Chapter Two

They watched the boy climb the stairs into their kitchen. After several seconds, Maddie whispered, "Jack, why is this happening?"

"You don't think-" Jack started to say, some modicum of hope, or denial, still burning in his breast. "You don't think that could be-"

Maddie shook her head sharply. "No. No. We saw him, Jack. We saw him die. We saw him turn." Pointing her finger at the stairs, she said, "It's like he said. Whoever that is, it isn't our son."

Her husband wilted again. He had been briefly returned to life when Maddie brought that impostor into their lab, but now he looked the same as he had for months, if not worse. She hated to see Jack that way; it was another reminder of what this world had taken from her.

"Do we believe his story?"

The way he asked that spoke a great deal. There was no question of the possibility of the boy's story being true. After studying ghosts and alternate dimensions for the entirety of their careers, being asked to believe in an alternate timeline was no great leap. Instead, what Jack wanted to know was whether to accept that his purpose for being here was purely accidental, purely innocent, or whether there was a darker motive for his appearance.

Maddie narrowed her eyes. "I can believe he is from an alternate time. I don't believe that this is a coincidence. Think about it – we've theorized about natural portals, but no one has ever seen one appear. What are the chances of one 'just happening' to form under that boy's feet?"

Jack nodded his head slowly. "You're saying we can't trust him."

"Yes. Exactly."

"Well, what do we do with him?"

His wife pursed her lips. Scowling at the floor, she turned her thoughts over in the air. "We can't just turn him out. People have seen him."

"Tell them the truth," said Jack simply.

"How? If they believe us, what good would it do anyone? It would only serve to sew distrust and paranoia. But I don't think they would believe us in the first place. They'd probably say that our grief has blinded us so much that we can't accept what is right before our eyes. They thought we were crackpots for years; it wouldn't take much to remind them of that…"

"But if we let them think Danny's back…?"

"It's a ray of hope. A sign that this world doesn't take everything from us. Maybe others that were lost are still out there." She waved a hand flippantly. "Et cetera."

Jack shrugged his slumped shoulders. Maddie suspected he did not approve of her suggestion to lie to the town or the cold rationale she gave for it. It didn't change her conviction. What remained of the citizens of Amity Park was a group of scared people, in a cage, surrounded by horrors, and the last time a conspiracy theory had gotten into their heads it had nearly destroyed everything.

"He said we got the Fenton Portal working," said Jack, gazing at the scrap-filled hole in the wall.

"We didn't," Maddie reminded him.

"We would've, if not for the virus. He's proof of it."

"Jack," said Maddie sternly, "I know what you're thinking. We can't. We don't have the materials. We don't have the time. We don't have the power to even run it."

"I know." He sighed. "That was another life. A job for another Jack Fenton." He laughed when he realized the words were more literal than he had intended. "So, what do we do with him? He came here looking for our help."

"So he says."

"Whatever he says, he's still a sixteen-year-old boy. What kind of evil plans could he possibly have?"

"Anything is possible anymore, Jack. You know that."

"Okay, maybe he's evil. You said we can't get rid of him. We can't build the Portal either, so we can't send him back to wherever he came from. What do we do with him?"

Maddie scowled at the entrance to the lab. She didn't like it, but it was the only viable answer. "He'll have to stay here where we can keep an eye on him. No matter what, Jack, I don't want that boy out of our sight."

Each of their gazes snapped to the other's, simultaneously realizing that was exactly where the boy was now.

Danny waited in the living room, hunched over on the sofa, regretting his life choices. He wondered if he should have just flown around until a ghost portal popped up, and he wondered if it was too late to do that. But since the Fenton Portal had never been activated in this world, and Pariah Dark had never stretched the boundaries between worlds with his invasion, the chances of being in the right time and place as a natural portal were pretty slim.

Of course, there was also the Plasmius Portal...

While he had never confirmed it, Danny had always gotten the impression that Vlad had based his portal off of stolen schematics for the Fenton Portal. It wouldn't be the first time Vlad built a device not one hundred percent a Plasmius original. Vlad was a pretty decent inventor in his own right (in a mad scientist sort of way), but there had always been those inventions he'd not been able to get quite right - not without a little 'help' from his old college buddies or the scientists at Axion Labs.

Still, it was worth a shot. Maybe the Fentons had sacrificed completing their portal for the greater good, but to Vlad there was no greater good than himself. If anyone would have a working ghost portal in the apocalypse, it was him.

Other than finding a natural portal by a one-in-a-million chance, going to Wisconsin was looking to be Danny's best shot of getting home.

Because if he stayed here, his only choice would be to convince the Jack and Maddie of this world to finish their invention to send him back. Even if he did that, it would take the two scientists months of working non-stop to finish, considering they had all of the supplies and enough power to spare from the zombie-shield. That last part was doubtful; the Portal was a drain on Amity Park's power plants on a good day, let alone an apocalyptic one. But say they tried to pursue it – working in between all of their other responsibilities, maybe it would take a year. More than a year. If they had to scavenge the supplies, maybe several years. All to help a person who was not their son but was instead a painful reminder of him...

Someone cleared their throat, and Danny whipped his head up. Jack and Maddie were standing just inside of the living room, looking wearier than he had ever seen them – weary, and cold. Danny had never seen his parents so lacking warmth; even when they hunted ghosts, it was with excitement or hatred burning hot inside of them. Was this what his own parents would be like if he died? If Danny didn't go home to them, was this the people they would become?

"We talked about it," said Maddie. "I'm afraid there's nothing we can do to help you."

Danny sighed, disappointment gripping his heart tight. "I understand." He hung his head and ran his hands through his hair.

"I guess if you… if you want me to leave…" Even if the Plasmius Portal was a bust, Danny could still survive out there. With his powers, he wouldn't be in great danger from the zombies, so long as he kept his guard up. He could probably scavenge for food and meanwhile look for a natural portal… He stood up, shaking his head bitterly. "What am I saying? Of course I should leave. I'm sorry for coming here. I just made things worse."

"Wait," said Maddie, and for a moment hope sparked inside of him. "You can't go."

"I can't?" said Danny.

Maddie shook her head, and her lips tightened into a thin line. "Too many people have seen you. What would they think if it seemed like we let our son go back into that world? It would make many question our sanity and we would lose the respect we need to defend them."

The brief hope sputtered and went out. "Oh," said Danny weakly. "No, yeah, that makes sense. Um, what should I… does that mean, should I pretend to be…?"

"Only while outside of this house. Don't insult us by trying to step into his place with our full knowledge."

Danny held up his hands in defense. "I wouldn't dream of it!"

It didn't seem to placate her. Maddie's eyes narrowed, an expression intensified by the wrinkles accumulated there in this life. "We don't trust you."

"Yeah, you've made that abundantly clear," Danny grumbled, garnering another milk-curdling expression from his alternate-universe mother.

She opened her mouth to retort, but whatever she would have said was cut off by the opening of the front door. "Dad? I'm-"

There was a small shriek, and this universe's Jazz Fenton dropped the box she was carrying, dumping fruits and vegetables across the floor. She pressed her hands to her mouth and stared at Danny.

Maddie leaped forward, pulled her daughter into the house, and closed the door tightly behind her. Without wasting a second, she guided Jazz to Jack's side in a wide circle around Danny, as though protecting her from him - and yes, that's probably exactly what she was doing. Jazz lowered her hands and gaped at Danny, looking like she wanted to pull away from her mother and embrace him. "Danny?" she whispered.

Danny was shaking. He looked to his almost-parents to take the lead, but they were watching him, waiting for him to speak, a warning lurking in his alternate mother's eyes. "No," he said. "I'm not…" Quickly, he told her the same story he had told her parents. As expected, by the end tears had welled in her eyes and were trailing over her cheeks.

Danny studied her while he talked. This Jazz, too, was not the Jazz from his memories. She wore camo pants, the legs stuffed into a heavy pair of brown boots, plus a sun-bleached checkered shirt, which was tucked into the top of her pants. Instead of her turquoise headband, the same one she had been wearing for years, a green bandana was tied around her forehead, to keep stray hair and sweat out of her eyes. Her hair, which had been long and flowing for as long as Danny could remember, was cut short, reaching only to her jaw line. Jazz's once pale complexion was now tanned several shades darker.

This Jazz was a worker. It made sense. Jazz was driven by a need to help people, and she liked to be as hands-on as possible. After admitting to Danny that she knew about his ghost powers, she thought she could help him by joining him in battle, despite being flat-out terrible at it.

"How is he going to get home?" Jazz asked her parents, once Danny had finished his story.

"For now," explained Maddie, "he will stay with us, until we know whether or not we can trust him."

It didn't necessarily mean much. Her words from only a few minutes before made it pretty clear that they already had their verdict. However, Danny was going to willfully interpret her statement as meaning he had some time to prove himself.

Hopefully he wouldn't need to. Hopefully he would be able to get out of their shield that night and make it to Vlad's mansion. Hopefully his trip to Wisconsin would be the end of this little visit to Zombie World. But better to be safe than sorry - sorry, and without a safe place to fall back on. So in the meantime, he would try not to make these Fentons hate him anymore than they already did.

"Why wouldn't we be able to trust him?" asked Jazz, frowning. "He's not our Danny, but he's obviously still Danny! You must see it, too!"

"Jazz," snapped Maddie. "You of all people should know that strangers are not always what they appear."

His alternate-mom made a good point. Danny had consciously decided to keep his most important half a secret from them, so he was definitely not what he appeared to be. Also, he had no idea what they had been through or how many seemingly good people had betrayed them, as was the case in every end-of-the-world movie Danny'd ever watched. He and his friends had gotten into the habit of saying "Stranger danger!" every time someone new appeared in one of those movies, because they were nine times out of ten bad news. Heck, that was practically the story of his own life. How many newcomers to Amity Park wound up being ghosts, overshadowed by ghosts, or ghost hunters?

Jazz pulled away from her mother, scowling, and walked over to the box she had dropped earlier to collect the spilt vegetables.

Through all of this, Jack had been abnormally quiet. Danny glanced at the big man, trying to discern something from his softly troubled expression. Danny was used to his own dad being so goofy or headstrong that he wasn't entirely sure how to interpret 'quiet'. What did Jack think about all of this?

It was a very uncomfortable moment of silence encompassing them, broken only by the thump of vegetables hitting the inside of Jazz's box. Danny swallowed and shuffled from one foot to the other. He finally mustered the courage to say something. "Let me prove myself to you."

"What do you mean?" said Jack, frowning.

"You don't think you can trust me," said Danny, quickly adding, "and I get that. Everything about me showing up is super weird, and I'd be suspicious, too, if I were in your place. So, let me prove myself to you. Let me help you guys! I can, I don't know, help scavenge for supplies, defend this place-"

"We're not going to let you handle a weapon, if that's what you are asking," said Maddie, entirely missing the point. "Besides, I doubt you'd last one minute against these creatures."

"Um, hello? My Amity Park is constantly being attacked by superpowered ghosts from another dimension. I think I know a thing or two about fighting."

"We are not going to entrust the safety of our people to a stranger," Maddie said decisively, interrupting whatever her husband had started to say. "That's final."

"Then let me help in other ways!"

Arms crossed, Danny glared at his alternate self's mother, and she met him unblinkingly. The tension was palpable.

Just then, Jazz jumped between them, raising her hands in supplication. "Why doesn't Danny help me in the gardens? We could always use another hand."

"Gardening?" Danny screwed up his face, offended. "I'm telling you-"

Jazz looked at him over her shoulder, one eyebrow raised and mouth in a stern line. He understood - she was trying to help him, to get him an "in" here in Amity Park Z, and he was sticking his foot in it. "Or, gardening!" he said brightly, clasping his hands together over his chest and smiling falsely at Maddie. "I could totally help Jazz in the gardens."

Maddie's eyes flicked back and forth between the two teens. Clearly she did not like the arrangement, yet a better one was not presenting itself.

"Well, Jack?" she asked her husband.

The big man shrugged. "Sounds good to me."

"Okay then," said Jazz. She breathed a sigh of relief. "Okay. Well... why don't I take him around and show him our version of Amity Park? I noticed a lot of people gathering and talking on my way here, so I'm sure rumor of him is spreading, and fast. It'll be good if they can see his face."

Maddie hummed, nodding. Pressing a fist against her chin, she studied Danny, like he was nothing more than an inhuman specimen. It was a familiar feeling - his own mother had stared at his ghost half in the same way. "We need to decide on a story."

"Um?" Danny raised his hand. Maddie, scowling, acknowledged him. "What about amnesia? Listen," he continued quickly. "I don't know anything about this world. I have no way to explain why I don't look like I've been living in the post-apocalypse for the past year. So, instead of trying to explain, how about I can't explain?"

"It could work," Jazz tacked on. "Whatever Danny 'experienced' out there could have been so terrible that he entered a stage of dissociative amnesia."

"So terrible, and yet he had fresh clothing, running water, and a perfectly healthy diet?" Maddie's expression darkened - and it hadn't been sunshiney to begin with. "People will wonder where he came from, who he was with. If whoever they were had enough resources to give Danny a life of comfort, but were terrible enough to drive him to amnesia-"

"Or maybe something terrible just happened to them," said Danny. "How about this - when I came to, everyone around me was dead. I had no idea what happened, so I gathered what supplies I had and struck out for Amity."

"Did you walk here?" countered Maddie. "Drive? From which direction?"

"I drove," said Danny confidently. "From somewhere outside of Minneapolis. Until the car I had ran out of gas about three hours' walk from here." He had lied so often since becoming a halfa that lying now felt like second nature.

"A small community in the suburbs that collapsed on itself," mused Jack. "It could work. We saw that happen more than once back in the early days of the outbreak."

"But how does that explain what we saw?" demanded Maddie angrily, and tears broke over her face. She quickly scrubbed them away.

But the glimpse had been enough. Danny remembered the root of why he needed a cover story. This Danny, their son, was dead, and the person stepping into his place was nothing more than a copy, cheapening the memory of the original. They were literally standing around scheming of a way to convince Amity Park that he was a dead person. Danny's irritation evaporated, and, sobered, he wished he could turn invisible. He glanced down at his arms to make sure he hadn't.

"Mom," said Jazz softly, placing a gentle hand on her mom's arm. "We saw him from the highway. It was a long way away. It wouldn't be a stretch to say we were mistaken." Jazz was crying now, too.

"We weren't!" bit out Maddie through clenched teeth.

"I know…"

At that moment, Danny hated himself. He felt like scum. He didn't have any right to be there. Instead of offering any more 'help', he stared at his shoes and waited to be told what to do next. If he had known he could count on the Plasmius Portal, he would have said "Screw it" and gone ghost right then and there and flown away. The repercussions of that couldn't have been worse than this.

Maddie, Jack, and Jazz talked for a few minutes longer; Danny did not care to know what they were saying. He was pulled out of his reverie by Jazz's gentle hand on his shoulder, and he raised his head to look at her. She was smiling, but the expression was tempered by the tension around her eyes.

"Are you ready to go?"

He nodded, leaping at the rope she'd offered for escape.

"Remember, Jazz," said Maddie, "he is not to be let out of your sight for a moment. If you lose him, call us immediately."

"Nothing is going to happen," said Jazz.

Maddie shuffled, arms crossed stiffly over her chest. She looked like she wanted to say more. All she did say was: "Be back by dinnertime."

As soon as the front door closed behind them, Danny bent over, resting his hands on his knees, and took several deep breaths.

"Are you okay?" asked Jazz softly.

"No," huffed Danny, and he straightened. "But don't worry about me. I don't have any right to complain. My situation is probably the least bad of anyone's."

Jazz seemed to disagree. "You just lost your home. They didn't have to be so harsh."

"I get why they are. I really do. I had no right to come here and open old wounds, and they have no obligation to help me."

"They have every obligation - you're their son."

"But I'm not," repeated Danny. He looked sidelong at this alternate-dimension Jazz, studying her expression. "I'm not your brother. I already have a sister, who's probably tearing apart my Amity Park to find me right now. Okay? Don't think of me as him."

"It's difficult not to," said Jazz, grimacing. "You look like him. Sound like him."

"Trust me, we're different enough." For example, this Danny had no urge to feast on human brains, unlike his counterpart would. But he also knew enough about himself from two years ago to know how much his personality had changed since that accident in the Portal. Leading a double life as a superhero could do that to a person.

Before Jazz could ask more about that, Danny turned his gaze to the street - to the remainder of Amity Park. The bright green shield glimmered against the sky, turning the whole city faintly emerald. Anyone who was out had stopped in their places to stare at the two Fentons, sharing whispered gossip behind their hands in between glances.

"They look like they've seen a ghost," chuckled Danny. Jazz frowned; of course, the joke was lost on her. In fact, it probably sounded like he was making light of her actually dead brother. He had never once claimed to be tactful, but at the moment he was making a complete ass of himself.

"Sorry," he muttered, his face flushing. "Wasn't thinking."

"You're going to have to start thinking," Jazz replied just as quietly. "Because from this point forward, you are my brother."

He swallowed thickly. "Right."

After that, Jazz was incredibly professional, albeit in a bizarrely detached way, as she led him through the little safe haven. She took him to every vital location and explained the purpose and who was in charge of each facility. The school, for example, was not only a school now but also an orphanage for children who had lost their parents and a shelter for those who had lost their homes, for those whose homes had lain outside the perimeter of the shield and for whom there was no more room in the remaining houses. The hospital had been lost but there was still a functioning MANA clinic that was being sustained on supplies gathered from pharmacies and hospitals in the area. There was a church where the community's food was stored and doled out to the people; Danny noticed that this was guarded by two people wielding assault rifles who stood at either door. A third armed man stood at the door to the basement.

"That's where all of the extra z-rifles and ammo are kept," said Jazz, inclining her head to the guard. The man was too busy staring at Danny to notice.

"'Z-rifles?" echoed Danny. As far as he knew, it didn't take a special sort of anything to kill a zombie, so long as you went for the head. Bullets, arrows, pitchforks, rocks, silverware - heck, a person's thumbs, if they jabbed at the eyes deeply enough.

"When we got back to Amity Park," said Jazz, "that summer, when it happened… Things were bad." She slipped into one of the empty pews - one that wasn't being used for storage - and motioned for Danny to sit beside her. "Mom and Dad managed to get the ghost shield converted into a zombie shield pretty quickly, but by that time, so many people had already been lost. Those who were left barely had enough to survive. We needed to go back out and start gathering supplies, but there were only a few guns and not nearly enough bullets. Luckily, Axion Labs has such good security that it got out of this mess nearly unscathed. It's not in the shield, but Damon Gray helped us get inside the fence, and since then we've been able to use it for various things.

"You know how good Dad is with inventing weapons." Danny grunted his agreement. Even before the Fentons had seen their first ghost, Jack Fenton had created at least six different types of blasters with which to obliterate them. "Well, he designed a gun that could use basically anything as a bullet. Rocks. Plastic. Compressed garbage. As long as it's cut down to size and can fit in the gun. There isn't any need for gunpowder, either, because each gun has just a little bit of purified ectoplasm charging it."

That was… equal parts impressive and disconcerting. Danny found himself suddenly thankful that his father had never been recruited by the military and that the only things his own dad's weapons could harm were ectoplasmic entities from another dimension.

Jazz waved her hand, gesturing toward the three armed persons in the room. "So now all the guards have z-rifles."

Danny raised his brows. "Good to know."

Dozens of people stopped them during this tour, hardly able to find the words to ask the question that would sound either crazy or insensitive - "Isn't he supposed to be dead?" - instead standing in their path with wide and questioning eyes and waiting for the story. Danny let Jazz handle the explanations, which she did with the proper amount of joy, relief, and astoundment. She was a much better actor than his Jazz, even with all the lies his Jazz told covering for him. She seemed to know exactly what these people wanted to hear, and instead of suspicion, they told Danny "Welcome back" and left with slightly hopeful smiles tugging at their lips.

"You're good at this," he commented after one such conversation.

"I have to be," she said, sober where she been wiping away tears of joy moments earlier. "I'm the closest thing to a psychiatrist these people have. It's my job to help them find a reason to wake up every day. Right now, you're that reason."

"Uh…" He took a moment to process that, but no, he was still lost. "I don't even know these people."

"But they know you - or they know about my brother, at the very least. And if he can come back to us after being gone for two years, maybe some of their family members will find their way here as well. I'm sure that's one of the reasons our parents… my parents want to keep you around."

"I'm propaganda?" Danny's stomach twisted at that, although he could not pinpoint exactly why the thought made him so uncomfortable. Because it was a lie? Because Jazz had just admitted that she and her parents were using him?

He winced. Technically, he was also lying to and using them. It was a fair exchange.

"You haven't been here," said Jazz. "We're safe, but things aren't looking good."

That was a loaded sentence if Danny had ever heard one. He wasn't sure he was ready to know, or if he wanted to know at all. It would only make abandoning this place and these people so much harder.

"Whatever," he gruffed. "I get it. Do what you have to."

The last place Jazz took him that day was the memorial in the park. He knew why it had been saved for last - it was going to be super depressing. Already he was having flashbacks to another memorial in another timeline.

'Gone, but not forgotten.'

As Jazz strode into the park, Danny reached out and grabbed her wrist. She stopped and looked at him over her shoulder. "Do you not want to do this?"

There was no judgement in her tone. She would not look down on him if he chickened out of facing the reality of this world.

"No, I need to do this," he insisted. "Just… before we go in, tell me. How many people are left?"

Amity Park had been a city of about forty thousand. Now those who remained lived within a single mile of it.

"Eighty-seven," said the alternate Jazz. "You make eighty-eight."

Danny inhaled deeply through his nose and nodded. "Okay."

He wasn't ready, but there would never come a time when he would be. He told Jazz to go ahead, and he trailed somewhat numbly behind.

The memorial was spread throughout the park. Once the zombie shield had been put up, someone clearly put a lot of time and care into this project. Across the lawn, among the fountain, the benches, the swingsets and water fountains, were huge cement blocks about four feet wide and four feet tall. They sat on circular cement pedestals, raising them about two feet off of the ground so people would not have to crouch so low to read them. They were not decorated in any way, which did not take away from the reverent air they instilled.

The park itself was empty, besides Jazz and Danny. The sun was beginning to sink toward the horizon, casting the memorial in orange.

Danny approached the nearest block. When he was close enough, he could discern rows and rows of names that had been carved into each side of the cube. All were last names ending in the letter "W". Glancing around, he counted twenty-five other blocks and realized there was one for each name of the alphabet.

Apprehensively, he scouted for the names ending with "M". Jazz took a seat on one of the benches and watched him in respectful silence.

He found it near the swingset. Danny could feel his pulse quickening, a knot forming in his throat. This side of the block was 'Me-" through "Mo-". He walked around to the left.

"Mabary… Macafee… Macartney…" He ran his fingers over the names etched out of the stone. They were neat and tidy, but there had been no stencils used. A single person had carved out each and every name in their own handwriting, spending who knew how many weeks or months working on this. "Madin… Maggiore… Malaney…" There were so many. So many names.

"Manson." His fingers froze on the rough letters. His breath caught in his throat, and it felt like his heart had even stopped.

"Manson," he repeated, a whisper, releasing the breath slowly. He read the names carefully:

Ida Manson

Pamela Manson

Sam's name wasn't there. Neither was her father's. It was unfortunate that her mother didn't make it, and crushing that her grandmother hadn't - Sam would have been extremely close to her. But, selfishly, he was soaring at the knowledge that he wouldn't have to face another timeline in which Sam Manson didn't exist.

Danny spent the next half an hour wandering among the tombstones - for that was what these were. There might not have been any bodies, but this was one big graveyard. A lot of the big names in town were on there, like Mayor Sanchez, Lance Thunder, and Tiffany Snow. He learned that most of his classmates were gone, although Mr. Lancer had survived. The A-list was down to Valerie and Dash - no Kwan, no Star, not even Paulina. Valerie he wasn't surprised about; she was tough as nails, even if she wouldn't have known it before the outbreak.

He saw that Dash had lost both of his parents. He was surprised at how sad that made him feel. He didn't like Dash at all, not even a little, but that was a fate he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy.

Well… Danny shook his head. Nope, he would not even wish for Vlad's parents to be ripped apart and cannibalized by zombies. If Vlad even had parents. It was difficult to imagine Vlad ever having been a child. He seemed like the kind of person who was grown by a mad scientist in a lab.

Whatever. Danny pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. It had been a long day, and he was exhausted. His brain was starting to lead him strange places.

He supposed there was no putting it off any longer. He forced his feet to take him back to the block with the names starting with "F", which he had bypassed several times already. He knew he needed to check in on Tucker, but he also knew that if Sam was okay, there was no way Tuck wouldn't be. No, it was another name he was avoiding.

And there it was, drawing his eyes as though magnetized:

Daniel Fenton

It felt… strange, to say the absolute least... to be looking at his own grave. Even though he wasn't actually dead, it was still dredging up a lot of existential feelings that he wasn't sure he wanted to deal with. Against his will, he started imagining what the other him must have been going through, right at the end. The fear. The pain. The hopeless knowledge that he was going to die, and no one could save him.

How had he gone out? From a bite or scratch and days of waiting for the end, in fevered delirium? Was that even how bites worked here? Or did people turn in seconds? Was that why his family had been so far away from him when they had seen him turn?

Or worse - had he been eaten alive?

And had he died like that - completely alone?

Danny gagged, fighting down the urge to vomit. He tore his eyes away from the name, only for them to land on three other names, ones he had not expected to see, ones that turned his legs to jelly and sent him to his knees.

Angela Foley

Maurice Foley

Tucker Foley

A/N: Yes.

...

I am having too much fun dropping hints about what happened to Other Danny. I've written that scene already, and, well, let's just say this Danny is correct in his urge to cry/vomit.

It's not been explicitly explained yet, but the Fentons were on a Fenton Family Road Trip when the outbreak hit, which is why they weren't in Amity Park at the time. More on that to come.

Btw, no more update schedules. I realized that trying to plan to update is nothing short of inviting the heavens to smite me with lightning bolts of doom, so I'm not going to jinx my life again. These last few months have been hell, and that started shortly after my last Treading Water update, in which I'm pretty sure I said, "See y'all soon! La-dee-doop-dee-doo~~"

So I will just say this: "Hum hai rahi pyaar ke; phir milenge chalte chalte" (We are travelers on the path of love; we will meet again as time goes on - from the movie Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi)

Thanks to: Black Upon An Icy Sky, roseofalltrades, Guest, GhostWriterGirl-1, SofiPhan29, AlecGateway, FallingToast, AFloatingShoppingList, MsFrizzle, dragondancer123, Foxprints, Glowing Loudly, Pour, MickeyNC, Death of Snipers, ImpudentMiscegenation, dannyphannypack, Phantomfray, and Catzooa for their reviews of Chapter 1, and to everyone who has added this to their favs and alerts!

T.F.C~