"I am so excited ta get yer pretty little ass all to myself fer two whole weeks."

Daryl stared happily at the dark-haired woman. Etta was an epidemiologist and had been away on business a lot in the past handful of months which was incredibly difficult for both of them. "You can't be half as excited as I am. I am getting sick and tired of some of my colleagues. God, when we were in India last week, I was about ready to drown them in the Ganges."

"The Ganges?" he asked.

"It's one of the biggest rivers in the world. It also happens to have bacteria levels that are about 2500 times the level considered safe, which is what we were studying."

"Jesus. Remind me again why I let ya go to these places."

"Because I am damn good at my job," she said sweetly. "Besides, I get a nice little bonus every time I am 'inconvenienced' by having to leave the country."

"I should make a list of the things I am goin' ta do to you while I got ya all ta myself."

Things were about to get a lot more interesting when they heard a slamming noise downstairs and Merle quickly appeared in their bedroom. "Holy Jesus fuck!" was Etta's response as she quickly tried to cover herself up. There was no way she was letting Merle see any part of her naked body.

Daryl was about to go into a rage before Merle held his hand up. "You two need to see this." He turned on the TV in front of their bed and changed the channel to a 24-hour news station.

The female reporter began talking about some type of weird "phenomenon" that was spreading through the nation. "We have not yet been informed why these people are acting the way they do, but the individuals affected are said to be cannibalizing in some cases." What they saw on the screen was like something out of a horror movie. It was a short clip of someone who looked almost dead attacking people just outside a restaurant.

"That's some messed up shit, and I wanted to know what yer stuck up, college fuck buddy had to say about it."

Daryl was about to go ballistic but Etta held him back as she narrowed her eyes at the screen. "I can't really make anything out, Merle. My guess would be drugs, given how that person looks."

Merle nodded slowly, trying to wrap his head around it. "Could be, I suppose."

"Now get the fuck out!" yelled Daryl.

"Fine, baby brother, I just thought you and yer fuck buddy should be informed."

As he left the house, Etta let herself relax a little. She was definitely not in the sexy mood after Merle stormed in and showed them the creepy shit on TV. Just as she was about to have Daryl make them some coffee, her cell phone began buzzing on the dresser. She groaned loudly and went to answer it. "Ben, why the hell are you calling? I'm on vacation, remember?" she asked her boss irritably. Her morning was quickly going from bad to worse.

"Have you seen that shit on TV?" he asked.

"Yeah. What about it?"

"It's some kind of disease and nobody knows what the hell it is. We need you to come to Atlanta."

"No way in hell, Ben! I only just got here. I'm sure there are plenty of other microbiologists out there that you can pluck from a lab and borrow for this."

"That's the thing, Etta: they are bringing everyone in. Half the morons here don't specialize in epidemiology and the other half aren't even microbiologists. This shit is serious and it's getting out of control fast. We need you, Etta – especially since you're so good with the weird shit. I also don't care if you are in the middle of an enormous fuck-fest with your redneck boyfriend." Etta and Ben shared a business relationship of mutual love and respect. "You need to get your ass over here now. We're sending a helicopter to get you in half an hour." She and Ben had been sent into a cholera epidemic together and after that, there really weren't any boundaries between them. They certainly didn't worry about the typical etiquette that other bosses and employees put on.

"Fine," she growled. "But you owe me, Ben."

After she hung up she began quickly throwing her things in a bag. "What the hell is going on?" Daryl asked.

"Apparently what we saw on TV is some kind of disease and they need me to come in." Daryl was about to protest before she held up her hand so he would let her finish. "Look, things are beginning to get very serious and they're shipping in microbiologists – many of which don't even specialize in disease – from everywhere to try and figure this shit out. I'm going to demand extra vacation time once this is all over and I'm sorry but I have to go. Look, I don't know what they're going to have me do when I get there, but I will call you as soon as I get some free time, okay?" She looked desperately at Daryl for his forgiveness.

He still looked pissed but sighed and nodded. "If ya have ta leave, then I guess I got no choice, do I?"

She shook her head before kissing him, having finished packing. "I'm so sorry."

When she landed in Atlanta, she was immediately met by Ben. "Look, kid, this is a real shit storm. We have a room set up for you, but you're going to have to leave your cell phone: they don't want communication in or out of this place unless it's sharing information on the disease with other facilities."

Etta threw her bag into the room then immediately ran to get her lab coat and catch up with Ben and meet someone afflicted with the disease. "Do we know what type of pathogen, yet?"

The older man shook his head. "We've been pumping all sorts of different shit into the test subjects. Every antibiotic on the planet, every antiviral, you name it and we're trying it."

"So we don't even know what it looks like?" she asked angrily. "I prefer to at least be able to look at the structure of whatever it is we're dealing with." They were moving quickly through the facility to an enormous lab where hundreds of doctors were working.

"No. Sorry. Look, you're going to have your own lab station with about ten people working under you."

"Ten people working under me? Ben, I've only been out of med school for three years and I've only been working with you for two! How the hell do I get ten people working under me?"

"Like I said: this shit's serious. The people running this circus from hell looked at your file and saw that you're good – and you are good at what you do, Etta. Since you're an expert in figuring out the weird shit, they've set you up with your own station. You have twenty patients under your care and pretty much free reign to do whatever the hell you want since this place is the most disorganized operation I've ever worked in. Anyway, good luck kid and try to figure this shit out." He left her there alone in the crazy shuffle to run to his own disorganized work station, just as frazzled and confused as every other bastard in the place.

She rushed to her lab and saw the ten people working under her. "Okay, so what do you guys specialize in?"

One of them looked nervously at her. "Some of us aren't even out of med school yet, Dr. Weaver."

"What?"

"They aren't really letting us do anything besides what you tell us to do, but they needed people to work here, so they've brought anyone who isn't working at the hospitals that can even sort of count as a doctor."

She sighed, trying not to let the horrible situation get to her. "Okay, show me to the patients."

They led her to a row of beds with people in different states. The first few in the row were running fevers that were worse than anything Etta had ever seen, even with the efforts the med students had made at trying to bring the fever down. Near the end of the row was where things were getting really ugly, though.

"They don't even look alive," she gasped. "Why are they restrained?"

The med student who was probably the elected spokesman for the group tried to explain. "Whenever anyone gets near them, they try to eat people. We have to restrain them not only to prevent that but also to prevent any kind of bite or scratch."

"It spreads from biting and scratching?" The student nodded and Etta began making very fast notes on a notepad she had been given. "So what do their vitals look like when they get like this?" she asked, indicating to the restrained patients.

"Well, they don't really have vitals."

What? Impossible. She went over to one of the restrained ones and held the jaw away as she searched for a pulse in every area she could possibly think of, but there wasn't a pulse. They were dead.

She took a very small tissue sample off the one at the end and brought it over to a lab table. After a few minutes analyzing it, she realized that the flesh was in the beginning stages of decomposition. How could they still be moving and trying to eat people when they were dead and decaying?

She turned to the 'spokesman' of the med students. "Hey Robertson, get your ass over here." This was no time to make niceties. Every piece of information she gathered defied the logic that she had worked with since med school. Robertson hurried over. "I want to analyze his brain. Get the necessary equipment. Do you know how to use it?" He nodded. "Good. Set it up and I'll be back in a few minutes."

She couldn't find Ben anywhere but she saw Dennis Hall who she had worked with before and ran over to his lab area. "What the hell is this?" she demanded. "They're dead."

He nodded wearily, looking like he hadn't gotten sleep in days. "We haven't been able to explain it yet. They have some brain function after they 'die' but I have no idea how their body continues to function."

"They have no pulse, Dennis. They shouldn't even be moving, nevertheless eating people."

"None of us have any answers, Etta. All I can say is that this is the craziest shit I have ever seen and I've been doing this for thirty years now."

"That makes two of us."

They heard screaming at Etta's work station and both doctors ran over to see what was happening. One of the 'patients' had managed to escape its restraints and bitten Robertson. But not before ripping out the throat of one of the other med students. "Two of you grab the arms without getting scratched and I'll grab the head. Then two other people will fasten the restraints again." The students stared at her for a second before she shouted "Now!"

Once that situation was taken care of she turned her attention to Robertson. "Get a bed for Robertson; he's a patient now." She could see tears swimming in his eyes as he realized he had more or less been given a death sentence.

Then, she turned her attention to the girl who had bled out on the floor from having her throat ripped out and tried to compose herself. Ben was right: this place was absolutely insane. The girl had been dead for close to five minutes and Etta was about to have the other med students take her to a morgue when she began moving. She hadn't even died from the fever yet the disease had managed to work its way through her system! There was no way they would be able to take care of her body without significant risk of being bitten or scratched. As Etta searched for a solution in her head, a guard who had been standing at one of the entrances walked up and started shooting the girl as she approached Etta and the med students. The bullets in her chest were doing nothing to slow her down but then the guard put a bullet in her head and she dropped immediately to the floor.

The room went quiet except for the moaning of the patients who had, for lack of a better word, reanimated. All the doctors were staring at the guard in disbelief when Etta carefully approached him and put a gentle hand on his arm, helping him lower his weapon. "Thank you," she said, though it hurt her to say it. "I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't stepped up." That much was completely true. "It's okay. Just go back to doing what you were doing."

She supposed she wasn't going to sleep for a while because this place was going to hell.

Etta splashed water on her face and stared into her bloodshot, brown eyes. She hadn't slept for more than an hour at a time in the past two days and the situation continued to worsen. The disease was spreading like wildfire through the general population which didn't come as much of a surprise. Families would care for their sick loved ones until they died and when they reanimated, they would bite their caregivers if they didn't just eat them alive. Before long, the whole family would be infected then break into the streets to terrorize other people.

The facility had gone to hell, too. If anyone let their guard down they could be bitten by the reanimated 'patients' only to suffer the same fate. She was about to reenter the general lab area from the bathroom but when she peered through the glass on the door, she saw soldiers filing in from a different entrance. Under normal circumstances, she may have just gone in anyway but every single pore in her body shouted at her to run and leave Atlanta far behind her.

Instinct got the better of her as she ran to the room she had thrown her bag into, hearing gunfire as she ran. Just before escaping the building she ran face-first into a much larger body. She was terrified that it was someone from the military there to shoot her, but she saw it was Ben. "Etta, you're alive," he said, clearly in a state of shock. He stared at her with a dazed expression before snapping out of it and grabbing her hand. "We have to get out of here."

He led her to a small helicopter pad just outside of the facility and helped her into the helicopter along with two other men. She tried to process it all as the helicopter flew them out of the city and night began to fall but her mind was so strained from the past couple days that there was no way she was going to be able to wrap her head around the situation at that moment.

Once the helicopter landed, about ten miles outside of the city, they all filed out. The five survivors looked at each other but before they could say anything they saw helicopters heading to Atlanta to drop napalm. Etta felt her knees go weak as she collapsed onto the ground feeling her vision blur then go into darkness. The days without sleep had finally caught up with her.

Only a day earlier Daryl was watching the news and saw how fucked up things were getting all over the country. He couldn't believe Etta was gone but what was worse was the fact that she hadn't called him or answered any of his calls. They had been living together when she had investigated cholera epidemics, weaponized anthrax, and even a new Ebola strain, but she had always called within twenty four hours of her arrival at the location. Even if she couldn't talk, she would typically text at least once a day to let him know that nothing crazy had happened. This time was different.

He turned the damn thing off and decided to shower in an attempt to clear his mind, not that he thought it would actually work. He was a wreck and felt as if he could fall apart at any moment. He had even seen a couple infected people in the tiny town that he and Etta lived in, which only served to increase his anxiety. This shit was out of control and she had to be right in the goddamn middle of it.

After his shower, he couldn't take it anymore and punched the wall. It hurt like hell but he wanted to do it again. As he wound himself up for another round of wall boxing, he tipped over the tiny trash can Etta kept in her bathroom.

Etta hated messes so he set it upright again and began placing the tissues back inside when he saw a small, purple box that sent his heart rate up into doubletime. Within a matter of moments found something else that was definitely not a tissue and had a pink plus sign on it. "Aw hell, Etta!" he shouted. If he had been worried before he was now panicking. Why the fuck hadn't she told him? He would have never let her go knowing that he had knocked her up.

Before he could take his anger out on the wall again he heard Merle's voice echoing through the tiny house. "It is time to go, little bro!" his voice reverberating off the walls. "There's supposed to be some kind of safe zone or whatever in Atlanta so that is where we're headed."

"No, I ain't goin' nowhere."

"The hell are you talkin' 'bout? 'Course yer comin' so get yer sorry ass movin'."

"Etta ain't here. I ain't leavin' without her."

"She's in Atlanta, you dumb shit! If she's alive, she is goin' to be in that safe zone."

"What do you mean 'if she's alive'?"

"The way things are lookin' bro, there are a lotta dead people. But we ain't goin' ta know if she's dead unless we haul ass to Atlanta so grab yer shit and let's go. I got everythin' of mine the truck already."

Daryl knew that Merle was right – that they couldn't stay there. That didn't stop him from leaving a note for Etta in case she came back, though. He even left a little food…just in case.

His mood continued to darken the further away they got from their home in the backwoods of Georgia because all he could think about was Etta. He shouldn't have let her go. To make matters worse, the traffic heading into Atlanta was backed up for miles and as far as he was concerned, that traffic was preventing him from finding her. He got out of the truck looking to pick a fight with someone who he could take his anger out on when he saw that Atlanta was being bombed. No. No, they couldn't do that – not with Etta in the city. He collapsed to his hands and knees trying to prevent himself from completely losing it. She was gone.