14. Explosion.


When Rosie woke up the next morning, she sat up in a panic. She had forgotten where she was. Her eyes flickered around the room, trying to figure it out. Her breathing calmed when her eyes landed on Daryl, who was passed out on the couch.

That's when the memories of last night flooded back to her. Shane was hurting Lori, and he might've hurt Rosie if Daryl hadn't stopped him.

I left my bag in Shane's room, Rosie remembered. She quickly crawled off of the cot and left the room, making sure to keep quiet to avoid waking up Daryl.

Rosie found the door to Shane's room left open. She peaked inside, too scared to actually go in, and saw the room was empty. Shane wasn't on the cot or the couch. Rosie grabbed her backpack from next to the couch and left the room quickly.

After dropping her bag off in the rec room, Rosie decided to go find everyone else. She guessed that they'd be in the same room they'd eaten dinner in last night, so that's where she went.

When she entered the room, Rosie saw Andrea, Glenn, Dale, Jacqui, Carl, Lori, and Rick all sitting at the same table they sat at last night. T-Dog was behind the counter, cooking something on the stove.

Without a word, Rosie sat at one of the other tables, separate from the others. She hoped that Rick and T-Dog would forget about seeing her act all scared last night.

Glenn was leaning over his plate, covering his face with his hand as he groaned.

It reminded Rosie of the way Fraser acted the morning after he had gotten drunk that one time. Of course, he was also groaning from the pain of fresh bruises, but also the effects of a hangover.

"Don't ever, ever, ever let me drink again," Glenn mumbled out.

Then Shane appeared from the doorway. "Hey," he said, announcing his presence. Rosie shrunk down into her seat, hoping to go unnoticed. Much to her luck, Shane walked right past her and straight towards the coffee maker.

"Hey," Rick greeted him. "You feel as bad as I do?"

Ok, so they're not acknowledging it. Good.

"Worse," Shane replied. Rosie looked at Lori. She just kept her head down.

"The hell happened to you?" T-Dog suddenly asked. Upon that question, Rosie remembered the scratches on Shane's neck. T-Dog must not have noticed them last night. "Your neck?"

"I must have done it in my sleep," Shane said, brushing it off as he sat down.

"Never seen you do that before," Rick commented.

"Me neither," Shane said. His eyes shifted to look at Lori. "Not like me at all," he said, staring at her. Then he turned his head a bit to make eye contact with Rosie. Rosie quickly looked away and buried her head in her arms on the table she was sat at.

"Mornin'," Dr. Jenner said as he walked out into the room.

This was all very foreign to Rosie. She didn't usually have breakfast. And when she did eat, it was by herself. Never in her life did her whole family gather around the dinner table and eat a meal together. Sometimes her dad would have friends over and they'd sit at the table playing poker. If she could keep quiet, he would let Rosie pull up a chair and watch. But that was the only time she could think of that she sat at a table with this many people.

"Doctor, I don't mean to slam you with questions first thing-" Dale started.

"But you will anyway," Dr. Jenner said in a monotonous voice as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

"We didn't come here for the eggs," Andrea told him.

Rosie lifted her head out of her arms when she heard something being placed on the table in front of her. She looked up and saw T-Dog, and he gave her a friendly nod before sitting at the table with the others. Rosie looked at the table in front of her and saw that he had brought her a plate of eggs. She looked over at T-Dog to maybe say thank you, but he was already distracted with something else.

Rosie decided that she now liked T-Dog.

When everyone was done eating, the doctor led them back to the Big Room. Rosie hadn't quite finished her eggs yet, but she followed anyway because she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. She stood in the back of the room, next to Daryl. She didn't know why, but she felt better being next to him than she did being next to anyone else.

Dr. Jenner went up to the computer and clicked a few buttons before saying, "Give me a playback of TS-19."

"Playback of TS-19," the robotic voice that Rosie had attributed to Vi spoke.

A big screen in front of them lit up. "Few people ever got a chance to see this. Very few," Jenner said as the shape of a head appeared on the screen. Rosie could see the brain inside of it, lit up in blue.

"Is that a brain?" Carl asked excitedly.

No shit, Rosie thought, but didn't say it out loud. Honestly, she was afraid to speak at all with Shane in the room. What if he thought that she was going to tell? Would he hurt her?

"An extraordinary one," Dr. Jenner replied. He smiled at the thought before his face fell again. "Not that it matters in the end. Take us in for E.I.V."

Rosie watched the screen intently, thinking back to a diagram she saw when she snuck into a psychology lecture at the local college. The screen started to zoom into the brain until they could see the individual neural pathways. Everyone watched closely, amazed by it all.

"What are those lights?" Shane asked the doctor.

"Neurons firing," Rosie muttered to herself from the back of the room, slightly proud that she knew something that Shane didn't know. She didn't think anyone could hear her, but Daryl did. He gave her a weird glance before looking back at the doctor.

"It's a person's life. Experiences, memories. It's everything," Dr. Jenner said.

Rosie scoffed quietly to herself. That's a very meaningful way of putting it, she thought. She had only thought of it as electrical impulses in the brain, having remembered the psychology professor calling it that. She never really thought about what exactly the electrical impulses did, or what information they held.

"Somewhere in all that organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you," Dr. Jenner said, turning back to look at the group. "The thing that makes you unique. And human."

"You don't make sense? Ever?" Daryl suddenly spoke. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest, staring at the doctor. To him, it sounded like a load of philosophical bullshit.

Rosie thought that maybe the doctor should stop trying to sound like the main character in a cheesy movie giving an inspirational monologue and start saying what the actual parts of the brain were. Luckily, he did.

"Those are synapses," Dr. Jenner said, pointing to the screen. Rosie remembered hearing that word. Something about a gap or something. "Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages."

Finally, Rosie thought, the actual definition of the lights in the brain.

As she thought about the lights in the brain, she remembered what the psychology professor had said when he talked about it. He said something about cocaine making the brain light up like a Christmas tree. Rosie wondered if that's what her dad's brain looked like sometimes.

"They determine everything a person says, does, or thinks from the moment of birth to the moment of death," Dr. Jenner continued.

"Death? That's what this is? A vigil?" Rick said, stepping closer to the doctor. Rosie wondered what a vigil was. She had heard the word before, but she didn't know what it meant.

"Yes," the doctor replied, his gaze focused on the big screen. "Or rather the playback of the vigil."

"This person died?" Andrea asked. "Who?"

This is boring, Rosie thought.

"Someone who was bitten and infected," she heard the doctor say, snapping her focus back to what he was talking about. "And volunteered to have us... record the process. Vi, scan forward to the first event."

The screen fast forwarded and the brain went back to being zoomed out. There were dark blue and red colors coming out of what Rosie remembered was called the brain stem. That was the only part of the brain she could remember the location of because it was at the literal stem of the brain. She remembered getting frustrated as she tried to remember the location of the amygdala or the hippocampus and eventually gave up.

"What is that?" Glenn asked the question everyone was wondering.

"It invades the brain like meningitis. The adrenal glands hemorrhage, the brain goes into shut down, then the major organs."

What the hell is a meningitis?

Then the brain went dark. All the lights, the electrical impulses, gone.

"Then death. Everything you ever were or ever will be... gone," Dr. Jenner said.

Rosie's eyebrows furrowed and she decided she didn't want to be there anymore. So she turned around, walking out of the Big Room without a word. She didn't know where she planned on going but she didn't want to be there anymore.

"You think it's boring too?" a voice asked. Rosie jumped around, trying to find the source of the voice. No one was there. When she turned back around to keep going, she jumped again. Fraser was there. Standing right in front of her. "You think it's boring too?" he asked again.

"Yeah," Rosie said quietly. It was half true. The reason for her leaving was half because she was bored and half because what the doctor was saying bothered her. She didn't even know why what the doctor said bothered her, so she didn't want to try to explain it. She hoped no one noticed that she had left.

"What are ya doin' with these people?" Fraser asked Rosie, walking in step with her. Rosie didn't say anything. She stared at her shoes.

You're dead.

"Rosie?"

You're dead.

"Hello? Rosie, I asked ya a question."

You are dead.

"Rosie!"

"You're dead!" Rosie finally snapped. "You're fake. Stop. Stop it."

She kept walking. Fraser was gone. She needed something to distract her. What the hell was going on with her? Why was she seeing Fraser?

He's dead. He's dead, you idiot. Stupid.

Her coloring book.

She'd color a dinosaur. That's what she'd do.

The book was in her backpack, in the rec room.

Rosie made her way to the rec room. She sat at the small coffee table and colored in her coloring book. She was coloring in a triceratops with a blue crayon. She wasn't sure if triceratops were really blue, but she colored it that way anyway. It's not like anyone was there to tell her otherwise.

As the girl was sitting there, quietly doing her own thing, Vi's robotic voice started talking through the speakers again. "When the power runs out, facility-wide decontamination will occur."

"What the hell does that mean?" Rosie asked the robot, scrunching her face up as she looked up towards the speaker on the wall. She got no answer. She rolled her eyes and went back to her triceratops.

A few minutes later, she could hear voices approaching from the hallway. Dr. Jenner was done with his cheesy monologue, Rosie guessed. Lori and Carl appeared in the room and Carl went to sit down and color next to Rosie.

Lori looked at Rosie and Rosie looked at Lori. Neither of them said anything. Rosie raised her eyebrows at her and Lori just shook her head.

Lori didn't want her to tell anyone, Rosie realized. She didn't like that idea, but decided it wasn't her business. She thought about all the times people asked her about her dad. She had always lied to them because she was either embarrassed or didn't want her dad to get in trouble. She figured Lori felt the same way about Shane.

Suddenly, Lori looked away and started waving her hand in front of a vent.

"Mom? Something wrong?" Carl asked, noticing too.

"Uh, nothing. It's just... the air conditioning stopped," Lori replied, looking back at the kids. Rosie did not like the look on her face. Something must've been up. Maybe she was just acting weird because of Shane last night.

A minute later, the lights went out.

Rosie and Carl looked at Lori as if she held all the answers. She didn't.

"I'll go figure it out," Lori said, getting up and leaving the room. Curious, Carl followed right after her.

Rosie stayed sat on the floor, leaning her chin on her left hand as she used her right hand to color the grass on the bottom green. She jumped when a loud alarm started blaring in her ears, making her get green on the triceratops's foot. She growled in frustration.

At first, Rosie thought it might be the fire alarm, but that was out of the question because she knew that fire alarms sounded different and were more high pitched. She also knew that if it were the fire alarm, the small white light in the corner of the room would be flashing. It wasn't.

"30 minutes to decontamination," Vi spoke through the speakers.

Rosie packed her coloring book and crayons into her backpack and put the bag on her shoulders before leaving into the hallway. She walked towards the end of the hallway, which she knew led to the Big Room. She assumed everyone would be in there.

Just as she was about to reach the Big Room and ask all of her questions, a huge metal door slid up from the floor, blocking her path. Rosie growled in frustration and kicked the door just once. "What the hell's goin' on?!" she tried yelling, but no one on the other side could hear her. The door was too thick and her voice wasn't loud enough.

She pressed her ear against the door, trying to figure out what was going on on the other side, but she couldn't tell what they were saying. There was yelling, she could tell, but she couldn't quite get the words.

"HITs: high-impulse thermobaric fuel-air explosives consist of a two-stage aerosol ignition that produced a blast wave of significantly greater power and duration than any other known explosive except nuclear," Vi's voice rang out again. "The vacuum-pressure effect ignites the oxygen at between 5,000 and 6,000 degrees and is useful when the greatest loss of life and damage to structures is desired."

Rosie didn't understand a lot of those words, but she did understand explosives and loss of life. She started kicking the door again with frustration, but it was no use. She wasn't getting anywhere.

"Lemme outta here, ya stupid robot lady!" she growled out. She turned around and leaned her back against the metal door. "Son of a bitch," she sighed out as she slid down to the floor.

Something started hitting the door from the other side hard. Rosie jumped up and away from the door, turning to look at it. Whatever they were hitting it with, it wasn't working.

The banging stopped for a few minutes. And then Rosie counted five gunshots. "What the hell are ya doin' in there?!" she shouted at the door, even though she knew none of them could hear her. She growled in frustration again. "Who's gonna explode shit?!" she asked, raising her arms to run her hands through her hair.

Then the banging continued, a little slower this time. They were giving up on the other side. At least that's what Rosie thought until the door disappeared back into the floor. Daryl was standing right on the other side, an axe in his hand.

"Come on!" he shouted back to the rest of the group.

"What the hell's goin' on?! Who's gonna explode shit?!" Rosie shouted at him, finally able to ask her questions.

Unfortunately, Daryl didn't answer. "You got yer shit?" he asked quickly, sounding out of breath.

"Yeah. Why? What's goin' on?" Rosie replied. Daryl began walking towards his room and Rosie followed behind quickly. "What's goin' on?!" Rosie asked again, irritated.

"Jus' do what I tell ya," Daryl snapped at her. And so she did. She waited exactly where Daryl told her to when he went to get his own shit and she followed him when he said follow.

The girl followed him and the rest of the group up a set of stairs. They entered a big room with lots of windows. It was the place from the night before, Rosie remembered. The lobby. It was much brighter this time as sunlight shined through the windows.

Rosie held onto her backpack straps as tight as she could, making sure to stay close to Daryl. Shane and Daryl banged on the glass with their axes and T-Dog threw a chair at it, but it just wouldn't break.

"The glass won't break?!" Sophia cried out in a panicky voice. Rosie was so confused, but everyone else was crying, so something had to be wrong. What was going on? She just watched as the adults tried everything to get the glass to break. Nothing was working.

Then Carol pulled a grenade out of her bag.

"Holy shit," Rosie whispered to herself. Rick started yelling and everyone ran back away from the window. They got on the ground and Rosie covered her head with her hands, just like she learned to do at school in case of a tornado.

There was a huge boom and the glass finally shattered. Rosie stared for a moment, frozen, until Daryl grabbed onto the handle of her backpack and pulled her to her feet. "Go!" he screamed at her.

Rosie jumped out of the window easily and helped Sophia get down without jumping because she was too scared. Rosie thought that it was stupid for Sophia to be scared of jumping out the window when the dead were walking, but she helped her anyway.

They ran through the parking lot just like they did last night. "Walker!" Sophia suddenly cried out. Rosie spun around and saw a walker just a foot behind her and Sophia.

It was going for Sophia.

Carol needs Sophia.

Rosie launched herself forward and kicked the back of the walker's feet as hard as she could, making it fall to the ground. She pulled out her pocket knife faster than she ever had before as the walker gripped the fabric of her shirt. Just as she got the knife open and was about to jab it hard into the walker's skull, the walker went limp. A bolt had pierced it's skull.

Looking up, Rosie saw Daryl just a few feet away, Sophia and her mom standing behind him. She nodded a quick thank you before pulling the bolt out of the walker's brain and running to catch up with the others.

Rosie followed Daryl to his truck and he quickly ushered her inside. Rick started honking on the horn of the RV.

"Down! Down!" Daryl started yelling. Rosie crawled to the floor of the truck, squeezed between the seat and the dashboard. And then they heard it.

To think that Rosie was frustrated with the loud buzzing of flies last night was a joke. The explosion was the loudest thing the girl had ever heard in her life.

When the initial explosion seemed to be over, Rosie slowly rose from the floor of the car, climbing onto the seat and kneeling as she stared out the window. The whole place was completely destroyed and had erupted into flames.

"Holy shit," Rosie whispered again.

"Sit down. We gotta go," Daryl said, putting his keys into the ignition.

Wordlessly, Rosie sat down into the seat and clutched her backpack tight in their arms. Walkers started rising from the ground and emerging from places she hadn't even seen. That's when Rosie saw Shane, scrambling away from the tons of walkers. As much as she didn't like the guy, she knew Carl liked him a lot, so she didn't want to watch him be torn apart by dead people.

"Hey, Shane's out there! Shane's out there!" she started yelling, pointing out the window. The RV was already starting to move without him. "Shane's there!"

Daryl started honking on the horn repeatedly. Rosie and him started yelling out the windows, trying to alert the others. Rosie's eyes were wide with shock, her heart racing, but she calmed quickly as the RV stopped again. The RV door swung open and Shane leapt inside, safe from the walkers.

"Fuckin' stupid," Daryl muttered as he put the truck into drive.

"Idiot," Rosie muttered. Then she remembered the bolt in her hand. "Here go," she said quietly, still staring at the CDC as she handed the bolt she had pulled out of the walker's skull back to Daryl. He nodded a thank you and tossed it next to his crossbow.

The girl stared out the window at the burning building as Daryl followed the parade of their group's vehicles.

🦖🦕🦖🦕

PSA: I've seen some people being confused about Rosie sometimes seeing Fraser, thinking she has schizophrenia or something, but that is not the case. Children who are severely abused often display symptoms of escapism-where they create fantasy dialogue or worlds in their head, or imaginary friends that distract them during, after, or before the abuse occurs, or in any other stressful situations. Daryl shows this when he sees/hears Merle when he's hurt in the woods looking for Sophia, and even more so in the game Survival Instinct. When Rosie sees/hears Fraser, she's completely imagining him as a source of comfort or guidance to help her through difficult situations.

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