(As Yet Untitled)

by DomWeasel

Watching the series again back in late 2022, I was reminded how much Sophia's arc in the TV show depressed me. Thought about it for several months and then rewrote season 2 with an original character to have some fun and take a break from another project, and to create a timeline where Sophia may or may not live as long as her comic counterpart. I don't know, I haven't finished yet

10. The Newcomers

In late December we had been in our darkest place. Dale had recovered from the lacerations he had received escaping his RV, only to go down with the flu. It had been cold, we had had next to no food and so the flu had left him breathing with a sound like a cement mixer. Water had been the only thing we hadn't been short of. One small mercy. Seeing in the end of the year, hungry and ill…

The prison food was not what the people around me considered good food. It was nutritious however and as people hadn't packed the spices when fleeing their homes, there was plenty to choose from out there so seasoning made the meals less bland but only a little. That was their grumble. For myself, Daryl, Axel, Oscar; they were hot meals and they came regularly.

Although I preferred whatever Daryl hunted to what came out of those cans of 'meat'. At least then I could know for sure what it was I was eating.

I knew how much of a difference it made sleeping securely and eating regularly. Deprived of one or the other, your health and appearance would deteriorate rapidly. The hungry and sleepless both got dark bags under their eyes. Their skin bruised easily. It lost colour. The walkers had turned brown after decaying for this long but fresh ones were grey. Just like someone who wasn't eating or sleeping. But while the life had been sucked out of the walkers, the beds in the cells and the meals from the supplies pumped it back into us.

It was most apparent in the women I thought. Carol had been quite skeletal the first time I had ever seen her and the winter had not made much difference to her. Now though there was flesh on her bones. Andrea and Beth's light hair stopped looking like straw. Lori started to appear like a healthy woman having a baby rather than a starving person who was bloating. Maggie gained some flesh on her face so that her cheekbones once again became a symbol of her attractiveness; not her unsated hunger.

I guessed because we were teenagers that Beth, Sophia and myself didn't look any noticeably different. Beth had been petite when I had first seen her and they hadn't been starving on the farm. Carl was a couple of months shy of being a teenager and he didn't change either. Although, I could only judge how everyone looked with their clothes on. Underneath was likely a more unpleasant story. My ribs always seemed to be stretching my skin though my pelvis had become less sharp.

The recovery of our strength was fortunate as the weather had turned. We had gone around in circles through the winter, driven by the walkers from place to place and besides the horde that Andrew had led into the other half of the prison, it had been quiet here. Not so now.

It began as a pack, maybe thirty or forty of them trickling in during the night. The pack became a herd and the trickle became a stream that reached the outer fence and milled around in front of the blockage, oblivious of Theodore keeping watch in the tower. The moment they saw movement up in the yard when people woke up though, they began to try and get through. There were a couple of hundred of them rattling the mesh while we had our breakfast. We couldn't just hide away and ignore them. Rick was quite determined about that.

He decided that he, myself, Andrea, Axel, Daryl, Glenn, Maggie, Oscar and Theodore would work on the problem. Nine people versus a few hundred walkers… It sounded insane until you took the fence into account. Then the odds shifted drastically in our favour. We only had to take down a couple of dozen each.

On paper that was very simple. Just stab through the mesh until they were all taken care of. Six months ago that would been extremely difficult but the bones of the walkers had grown brittle. The eye sockets were still the easiest way to take them down but failing that, you could now impale them straight through the forehead with enough strength. It would have been easier to whack them on the head as even a weak blow could send shards of brittle bone through the brain.

The walkers made it easier though by pressing against the mesh. Some even tried chewing through it which was a horrible noise as teeth met metal and that told me there were still sounds I could find horrible. With them against the wire, I didn't have to worry about aiming. The crowbar was ideal for this kind of work. But each thrust required a deal of savage strength. I had been exhausted taking down half a dozen of them the morning after we had first come here whereas now, I could take down a dozen without breaking a sweat. All thanks to a regime of three meals a day of prison food.

The exertion pulled at my abdomen to remind me that it hadn't been so long since I had been stabbed. Six weeks or so… It was the start of May now. We had been here for just about two months now and barring my stabbing, things had been going quite well.

This grim work would have been better with someone to talk to but we had had to spread out to disperse them along the fence. Once strung out, they couldn't bring a great weight upon one section. I had thought before that one person could topple a fence by rocking one of the supports back and forth for long enough. A group of people together could do it much faster. Walkers weren't organised though and all they could do was hurl themselves at the mesh. If that weight was pressed against the fence long enough, it would sag and eventually topple. The walkers at the farm had broken down the barbed wire cattle fences with their sheer dead weight after all.

It was lonely work and longer than expected. I got my two dozen and change and then went back along the fence to help out. They were still coming out of the woods with the creek channelling them straight at the gates where Andrea, Rick and Theodore were hard-pressed.

"We've got to spread them out again." Rick grunted, with sweat clinging to his beard as the sun rose higher.

This was simple enough. We just had to all move together along the Sterile Zone and they obligingly stopped their attack on the gates and flanking fences and followed us along, forming a long line once more. Then we had to retake our positions and keep working.

We had taken down so many walkers to take this prison and then to explore it, only for Andrew to re-infest the place. Now here we were taking down scores of walkers to defend the field. For the moment we could ignore the walkers inside the prison because if they couldn't see us, they didn't bother us but we couldn't ignore these ones. They would build up until we couldn't get out anymore and if they built up enough, they would break through the fences; a great, battering ram of human meat.

And this story would repeat. Clearing walkers was already a daily chore but tackling herds like this would be a frequent occurrence, with whole days given over to fighting them and getting nothing else done. Followed by days of clearing the bodies. We would have to bring them inside to burn, so that other walkers weren't drawn into the flames to spread the fire around. Another hard chore.

At least with Axel and Oscar, the work was shared by more able bodies. Beth, Carol, Dale and Hershel could have been here with us if Rick hadn't want to spare them the ordeal.

Or so I thought.

My first thought, worryingly, was that I was hallucinating her. With walking corpses in front of me, a kid with big sad eyes standing beside me was unexpected. The freckles didn't help. I had no idea why freckles were associated with innocence but that was what I thought when I saw them. A striking contrast to her eyes which had lost that long before I had met her. Not so long ago she had been terrified of walkers and now she could stand this close to them without flinching. I caught her eye and she dared me to say she shouldn't be there. That she shouldn't see this. One thing remained constant between us and that was that I didn't lie to her. I wasn't going to pretend we could turn back the clock by shielding her from unpleasant things now. You could act childish from time to time, have silly innocent fun… But you couldn't go back. Lori worried about Carl having lost his innocence and talked as if things could go back to the way they were. No chance.

Carol was standing by Daryl so Sophia hadn't done a Carl and wandered off. Carol knew she was here though I couldn't imagine she was happy. She approved of her being by me and the only reason I could think of for that was that it made Sophia happy to be around me. Even while I was stabbing monsters in the face.

"I wish I was taller." She said.

"You don't want to help with this."

"No." She agreed. "But I wish I could. If I had to."

Meaning she had been thinking about her weaknesses. She was a kid, she wasn't full grown yet and that put her at a disadvantage against walkers and against people. Which meant she was always in danger. A gun was a great equaliser, but only if you had it ready and you knew you were being attacked. If someone or something grabbed her without warning, there wasn't much she could do. As I had pointed out to her and Carl that day back on the farm.

"He ignored me." She declared just as I skewered a walker and it seemed to me that the creature gaped in surprise as I looked at her confused, and then I twisted the spike free so another body was slumped against the fence. "I had a gun but he attacked you." She continued. "He ignored me."

It took me a moment for me to realise she was talking about Andrew. This detail had escaped me but now I thought about it and realised she was correct. "He wasn't that bright." I said carefully. "If he was, he'd have grabbed your gun and shot us both." Perhaps. That wouldn't have been the best survival strategy with the walkers he had let into the prison on one side and a whole bunch of people with bigger guns on the other side. But as I had just said, he hadn't been that bright.

"He thought you were a threat and I wasn't. Even though I had a gun." She had a different weapon now and I didn't know what had become of the one she had used on Andrew. "He thought he could kill you, and then me, and I wouldn't do anything. I'd just… Stand there and cry."

"But you didn't."

"He thought I would."

I put down another walker. "Do you want me to find a mirror?" I asked. "You're a kid! You look like a kid! People ain't scared of kids. They expect kids to be scared of them. That's how it is." I said and she gave me a reproachful look. "Do you wish you looked like Daryl? All leather and knives? Theodore? T-Dog actually looks like a dog! And Maggie looks like a cat. Andrea… I think she wants to look like a mountain lion." Sophia was still giving me the reproachful look. "What do you want, Freckles?"

"Don't call me that!"

"Why? Because it's cute but you want to be a lil badass?" I asked and she glared at me. "Wait a while."

Now she was confused. "Wait for what?"

"To grow up." I said and she glared again. "You don't want people to see you as a kid, you're gonna have to wait until you ain't a kid no more." A walker frothed through the fence at me. "Shut up!" I snapped and impaled it. "Let's hear another sad story about Bas' childhood." I said to her. "When I was your age, I had to stay away from everyone. Everyone who wasn't a kid like me. Because kids that age on the streets are just meat for the grinder. All the things you could get mixed up in… I couldn't wait until I stopped being a kid. Fewer people trying to take advantage of me." I had her attention now. "But I had to wait. And every day, every day was a struggle…" I ran my tongue over my teeth. I had good teeth despite everything. Despite having to steal toothbrushes. When you saw enough toothless hobos as a kid, you decided that a good brush might actually be worth it when you were on the streets yourself. "But I got through it. I didn't become a junkie. I didn't sell drugs." Here my argument fell down. "I became a thief…" It was enough to make her smile for a moment. I was definitely not the best role model. "But I got through it. And there's still no shame in running away." I assured her.

"I'm tired of being scared all the time."

Sophia looked so incredibly lost that my first instinct was to hug her. I checked it though because it wouldn't help her and because I had a job to do. "You're much braver than you used to be." I told her instead. And spiked another walker.

"No I'm not."

"Yeah you are. I remember when you couldn't even hear one of these things without panicking. Now look at you." Barely three feet away from the quartet who were trying to get at me. "And look at me. You never shut down and turned into a vegetable because of these things. You're better than me."

It was hard to stab a walker in the eye and watch her thinking at the same time. She did think about it though, and concluded that this was true. She hadn't hid away in a tent for a couple of weeks as I had. She hadn't completely broken down. "You had your reasons." She said because she was Sophia and couldn't be negative about anyone.

"Yeah, I was scared." I replied. "More scared than you."

"Because you had seen more. I didn't see things because people wouldn't let me."

And now she had seen enough it no longer utterly horrified her. "You still haven't had a meltdown like I did." One more walker down. "You're tougher than you think."

"No I'm not."

"Are you going to just disagree with everything I say?"

"Yes." She said and sounded more like a teenager than a child. That was not reassuring.

I put down a third which left me with just the one. Again I was struck by the way they didn't pay attention to each other as they were taken down. This last one was oblivious that it was alone now. She didn't care either. Who cared about walking corpses when you had killed someone?

With the fourth one eliminated that left nothing left at my section. I stepped back and saw the others didn't need my help. "What do you want, Sophia? Really? What do you want?"

"What does that mean?" She replied and it really did mean nothing. What did that question mean in this dead world? During the winter our aspiration had been food and security and we had both now. We were defending the place right now to maintain the security while they working on food. Crops… Growing our own food.

"I never finished elementary school." I said. "So I never had any big dreams. But I've got what I wanted. A place of my own to sleep… That makes me happy. Everyone else…" They had lived in a whole different world. They had ideas about the way things were meant to be. Even Axel and Oscar had that. Carl, Sophia, me… We didn't have that to cling on to. We were learning a whole other way to live. "This is a good day."

"Good?" Sophia looked back towards the gate where a fresh wave of walkers were arriving.

"We're surviving." I said and then I had to go to the gate to help draw them back along the fence. She remained where she was.

I guessed that Dale and Hershel were keeping an eye on Carl because he didn't appear. I didn't see him until Rick decided it was time to take a break and we slipped away between waves to see to our needs; to wash the gunk off our faces and hands, change our clothes and have a meal. The fences would hold in the meantime.

Of the group, I thought that Axel and Theodore were the ones most shaken up by the morning's work. Axel didn't care much for violence while Theodore had been grim since we had been driven off the farm. No matter how many walkers we put down, there were always more and that seemed to weigh on him. I didn't know much about the man but he seemed to struggle with the world. He was always a firm part of Hershel's prayer circles. That seemed to get him through it all.

The others, they were like me. They were treating it as just another chore. I listened to them talking and it was nothing new. It was always the same conversations; how we were going to turn this place into a proper refuge. There was even talk about rigging up water tanks so people could have showers. Cold showers, but still a good wash. It was good talk because it wasn't pipe dreams. It was all possible. It was just required the materials and time. The materials… Well, they were out there. The whole world was up for grabs. As for time, we had spent the winter thankful for every minute we were alive. Now we could make the minutes count.

Rick observed the masses down by the fences and decided we would take a break for a while. 'Rest up and not rust up' as he put it, sounding unnaturally cheerful to my ears.

Sophia wanted to continue 'hanging out'. She sat on my bed and hugged her knees, staring at the sunset she had painted on my back wall. She didn't say anything. She just sat there and stared and I could not think of a single thing to say to break her out of her malaise. I sat on the metal stool and ignored the growing ache in the small of my back.

"Why does Daryl look at you?" She asked without warning.

I had to take a moment to think about what she was even talking about but then I understood. "He's worried about you." I said.

"Me? Why does he stare at you if he's worried about me?"

"Because you keep spending time with me."

Now she looked at me. "I'm not going to kiss you again." She said, still hugging her knees.

I said nothing.

"Does he think you're going to kiss me?"

"Ask him." I suggested lightly.

Sophia shook her head with mock fearfulness and then giggled. It didn't sound natural. She hadn't laughed naturally for some time. She stared at the sunset again and then cocked her head and addressed the wall. "I think Daryl could be my new dad."

"Whuh?"

"She talks to him." Meaning her mom and Sophia said this as if it was a grand revelation.

"She talks to a lot of people."

"It's the way she talks to him." She said, giving me a look that suggested I was an idiot. Very teenager.

"And how's that?"

"Friendly."

"She likes him. He's the one who found us remember? He wouldn't give up on finding you. He's always going to be one of your mom's favourite people."

"You don't get it." She said and looked back at the wall.

I was not one of Daryl's favourite people. I didn't know the details but I could tell he had been abused and he knew that Carol and Sophia had been too, so the idea of Sophia kissing me got deep under his skin. The others might have thought of it as innocent but he had a better understanding of where the impulse came from. He couldn't help but think of me as a potential threat to her. And if Carol had shared with him what she had shared about her husband with me; doubly so.

I didn't know if he blamed me for Sophia having to shoot Andrew. Perhaps it was an issue with him or perhaps he thought I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't going to ask. I was still sure that one word from Carol and he would cut me.

"Do you have a problem with Daryl and your mom?"

"No."

"Why?"

"He makes her happy."

"So…" If we were just making conversation, she was extremely uninterested in her own topics. "What would make you happy?" It was the same question I had asked her earlier but right to the point.

She kept staring at the wall. I had expected this. With where her head was at now, she really didn't have an answer. Even the little things she had enjoyed in the past did nothing for her now.

When Rick sent us back out to finish clearing, she didn't follow. I was grateful because I couldn't fix her. I had told her, essentially, that only time could heal her. That when enough time passed she would be strong. Time was a good healer because I had definitely let go of a lot of my hatred for my parents for bringing me into this world and then leaving me to struggle with it. But if someone had told me when I was ten that when enough time had passed I wouldn't be so angry; I would have kicked them in their genitals. If they had told me when I was thirteen; I would have punched them in the face. Progress.

It was a risk asking her what would make her happy. The answer before had been pursuing me but that girl was gone now. Dead. I could still see her strolling away after kissing me, before I had fled to tell her mother. She didn't stroll now. She was alert. Edgy. It was still possible though that she might decide to aggressively pursue something she wanted. Just to distract herself. People did that sort of thing all the time. Adults did it with alcohol, drugs and sex and she could easily follow a child version.

I knew I could use a good distraction because spending all day stabbing walkers in the face was not pleasant. I needed a way to unwind and a board game wouldn't do it. Reading a book likewise wouldn't cut it. But when it was dark and the stream of walkers finally stopped flowing, I was too tired to do anything but go to my bunk and crash out.

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

When we had gotten here, they hadn't wanted the kids to see corpses being burnt. Specifically they hadn't wanted Sophia to see it although Lori wasn't enthused about Carl being desensitised to the sight. Now of course, it didn't matter. It didn't matter for them to see the pick-up loaded up high with bodies and driven up to the yard, again and again, with the pile growing huge and horrible and belching black smoke. They didn't like the smoke because it was a beacon to whoever might be around and perhaps to walkers. We really couldn't tell if they were attracted to smoke.

Why I had become the designated cremator… They brought in logs from the woods to fuel the blaze and I had to maintain it while they kept loading up the truck to deliver a fresh batch of meat. What was worse? Days like this where we were burning bodies or when they cleared the mound of bones and ashes and buried them outside the fences? There were already bared blackened skulls leering at me now. Scraping them up with a shovel into the truck and then having to sweep them out into a hole… At least it wouldn't be my job if I had to stand here and poke the pyre with a pole to keep the flames roaring.

I had gotten this job because I was weaker and smaller than the grown adults. They had the unpleasant task of having to move the bodies and I had to burn them. I hoped that would not be my official role for life. It might have been necessary but it was not a future I could embrace. Stabbing them through the fences was better than this.

At least I could wear one of the masks from the riot gear. It kept the smoke out of my eyes and helped with the smell. Helped but didn't eliminate it because I was too familiar with it and knowing it was there meant I smelt it even through the filters. It nagged at me though; the thought that I didn't know if this mask had been attached to a rotting walker's face for months.

Everyone involved in the work changed their clothes for lunch. For them it was the stains from moving the dead while for me it was the smell. These days no one batted an eyelid at me putting my head in a bucket of water; just Bas being Bas. I needed a haircut. The water masked the smell reasonably enough though and I could eat with the others without putting them off their food. Throwing walkers in a pick-up built up the appetite.

I watched the others as we ate.

Andrea was content defending this place and in effect getting back at the walkers. Axel enjoyed having company after so long trapped in that cafeteria. Beth was laughing at something her father had said and her spirits never seemed to dampen. Carl was bored because while there was plenty of work for him to do, he was a kid and he wanted to be a grown up. Carol was watching Sophia without seeming like she was watching her and I could see the effort it took to keep an eye on her daughter without annoying her by being seen to keep an eye on her.

Dale seemed a little lost to me at the moment, unable to pitch in with the heavy work and left standing around watching. Daryl was brooding, restless from the repetitive work but anticipating his next hunt. Glenn was happy because we were safe and secure and he had Maggie. Hershel didn't look like he was sat at a metal table in a cell block common room but at his dining table back on his farm. His new farm might only have consisted of some planters right now but it was enough.

Lori looked healthier but also lost because of her distant husband and because… What would it be like raising a baby in this world? Perhaps Maggie had the same concern because it seemed to me she avoided looking at Lori. Oscar was like Axel, enjoying the company of people who weren't convicts and it made a break in his brooding. Theodore too, despite the grim work today and yesterday, he was enjoying the moment. With Sophia's artwork on the walls, it was almost possible to forget what this room had been.

Rick was keeping watch but I didn't need to see him to know what he was thinking. It wouldn't be long now before Lori gave birth and I knew that childbirth was a grim business at the best of times. A prison infirmary wasn't equipped for that. Complications could get very complicated, especially when our 'doctor' was actually a veterinarian and his assistants would be the untrained Beth and Carol. He distracted himself with work. Making us work. We had transformed this place with our work, turning an infested hellhole into a grim stronghold. Grim on the outside. This room, my cell, they certainly weren't grim now. While half the prison was still hellish, it wasn't our side.

Then there was Sophia. Quiet. Contemplative. She didn't look like the girl I had followed off the road anymore. I tried to pinpoint a moment in my life where my innocence had just been gone. Finished. But it hadn't been that way with me. It had never been just one thing. Some people could identify a critical moment that had shaped their life but it had been a whole bunch of little bends in the road for me. Not a giant crossroads. Not killing a man.

I realised it had become silent and I looked up. They were all staring at me. Not at me… At my hand. I had put my left hand down flat on the table and without even realising it I had taken the bones from their little pouch and placed them on the table with my hand where they should have been if I hadn't hacked them off. Two fingers with their flesh coverings and two of bare bone; just laid out on the table.

I snatched up my fingers and left, wondering how the hell I could have become so distracted.

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

Hanging a blanket on the cell door stopped the dawn from creeping in. It kept the cell warmer as well through the night which had been good throughout April as the evenings had been very cool even before night fell. It was getting warmer though and we would appreciate the layers of cement and concrete keeping this place cool. How we would keep the place warm in winter though, well that was a question to ask in five months.

No one had asked me about my fingers at last night's meal and they didn't ask this morning at breakfast. As a rule, I was the one who brought up my disability. Understandably, they had no desire to.

There were a smattering of walkers at the fences and Rick wanted them eliminated before another run. He wanted to take Hershel out to visit the nearest farm and see what could be retrieved and what could be earmarked for the future. Rick was determined to get the field established for growing crops despite our current abundance of supplies because growing our own food would establish a proper sense of permanence here. There were no illusions anymore that the world could go back to the way it had been. Even if there was civilisation out there somewhere, it wasn't going to find us any time soon. We had to make our own way. Growing our own food, establishing a way to get water directly from the creek; it was vital.

Rick, Glenn, Maggie, Hershel and Andrea went on the run. Beth decided to join me keeping watch in the tower by the gate. Because she did want to know about my fingers.

"I should have died outside Atlanta." I said. "Somehow I got my hammer in time and I managed to fight off the walker that was going to rip my throat out. I survived that so a walker in a pile of garbage could take the tips of my fingers off… And somehow I survived that and survived hacking off what was left." I held up my hand, thinking how easy it had been to maim myself in the moment. "I'm alive though. That's good." Beth was scared by my indifferent tone. "She saw me cut them off. Sophia did. She saw me cut off my fingers and then she sat up all night scared I would turn. I thought that was the worst thing I could ever put her through…" I shook my head. "Now I know that's not true. Worst thing I could do was fail to protect her from a psychopath…"

"She's alive."

"Is she? Seems like the part that matters is dead."

"She just needs time. You know that. We both know that." She didn't seem to be aware of the way she clutched her wrist. "She enjoys helping with the garden. You can tell; that makes her happy."

"She was happy when she was looking around at this place and seeing all the potential. Now she's just… Autopilot."

"Like you. You're both sleepwalking." Beth gave me a critical look. "It's not your fault."

"If you two swapped places, if it was you who shot him and you who saw me stabbed… I'd feel the same way."

"Why? Because we're girls and you're a big strong man who needs to protect us?" She asked with mock severity and then smiled impishly. "Do you wanna be our big brother or our knight in shining armour?"

"I never had a sister." I said and she grinned. "I wish I did. It'd be easier if I thought of you as sisters."

"How do you think of us?"

"My friends." I said. "I never had friends before."

"If we're your friends, what's everybody else?"

"Grownups." I replied and she grinned again. "Telling me what to do and when to do it." I looked at the still road leading away from the prison. "Dale says I don't annoy the adults. I do what I'm asked and I don't complain. Theodore said I know when to shut up, but Rick knows what I'm thinking even when I don't say it."

"He's under a lot of pressure. The baby will be here soon."

"Then we'll all be under pressure." I couldn't imagine a crying baby doing much for morale. "Excited?"

"To see a baby?" She raised her eyebrows.

"You like cute things." I pointed out and she shrugged happily. "What about Carl?"

"I think he's excited to have a baby brother or sister."

"Which?"

"I think he wants a sister."

"So he can be a big brother." I remarked and Beth grinned. "Maybe I do like protecting people. Feels better than stealing."

"We're just starting out here." Beth said and I didn't understand. "It takes a lot of work to make a farm, but when we do, you'll have lots to do and you'll see the fruits of your labour." She sounded remarkably like her father with those words. "You won't have time to sit around… Brooding…"

"I'm not brooding."

"You're feeling sorry for yourself. I know we're teenagers and that's what we do… But it'll be better when you don't have so much time to just…" She made the effort to think of a polite way to put it. "Have regrets."

"I told Sophia she has to wait. Wait to grow up. Get bigger. More capable." I looked at my hands. "I don't think I'm going to get any bigger. I don't think I'll be able to shoot like Andrea, Dale or your dad. It'd be nice if I'm good at farming…"

"We'll get you some overalls. A nice straw hat." She pulled a face. "You'll have to find your own muscles." She declared and then grinned at her hypocrisy.

"You know what's funny? Sophia's griping about being young but she's grown so much in just a few months. I picked her up and carried her... I couldn't do that now… I could still carry Carl."

"She's almost as tall as me now." Beth mused. "But we'll turn around one day and Carl will have shot up."

"I'm sure he's looking forward to it. He doesn't like being the smallest person around here."

"That's the other reason he's looking forward to the baby coming." Beth said and then pulled a face. "Have you thought about how… The baby will never know what things were like? That all this is gonna be 'normal' to them?"

"Lucky them." I replied and Beth stared at me. "It's always going to be weird and creepy to us that the dead don't stay dead. The kid ain't gonna have that problem. They'll never hesitate."

"That's sad."

"Yeah… I guess that's the new unfair. They don't have to remember a time when the dead weren't walking and we can remember when people had so much food they used to throw most of it away."

"You're brooding again."

"That's not brooding!" I protested and she laughed at me. But then I had a dark thought. "Can your dad handle childbirth?"

"I don't think a person can be that much harder than cattle and horses and daddy's taken care of them with no problems all his life."

"Carl was a caesarean." I had overheard this more than once during the winter as Lori worried about her situation.

"It's a good thing we cleared out the infirmary for you then."

"Silver linings." I said and my side throbbed and she saw me reach for it. "So are we prepared then?"

"Like a hospital? No. But we can make do."

"Is that true, or just you being you?"

"Both." She beamed disarmingly.

"You kept me alive…" Though what I knew about medicine and surgery would cover a few post-it notes rather than the libraries full of books on the subjects. "Rick was right about one thing; this place was a gold mine."

"Andrea and Daryl really wanted to find a heap of guns."

"Course. But we can find guns. Morphine's harder to find."

"You liked morphine."

"Yes. Yes I did." A lifetime of saying no to drugs but I would happily take another shot of morphine, even though I didn't need it.

Beth pointed toward the trees. Seven walkers together coming toward the fence. Seven was nothing like the other day so it was nothing to worry about, unless there were seven hundred behind them.

"You ever think about how many of them are out there?"

"I try not to." Beth confessed. "What could we do if they showed up?"

Nothing. That was the answer. There was no need to say it aloud though. "Do you think we should take care of them?"

"They haven't seen us." She said, meaning she didn't want to get messy if she didn't have to. Understandable. Maybe in the future we would clear walkers wearing raincoats, goggles and rubber gloves. Although the thought of doing that during the summer was hellish…

"I wish we had more crossbows. Then we could just shoot them. Daryl could make us the arrows."

"We'll have to when we run out of bullets."

"Bows and arrows. Spears. You already made using an axe look good." I surprised myself by shuddering until I remembered my last experience with an axe. "Maybe we'll dig a nice deep ditch in front of the fence. Something to stop them piling up against it."

"You won't want to dig. Trust me."

"Honest labour." I said.

"Hard labour." She replied. "Everyone will hate it."

"That doesn't matter though, does it? We do it because we have to."

"Because we have to." Beth confirmed.

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

I seemed to have an uncanny knack for eavesdropping. Despite the close confines of living in the cells, it still didn't mean I knew how things were going amongst the others. Meals only told you so much. I had to try and infer based on body language and the odd look and I did not have enough experience with people to know what I was and wasn't seeing.

But it seemed that Lori and Rick were in a better place now. Better but still… Awkward. My impression was that they had had their difficulties before all this and neither of them were particularly well-equipped for figuring out things now in this world. But the baby was due and Rick couldn't bury himself in making this place work forever. Things had slowed down now that the prison could be called secure and we were establishing ourselves so he couldn't pretend to be too busy to deal with her. This was good. One less source of tension. Although it seemed to me it would take the baby arriving before they were able to take that final step towards actually fixing things. One way or another.

I wished that I could bury myself in work. Beth was right about me having too much time to brood and it almost made me miss those dark days in the winter when we had either been on the move or holed up and too on edge to relax for even a few minutes. I was trying to understand where I fitted in now. My skill at opening locks wasn't so useful anymore and my age and build meant I was third choice at best for runs. That left me odd-jobbing around the site and the housekeeping tasks didn't occupy me for long.

Which was how I ended up overhearing conversations I wasn't supposed to hear. That no one was meant to hear.

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

They had identified what they needed the day before and now it was decided it was time to mount an 'expedition'. It was considered safer to go out there than to try and retake the other side of the prison. Rick insisted that trying to down the walkers through the courtyard fence would rile them all up into a mass that would crush the fence and overrun us. Trying to lure them back out meanwhile carried too many risks when we didn't have the ammunition to spare on a huge number of walkers. I had the thought that it might be possible for someone to creep in during the night to re-secure a few doors and gates but I knew it would be judged insane. Daryl or I could do it but no one would let us take that kind of risk.

So instead they were going out. And Rick wanted them to clear the roads for future trips so that meant more people going out which meant that the only people staying behind were myself and Dale, Carl and Lori, Beth and Hershel, Carol and Sophia. Axel was outright disturbed at the prospect of going out there for the first time but Rick wasn't leaving him behind this time. Whether this was because Rick wanted the muscle or he didn't trust him alone with the old and young and his pregnant wife… Axel probably had his own suspicions.

Lori wasn't happy about it at all but she didn't say anything. But I remembered how she had been when Rick and Shane had driven Randall eighteen miles out and she was no different now, even if Rick had seven people to back him up.

I didn't like that they intended to be away for the night. He wanted to 'do things properly' which meant taking their time and not rushing things. This meant staying out there, but I wasn't worried about them. Their group could take care of themselves and Rick was emphatic about already having secured where they would spend the night. It was my half of the group being left here that troubled me. Everyone seemed confident that things would play out neatly and they would leave in the morning and return the following evening. And nothing would trouble us here. After all, we had our nice secure cell block. Our stronghold within a fortress. Walkers couldn't breach these steel doors and gates.

But it wasn't walkers that troubled me. It was the memory of that nursing home. Rick had taken us there after the CDC had gone up in flames and instead of a safe refuge filled with armed people who could have protected us for a while, it had been a charnel house. And it had been the work of the living, not the dead. The living who had made a point of shooting all those people in the head. Whoever it was had known before us that everyone came back; bitten or otherwise. They had made sure those people wouldn't ever be a threat to them. I wasn't going to forget that place any time soon.

Even with the dead rattling the outer fence, the empty field and yard were very conspicuous. A closer look would reveal our planters in the yard. Anyone with half a brain could tell that someone was living here now even if we had been told to stay in the cell block. Even with Dale sitting and keeping watch in the cage, we were exposed. Although, that was true even with the full group here. We only ever had one or two people on watch and there was only so far you could see beyond the fences. The towers were made for looking in; not out.

I had to keep all my worries to myself. Obviously, all the adults knew this. And our leader had deemed it an acceptable risk.

I kept to my cell throughout and read. I tried to read anyway. I only had to be indoors for two days and yet despite knowing that, I couldn't get over the gnawing thought that I was confined. In a prison. I knew how ridiculous I was being but I couldn't get over it and this annoyed me even more. I was annoyed with myself for having an irrational feeling which was utterly mad.

Two things kept me sane. My conversation with Beth and the promise that I would have my time occupied so I wouldn't have the time these daft thoughts. And of course, what Sophia had done to my cell. I had lived my whole life in the city and never seen the countryside before all this so the meadow she had painted was alien to me. I was used to seeing urban landscapes and the woods full of walkers but this meadow… The walkers could never enter it. It was something they couldn't taint. And looking at it, I could actually forget the original purpose of this room for a little while.

The only thought I had was that maybe it would be a good idea to ask her if she felt like painting the underside of the bunk above me so I could look up and see something pleasant there as well.

Or convince Rick it was a priority for us to get proper beds so that I wouldn't crack my head on that bunk above when I heard a scream and sat up too fast.

I was still rubbing my head as I clunked down the metal stairs and asked the obvious question. "What the hell was that?!" Everyone was present and it took me longer than it should have to realise this meant that the scream belonged to a stranger.

"That was from inside." Hershel said, assuring himself.

"How could anyone else get in?" Carol asked. "The place is swarming with walkers; no one would risk it."

"If they came in where the fence is down, they wouldn't know what it was like in here." I was the only one still here who had seen the far side exterior. "Not until they were in too deep." There was another scream and Carl went for his pistol.

"I'm going." He said.

"Oh no you aren't!" Lori put her hand on him.

"Dad would go!" Carl insisted, glaring at his mother.

"You're twelve!"

"I'll go with him." I said.

"Neither of you are going." Now Hershel put his hand on me.

"You can't stop me." I said. "And if you remember, Rick put him in charge." I meant Carl which meant Lori gave me an absolutely foul look. "I've been through there enough times. He just needs to cover me. If there's no way through, there's no way through and we'll come back." There was a third scream and its pitch and intensity cut through them. "And if they got in, we need to know the block isn't going to be crawling with walkers."

It was not a winning argument but there was nothing Lori could do to physically stop Carl and the same applied to me. The old men could only glare while Carol and Sophia gave me reproachful looks. Beth didn't know what to think. The screaming however compelled that we do something.

"Stay behind me and keep the light up." I told Carl, a little uncomfortable with him holding a pistol behind me.

"I know what I'm doing." He insisted.

"Yeah, but anything happens to you and your dad will gut me like a fish." I pointed out and Carl nodded in grim acknowledgement of the truth of this. "Now cover me."

Our section of the cell block was secure but beyond the locked gates, the maze of dark corridors was no one's idea of safe. We had cleared it the first time, cleared it again and rechecked. After Andrew, they had done their best to ensure it was secure once more but now if people were inside, they must have gotten a door open and that meant the whole building was compromised again. In a sickeningly fortunate way, we didn't have to do any searching; the screaming was all the guide we needed.

I had been this way before during the clean-up. The boiler room had been unpleasant the first time around and now it was a battleground once more, with two people, a man and a woman, trying to hold off walkers with a hammer and shovel while a third clutched a bloodied woman with a guy around my age standing over them. They had no idea what they had gotten themselves into as walkers flooded into the room.

Carl scared the everlasting shit out of the fighting woman by shooting the walker she was grappling with and seemingly grazing her with the bullet which whipped over her shoulder into the walker's face. The noise of Carl's suppressor was painful in the small solid room but far better than if it had been uncovered. They gaped for a moment at our appearance. At Carl's appearance; they weren't expecting to see a short, pistol-packing kid in a Sheriff's hat. By contrast I was reassuring. That was a first.

"Come on then!" I snapped at the gaping group who were about to get themselves killed by the pack pouring in. The shock wore off and caught between a rock and a weird place, they decided we were their best option. Carl shot another walker and then took off. I waited as they passed me, the woman being carried and I had an odd moment catching the eye of a black man who made Theodore look small. He carried a long necked hammer that was coated in gore, as was his arm. He hesitated and then I drove my crowbar down on a walker's skull and he realised I could handle myself.

They hadn't gotten far. The man could not carry the injured woman and he made the insane declaration that they should be left behind. The big man took care of it by scooping her off the floor with one arm and shoving him forward with the other.

"Carl!"

A whole herd of walkers was coming down the corridor and with two quick shots, the kid put down two of them to trip up the rest for a few vital seconds. "Move!" I snapped at the shovel-wielding woman who was wild-eyed at what she was seeing.

We got out of there. I could hear the walkers snarling after us but we had too much of a head start for them to catch us now. But it meant they were now flooding the structure and the others would be pissed when they came back to find the house in chaos.

We emerged into the light of the common area of the cell block and Carl closed the door behind me. He was going to shoot at our pursuers but I pushed the pistol down. It was a waste of ammunition. He turned around to where the two men were tending to the bloodied woman. It was immediately apparent to me that she was dead.

"I'll take care of it." Carl declared, stepping forward and levelling his pistol again. Once again I had to stop him.

"It's not your job." I was alarmed by his willingness to do it, even if I knew he had put down Shane.

"It'll be clean." He said with unnatural calm.

"No." The big guy was unnerved by Carl but reassured by me. "We take care of our own." He said to me and I nodded. I made Carl step back.

"Who the hell are you?" The shovel-wielding woman demanded as the adrenaline began to wear off. "How did you get in here? Who are you with?"

"Us." Hershel spoke from the locked gate and the sight of him and Dale, two bearded old men, didn't reassure them. But the big guy focused on the immediate issue and raised his hammer.

"No, Tyreese!" The other man was still clutching her hand.

"I gotta do it!" He hissed. "Look, just take Ben and lean against the wall. It'll be quick. I promise."

He couldn't just let him do it though. Not like that. He had to cover her first and I saw the bite on the woman's arm. It must have happened within the past couple of hours and she had bled out.

Carl motioned me to step out but I shook my head. I knew what was in his mind but if he locked them in the common area, it would put them between us and the way out. Besides, there were four of them and only three adults. Carol, Dale and Hershel made us equal, and Beth and I outnumbered their teenager between us. Carl had also made a distinct impression.

Tyreese was about to do it when he was interrupted by the walkers arriving with full force at the gate. They slammed into the unyielding metal and the woman and teen recoiled from it. I cursed brutally and went to it. I began spiking them through the bars and then heard a distinct crunch behind me, meaning Tyreese had done what was necessary.

No one said anything until I was done. I knew there were now many more walkers on the other side but at least for the moment we had peace. A moment to assess each other.

The obvious safety of this space was enough to calm them and they started to look around, wondering if they were seeing things as they took in Sophia's artwork. They had been startled by Carl's appearance but the pretty appearance of this space was surreal after the dark corridors they had just been through. It was both comforting and disconcerting for them to hear Lori telling Carl off for his 'heroics'. It was too domestic. And Lori was clearly in a state because I heard her tell Carl she couldn't lose her first child before the second was even born. This told the four strangers she was pregnant and I could see Tyreese trying to get a grasp on our group. They hadn't seen Lori, but Carol and Sophia were at the gate to the block, Dale and Hershel were stood inside the common area and Beth looked very small.

I saw the woman notice my hand and I gave her a wave with it which got the attention of Tyreese. "How the…" He began and then realised it was a dumb question. He decided to drop it.

"How'd you get into the building?" I had to ask the question. "You break a door down?" One of the doors that wasn't built to resist the convicts.

Tyreese nodded grimly.

"And how'd you get that far?"

"There weren't so many. Not at first…"

This meant they had likely either dispersed or bunched up in a section of the prison courtyard. Now following the noise they were inside this building again. It couldn't be helped. When the others came back though, we would have to secure the block all over again; including the cafeteria and infirmary.

I let Dale and Hershel take over from there and make the introductions. They were Allen and his boy Ben, and Tyreese and his sister Sasha. The dead woman was Donna; Allen's wife and Ben's mother. Now just another corpse whose only dignity was an old blanket.

Perhaps though that was more dignity than shuffling around, rotting and snarling.

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

I had wondered what it would be like to meet other people for a long time. Normal people, not people who had turned to banditry apparently with eagerness or convicts frozen in time. Plain, normal, boring people. Their story was only a little different from ours and that was because Sasha and Tyreese had taken shelter in an actual bunker of all things. I was almost wistful for the hot shower I had enjoyed at the CDC but that was the only part of being in that underground place that I missed. Before Sophia had brightened it up I had found the cold concrete space of my cell hard to endure so I didn't want to imagine what a bunker was like, especially shared with other people.

When they had abandoned the bunker after running out of supplies, they had met Allen, Ben and Donna and a whole group of other people. They had numbered twenty-five at their high point, and now there were just four of them. Four from twenty-five. Tyreese reported grimly that the dead were everywhere which we already knew but he also grimly proclaimed that the 'living were less like the living'. Sasha followed this up by saying we were the only decent people they had met, and we had locked them up in the communal area for the night with the floor to sleep on… But we had also given them two good meals. Hershel had given them medical care. Sasha and Tyreese certainly didn't hold the rough night's sleep against us. They understood the precaution. The only thing they seemed to resent was Carl constantly glowering at them. He was trying to look tough and to project the strength of the group and all while completely unaware he still looked every bit like a kid. A kid with a gun. After everything they had been through, this frayed at their nerves.

Hershel warned them about our group being larger, and close. He didn't go into details but he did warn Tyreese not to get comfortable. He and Dale then had an argument in private about this with Dale's stance being they couldn't possibly turn them away while Hershel was pragmatic; don't make promises you couldn't keep.

I knew though that this was a very grim thing for them to hear. They might not have had a comfortable night's sleep and there were walkers loose in the cell block but the dead could not get in. Nothing would allow the dead through these doors. After being out there where the dead were apparently teeming in the warmer weather, the thought of leaving even this grim place was unbearable.

So I kept an eye on them. Sophia and Dale had gone down to the gate to keep watch for the others but his focus would be out, not in. Besides, Dale was a trusting man who believed in the good of people. I had a much lower opinion of humanity and I was proven right when the four of them took Donna out for burial. I slipped out after them, unnoticed and casually sliding into the shadows behind their procession. They didn't get far before they put her down and Allen had a feral posture as he looked out on what would be her final resting place, and then the gate.

"Golden opportunity." His voice carried amidst the prison buildings and I heard him clearly.

"For what?" As did Sasha, and her tone told me she didn't understand what he meant. His son did though. I could see that.

"Little girl and an old man." Allen said, meaning Dale and Sophia.

Ben had a very firm grasp of his father's meaning. "Ask them for a hand. Get a hold of those weapons!" He even sounded excited by the prospect.

"What?" Tyreese sounded like he didn't even register what he was hearing.

"We do it quick." Allen said matter-of-factly. "They'll never even know what hit them."

"We're out here to bury Donna." Sasha was utterly incredulous.

"And we will. After." Perhaps Ben couldn't accept his mother being dead and that was why he was grasping tight of this; something to distract him from it.

"Shut up." I barely heard Sasha's whisper.

"Look at this place." Ben continued and I heard the anger in his voice. "It's secure." He really needed a line to grasp right now.

"These are good people." Tyreese sounded exhausted and not with Allen and Ben but humanity in general.

"This will be easy." Ben asserted. "Two kids, two women, two old men, a girl and a one-handed teen."

"You gonna smash the pregnant lady's head with a rock?" Tyreese asked. "Or just kick her in the gut so she bleeds to death?"

"What is your problem?" Allen demanded.

"How about a little common decency?" Tyrese retorted and it almost made me laugh to think of good manners these days. "This isn't what we do."

"You're living in the past, Ty." Allen told him. "So are you." He added to Sasha. "This is survival of the fittest, plain and simple."

Now this did make me laugh aloud and the four of them looked around sharply as I peeled myself off the wall and out of the shadows. I was not a threatening figure, especially if they had noted my hand. But that was why I hadn't come unarmed and why I hadn't settled for my new little weapon.

"You know the funny thing about shotguns is people don't know how much damage they can do to a person." Allen blanched as I pointed it between his eyes. Just as Tomas had. "Right now, I'd scatter your brains across the field but leave your jaw still attached… You seen how a corpse looks with the top half of the head missing? I've seen plenty of torn-off jaws on walkers, but I've only seen the tops of heads blown off after seeing a shotgun in action." I lowered it so it aimed squarely at his nose. "Now you'd have no head at all. You'd just… Stop… Above the neck." I lowered it to his chest. "This would kill you instantly. All that metal slamming into your heart and lungs; you'd never know what killed you. But this…" I lowered it to his gut. "Stomach and liver… You'd live for a while. Long enough you'd be begging me to shoot you in the head. And here…" Finally, I pointed it at his groin. "You'd bleed out in about a minute. Relatively painless because of the shock." I didn't know much about medicine but I had an unfortunate knowledge of how to kill people. I raised it back to his chest. "So where do you want it?"

"It's not what you think." Tyreese said, staying very still.

"No? He called it 'Survival of the Fittest'." I couldn't help but smirk. "The guy who originally owned this thought like that. Now he's dead." A seven pound shotgun wasn't the best thing to hold on someone for an extended period of time. "So you want to kill a couple of kids and a pregnant woman." I had had my differences with Rick and Daryl and their willingness to kill threats to the group but here I was with a completely unambiguous threat. The two of them had even spelt out what they intended to do. "Do you know what's funny about that? Even if you did murder all of us, do you know what would happen to you when the others came back? You think you could fight them off?" I outright laughed in Allen's face. "If Carl's dad came back to find you'd killed his son, his wife and his unborn child... He'd cut you up into little pieces and feed you to your boy."

Sasha and Tyreese exchanged a look. They didn't think it was an idle threat. Neither did Allen.

"I think we can agree you're under a lot of strain right now." I said and still didn't lower the weapon. "But I know you weren't just talking. I know talk. There's two of you though… Two of you, eight of us and soon, eight more of us. Think about that. Think about it a bit more. And keep thinking about it. Ask yourself if you really want to have lived this long just to die here. In this place… And again, if you do anything stupid, it will not end well for you…" I let that sink in. "BANG!"

Allen went down, fully convinced he had been shot and Ben gaped in utter shock while Sasha and Tyreese took three full seconds to realise I hadn't emptied a shotgun into Allen. Andrea, Daryl or Rick wouldn't have fallen for it but these people were relatively fresh. Not yet desensitized to sudden shocks and loud noises.

"What are y'all doing?" Beth asked from behind me and I looked around to see she had brought them tools to dig with; a pick and a spade.

"Talking." I answered.

"Talking…" She took in Allen on the ground and then me with my shotgun. She got that Beth look. Much like Dale, she believed in the good in people and so she couldn't conceive of how a burial party might need to be threatened with a shotgun. "I brought you some tools…" She said lamely.

"It's much appreciated." Tyreese stepped forward to relieve her of them and he glanced at me just for a moment. A moment to note that I didn't react at all as he moved. Just as he and his sister had both noted I hadn't counted them when telling Allen about the odds he was facing.

"We'll… We'll take it from here." Sasha said and Beth looked at me but I gave her nothing. In all likelihood she decided to report to her father. I stepped back into the shadows and leaned against the wall once more. I stayed there as Allen slapped away the hand Tyreese offered to help him up and then he and Ben furiously picked up Donna. If they did end up staying, I had made two enemies for life. Now there was a crazy thought what with everything going on in the world.

Leaning against a wall was draining so I went and sat on the bleachers where I could watch Tyreese attack the earth with the pick while Allen made much less of an impression with the spade. They didn't know who the existing grave was for and I wondered if it would make a difference if they knew she was going to rest next to a headless convict. Further insult to Allen's pride.

Hershel came and sat next to me and I reflected on how the last time I had sat here, Sophia had kissed me. That felt like two different versions of us now.

"Beth told me a story." Hershel announced.

"A story you tell at the dinner table, or behind one hand?"

"A story without a beginning." He answered, and it was a very good answer.

"Allen and Ben would prefer not to leave."

"I guessed that. And Sasha and Tyreese?"

"They know how to be good guests." I said and Hershel read between the lines swiftly enough.

"You sure shotgun diplomacy was the best idea?"

"They don't have guns. The guns we have are big and scary." I chuckled. "Do you think they'll work out that with my hand I'd really have trouble making this thing work? It's not even loaded."

"You threatened a man with an empty gun?"

"Big one's empty. Little one isn't." Although in the time it would have taken me to drop the shotgun and for them to close on me, I doubted I could have drawn my new revolver. That was something I might want to consider practicing. "It's a lot of meaningless threats. They don't know me. They don't know I couldn't blast someone in cold blood. But I have my claw." I held up my hand. "And they've seen me spiking walkers so right now, I just look like a maniac. Until the others come back, you've got me being a maniac and Carl being a creepy kid to make them think twice about doing anything stupid. And they won't. Sasha and Tyreese-"

"Good people. They don't want to let go of what makes them good people."

"Better than us." I said, thinking of the laundry room and shuddering. "Do you think Rick will let them stay?"

"Depends. Depends what you say to him."

"I wasn't going to say anything." I pointed at Allen. "He's not in a good place right now. You can't judge a man at the worst point in his life. Ben too. He's worse actually, he's my age. We do stupid things without thinking even when our moms ain't dead." Not that I would have shed any tears for my mother.

"Twenty people would make this place much more liveable." Hershel mused. "Three more adults." This was his subtle way of criticising our present division. "Here comes trouble." He said.

I didn't know why but seeing Sophia glare with annoyance at the gate the quartet of newcomers had left open was very reassuring to me. She closed it behind her and chained it and then she came and sat on my other side.

"Bored?" I asked, meaning that she had abandoned keeping watch for the others.

"I saw you." She said. "I heard you." She gave me that hard stare of hers which was half genuinely intimidating because of the intentness of her hazel eyes and the shape of her eyebrows, and half ridiculous because her freckles were the opposite of intimidating.

"I was just being… Theatrical." I settled on this term and she narrowed her eyes further.

"And now you're keeping an eye on them."

"Me? I'm just enjoying the air and Mr Greene's company." I said.

"It's a fine day." Hershel declared and I wondered what his opinion was of my drama with Sophia, and the way she was sat close to me now.

She seemed oblivious of that proximity and the significance of this spot. But her mind was elsewhere as she turned that intent gaze on the four of them. She was young, I guessed. When you were young, you tended to focus on one thing at a time and lost sight of other details. And she was trying to keep one thing out of her mind so focusing on the situation of four strangers in our midst was a welcome distraction.

"Not such a fine day for what they have to do." Hershel continued, regarding the grave they were digging. "Or a fitting place."

"At least she gets a grave." I didn't even see the point estimating how many bodies we had burnt. Whatever figure I came to would be meaningless when the next round of cremation began.

"Time was we'd all be down there with them." Hershel mused but made no move to leave. He was right though. I had been present at the funeral for his family members even though he and his family had all been strangers to me. It had just been the decent thing to do. Now though, we left these people to themselves. Unless you wanted to claim our observation of them was a vigil.

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

The others returned late. They had had to take a wide detour after finding their original route blocked by walkers and Glenn considered the positive that by having to turn back and to circle around they had led them away from the prison. They were tired but satisfied with the results of their expedition. Meanwhile I thought that Allen was contemplating the very nasty fate I had spared him from by threatening him as he took in Daryl, Oscar, Rick and Theodore. Even Axel gave him pause and Axel was locked in contemplation of his exposure to the world as it was now; though perhaps to Allen's eyes this gave him a dark, brooding persona. Sasha and Tyreese meanwhile found Andrea, Glenn, Maggie, Oscar and Theodore reassuring. Oscar might have still been wearing his prison jumpsuit but he and Theodore were reassuring after meeting the all-white half of the group.

Rick was unimpressed to find four people had just wandered into his refuge. Even less impressed that there were walkers in the cell block cutting us off from the cafeteria and infirmary. And not happy at all that Carl and I were the ones to have brought them in. Lori was spectacularly unimpressed by Rick demanding to know why she hadn't stopped him and he had no response to her question of how she was meant to stop Carl doing anything in her condition. It severely undermined his authority to have this argument within earshot of the newcomers but that was his own damn fault. But at least he knew it.

Beth and Hershel told him nothing of my scene with them in the morning. Neither did I. Rick decided to sleep on it despite having given them barely a glance. The others however were more open. The new arrivals weren't convicts after all and didn't breed the same paranoia. Particularly when Glenn inquired and Tyreese revealed he had formerly been in the NFL while Sasha said she had been a firefighter. Theodore shared that he had played football in college which was the source of his nickname 'T-Dog' and he and Tyreese had a short but earnest conversation before becoming silent as they contemplated how the world of football was dead and gone. Glenn meanwhile enthused to Sasha about how Rick had been a cop and Andrea had been a lawyer so it was like we were collecting professions. He then sheepishly admitted he had delivered pizzas when Sasha inquired.

Andrea and Daryl were wary but in a protective way. Daryl didn't like Allen and Ben's silent brooding, ironically, though so far as he knew it was only because they had lost someone. If they had known about their wild plans to takeover, I doubted any of them would have been so welcoming. But it wasn't my place. If Hershel felt there was no need to mention I had had an altercation with them…

Oddly, I slept quite well. I thought Sasha and Tyreese were harmless unless threatened while Allen and Ben were depressed, desperate, but ultimately not a threat to the group. It was one thing to have wild ideas about killing children and old men and another to think of massacring a group of able-bodied adults, especially Daryl with his crossbow and knives and Rick with his machete.

In the morning, Rick told Tyreese to take a walk with him and it proved literal. I sat on the bleachers again as they began a circuit of the field. I had no way of knowing what they were talking about and it seemed like an oddly casual conversation. I assumed Rick wanted to get to know his man having not bothered the night before, and Tyreese could tell him what he had already told us about the state of things in the wider world. Every scrap of information was useful.

"You didn't tell him." Sophia accused before she had even sat down.

"I didn't need to." I enjoyed her accusation, and her follow up question.

"What did they do?" She had after all only watched from a distance, and heard me yell 'Bang'.

I explained it all to her, leaving nothing out and took a moment to muse once more that I never held anything back with her. I always told her the blunt and horrid truth. I never lied to her to make her feel safe.

"And you want them to stay?"

"I don't want anything." I said. "Sasha and Tyreese are okay. Allen… Our group had a discussion about whether to murder someone. We ain't so different. And if we punished everyone for every stupid idea they had, we'd have needed hundreds more prisons like this just in Georgia, let alone the rest of the country."

"So you trust them?"

"I don't trust anyone."

"Even me?"

"Especially you!" I said nastily and managed to raise a smile. Then I became serious. "We're still keeping an eye on Axel and Oscar. We're not going to relax around four more new people."

"So where will they sleep?" Sophia asked.

"Good question." I doubted they would be pleased to hear they had to live with the two convicts who were likewise still earning trust. The other cell block was not so nearly as comfortable as ours. "Not our problem though." And it seemed to me that Rick and Tyreese were having a disagreement because they had stopped pacing around the fence and were facing each other, their arms out at their sides. Perhaps Tyreese had warned him about Allen or maybe Rick had outlined conditions that Tyreese couldn't accept. Maybe they were just posturing the way that men did.

"We need more people. More people make us safer." Sophia said. "There's thousands of them out there." She meant walkers. "So we need more people."

"So wise." I remarked and she shoved me and she was surprised that she did. Then she realised where we were and she became contemplative. I let her think to get her head on straight while I had nothing new to say.

"I'm not sorry I kissed you." Sophia finally declared and it was not what I expected to hear right now. "I'm not." She said with even more determination. "I shouldn't have, but I'm happy I did."

"…What?" I found this hard to wrap my head around.

"It made me happy." She said. "I don't get to be happy." And this I could understand. "I won't do it again. Yet."

"You said that before." And I had been concerned then.

"We didn't finish that conversation."

"No…"

"You were going to say something."

I realised that she was finally moving on from shooting Andrew but she was doing so by revisiting where she had been before. She was right though that we hadn't finished that last conversation and I had to think carefully about it. Unsurprisingly, it was the memory of an axe coming at my head that I remembered more than anything else. She had asked if she made me nervous and then proclaimed she was willing to wait. And she had given me two figures; sixteen and eighteen.

She was in that stance of trying to look older than she was which only emphasised the awkward stage of life she was in. Carl still looked like a child in virtually every way but Sophia had grown over the winter so that she had a teenager's legs but still a child's face. I knew this was normal for girls while my own awkward phase had come at a later age.

"I was going to say that when you're sixteen, or eighteen; it'll still be weird. …Inappropriate."

"Why?"

"You said it. When you're sixteen, I'll be twenty-one. I might actually look like an adult then while you… Won't. And eighteen's no different. I'll look even older and you'll look, and be, a teenager."

"Does it matter now?" She asked. "Everyone's dead."

"It matters to a lot of people. Like your mother." Carol was more than tolerant simply allowing Sophia to continue to be around me at all. That she permitted her to be alone with me always felt very strange.

"Does it matter to you though?"

"Yes." I said quite brutally.

I thought this might upset her but she had that look again. That look that I was fighting against a rising tide. "Maybe you'll change your mind when I'm older."

This was an unpleasant thing to hear and tempered only by the fact I knew about her sordid experiences with her father. By her experiences, if a vile man like her dad would go after her as a child then why would I be any better behaved when she was an older teenager? It wasn't as if the whole world before hadn't prepped her to accept older men with younger women. That was why she was asking if it mattered now if it was adjusted down so that it was a younger man with a teenage girl.

I felt that nasty feeling of being unclean yet again.

"I'm eighteen now." I heard myself saying and it surprised her to learn I had had a birthday I had ignored. "And you're the only person to ever kiss me." She tried to hide her emotions but first she was pleased and then she felt guilty. Of course she felt guilty; that was who she was. She might have decided that kissing me was a happy memory she could cling to but she was too selfless not to care about the discomfort it had caused me. "I really don't want to be scared of you turning sixteen or eighteen thinking you might…" I cast around for the right phrase and couldn't find one. "Jump me."

"I'd warn you next time."

"How sporting." I heard myself say, imagining being literally chased by her. "I think they're making friends." I remarked of Rick and Tyreese who were clasping forearms. That was good, although I would have loved to have known what they had talked about. It wasn't for me to know though. Rick was the leader and I wasn't part of the inner circle.

"Good." She said. "Are we okay?"

"Depends."

"On what?"

"Your intentions." I replied and felt utterly ridiculous.

"I don't have any intentions. Yet."

"Stop saying 'Yet'!" I hissed and she grinned before outright laughing and after everything she had been through it was nice to hear her laugh again. "You're just bullying me, aren't you?"

"Maybe." She said and then became serious again. "It made me happy." She repeated. "But I promised my mom so you don't have to worry." She smirked. "For three years anyway."

"That's not funny." I told her but I knew she was going to repeat this joke to me. A lot. And leaving me wondering whether she was serious or not was the part she would enjoy most about it. "I need a vacation." I sighed and she patted me on the back with faux sympathy. Maybe the next group of people to stumble on this place would include some cute thirteen year old boys and she would forget about me. It was very odd thing to hope for.

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

Theodore and Tyreese made an excellent bulwark. Each clasping a riot shield, they were able to block the corridor against even a pack of walkers which the others could dispatch over their heads. This time around I played no active part; I stood back and held a flashlight just as I had said I would the first time. But now there were more of us. More adults who could fight.

The others had taken to calling these dark spaces 'The Tombs'. It felt wholly unnecessary and only added another layer of grimness to the task of clearing the building once more. It was brutal but systematic work and Sasha and Tyreese were plainly unnerved by the way we went at it. As for Allen, at this point he was either wetting himself with fear that I might divulge his wild plans to take over or was in complete denial he had ever voiced those dark ideas. Seeing the way our group cut through walkers like a well-trodden chore rather than a dangerous mission was disturbing to a group that had shied away from fighting unless necessary. So had we once. But we had honed our skills during the winter and perfected them here as we battled the walkers again and again for control.

And it was all about control. Corralling the walkers into tight spaces where their numbers couldn't tell, forcing them to come at us through doorways one at a time to an impenetrable barrier of shields and ensuring that every angle was covered so no one could be blindsided. Walkers had no organisation and if they could be directed; their numbers meant nothing.

The extermination of the walkers in the cell block and then the other rooms progressed without incident, unless you counted Allen, Sasha and Tyreese seeing the supplies still piled in the cafeteria where the convicts had lived and being awed by them. Enough food to feed an army, and there was more than one cafeteria. After watching their group dwindle almost to nothing and almost being wiped out here; the promise of regular meals was powerful. Almost overwhelming.

Securing the structure was a little harder as Tyreese's group had broken down the door which would have to either be repaired or barricaded. There was no way to do that though without facing all the walkers outside but Rick was willing to sacrifice some meaningless space. We backtracked to the next interior gate and locked it. They could get in but not get far. We split into smaller groups and quadruple checked that each zone was secure. With the abundance of key sets we had recovered, Rick decided to lock every gate to ensure containment in the future. If someone else wandered in, they wouldn't make any progress in this block. Not without a blowtorch.

"When we started we were able to lock the gates outside in the courtyards." Rick explained at dinner. "Keep the walkers separate and face them a group at a time. Now they're all wide open." He went on to tell Andrew's story, but left out key details. He made it sound like I had killed Andrew and if the newcomers had thought I was psychotic before, hearing that I had been stabbed by a murderous convict who was now dead while I was still alive painted me in an even darker light. I didn't care. I was happy for them to think I had killed him rather than they learn he had died by Sophia's hand. "We'll take it back though." Rick continued. "Piece by piece. For the moment, the cell blocks we have already have all we need."

"Taking the workshop would be useful." Oscar said. "But we brought back enough from the outside." Meaning their expedition. "There ain't anything useful in the administration block neither."

As they had come through that way, Tyreese's group were happy to hear they wouldn't have to go back through it. On the other hand, they would have to play a part in cleaning up what we had just cleared. "So this is why you need extra hands." Tyreese said to Rick.

"We made a start on crops." Rick said. "It's just a garden for now but it's a start. The real hard work is taking on the walkers. They come at the fences by the field every day. They're inside the prison. It takes time to take them down, move the bodies and burn them. Time we need to do other things. More important things. Every set of hands makes those things easier."

It wasn't a one eighty on his policy of mistrusting outsiders. More like an acknowledgement of reality and pragmatic acceptance that a small group simply couldn't survive the walker threat. It was plain that the original Atlanta and farm group were the people he trusted and relied on and they would be for a long time. But already Axel and Oscar felt less like outsiders now that there were more new faces around.

They were quite accepting about sharing the other block with Axel and Oscar and I knew why. They were there until they built up trust and they knew one word from me could see them out on their asses. I didn't know how Axel and Oscar felt about that place as C Block was becoming more homely all the time. Everyone ate there at least so there was that.

Breakfast in the morning felt odd though. When we had come here, there had been fourteen of us, half-starved and exhausted and less than half of us had been capable fighters. Now there were twenty and we were well-fed and while the new additions to the group lacked our experience of fighting walkers; their experience would grow every day and that the meant the majority could now fight. When there had been fourteen of us with four of us teens and children, the group had felt much smaller. Now it was almost as if there were a crowd.

That suited me fine. More hands to move bodies and make swifter work of the horrible job. There were a dozen of us who could do the job and only six dozen walkers from the once again clear block to remove. And just for once, I didn't get the job of tending the pyre. Although after moving a couple of particularly heavy walkers I thought that maybe cremation wasn't such a bad task after all.

It suited me as well to have more people around because it was second nature to me to meld into the background and that wasn't something you could do with a small group. The growing number of adults let me be ignored and I preferred that. Maybe it was completely stupid to think that way now but it made me comfortable.

Moving the bodies only took the morning though the fire would have to burn most of the day. That left the rest of the day for other projects. Sasha and Tyreese took special interest in the planters we had built and the water barrels collecting from the gutters of the roofs. It was the beginnings of sustainability. Of the transformation of this place from merely a collection of fences and doors that shielded us from the dead into something that could actually keep us alive indefinitely.

Hershel explained in frighteningly deep detail how the field could be transformed into farmland. Frightening because he could lay out what needed to be done every month of the year, from what needed to be planted to harvested to simply spending the time making compost and mulch I chose not to ask what the difference was. I had thought the hard work of farming was planting and harvesting and the time in between was spent sitting and relaxing while you waited for things to grow. As it turned out, there was work that could be done almost every day. A few weeks from now in June was the best time to plant sweet potatoes he explained, along with peas, and July was when you planted your pumpkins; so they would be ready for Halloween he added with a twinkle.

What I took away was that the delay caused by our lack of resources and Andrew's flooding of the prison with walkers meant that we had missed the window of opportunity for a summer harvest besides what we had in the planters. We weren't going to run out of food with the stockpiles available to us but as Rick was more than a little obsessed with making the prison a self-sufficient fortress, we were likely to feel his temper from simple frustration at some point.

Hershel however sold it to them. We might have been a long way from self-sufficiency but the prospect of fresh tomatoes from the planters was enticing if not exciting. Especially when Daryl came out of the woods with a deer.

I couldn't say I had been to many barbecues while the others had but not to one featuring a whole roast deer. For the newcomers as well as Axel and Oscar, it was hard to believe. It was hard for me to believe and I had eaten what Daryl's crossbow had provided all winter. And the prison buildings might have been grim but in the firelight from the makeshift barbecue and with everyone sat around it; it could actually be called pleasant.

I listened in to the conversations. For my people it was talk about how we were settling in and making the place our own. Axel and Oscar had similar talk about how a prison felt less like one every day. For Tyreese's people, it was the security of this place. The two fences separating the outside from the field and the fence splitting the field from the yard made walkers a non-threat even if we weren't in the confines of the cell blocks with their steel doors.

I ate my piece of venison and wondered why I felt tense. I did not wish to be the Eeyore of the group but something bothered me. It took a while but I realised it was because back on the Greene farm I had enjoyed good food and comfort and then it had all come crashing down. I had enjoyed good food and comfort here and then Andrew had stabbed me and Sophia had been forced to kill him.

Eeyore really was the right name for me. But at the same time, the pattern was definitely there.

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

Three days later the woman appeared at the fence.

I had volunteered to clear the fences because today I needed the outlet. That feeling of doing something to make us all safer and every walker down did make us safer; if only minutely in the grand scheme of things. It might have been grim, horrible work but through the winter I had found that from time to time it was gratifying business. So I was at the fence clearing the latest build up when Andrea found that one of the walkers she faced was actually a live woman.

Although with the state she was in, the walkers didn't notice that fact. What I noticed was that she had a sword. All I knew about swords was that the one she carried was Japanese style. I was used to Daryl with his crossbow but a sword? I couldn't see a pistol anywhere on her but if looks could have killed; her wild eyes were all she needed.

Our attention made the walkers become aware of her. Slowly though, like those mindless creatures had trouble recognising her as one of the living. She had no such trouble recognising the danger and whipped the sword out the scabbard and took the head off the nearest walker so fast that I was the one who had trouble believing what I had seen. The incredible act though drained half the life out of her and when she lunged to stab another walker in the head, the sword sank through its skull and she collapsed on top of it.

So she had crazy eyes, a sword and enough gunk in her hair to make her dreads look like snakes. No matter how unfriendly that made her look, the other clearers weren't about to let her get torn to pieces. They had the gate open in moments and Andrea cut down two walkers before Maggie could follow. No one even considered going for their guns and instead used their other weapons so that the walkers went down fast and quiet. Much faster than stabbing them through the fences.

It felt very different being on this side of the fence.

They were coming from the trees and from along the rest of the fence and Theodore picked the woman up like she was a doll and she was out. Clean out. Sasha retrieved the sword and held it like a viper. It didn't seem to me to be a very practical weapon which meant if the woman had survived this long with it then she knew how to use it. Properly use it.

We retreated back through the gate and once again I was in the Sterile Zone and when the gate was rammed shut, we were safe again.

"Is she bit?" Andrea stood by as Theodore checked over the now firmly unconscious woman.

"No." Theodore said, checking her arms and legs and even lifting her shirt. She had a leather vest that I found interesting. With matching leather fingerless gloves. It was quite an outfit. "No bites. She been shot though. Near miss."

"Looks like it hit to me."

"Just a graze. Nasty one though." Theodore gazed down at her for a moment. "Hell, she tough as nails to walk on it. And she must have come far." He picked her up again. "Shit."

I went with them for two reasons. The first was that I was fascinated by this stranger and the second was that I was pretty sure I had more experience with feral people than any of them did.

There was a brief argument about whether to put her in a cell or take her to the infirmary. Hershel put his foot down but tempered it by saying she was clearly in no state to be a danger and would be out for hours at least. Rick accepted this to a degree, and joined the party. That made six of us going to the infirmary with the woman who proved Hershel was wrong by coming to. A brief fight ensued and Rick took a fist to the face in the process. She was evidently in incredible shape because Theodore struggled to control her and if she hadn't lost so much blood, it would have taken a lot more to contain her.

In the end she silently consented to Hershel cleaning and stitching her wound. I was pretty sure he need not have bothered with the local anaesthetic before stitching because she looked like she could have powered through the pain of sutures with no trouble. She glared at everyone watching her as Hershel worked and finally settled on me. Large, dark angry eyes and they had no effect on me which intrigued her though I only knew that by the slight tightening of those eyes. Her attention on me made Rick realise I was there.

"The hell are you doing here?" He asked.

"How many people you dealt with like this?" I replied. "I know that look. That look means you're only alive because you've slept with one eye open because danger was all around and that danger's been there for so long that when you were actually safe… You didn't sleep at all." I gave this description and her eyes tightened some more to prove I was right. "You couldn't sleep because you knew safety… Just a lie. An illusion."

"What are you talking about?" Sasha was giving me a wild look of her own.

"Life on the streets. Desperate people. Dangerous people. But only if you didn't keep your hands where people could see them." It was a subtle warning to the others not to make any sudden moves that would trigger her. I also hoped Sasha kept well back with that sword because if the woman got hold of it, I guessed she would cut us to pieces in a heartbeat. If she had the strength for it which seemed… It was hard to tell. With how she had been down at the gate, the local anaesthetic in her system should have been enough to put her out again.

"Thank you." She said quite unexpectedly to Hershel. Politely too. I would have expected a sarcastic tone but besides sounding a bit scratchy, she could have been receiving her drink at the counter.

"You mind telling us how you got shot?" Rick inquired and she turned her eyes on him. She didn't reply. "If there's people out there shooting at other people, and nearby, there's precautions I need to take. And if they followed you-"

"They didn't follow me." She said and she had a particular way of speaking. A certainty of conviction.

"Why?"

"Because I killed most of them. And the two that were left… They were in no state to follow me. Walkers probably got 'em."

"And if walkers didn't?" Rick asked. "Do I have a problem?"

"With who?" She replied with a scowl that seemed more appropriate on Carl, Sophia or even my own face than an adult's.

"Look, if you want we'll let you stay 'till that mends then give you a bit of food and some water and send you on your way. But just tell us how you found us."

She stared at him balefully and then she smiled and I was the only one who didn't react fearfully to it. "I saw a tower through the trees." Her tone was sickly sweet and intended solely to piss Rick off. The smile vanished as she turned on me because she was fully aware I hadn't responded to her expression. She didn't like how I was reading her like a book. It was a book I knew well though, except carrying a great big sword was a detail that hadn't been included in it before.

"If you want I can take a look at some of your other injuries." Hershel said to ease the tension. "You've been through the mill. I wouldn't want to see the other guys. Any of them."

She looked at Hershel and like me she seemed to regard him as looking like Santa. No matter how suspicious and paranoid you were; you couldn't mistrust Santa. She gave him a nod.

"Keep an eye on things." Rick told Andrea, Sasha and Theodore. And then to reassert his authority, he dragged me out by the ear. I let him for the reason that the theatrics did serve a purpose. We didn't go far before the interrogation began and he didn't mince words. "Spill."

"She's been alone for a long time. She doesn't trust you or anyone and she's only letting Hershel touch her because he's helping her. You lay a finger on her and she'll bite it off."

"And?"

"She's telling the truth. Not all of it but whoever attacked her isn't an immediate threat. If they were, she'd tell you so you could take them out for her. Her kind don't leave dangling threats."

"Her 'kind'?" Rick asked, tilting his head the way he did.

"Survivors." That was these people had been back then and only more so now.

"She didn't have any supplies on her."

"She did. Probably lost them in the fight or dropped them so she could get away on that leg."

"And she just happened to find us?"

"They did." I said, meaning Allen, Ben, Sasha and Tyreese. "And you just stumbled on this place too."

He stared evenly at me and he seemed to deem I had a point. In three months, two groups of people and now one individual had found this place by chance; our original group of fourteen, Tyreese's five and now this woman. Perhaps there were more people out there than we had imagined during our long winter isolation. Or perhaps this place wasn't so far off the beaten track as it seemed. He let me leave.

I went and sat on the bleachers and stared at the exercise bench at the other end of the basketball court. The dumbbells were rusty and the padding had split from the sun and gone mouldy from the rain. I imagined if Tyreese sat on it the whole thing would collapse. If Beth sat on it there was probably a high chance it would collapse. The prison staff must have covered it with a tarp at night and brought in indoors during the winter.

"What are you staring at?"

"Nothing." I replied, thinking Sophia had either crept up on me or I was really far too engrossed in the symbolism of a rusty exercise bench.

"Who's the lady?"

"No idea." I said.

"No one asked?"

"She's not a talker."

"She has a sword."

"Yes, she does." I said and Sophia sat beside me. Despite the history of the spot, I was far more comfortable to sit and talk with her here than have her visit me in my cell. People could see us here.

"What kind of person has a sword?"

"What kind of person has lockpicks in their sock?" I replied.

"You still carry those?"

"Always have. Always will." Or at least until there were no more functioning locks left in the world. Looking at the weight bench… "How's the garden?"

"Growing." She replied and her answer made me think she was mimicking me to mock me but then I saw her dark expression.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine."

"So, no?"

"I'm…" She breathed in and then sighed heavily. "It's just a bad day."

"They happen."

"I know."

"Lady with the sword has a bullet wound." I remarked. "Could be trouble."

"Trouble?"

"She said no one's after her." I didn't lie to her but I didn't need to outright repeat what had been said and what I had heard. "But you never know."

"Do you want me to stay inside?"

"I want you to…" I thought about it. "Just stay alert."

"I'm always alert. I'm alert all the time. I'm alert right now." With her bad day, Sophia more than delivered the paranoia she had felt ever since shooting Andrew. She might have been better than she had been but that wasn't going away. It was useful in many ways given the condition of the world but not a state any sane person could be happy she was in. It was that state of paranoia that meant that Tyreese's group were visibly getting less sleep while those who had been settled in the safety of the secure cell blocks were generally well-rested.

The question for me was what I could actually do even if I was alert. When I had heard gunshots in my old life, I had headed in the opposite direction. If we were attacked here, there was nowhere to run. Except indoors. I had my little gun but unless whoever was attacking was dumb enough to run out in the open, I had no hope of hitting them. And if someone attacked, they wouldn't do it with pistols. I had seen for myself how the military had been devastated so their weapons had been up for grabs for months.

"There's twenty-one people here today." Sophia mused. "There were seventeen of us at the farm."

"Yeah." And after Jimmy, Patricia and Shane had been killed, there had been fourteen. Four people had died here since we had arrived although Big Tiny and Donna were the only ones deserving of sympathy. Andrew and Tomas… Big Tiny had been doomed the moment that walker had gotten him though Tomas had still been the one to kill him. Donna had entered this place with a bite. Two to the walkers and two to people. I looked at Sophia and wondered at the difference between her and Rick. I didn't think Rick had lost a night of sleep killing Tomas while Sophia was haunted by Andrew. At least I knew that Rick was still bothered by Shane but the man had been his best friend.

"What do you mean 'Yeah'?" She asked.

"Nothing."

She stared at me and then also looked at the decaying weight bench. "How many people were there at Atlanta?"

"I don't know… Forty maybe." And only fourteen had survived. Fourteen that had included a bitten Jim with not long to live, a still shell-shocked me and a suicidal Andrea and Jacqui. If Andrea had accepted Dale's choosing to die with her, we would have lost three people there instead of one. And only ten people would have been there to break down on the highway. I tried to imagine how things might have been had Andrea and Dale not been around. With both Jim and Dale gone, would there have been anyone left who could fix the RV? No Dale meant no one for Glenn to talk to. No Andrea meant Shane would have had no allies at the farm but no Dale would have meant one less opponent for him. It was fascinating to consider the outcomes of one person being around, or not being around.

"More people is good." Sophia said, recalling our previous conversation on the matter.

"I always avoided people."

"How'd that work out for you?" She asked with a wonderful edge of teenage sarcasm and sass.

"Here I am."

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

Scary lady crashed out and Andrea elected to keep watch on her. One person in a locked room. Some people thought there should have been more.

"You make her feel trapped, she'll lash out." I warned.

"Lash out?"

"If she's only staying the night, she's in a safe, open space and the doors are locked for walkers; not her. Nothing to make her feel… Penned in. If she stays longer, let her move around like the rest of us so the only restraint is the fences."

"Why?" Glenn asked.

"Because if she thinks we're keeping her prisoner… How's your face?" I asked Rick and the bruise where she had punched him had turned purple. "If she feels trapped, you won't get anything out of her."

"How about we just give her this back?" Sasha still had the sword. It had been passed around and Axel had cut himself testing the edge. If she kept sharpening it like that, there wouldn't be anything left in a year or so.

"I would." I shrugged. "Let her carry it around. We're all armed so it doesn't make any difference."

"It's a sword!" Glenn protested. "And it's seriously badass!"

"You want it?" Maggie asked him.

"Well, yeah!" He said and then sighed. "But I can't. I can't be the Asian dude with the katana." He looked forlorn. "It was bad enough people thinking I was Chinese without them thinking I'm Japanese." He declared and Maggie grinned at him.

"Bas, you want this woman who was shot and who walked through a bunch of walkers unseen because of how messed up she was… To just walk around freely?" Sasha inquired incredulously. "With a sword?"

"If she feels threatened, she's a danger. If she knows she's free to go anytime like Rick said, she's harmless."

"Based on what?"

"I know." I said and it was a lame answer but there was no adequate way to describe the years of experience I had with feral people. I just knew they were no different to animals and you had to build trust which was what Hershel had done treating her and Rick by saying she could leave when she pleased.

"Trust him." Sophia spoke up for me and Sasha and Tyreese stared at her while the others stifled smiles.

"The alternative is you throw her in a cell and make an enemy for life." It wiped away their smiles. "It's one or the other. And if she sees all of us, she's got no reason to fear us." I dropped my voice. "Except Lori. She's mean now." I was pretty sure she was asleep but there was no way of knowing for sure and everyone nodded grimly, even Allen and Ben. She was done with being pregnant and the relative comfort of the prison meant she wasn't afraid to express it. It brought the smiles back.

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

Sword lady ate in an odd way. First she was cautious, then she was ravenous and then something clicked and she ate in that civilised way I had never learned. People tried not to look at her but that was difficult. It was as if every aspect of her appearance had been cultivated to make her look interesting. Hair, eyes, muscles, clothes… She had style. Carl in his dad's hat and Daryl in his biker gear was the best we could do for style. Not unless you were a fan of Axel's facial hair and I wondered if styling his beard had become an actual hobby of his.

Sasha returned her sword and I thought it was a fortunate touch for a black woman to return it. I had a nagging suspicion that her hostility toward Rick was because he was a white man. A white man who stood like a cop even when he wasn't dressed like one. Shane had been the same way. It gave off an arrogance he didn't intend and it made the scary lady's hackles rise.

She limped around, didn't talk to anyone and gave everything furtive glances. Sizing up the place. Sizing up us. I didn't find this suspicious because obviously, I knew all about scoping out a place. She wasn't looking for valuables or assessing threats. She was assessing us. The kind of people we were. I wondered who she had dealt with in the past to make her so suspicious. We had encountered Jenner but ultimately he had proven reasonable, even in the depths of insane despair. Speculating was a waste of time though as there were a thousand stories that might fit her.

She chose to hole up in the overturned prison bus by the gate. That didn't bother anyone beyond wondering what kind of person preferred a bus to a cell. I knew what it was like going from sleeping on the ground to a bed so I understood that discomfort but what she was really after was her own space.

No one tried to talk to her. Her eyes discouraged conversation and she didn't speak to anyone besides Hershel when he inquired about her health. It was an odd way to live but it seemed they had taken my advice not to crowd her to heart. Perhaps if Rick hadn't been distracted he would have been less patient. But Lori was a big distraction. As the days rolled into June, that baby was coming at any minute. The prison infirmary obviously wasn't equipped for babies but Hershel could make do and they had retrieved baby things in anticipation.

With a baby around, Rick really would be distracted.

Beth and Sophia were excited for June. We would clear some land in the field and plant those peas and sweet potatoes. I looked at the length of the grass in the yard and knew that clearing even a small stretch by hand would be tough but it was something to do. Real work. Productive work. I was up for it. So were Theodore and Tyreese and Allen and Ben. Allen and Ben had been keeping their distance from me and perhaps they thought they had been too obvious about it so that was why they were volunteering for this.

"I've never used a scythe before." Ben remarked.

"Andrea has." I said, remembering that day on the farm. The aftermath of the barn. Her swinging that scythe was one of those memories from that hazy time of blood loss and dehydration that was quite firm in my mind.

"Really?" Tyreese was confused. "I thought she was a lawyer."

I didn't explain. It would open old wounds. I listened to the other chatter as we filed out of the cell block and started to cross the basketball court. Another happy day in jail.

"Great." Theodore said, looking up at the sun in the clear sky. "Just what we need for this work." He looked over us and besides Tyreese, he was not impressed with the work party intending to cut the grass. "This gonna be a long day." He declared. "But if it means a sweet potato pie-"

The hot goo that hit me was unfamiliar because I was used to the cold black gunk that came out of walkers. The sound of gunfire however had been known to me before all of this and I grabbed Beth and Sophia and dragged them both to the ground with me as Theodore toppled like a tree trunk and hit the ground in front of us with a smack like meat being tenderised.

Beth yelped as Theodore erupted in little gouts of blood as more bullets struck him but the sound I focused on was what was firing those bullets. Automatic rifles. Weapons made exclusively for the purpose of efficiently killing people. More rounds hit Theodore and the bleachers and the concrete and the wall of the cell block.

I fumbled out my weapon but I couldn't even see from where we were being shot at. I could only hear them shooting and see where their rounds were going and using Theodore as a bulwark, I saw nothing. Just the fences and the trees beyond them. I heard a clang and looked up to see the weight bench had took a hit; a bright silver mark left on the rusty dumbbell.

I flinched as a gun sounded beside my ear and looked into a steely face that emptied her pistol into the treeline. A steely face with freckles. The response to her shots however splattered that face the same as mine and she turned and clung to me, shaking like a leaf.

She shook even more as more guns fired behind us. Automatics of our own. The yard was an open space made deliberately to give the inmates nowhere to hide but the yard lay above the field and the mesh distorted the view both ways so most of the incoming fire was going high to strike the cell block while I had no idea where the return fire was going. I didn't even know who was shooting at us. I could see nothing.

It was Glenn, Maggie and Rick shooting back. Andrea too but she had the hunting rifle she had carried ever since the farm. Otis' rifle. The bullets went for them now but none seemed to find them, only the concrete of the yard or the bricks of the cell blocks. The buildings magnified the sound of their shots so that my already ringing ears were thundering while Sophia jerked with every snap and crack.

Somehow, they made it to the fence and lying prone they had to be able to see who they were shooting at. It might have been a chance to flee and Tyreese took it, picking himself up and running back to the cell block and someone chose him for a target because the rounds cracked into the wall around him before he disappeared through the door.

Theodore was dead. Myself, Beth and Sophia were pinned down. Looking around I saw Allen and Ben on the ground, hugging the concrete. The quartet of shooters were spread along the fence and Daryl came out with Sasha and they went in the opposite direction to the others; splitting the attackers whoever they were.

They did a lot of shooting. We didn't have the ammunition for that, especially not for rifles, and it showed as my people fired in careful bursts. They could see who was shooting at us at least.

Beth made to slip away but I held her down. Now that we were shooting back, I knew any clear movement up here would provoke a fusillade of shots. It would be instinctual. There was a pause, a lull in the shooting, and then a single shot from Andrea that provoked another storm and I felt something hit my foot. I looked down to see a spent round.

Theodore started to move.

I thought it was more rounds hitting him but then he started to rock as his limbs twitched as he began to awaken and I had seen those jerky movements before. I heard Jenner's voice in my head as he spoke of varying resurrection times, 'in as little as three minutes', and then I shot Theodore in his head.

My first kill with a firearm. One of our own.

(20,023)

Author's Notes:

Sophia was killed off on the show because Madison Lintz had a growth spurt after Season 1. Chandler Riggs didn't. He wouldn't hit puberty until after they filmed Season 3 and the contrast between him in 3 and 4 is striking. As Season 1 and 2 follow each other with days between them and Season 2 takes place over a matter of weeks, Lintz's growth caused 'continuity issues' especially when compared to Riggs who still very much looked like a boy. It's the problem with child actors. It's obvious in the Season 2 premiere when Rick picks up Sophia and you can see how tall she is and how awkward it is for him to carry her. When Walker-Sophia emerges from the barn, she looks very much like a teenager than a child. So the references I've made to Sophia growing over the winter is an allusion to that.

It's challenging to write a story set in an existing world where the protagonists are too young to direct events. Bas would be a supporting character in the show, like Beth in Season 3. But this is from his perspective, so he doesn't get taken out on runs and he isn't involved in planning like the inner circle are. It's a lower decks kind of story.

Writing Sophia is difficult. Trying to balance her age, her temperament and her trauma. I've been writing since I was twelve so that helps; I can find young voices. I didn't want her to just 'get over' shooting Andrew and certainly not to lose her crush on Bas in the process. Too convenient. There's different layers to her. There's the part of her that canon Carol recalls 'didn't have a mean bone in her body', the part that suffered from her father, the part experiencing the apocalypse and the part of her trying to live her life with all of this. One day she can be cheerful and the next, completely crushed by her experiences. It's not fun to write a character being depressed and suffering all the time so she has to have the ups with the downs. I hope her variations come across as emotional instability during this episode her life rather than inconsistent writing.

Tyreese's group comes to the prison a few weeks early and Carl isn't alone in helping them this time around. I'm often disparaging of Carl as his bratty behaviour in Seasons 2 and 3 irks me, so it was good to write a sequence where Bas and Carl work together. Bas intervening in Allen's plotting to take over may seem Mary Sue-ish but I thought it fit his nature to watch them. And I had already written his intervention with a shotgun with Tomas so it was established behaviour. I don't think of Allen and Ben's plotting as overly villainous; Donna's death has messed them up. They're not in a good place and not thinking clearly. In the show, Tyreese points out they'd have to kill a baby. Here, it would be a pregnant Lori. I don't think they could have done either.

Michonne… Suffice to say Woodbury has entered the narrative and this time the prison doesn't have a friend in the enemy camp.