It had been a very, very long time since I'd recounted in detail the deaths of my dearest friends.

The first to go had been Amy, of course, back at the camp outside of Atlanta. I had the least trouble describing her death, and the circumstances around it. I was about twenty minutes into my tale, having already gone over what happened to my family during the initial outbreak, and why I set off on my own, and how I got to Atlanta with the Dixon brothers because I was lucky enough to be spending the night in an abandoned liquor store and traded all the booze I'd squirrelled away for the ability to stay with them. They also admitted, after a few days, that I was a 'a damn typical asian genius' when it came to strategizing and getting around. Not so much with hunting, though, to their dismay.

From Amy's death, I described the journey to the highway where T-Dog died, the loss of Sophia, and the way Carl had been shot by Otis; how Shane had come back empty handed, without Otis, and Carl had eventually died. How Lori was revealed to be pregnant, how Maggie and Beth had killed themselves in the Farmhouse. How Andrea shot Daryl and then, in her haste to get down to him, fell off the RV near the ladder, but got her leg tangled in it, and broke said appendage. It was an open fracture, the bone had come out through the skin, severing the major artery in her leg as it did. In the process she'd also slammed her head against the side of the RV hard enough to put her into a coma Hershel wasn't sure she'd come out of- it had been a close call and he wasn't sure he was even going to be capable to stabilize her that much.

Shane and Dale had gotten into a fight and, one way or another, Dale had been shot and killed. Shane claimed it was an accident, but nobody was stupid enough to trust him with a gun after that. Shortly after Dale's death, walkers swarmed the more or less unprotected farm at night, when the group had forgotten to assign someone to watch. The farmhouse was overrun, it was impossible that Andrea would have survived (at least she wasn't aware of it I hope), and Hershel begged me to be put down after he'd been bitten. I had to do it, because everyone else was at the RV, except for Rick and Shane who were out with Randall... and I would never burden a woman with having to take a living person's life unless it was necessary.

Rick came back alone as the dead had killed both Shane and Randall. Unlike with Shane, everyone knew Rick well enough to understand he had no choice in whether to bring them back or not. If it was possible, he would have saved them. Nobody believed otherwise. It took half an hour after his return for everyone to finish packing up and start moving on.

With a bit of luck and desperation, we found a prison. Things were going well at first, until one of the inmates killed Carol, and the nearly-ready-to-give-birth Lori was no match for him. She managed to make it a double death, for he never left the cell she'd been sleeping in, but it was no consolation to us. The three other inmates were apologetic about the whole thing, but they still turned us out shortly afterward. Rick was in no shape to lead, too wracked by grief; he had been able to focus on Lori and the baby enough after Carl died to keep going, but now he had nothing. I ended up taking his position, and by the looks of it, Merle and Daryl didn't mind too much, since I ended up treating it like a democracy anyway, only veto-ing things if it went against what Merle called 'obscure asian strategist rules'. We ended up asking the Inmates to allow Rick to stay with them; he would only die out there, and at the least if he recovered with them, he would be a handy gunman if they needed it, and he was smart about security- and he would accept that they were his new group and wouldn't go against them. They agreed, and we never saw them or Rick again.

A little while after we'd left the prison, Merle disappeared while hunting, and we couldn't find him. We found his arrows and the buck he'd taken down, though, and Daryl was broken for the two days that we'd spent there before moving on. Eventually we found a small gas depot, boarded it up, and made it somewhat liveable. We built a bit of a house on top of it, on its roof; it wasn't up to before-outbreak codes, but that didn't matter too much to us. We made a farm up there, too, as hard as it was. Daryl seemed to be recovering from the loss of his brother, but he still wasn't doing too well when the Walkers figured out how to get up to us. In our grief we'd neglected to make sure we moved the corpses away from the wall of the depot; they managed to climb over their fallen brethren and were assailing our pitifully built house. Daryl was about to blow his own brains out to avoid being bitten and to give me an unwanted chance to escape. I had shouted 'NO' at the top of my lungs, and then... then I had woken up in a strange room that reminded me of pre-outbreak hospitals.

I licked my dry lips as I finally met Hershel's gaze, only to see shock, concern, and disbelief written all over his face. I felt tired again, which was a disappointment considering I should have been ready to get up and move again.

"Why am I so tired?" I asked, and Hershel shook his head.

"Well, it's not a big deal," Maggie interjected. "It's expected for someone who has... gone through your ordeal. Dr. Seamus... let's go get Dr. Blake. He can explain what happened better than we can, Mr. Hunter."

I frowned at Maggie after she called me 'Hunter' again, and watched her warily as she trotted out of the room in her nurse's outfit I'd never seen her wear before, followed by Hershel in a white lab coat that I didn't remember him owning, either. I let my eyes drift shut after they left, and I didn't wake up again until the next day (or so I later learned).

"Hello, Mr. Hunter," I heard a familiar voice say. I had been staring at the ceiling for about a minute, trying to place everything, and when I saw Daryl trotting into the room, my breath hitched in my throat and I forced myself out of bed again to latch onto him, sobbing. "I th-thought you were d-dead! Don't ever fucking scare me like that again, Daryl! You hear me? I don't ever want you to do that! What was going through your damn head, I-"

To my utter surprise and dismay, Daryl took me by the shoulders, forced me to sit down, and took a casual seat near my bed.

"I'm afraid that you haven't been told everything, Mr. Hunter- may I call you Gregory?"

"My name is Glenn, goddamn, Daryl, why is everyone acting like none of what we all went through happened?"

"Because it didn't, Gregory. I hate to break it to you so bluntly, but you've been in a coma for the last two years. It is the year 2013, you have no next of kin that we could find, and you're in Ontario, Canada. Scarborough General Hospital, to be specific."

I suppose my disbelief and irritation must have been written all over my face, because Daryl shook his head at me.

"My name," he continued, "Is Casey Blake. I am an only child, and I grew up in this neighbourhood. I came in to check up on you from the beginning, because an individual slipping into a coma at work for no reason is certainly a phenomenon, and I hoped to discover the reason, as I am a licensed psychologist. Aside from visiting you in your coma, I have never before met you. I wish it was under better circumstances, but be that as it may, it is nice to finally do so."

I think the fact that this Casey, so much like Daryl he may look, spoke in such a different manner (for he was not quite as taciturn, and definitely seemed more educated) was what made me believe that he, at least, was not really the Daryl I knew. Still, I refused to acknowledge his insistance that the outbreak had never happened- that was impossible. I also could not accept one without the other, for Daryl and Casey were the same, one voice, and one face, their features were too similar to be anything but one person. This, I decided, was a mystery. It must be that Daryl was simply brainwashed, hypnotized, or something. I decided that I had to get out of here- and take them with me- before whoever was running this place realized that it was just like the CDC centre, ready to explode at a moment's notice, and sealed us all in with them. Or worse, brainwashed me as well.

Daryl looked at me with an odd expression, and I supposed that he had deduced at least some of what my train of thought had been. I gave him a sheepish look. "Listen, Daryl, I don't expect you to to lie to me, and so I guess you aren't lying, unless perhaps you have a very good reason for it. Still, you don't have that much skill in lying; you don't do it very often. Here's my proposition to you: I will try to believe what you're telling me, and you will try to believe what I am telling you. Perhaps we can find out more of what's going on that way- you, as a Psychologist, will understand more about me and what may have caused my... coma... or whatever, and I'll eventually figure out why you're telling me I was in one."

Daryl seemed a little surprised at my suggestion, and smiled, wherein I cut him off before he could speak again. "Wait, there's one condition," I told him. "You have to answer to Daryl, and call me Glenn."

He sighed. "I'd be breaching policies if I did that," He said, frowning. "But... here, a compromise. We'll call each other Daryl and Glenn in private, and Casey and Gregory in public."

I agreed to it hesitatingly... going by Gregory for his sake couldn't be that bad, and at least it would only be in public.

"So," Daryl said, "I heard your story already, but there were a few points I'd like you to elaborate on, if you wouldn't mind. After that, we can get lunch, if you're hungry."

When I finished doing enough talking to satisfy him, which was very close to being a little too much for my taste, some food was brought in. On some level I was excited to see real food rather than the meat we'd been eating and cooking ourselves, not to mention the slop before that, but on another I was disappointed at having to eat hospital food again. On another level entirely it was nice, feeling the mundanity of being annoyed with the kind of food hospitals serve their patients.

"Hey, Glenn," Daryl said after the nurse bringing food had left, "What kind of evidence do you think you would need in order to believe that the outbreak never occurred?"

I thought it over for a while. "For one, I'd need to fly around in a helicopter around most of the US and Canada, to make sure that this isn't just a single zone that survivors somehow reclaimed and barricaded. For two, I'd have to see proof that there are still around a couple million people still alive."

Daryl grinned at me, almost as though I had said something silly. "Well," he said, "I may not be able to prove without a doubt in the next few minutes that there are still seven or so billion of us kicking around, but I've got some good proof that nothing happened here. Look out the window."

I hesitated for a few minutes before, with his assistance, I hobbled (for some reason I was so very weak) into the wheelchair next to my bed and let him wheel me to the window. When I glanced outside, I was shocked. There were busses so full of people that an accident could kill at least thirty of them passing by every five to ten minutes. Hundreds of cars passed in the same time frame, and ten to twenty pedestrians crossed my line of sight every ten minutes. It was either, I reflected, a very complex hallucination, a very detailed hologram or other illusion, or it was real, and there were thousands of people in this part of the city alone.

I think that's about the point at which I fainted.