The Apocalypse: Race For The Cure

Our Connection

"Ashley, Ashley. Are you okay?" I hear Angel asks as she shakes me awake. The constant throbbing in my head is making it hard to hear.

"Ugh." I groan out as my hand shoots to the back of my head. Yep, there's a knot there.

"Are you okay?" Angel asks me again as my eyes flutter open. The light hurts them.

"I have a concussion." I whisper, hoping she would follow my lead and lower her voice.

"How do you know?" She questions, lowering her voice.

"I just do." I assure her, trying to sit up.

"Maybe you should lay back down." Eric instructs me, trying to put a hand on my shoulder. I flinch and shoot up.

"Don't you dare touch me." I tell him, holding a hand up between him and myself.

"Ashley calm down." Angel whispers.

"How can you tell me to calm down? He just assaulted me!" I say almost hysterically as Eric inches closer to me.

"I hardly assaulted you Ashley." He half chuckles. Oh this shit funny?

"Eric, I swear that once this pounding in my head stops I'm gonna-"

"Ashley stop trying to prove you have the bigger balls and just hear him out please." Angel says, pulling up a chair so I could sit down. I take a seat, never taking my eyes off Eric.

"You have five minutes." I tell him coldly. He nods and smiles as he pulls up a chair across from me and Angel leans on a nearby table.

"I'm not a bad guy." He starts. How convincing. I roll my eyes as he continues. "I'm just like you Ashley, I want to fix what they did. I want to make everything right again."

"How do you know what they did exactly?" I question with a raised brow.

"I was here." He replies quickly.

"What? What do you mean you were-"

"Room 511." He cuts me off.

"No." I say as I shake my head. "There's no way that you-"

"There is." He nods. "My mom was on the research team that your mom ran." He says, half smiling at a memory in his head. "She didn't want me to be apart of it." He shakes his head. "She begged me not to actually. But I'm stubborn and I wanted to make a difference in the world. I wanted to be apart of something special. Don't you understand what would have happened if the serum had worked?" He asks with wide eyes. "Cancer...gone. AIDs...gone. No more common colds, no more anything really." He shakes his head. "Mankind wouldn't have had to worry about any of that stuff anymore." He pauses and sighs, standing and walking around his chair. "But I guess mother nature decided against that plan." He half chuckles.

"My mom would have never allowed you to take part, you were only-"

"Fourteen at the time." He nods. "Right. Your mom didn't know. Like I said, I had to beg my mom to be apart of it."

"That still doesn't explain-"

"Why I'm here and how I found you?" He finishes my sentence for me. "I've been following you since you left Atlanta. We set up camp there."

"We?" I question.

"My dad, about thirty or so army soldiers, and myself. That was who you heard me talking to." He clarifies.

"Why?"

"Ground zero." He shrugs.

"We were gonna rebuild, or at least we were trying to figure out a way to rebuild."