My apologies for this long overdue update! Hopefully, my wonderful readers have not lost interest. Student teaching has been an amazing experience, but it is also kicking my butt! I know this is a pretty short chapter, but I needed to do a quick update. The next chapter should be quite a bit longer. :)

My heart was beating so hard I was sure it was bruising my chest. Oxygen rushed in and out of my lungs but I felt like I was drowning. Twenty feet away from where I laid plastered to the ground stood my grandfather. It had been about a year since we'd seen him. Once he and grandma had retired they had bought an RV and started traveling. My hands clutched at the grass underneath me, trying to keep myself from losing it. The girls started running for him before I could figure out how to make a sound. My hands trembled and my knuckles were white, I was stuck until a slightly bloody hand grabbed my own.

I looked up from my hand into blue eyes. He didn't say anything just stared at me, his mouth clenched in pain. I swallowed thickly and jumped to my feet. By this time my grandpa and the three other men were right in front of us. "What the hell, Officer Friendly?" barked the angry redneck as a young Korean boy proffered a hand to help him to his feet. Daryl just slapped the younger man's hand away and started towards a white house beyond the field.

"We thought you were walkers!" the boy rushed to explain. Daryl turned, gave each man a hard look, and then proceeded to stalk off.

That left me in a field with three strange men, my grandfather, and two sisters. There were two white men. They seemed to hold some sort of authority within this camp. One looked at me speculatively and the other was harder to read. "And who are you three?" the cranky looking man said.

"Gentlemen, these young ladies are my granddaughters." Dale said, his voice was thick with emotion. He grabbed my arm and pulled me into a hug. All this time. I can't breathe. All this time? We had been in that damn forest for weeks. Barely surviving for weeks. Fighting the living dead for weeks. Pretending to be a mother, a protector, a source of stability and sanity for my sisters when every fiber of my being was screaming inside. And ALL THIS TIME my grandfather had been a matter of miles away from us. A real adult who knew how to take care of kids. A real adult who could have taken care of me, told me that everything would be okay, that could have told me what to say to two young girls that saw their mother die horrifically.

"Well, that certainly changes things," the man dubbed "Officer Friendly" shook me out of my momentary freak out. "Why don't we take this conversation into the safety of the farm proper. Those gun shots are likely to attract unwanted attention." Sam and Lace each grabbed one of Grandpa Dale's hands and the group started off towards the house. I stood staring at their retreating forms. How surreal this little spark of familiarity. This new world that my sisters and I were thrust into could have—no—would have been so different if I had just known how close my grandfather had been.

"Caitlin Marie, you coming," the familiar voice of Grandpa Dale was a momentary balm to the hurts that have clawed their way into my skin and my mind. Taking a deep breath and rubbing my hands on my jeans I centered myself. Who knows what is to come of this but one thing I was sure of was this: even with the safety that Grandpa brings, I will not let my guard down. Doing so always ends in tragedy.