Glenn and that lady Tara are welcomed as highly honored guests since I have talked up a few glorious spotlight moments the group had (ha). At dinner, I sit down across from Tara and in between Joanna and Aviva.

"So how's life?" I ask Tara. My classic ice-breaker. It's better than how are you?

Tara shrugs. "Normal," Tara smiles tightly at me. She doesn't elaborate.

Define "Normal."

"Okay..." I eat my granola bar--I insisted that they don't have to give me a big ration.

"So you all were separated right?" Joanna says. Glenn nods. "Who specifically are you looking for now?"

"Well, I'm still set on looking for my wife Maggie," Glenn responds before he lifts a noodle-twisted fork to his mouth.

Aviva, not looking up from her George R.R Martin book, says, "I ship it...,"

Bewildered, Nate—who's sitting next to Aviva—raises an eyebrow. Aviva notices. "Oh, I mean the book. Daenerys is getting more ships for her army."

Nate nods. "Yeah, okay..."

"So have you encountered anyone else, Ember?" Glenn asks eagerly, leaning forward a little. I shake my head solemnly.

"Haven't seen any trace of them," I tell him and he slumps back against his chair and nods.

"It's fine. We'll find them eventually." He says, smiling. I bite my lip. He frowns, noticing. "What?"

"Well, this place is incredibly safe. They have a good thing going on here." I explain and everyone watches, including Aviva. "I want to become a permanent member. I want them to help recover the community center/high school fully and turn it into a safe haven. I want to stay here." I blurt out. The words tumble out of my mouth like an avalanche, and I'm afraid of its aftermath.

Glenn's mouth parts in shock. His eyes are wide. His entire face is a telltale of surprise, and maybe betrayal too. He shuts his mouth and stares at me with somber eyes. "That's fine. But I can't stop the rest of the group coming after you when we all reunite." He says and I nod. "Daryl will want to see you. I know he's not your brother by blood but he cared enough about you to now screw the group over when it all started. As far as I'm concerned, that's more than blood."

Aviva smiles and Joanna looks away, setting down her granola bar hastily. Nate frowns at Joanna out of concern. His friendship senses must be tingling or something.

"Okay," I nod and finish my granola bar.

Now I just want to get to teaching kids how to hunt.

---------

Glenn and Tara are staying for a little while, then they'll be leaving to find the ghosts of our group. I'm not saying they all are dead, but what are the odds all of them will find each other? There was no Plan B to the prison. There was no safe house or meet-up point. There was no thinking ahead.

Aviva's brother, Kyler, told me that they have multiple spots marked on their map for all of their people. They divided them all into groups and assigned them pre-checked houses for if anything happened to the Legion. It was Aviva's parents' idea. I heard that should anything happen to their father, one of their children would take their place. The Legion trusts them already and sees them all as leaders. But it's a democracy for the most part.

Today, we're making sure the entire community center/ high school is walker-free. The high school is huge. It has three stories and is right next to the library. It's mostly empty. The high school is also a part of the community center. There's rock walls and a pool where the swimmers would compete and the families would play (wouldn't recommend swimming in it anymore though) and there's a gym with workout gear and indoor basketball courts. There's also a kid's area where kids would be babysat while their older siblings or parents would do activities in the community center. I heard this town was one of the best and safest places to live once. And it could be that way again.

In fact, if we secure that place, it'd be a gold mine. More space. More outdoor area for food. The Legion would never suffer from famine again. And more people could live here. This place could be actual civilization.

Horribly giddy, I find myself grinning. Joanna smiles too as she hands me a handgun. She holsters one of her own and grabs a knife. I grab one too and put it into a sheath, feeling like a badass in uniform, not someone chastised for being reckless when I just want to do something for a purpose. Like a protective mother, I banned Glenn from participating. He needs to be there for Maggie when he finds her. He's studying routes on a map one of the Legion members provided him.

Joanna smiles at me. We are all set. We walk out of the cramped armory and squeeze past the people lined up to gear up. Once we recover the high school, they -- no we, I'm a part of this now, -- won't have space issues like this anymore.

"You're an artist, right?" Joanna asks and I nod.

"Yeah..." My mind goes to those leaf pictures. I'd always draw them because art class had a leaf unit before the world turned to hell. It was a weird therapy for me.

"What if the Legion had some kind of sigil and we would patch them onto our jackets? We'd all be connected and united. Bad outsiders who have encountered us before wouldn't dare attack if they saw us bearing the Legion's insignia." Joanna plans wistfully, going into a fantasizing daze. Again, I think about something pretty much unrelated. I accidentally remember this anime I watched and remembered how the Cadets in Attack on Titan had these cool sigils on their jackets.

I grin. I sure as hell would feel powerful and confident if I had a cool jacket uniting me to a powerful Legion. "That's a pretty friggin' awesome idea, Joanna." I agree and she smiles, tucking a stray strand of blonde hair behind her ear. She has her dirty blonde hair back in a ponytail. Her blue eyes are triumphant.

"Ha! You don't have to be Aviva to have strategically awesome ideas!" Joanna says happily and I chuckle. She's finally herself again since that one expedition where she came back looking deflated and shaken.

"We'll run it by Aviva's dad. I think it will work."

Joanna and I join whoever is ready at the front gates. I notice in the small courtyard's farming areas there are more materials for building a wall. They look sturdy. It looks like it's from cargo boxes or something. It'll last longer than the prison's chain link fence had.

Once everyone participating made it to the gates, Aviva joins my side and smiles at me and Joanna as her brother takes charge. The gates open outwards and we follow.

The groups are assigned different wings of the school to clear out. I am with Aviva, Joanna, Nate, some guy named Aiden they seem to know, and some other people. The apocalypse started in the school year, but it should've been canceled when the first signs of the apocalypse started. So we shouldn't see much walkers in here.

We're on the first floor searching through the arts section. I know, what irony. I find the art classroom particularly red. I draw my knife and ready it as I push through the door. Nothing. Just a dead body. A dead, dead one.

Releasing a withheld breath and go to check it is truly dead. I prod it with the toe of my boot. No reaction. I turn back to the open door. "There's a truly dead one in here!" I shout. And I glance back down at the rotten corpse. It looks like a teenage boy. Next to him is a gun, splattered in blood. I turn the body over and my eye snags on the deepest red circle over his ear. Bile rises in my throat. I swallow it down, gasping as it burns my throat and bitters my taste buds.

I let the body fall back on its back. My hand is dyed red. I try to wipe it on my black hiking pants. I bite my lip and straighten. I leave the room as the people outside tack a paper onto the door stating what is inside.

"Did you check the supply closet?" Joanna asks me as I step out.

"The supply closet? Oh." I should've known. Joanna walks back in. She exits hardly a moment later.

"Nah, nothing. I almost expected it." She says, shrugging. She traipses off further down the hall. I follow her, each step echoing through the near-vacant halls sounding as hollow as my chest. She peers at me. "You okay, Em?"

I sigh. "Well, that kid..."

Joanna frowns and looks away, then puts on a weak smile and meets my downcast eyes as best she can. "They're going to look for identification and give him a proper burial. School records must be around here somewhere. Like the guidance counsellor office or the main office..." She lists on possibilities, but the idea of looking through any classroom that could've been homeroom and had an attendance sheet matching his slightly-decaying face seems futile and worthless.

"No one dies nameless." Joanna reminds me, and I nod robotically. I know lots of names, but they will die faceless to me--I'll never see how they turn out to be. If they've changed or not--physically and mentally. The group might lose pieces of themselves when we reunite--physically and metaphorically.

God, why am I so cynical?

Because it's the apocalypse, duh.

Duh.

-------------

In the end, we found a group of teenagers and teachers holed up in one of the wings, who had been hiding in the cafeteria kitchen. They thought we were bandits and raiders. They are so thankful that we are not horrible people, and that we have plenty of food to spare (and especially since they are keen on donating the school's remaining good food supply in exchange of residence in the Legion).

Here are the new names in the membership records: Cara Wills (sophomore), Sean Woodrow (senior), Mrs. Fatima Cobble (science teacher), Matthew Price (junior, honors math student), Mr. William Jackson (English teacher), and Kimmie Sanders (freshman).

There is lots of welcoming this evening and warm introductions to the young newcomers. Aviva's sister Edith is excited for a new addition to add on to the new generation but however, some people were disgruntled by the rise in newcomers.

They wouldn't have to be worrying about feeding a few more mouths soon, as Glenn and Tara are trekking away from the Legion with a map. On that map will be riddles and deep clues to the Legion's location (Aviva's idea) in case bad people get ahold of it. She told Glenn and Tara the answers to those riddles--and only them.

They will be going away to find others. We could all be going in different directions--north, south, east, and west. And it won't be until they travel around the Earth's poles and bounded across the world's circumference they would intersect.

Chances were close to zero that I'd see my apocalypse family all together again, but if there was even a small beam of hope, why not go after it just in case? Anyway, that's what Glenn is going after to find Maggie. Glenn doesn't look very good. At all. But he was given medicine (not a lot, though, because the Legion hasn't found a whole lot of med supplies until they scavenged what they could from the Nurse's Office, which also didn't have a whole lot) and he claimed he couldn't stand to wait around for others of the group to miraculously stumble upon this forest-surrounded town where the Legion is, as I had done. To be honest, it hurt to realize I had been sitting around as if the group never existed while the others are dying to find each other. But I don't really have anyone to die for. Friends, yes. But my best friend and sort-of-(maybe ex now?)-boyfriend Carl and my not-actually-related bro Daryl are the closest friends alive I have--or had. Then there's Beth and Maggie and I guess Zaylee and Jacks and Glenn and...

Holy crap. I just would've let them disappear from my life. And I accepted that.

"You have a headache or something?" Some boy named Everett Rivera couple seats down across the table asks me, looking at my curled fist against my forehead as I lean over the table. I'm totally zoning out.

"No," I respond curtly as I take the book open in front of me and get up from my chair. The boy purses his lips, annoyed at my impolite crap. But he soon after channels that annoyance towards the Legion politics about their openness to outsiders and how if they keep accepting people that will just make ration portions smaller along with draining the food supply.

Whatever. Famine won't be too large a problem once we get the farms going.

Self-subsistent farming:

It worked for the New England colonies in the colonization time period, why not here and now too?

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:D

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Zaremareth