if expecting them to grow teeth. That would have been cool. Dale looked on with his rifle slung on his shoulder, looking like some kind of watchful soldier. And Glenn… Glenn stared.

"What?"

The flat question startled him. "Nothing, man! …It's just… You know…"

"You kept that little girl alive." Rick said it. "You kept her alive this whole time."

"We just hid in a house. That's all. Hid away and got thirsty."

"That's not 'all'." Rick held my mangled hand. "You went after her on that road. You didn't even hesitate. You went after her." He said it like a prayer and completely unaware he was hurting my hand.

"What happened?" Dale asked. "Daryl said your tracks led straight away from the highway, then you followed a creek and then you kept heading away. He lost you then."

"We couldn't get back. We could hear them in trees. I don't know if they were passing along the highway and beneath it too or the ones on the road spilled down into the trees… Couldn't go back. And I don't know shit about the woods so I wasn't going to try circling around. We'd be in Alabama by now… We just headed straight. Found some houses. Hunkered down." I looked at Rick. "Carl was shot?"

He nodded grimly and took a moment to collect himself. "Day after. We were out looking for you and we found a church. I sent the others back to the highway and me, Carl and Shane pressed on. A hunter was after a deer… Carl was on the other side."

"I heard that. We heard a single rifleshot."

"Well, that was my son getting shot." Rick said it in a way that told me he had considered how his son getting shot by accident in the middle of all this was just brutally cruel. His son getting shot the day after Sophia had gone missing, meaning the group had lost both kids in rapid succession.

"Daryl says he's alright."

"Thanks to Hershel. Man performed a miracle saving my boy. Just like you did saving that girl."

He seemed to be clinging hard to it. As if I had done something wondrous. "Thank Daryl." I said. "He's the one that found us."

"He was out there. Every day looking for you." Dale said.

"That's what I told Sophia. The redneck will track us down." This made Glenn chuckle. "What happened to him? He wouldn't say."

"He took a horse out. A nervous horse. It nearly threw him down a cliff."

"You serious?"

"I don't think Daryl exaggerates." Dale replied. "He says it threw him and he was lucky to snag on a rock. I haven't seen the cliff but I've seen the bruise on his leg so if landing on that rock was lucky, it must have been one hell of a near-miss."

"And he kept looking?"

"Man on a mission." Dale said with an arch of his impressive eyebrows. "Wouldn't take a day off to rest, not while you were out there. Not with Rick and Shane out of commission. Needed someone out there he said."

"And them?"

"Carl needed blood." Rick said and he did look rough. Like me. "And Shane… He went with the man who shot Carl to get the supplies Hershel needed to save his life. Shane busted his ankle up pretty good."

"And the man?"

"Otis. Dead." Rick said grimly. "Didn't make it back."

"And all that?" I pointed toward the barn and Rick looked away and the down at the ground.

"It was Hershel." Glenn explained. "He was keeping his family in there."

"What?"

"He thought they were sick. That all of them were just sick people. And that we were just going around murdering sick people… He had his wife and step-son in there." Glenn seemed really uneasy.

"The blonde girl?"

"Beth. His daughter. That walker was her mother…"

"So they think you just murdered their family."

"Maybe." Glenn's uneasiness grew. "Shane kinda demonstrated they were dead by shooting a walker full of holes. I think he realised then… Before… Before Shane opened the barn up and we…"

"Slaughtered them." I finished for him. "We thought you were being attacked."

"No." Rick said and his measured tone made my skin crawl. "No we weren't. But Shane decided they were going to break out and kill us all and had to be dealt with."

"He thought we were dead." Referring to the first time Carol had slapped him.

"Yeah." Rick didn't even bother with a pretence that he hadn't. "Seventy-two hours." He said to himself and both Dale and Glenn frowned but I knew what he meant.

"Anything else I should know?"

Dale and Glenn exchanged a look and Rick's expression grew even darker. But none of them said anything. I guessed it couldn't have been anything really serious if they wouldn't talk about it. Personal crap. I just wanted to lie down.

Glenn decided to excuse himself. "I'm going to go and try and smooth things over with the one Greene who might listen." He explained.

"You go do that." Dale told him and something in his tone made Glenn awkwardly shrug.

At this point Andrea, T-Dog and the farmer kid walked up. In other circumstances I might have thought his hat was stupid but in this heat, it seemed ideal.

I had to go over it again and they had more of a reaction to my severed fingers.

"You seriously carrying them around with you?" T-Dog said while clearly thinking I was messed up.

"I thought if I said I was bit, you'd all freak out." It was a half-truth. "So there you go. What got bit. What got cut off. That was… Three days ago and I'm still here. I'm not going anywhere. Maybe…" I looked at the two stumps. "It was night. There was a walker that had blundered into a heap of garbage bags and got itself caught and was snarling the neighbourhood down. I went out there, crept up on it and it never even saw me. And I didn't see the other one lying under the trash until it reared up and bit me. Like it was lying in wait for me." They all exchanged nervous looks. "It bit them off, I killed it and then I chopped off what it left." I shuddered quite uncontrollably. "I was lucky." I held up my two remaining fingers and thumb. "Go figure; this is lucky."

Thankfully, they moved on from me and the topic became what they were going to do with the heap of bodies by the barn. It was straightforward enough. They would bury the farmer's wife and step-son and burn the rest. Meanwhile, Rick was going to have a talk with Shane; wherever he was. The mention of Shane caused no small amount of embarrassment; enough that Andrea and T-Dog went almost eagerly with the farmhand to give the dead their due. Rick went to have his talk. That left me with Dale.

"You sure you're okay, son?" He asked.

"What does that even mean?"

"Right now it means is there anything you need?"

"A bath, a change of clothes, a meal and two days of sleep?"

"We might be able to do the clothes and the meal." He said.

I stood up at the sound of a shrill cry nearby, just in time to receive a full-bodied but one armed embrace. One armed because it seemed unlikely she was ever going to let go of Sophia's hand. The woman's embrace was even more awkward than the one from her daughter. Which I proceeded to get when she released me. The awkwardness continued when Sophia released me. I didn't know what to say as Carol thanked me, over and over. She had something else to say though. "I don't even know your name."

"Bas." Sophia answered for me.

"Bas." Carol didn't find the name odd. "Thank you, Bas." She looked at my hand and I had to go over it for a third time. Except this time, the story came with the addition of Sophia's perspective. I didn't remember yelling when I was bitten and I was vague about the process of cutting off my own fingers. She remembered in exacting detail however. And she told the story of sitting awake all night, with a knife, wondering if I was going to turn.

"Sorry." I said. For all of it. For her little girl witnessing an amputation and then spending a night in sheer terror.

"And you're not sick?"

"I am tired. I am hungry. I am not sick." Except perhaps for having drunk too much water in the RV.

I had Carol, Dale, Daryl and Sophia all staring at me and I wondered again how much blood I had lost. I couldn't look worse than the sheriff.

I certainly didn't look worse than Hershel. After they had dug graves for his family, they held a service for them. Kind of. No one said anything. Not a word. And while Hershel wore a suit, our party out of Atlanta wore the same beaten clothes. Carl and Sophia weren't there. They stayed in the house where Carl was still bed-ridden. I hadn't looked in on him. What would I say? Sorry for being shot? Would he say sorry I had had fingers munched off?

We stood there for a long time and Hershel seemed to mutter a silent prayer. Or tried to. He had the look that I had seen so often through all this; the look of being completely and utterly overwhelmed. If he had really believed his family were just sick, then he was processing that the dead really were walking. And attacking. No one had dealt with that easily. I had spent weeks in that campsite virtually catatonic and only snapping out of it when I had had to fight for my life.

We would probably have stood there until Hershel was ready to move but Shane drifted off. The buzz of his hair made his sullen mood look worse. I didn't know what conversation he and Rick had had but it was unlikely things had gone well for either of them. Rick had a face like thunder.

With the group breaking up, I went and returned to the loam. I had done my best to avoid going back into the woods and now I was becoming one with nature.

This time I was left alone. No one disturbed me as I lay there without sleeping. Not sleeping but thinking. I was back with the group. Sophia was with her mother. There were five new people around. We were on a farm which was surrounded by fences. Low fences but still strong wire. No lone walker was going to get through those unseen. But a whole pack of them? Well, they had been here for days so it hadn't been an issue. Yet.

I heard a vehicle depart. A long while later, I heard another. Maybe they were doing runs; I didn't have the energy to find out. My stomach grumbled, quietly at first and then loud enough that I heard a giggle. I cracked my eyes open and saw Sophia smiling at me. Smiling. I saw her mother fight to contain herself before putting an arm around her.

[][][][][][]

Carol and Lori made us all dinner and I was astonished to be served fresh eggs before remembering I was on a farm. Lori took a plate for herself and another for Carl and went to the house. The meal came with fried 'meat' that I couldn't identify and as I was told to 'Ask Daryl'; it was better just to eat and not think about it. I wolfed down the hot food and Carol gave me another helping. I didn't know what to do with her gratitude. No one had ever been thankful I existed before.

I learned that Hershel had vanished and they thought he had gone into town. For a drink. Reading between the lines, I realised he was an alcoholic and so he wouldn't have kept any liquor in the house. With what he was going through, going to a bar in this world was almost reasonable behaviour. But obviously, Rick had gone after him and had taken Glenn with him. I thought that was an odd choice but Glenn seemed to have a connection with the Greene family which I suspected from Dale's disapproval was physical. Good for Glenn. Apparently Beth wasn't doing much better either so they really needed Hershel back now.

When we were done eating and they still hadn't returned; Lori insisted on sending Daryl after them. Daryl didn't seem to have had his fill of playing fetch today so he agreed and T-Dog chose to go with him. Shane was nowhere to be seen. That left Andrea and Carol as the only people over twenty and under sixty who weren't in the farmhouse. Lori went back to Carl, to tell him his dad was AWOL again.

Dale was still acting as lookout and Andrea had a rifle too, and a knife. The last time I had seen her, she had been in a state of deep depression. Suicidal depression. And angry. She still looked angry. Pissed off seemed like the right description. But it seemed she was pissed with purpose now. Like she was trying to be a soldier now. That suited me; it meant I could rest easy tonight.

And I did. They all seemed to have everything in hand and I curled up on the ground beside the fire and simply fell asleep.

[][][][][][]

I wasn't cold when I woke up because someone had draped a blanket over me but there was a chill in the air that definitely said winter was coming. I took several minutes to wake up, rolling one way and then the other and I saw Andrea on watch on top of the RV. When I finally picked myself up, she nodded at me.

"They're still not back yet." She said.

"What?" My brain was foggy.

"Rick, Glenn and Hershel. Daryl and T-Dog. None of them."

"Maybe they waited out the night in town."

"Maybe." She wasn't convinced.

"You want to send out a search party for the search party."

She gave me an unimpressed look but she had no real answer. "Maybe."

I didn't know the bathroom situation and I didn't feel like asking so I went for a walk out of sight and scraped a hole. I wasn't sure if that was better or worse than a toilet full of wine. Afterwards I went for a longer walk, following the fence and getting my first close up look of real live cattle. They were much bigger than a city boy like me had ever guessed. They also seemed very inviting to a hungry walker. The fences were good though. Nothing was getting through the wire before being spotted and if one got snagged in the dark, it would make enough noise to draw attention.

This whole place felt like a different age. There was nothing here that suggested this was the 21st Century and there was a 60s Ford pick-up that seemed right at home here. It was only when I walked around the farmhouse I saw some newer vehicles. Newer but still a couple of decades out.

The idyllic location with its tranquil feeling felt off. It took me a few minutes to figure out why. Everywhere else were hints of what had happened to the world but here… They had cleared up the aftermath of the barn pretty thoroughly. The dark stains in the dirt had even been kicked over. This place was untouched.

"You're new."

The voice made me jump but she wasn't apologising. I had seen her the other day at the service but I hadn't 'seen' her. She was a very pretty girl with very vivid green eyes. The tilt of her eyebrows with those eyes gave her a piercing stare that made me feel like I was on trial. She hadn't slept last night.

"You're the one who saved the little girl."

"I didn't save her, I was just with her."

"You kept her alive." She had that country lilt her father did but not quite so pronounced. What did I sound like to her?

"I guess." There was nothing much else to say. "How's your sister?"

"She needs her dad." She stared off into the distance. Down the road they were supposed to have come back on.

The interview was over and I thought about the look I had seen Dale give Glenn. Definitely she and Glenn had done more than flirt and kiss in the past few days. Good for them. Good for both of them.

I went back to the RV and lit the fire. As a city boy, I didn't get many opportunities to play with fire. I had known an arsonist; an idiot who had gotten himself fifteen years for torching a derelict warehouse. For fun. Not some insurance scam or something. He had just wanted to graduate from stealing cars and torching them for fun to something bigger. Except car thieves were a low priority for the police but arsonists weren't. He was an idiot. Probably a dead idiot now.

Shane emerged from one of the tents and sat down in a camping chair. He gave me an unblinking baleful stare and it would have been intimidating if I hadn't been glared at by drug dealers, psycho enforcers, neo-Nazis, black supremacists and a whole bunch of other people who were much scarier than some cop; even one as squat and bull-headed as Shane. I had always seen him with the shotgun before. A Mossberg rather than a Benelli. I knew my cop weapons and Shane looked naked without the shotgun. He had his pistol though.

He stared at me and I ignored him as the morning warmed up until Carol, Dale and Sophia came out of the RV. Carol and Sophia both smiled at me while Dale and Shane exchanged a look that was nothing less than hateful. What the hell had happened in the past week?

I stayed quiet as Andrea and Shane decided they were going to find out what had happened to all the others. Lori came out with Carl and while the kid was shaky on his feet and hunched, he looked good for someone who had been shot. Dale didn't need to say anything but he clearly wasn't happy with Andrea going off with Shane but Lori was relieved. She was another one who hadn't slept through the night.

Perhaps as a respite, a one-off kind gesture from an unforgiving universe, they were just about to leave when the others suddenly returned in a convoy. I was the first to see that Carol's jeep had bullet holes in it, followed by Shane. Neither of us said anything and the others were too happy to see them return to notice.

Glenn and Maggie definitely had something more than physical going on because she ignored her dad and went for him instead. Glenn got a warmer reception than Rick, although maybe reunions had become too frequent for Rick and Lori to have the same impact. He was glad to see Carl on his feet. Daryl got an unexpectedly warm welcome from Carol. Unexpected to him anyway. Man was an odd book.

Shane and I hadn't spoken a word but we shared a look at the bullet holes, and the blindfolded kid in the back seat of Herchel's chevvy.

"Patricia!" The farmer sounded pissed. "Prepare the shed for surgery."