"We're not supposed to be doing this!" I hiss at Izzy as she yanks on the chain that holds the gate closed. "Remember the rule Samantha told us about trying to help survivors on our own?!"

"Rules are made to be broken, Wynne," she grunts, "Help me with this damned chain!"

I don't get a chance to, because Rogan comes up and tugs the chain off almost immediately. As he drags the gate open, Izzy mutters, "I loosened it up for you."

She runs through the gate. I glance at Rogan as I hurry after her. He seems unnerved, panicked.

Izzy is sprinting through the snow ahead of me. The runners are dangerously close to the person who was hiding in the trees. The slow ones are approaching at an alarming rapidity.

This person can't seem to run properly, like they have a bad leg or something. The second they start to put some distance between themselves and the runners, they trip and go crashing face-first into the snow with a yelp.

Rogan tears past me. Izzy collides with a runner and stabs it in the forehead with her knife. She leaves that one lying in the snow and moves on to another. Rogan sends a knife flying through the air into a dead thing's eye socket. I pull out my Glock 26 and aim, managing to take down a couple of the runners.

Izzy attacks a slow one that is approaching. Rogan throws another knife. I keep shooting. The person on the ground pushes up onto all fours.

I know Izzy and Rogan will take care of the dead things, so after emptying my mag into as many undead brains as I can, I rush over to the figure struggling to lift themselves to their feet.

I grab hold of their coat and pull up. A pair of bright blue eyes, wide with terror, lock on mine, a pale face framed by a dark hood, full-lipped mouth slightly open.

I urge her forward, back toward the gate. "Go, go!"

A rotted hand clamps down on my shoulder as she flees, I pull my knife from my waistband, twist around and jam the blade deep into the disgusting thing's forehead.

"Back inside, Wynne! Hurry!" Izzy shouts; I see her running after the girl.

I look around and spot Rogan slugging a dead thing in the head with the butt of his rifle. He'll be fine, I tell myself, though the number of dead things seems to have doubled. I race after Izzy, join her on the safe side of the gate.

The girl with the bright blue eyes is on her knees, rocking slightly.

Rogan comes flying through the gate a minute later, and he and Izzy – surprisingly – work together to get the thing closed again. His hands shake as he refastens the chain.

I crouch down beside the girl. "Are you okay?"

She doesn't answer, just covers her face with her hands. Sometime during the fight, dawn hit. Despite the clouds, it's quite bright out now.

I hear a shout from down the road a ways and turn toward it.

"Oh shit, here comes the warden," Izzy mutters as Samantha practically stampedes toward us.

I stand up and move to Izzy's side as she watches Samantha nearing us. "She's pissed."

"Definitely," I say. "But if we'd waited for her, or anyone else, that girl'd be dead."

"Mm-hmm."

I hear the crunch of snow under boots and turn around. Rogan is standing about five feet away from the girl, his scarf pulled down off his face, his eyes wide. With a shaky breath he whispers, "Mara?"

She gradually pulls the hood of her coat back, revealing a ratted mess of blonde hair. Her blue eyes fix on him, she slowly rises to her feet, her pale face etched with surprise and...disbelief?

"Rogan?" She utters, quietly the first time, "Rogan! Oh my god!" She's sobbing as she trips toward him, leaping onto him, wrapping her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist. "I thought you were dead!" Her sobs are muffled as she buries her head in his shoulder.

"I thought you were," his voice is muffled by her shoulder as he brings his arms around her, one hand grasping the back of her coat tightly, the other pressed to the back of her head.

Apparently they know each other. That explains Rogan's franticness.

At the sound of it, Izzy turns around. We exchange a glance, and I just shrug.

"What the hell were you thinking?!" Samantha thunders, causing me to jump. I turn around and she's barreling toward us, her eyes flashing, arms in the air. "You could have been killed!"

"Well, she would've been killed if we hadn't gone after her," Izzy says, crossing her arms.

Samantha looks past us at Rogan and Mara clinging to each other for dear life, and her expression softens ever-so-slightly. But when she focuses back on us, she's glaring again.

"There were three of you. How hard would it have been to spare one to alert someone of what was going on? I thought we'd been infiltrated!" She barks, waving her arms around angrily.

"Well, there were a ton of zombies, and we couldn't spare anybody," Izzy sneers, "So."

Samantha presses her lips into a tight line. "You're shift's over, anyway. Go home."

Izzy flashes a very fake smile and says sarcastically, "Thank you."

"But if you do something like this again, Ellie's gonna want to talk to you," Samantha says as she starts toward the ladder. She hoists herself up and walks out of earshot down the wall.

Pirate, who has been sitting on the far side of the gate, goes trotting up to Rogan and Mara. He sniffs her pants leg, and Rogan lowers her back to the ground. A smile creases her tear-stained cheeks as she crouches down, and she exclaims, "Pirate!" before wrapping her arms around his neck and burying her face in his brown fur.

Rogan, his eyes filled with a light I've never seen before, keeps his hand on her back as she greets Pirate, whose tail is wagging with enough force to make the snow falling around it blow off in different directions.

Izzy taps me on the shoulder. "Come on, let's go. I feel like we're intruding."

"Yeah," I say absently, casting one last glance at the happy trio before following Izzy back toward Alicia's house.

+++++

Izzy says she's sleeping on the couch, whether it folds out into a bed or not. And if it doesn't, I can just suck it, because she'll already be asleep by the time I'm finished visiting Seth and Doyle. And also, she's got dibs on telling Seth about Mara.

We walk up the stairs together, and enter Seth's room. Fortunately, he's awake.

"Hey," he says, his voice hoarse.

"Hi," Izzy says briskly, flopping onto the end of his bed, "I have stuff to tell you. Like, exciting stuff."

"Oh, really?" He asks, shifting into a half-sitting position.

"Yeah," she says, "So Wynne, make it snappy."

"Okay," I laugh. "I just came to see how you were feeling, Seth."

"I'm all right. I actually feel better than I did yesterday, which is good. How's Doyle?"

"Well, he was fine when I left him last night. I haven't seen him yet today, though."

"Okay, time's up!" Izzy says, jumping to her feet, grabbing my shoulders and turning me towards the door. "Bye-bye! See yah later, all that jazz." She shoves me out into the hallway. "Just get out!" Before she closes the door all the way, she pokes her head out and flashes a quick, forced smile, then shuts me out.

I laugh a little as I head down the hall to my old room. I open the door slowly, trying to be quiet, but it squeaks anyway.

I hear the mattress creak, and out of the gray-darkness of the room Doyle says, "Good morning," very sleepily.

"Hi," I say, closing the door behind me and plunging the room into almost total darkness again. When we started the night shift at the wall, Izzy hung a blanket over the window to block out the sunlight. I walk slowly across the room, my arms out in front of me, trying not to hit anything, until I safely reach the edge of the bed. "I didn't mean to wake you up."

"It's fine," he says as I sit down beside him, twisting around so that my back is against the headboard. "I wasn't sleeping that well anyway." I can feel the heat radiating off of his body.

"So, how are you?" I ask, yawning.

"Sore."

"I'm sorry."

"Why? You didn't hurt me."

"Well, somebody has to apologize."

"Yeah...but not you. You never did anything to me."

"I'm sure I did sometime or other," I scoot down until I'm laying on my back and our heads are right beside each other. "Anyway, something exciting happened at the wall."

"Of course it did. The minute I leave." He jokes, laughing a little, but stops with a small groan.

"Hurts to laugh, does it?" I ask, closing my eyes.

"Ohh...you have no idea. But what happened?"

With a yawn, I begin. "Izzy came up to me and said she'd seen somebody hiding out in that group of trees – the one that's a little ways from the wall."

"Yeah...."

"And then we started talking about...stuff...." I feel my cheeks heat up as I remember what we'd really been talking about, "and while we were talking, somebody screamed. And to make a long story short, the girl we saved...well, apparently Rogan knows her." I finish with another yawn.

"That's interesting...I figured he'd been alone since this whole 'end-of-the-world' thing started."

"Yeah, me too...maybe they knew each other from before?"

"Maybe."

I roll onto my side, my face toward him.

"Oh, I have something to tell you, too," he says.

"What?" I ask groggily.

"Alicia said that Ellie's coming tomorrow to talk to me and Rogan. And probably you and Izzy, too. About the fight."

"Oh?" So close to sleep......

"Yeah, I think she already talked to the jerks that attacked me, but now she wants the other side of the story........" His voice fades as I drift into unconsciousness.