They'd damn near cleared out every drug store in the area for the pregnant girl. A task, proving to be more and more difficult with each trip. Not only did they have the undead to worry about, but they also needed to be on guard for strangers. People from the colony, rogue, dangerous survivors, and starved animals that no longer avoided areas where people once were prevalent.

Nick had his knife, his guns, his talents for survival— being pampered back into the old way of living in the world came naturally to Nick Miles. His career built on this, his life, his childhood, the foundation it thrived on.

Looking to CiCi, the young girl he saved in pursuit of trying to find his sister, he knew they would be safer within the walls of the colony, rather than out here running errands for Paige and Isaac. The vitamins and medicine needed for Emma and her pregnancy made it a mission Nick felt alright with risking his life on. CiCi, however, was still learning the ways of survival and how to defend herself. It had only been a couple of months ago that he thought her how to use a compound bow. A bow that meant business and took serious strength to draw back and aim.

Luckily for them both, the girl was a natural.

Not one to generally pick wars, Nick felt that the time for drawing in on the colony was imperative for Emma's survival, for CiCi's survival. Ana Maria sent in not long ago, they eagerly waited for news on if they'd be welcomed, or if the opportunity came for them to get rid of the powers that be there. The likes of Russell, which half of their group had come to meet and end up on the wrong side of the tracks on.

Mulling over where all roads were leading, Nick focuses on the present when they arrive at the abandoned hospital. Covering the lower half of his face for the fear of flourishing diseases that came with the piles of long-dead bodies inside, Nick climbed over the corpses, occasionally checking for CiCi behind him to make sure she was keeping stride.

"Ya got tha list?" He drawled through the handkerchief covering his mouth. Nick was ready to get these damn pill things and get the hell out of here. The bodies with the possibilities of the risen infected among them made him uneasy and searching each one he crossed over for the possibilities of reanimation.

"Right here," She offers it out, but Nick refuses to take it, "Alright, I'll hold on to it. Sorry, thought you wanted to see it."

She apologized often and usually, over nothing. A timid, insecure girl, Nick took an instant role as her guardian when he found her at the campus. Herself and Dalton had been held up for months, near death from starvation, with bodies like these littering the floors below them. The dormitory, not one where his sister took residence, but Nick left no stone left unturned in his relentless search for her. A search that ceased, when he didn't find her there and with nowhere else left to look.

"Looks like we're here," She says, her wide-eyes pointing him toward the pharmaceutical room on the second floor, "I think we need a key to get in..."

Before she can finish her suggestion, she's cowering away when Nick kicks once, twice, three times till the door breaks from the hinges. Only, to reveal a locked pull-down gate behind it.

"Good job," She says, catching the glare he tosses her way. Bending down, she takes the key from the nearby dead that's swollen from its decay. Gagging against it, she hands him the keyring in his expecting hands. Again, the third times the charm when he guesses which one on the ring matches the lock.

He lifts up the rickety gate, one that reminds CiCi of the gates at the mall that they'd bring down when her friends wore out their welcome.

Covering the open doorway with his drawn gun, Nick checks the room. CiCi struggles to read the long words on the list after she clears the pre-natal vitamins from the shelves.

"Jus' grab everythin'. I ain't tryna head back 'ere anytime soon."

First finding the things on her list, CiCi does as Nick suggests. Smart, of course, but she's terrified that she can't think ahead of what's written in front of her. It's why she loved being around Nick, having him as a mentor of sorts. She wanted to be more like Nick. Level-headed, smart, brave, capable. While she admired Paige for her knowledge of medicine, for her caring nature, and Isaac, for his ability to take charge and formulate plans, it was Nick that she saw the greatest ally in her survival. At one time, she thought Dalton to be the sun that rose. When she was a girl, with nothing but a degree and basic young dreams. Behind in her life progressions alongside everyone else, CiCi's sheltered life made her a poor statistic in surviving the apocalypse. Not to mention, the traumas of her past that she shared with Dalton in high school.

Though she had a thousand things more to fear in this new life, it was in that deranged shooter, and then in the Scripture Killer that kidnapped her friend that she found herself stuck in paralyzing fear at times. Dalton, it seemed, had risen above it. CiCi felt it regressed her into a childish state. One, that she desperately tried to break free of, that Nick started to help her with...

And, though she couldn't truly admit to herself, let alone to anyone else, it was to the older man at least ten years her senior that she found a new sun, and a brighter one at that. She'd follow him to the ends of the earth if he'd let her.

Her gym bag filled, heavy and too much for her to carry, she hands it to Nick when her small shoulders can't bear to carry the awful weight. He takes it without question and the two are locked in a stare when a familiar sensation causes their hair to stand on end. They feel it before they hear it as if a sixth sense has been cultivated in this time where every breath could be their last.

Horror fills CiCi's wide eyes and Nick finds his anchor to keep her steady should she shut down on him again.

The dead in their guttural pursuit sound from down the hall. It reverberates, letting them know they had a small window of time to escape, but surely, they would be seen with their lack of coverage.

She expected him to grab her arm, to run down the hall, but instead, he slams down the gate behind them which causes the dead down the hall to go into a frenzy after the loud noise.

"What are you doing?!" She shrieks, tears spilling out over her reddened cheeks in the expectance of death.

He lifts her, much to her surprise, to balance her in a stand on a nearby chair. Complying, without a guess as to what the hell he was thinking, she begins to shut down into her nightmares as the dead reach their oozing hands at them through the gaps. Some, shredding their own skin back in the tight reach. It shakes dangerously, threatening to break down the more undead pile on to fit their shredded hands in their fruitless reach.

Awestruck in her terror, CiCi stares into them from her place atop the chair as Nick begins a climb of his own on the shelves. Lost to what he's doing and finding a scrying presentation of her past and the face of the man reloading shotgun shells to end her life, the green teeth of the freakiest zombie is the mecca of all her suppressed fears. From above, a hand grabs her, causing her to scream with the sudden realization of her present.

She's being pulled and upon looking up, sees Nick from the lifted panels of the ceiling granting her escape. The gate breaks down and after her swinging sneakers, a zombie takes one with it as she's brought up to safety.

She's screaming even after she's in safety, but her need to live draws her onward to crawl after Nick in the tight space. Her hands scratch and bleed against debris in the trail he leads, but anything is better than being ripped apart by the dead that carries their starving sounds after them in the echoing tunnel.

"Git yer flashligh' out!" His full twang rang off the metal casing of the ceiling as he waited for her to light the rest of his way. Aiming for the other side of the hospital to drop down on, Nick imagine all the eyes of the dead below them follow the imprint of their crawling bodies on the soft tile. Expecting them to buckle from his weight and when they didn't, Nick relaxed with the small gift of that as he paused.

Dust stung at his eyes and invaded his lungs. Coughing against it, ignoring the erratic beat of his heart that made him dizzy, it's the sound of CiCi's coughing that urges him to stay calm. If he let his own fear take him, he could very well die here and now. A curse passed onto his father and onto him. Hearts of gold—his mother would tell him—didn't beat like everyone else's. As he lifted the tile up as quietly as he could manage to, a few straggling walkers appeared.

Nick looked at CiCi and says, "Take the shots 'n I'll drop down first."

It might not have been the best time for practice in their situation, but Nick needed this girl to get some real experience against the dead. Her own face showed this temporary distrust in his decision, but understanding what he meant for her, the nervous girl takes up her handgun and after a few calming breaths, takes the shots. Quickly, but with fair amount aim, Nick drops down in their race against whatever else could hear it.

"C'mon! C'mon!" He waves her urgently down. Her struggle, not as graceful to drop as Nick helps soften the blow of her fall with a studying help for her to find the ground.

She cries out, distracting him for a moment in his dragging her away from the undead that re-emerged in a trickle against the broken gate toward them. To her leg, he sees the deep scrape, one that might require stitches and could impair her stride.

A southern gentleman normally, Nick found no need to ask for her permission in saving her life. Picking her up, the dark-haired Yankee would now be part of any pace he chose as he descends down the stairs to the first floor.

Finding the first floor, then the way they came, overrun by a horde squeezing through to come their way, Nick takes the abrupt turn to tread into the unknown territory to his left. Ahead, the way out. A door, clear, that he runs at with CiCi over his shoulder with the bag of medicines.

When the door fails to open, Nick remembers that this is, in fact, the end of the world and there was no power left to the automatic door that would swoosh open in a luxurious past.

Turning again, Nick orders her, "Shoot the glass!"

The shot rings out and the glass rains down for their freedom.

"Keep on shooting', girl!" He tells her as he runs, hearing the erratic shots that leave her protecting his back as he keeps his eyes in search of his Jeep.

Now that they were on the other side of the hospital, he'll have to round it, avoiding however many of the dead trickled into the hospital after them from the other side. Having parked in the distant lot in just this fear of the dead and being raided by desperate survivors, Nick feels a weakness in his knees as the pain in his chest intensifies.

His heart could give out. Finally, after all these years, after all this stress, before the dead could ever do the honors for him.

Slowing, he's unaware he's stopped as CiCi drops from her own escaping of his shoulder. Taking the meds off his shoulder and remembering well that Nick has done something like this before, the shots continue to ring out as her hand wraps around his wrist to carry him onward.

In the blur of vision and pain, he's in the front seat of his jeep. To the driver's side, CiCi takes it, struggling with the stick shift as it stalls out upon starting. Then, in her own practice to calm down, the jeep goes into motion when she conjures the memories of how Nick drove his coveted vehicle reinforced to take on the dead. With the pull of a handle, the blades on the doors give way, tearing into the dead that gets too close for her comfort.

Being a girl from the Bronx, CiCi didn't know how to drive. But, in her visual memory, she replayed how Nick did it and managed to pull it off in the boxy vehicle. Enough so, that she makes it to the main road, where the dead gape after them in the distance in their slow walk to even come close to keeping up.

Nick's eyes closed and hand over his heart, CiCi's relief is short-lived in the concern for Nick's life.

"Don't die on me, Nick. We need you. I need you. Just hold on a little longer...Paige can help you. We have the entire pharmacy now, remember? We're safe. It's okay." She coos, her hand finding his shoulder as her own heart races against the beat of time.

The dull ache returning in his chest, the absence of medicines long run out for Nick returns. They'd saved the girl, but at what price? Retribution didn't come swift enough.

Through the night, Nick waited with Dalton. Keeping an eye out, unarmed, of course, due to the colony's protocol that civilians weren't allowed guns, he wondered if Soup was hiding the weapons somewhere in this farmhouse that they shared.

A hooded figure emerges quickly from behind the farmhouse ahead and Nick's ready for a fight when the figure comes bursting into the porch's light.

Her hoodie lowered, Nick didn't expect the face that looked him dead in the eye with such a rage that he recognized immediately as Ana Maria...no matter how many bruises she had on her face. Those eyes, they often spewed venom.

"What are you doing' 'ere?" He asks her, expecting something foul in her intentions with the girl they harbored under their roof.

"I could ask you the same damn question...I saw you lit the signal to Isaac!" Ana Maria hisses back.

Her face drips in a cold sweat. Certainly, Ana Maria's seen better days and was at the end of her rope, with no allies now to call her own.

Nick's arm holds the door open, keeping the traitor to his own group behind the invisible barricade of his own making.

"Don't take another step further..." He warns, "If ya came 'ere looking' for trouble, yer gonna find it, Ana."

She's in his face, the hiss in her voice one he knows well, "If you and shorty back there would have stayed at the beach and trusted me, this all could have gone a lot differently. That girl is nothing! She's one of Russel's people, his puppet, girlfriend to his damn nephew for fuck's sake! You get your ass out of here and take the runt with you and let me do my job!"

Shoving her back out the door, Nick makes no apologies when she winces as he shoves a sore spot. She draws a handgun at him, but he does nothing but stares in that empty, annoying way.

"You won't shoot me," he tells her, taking a step forward, "Get out of here, Ana. You've got no friends here. You left them all behind five months ago and your new ones don't trust ya either."

Her blood ran colder than anyone he'd ever known and yet, her heart pumped out something different for Nick. He knew this from a reveal she made before she left them. She confessed her attraction, her wanting of him, yet Nick turned her down.

There was a darkness to Ana Maria. Darkness, he found to be a great deterrent not just romantically, but in her as a person in general. It took a great deal for a woman to catch Nick's attention, always had been that way. More so, than other men. He had something specific he sought out and his attractions came from something else, something not even Ana could portray in her best days. Ana Maria didn't make the cut, nor would she ever.

He knew it. She knew it. And, it bothered her.

She lowers her gun and though it still clenches tightly in her hand, as it often did, she reaches for something else in the pocket of her hoodie.

Revealing the plastic bag and the pills inside of it, Nick catches them limply in his hand as she shoves it against his chest.

"Figured you were running low on these," she says, releasing the bag of pills as she takes a giant step back on the porch, "Though if you can survive a zombie bite, I'm sure you can survive your heart issues too."

That same broken look in her strong demeanor flashes, the same it did that night he turned her away. Rejection: she didn't handle it well the first time, nor did Nick think she'd handle it well now in the reminder in where he stood with her. Yet, though she held nothing but rage and vengeance, she didn't tell them about his immunity. Not yet. She'd seen the bite long ago and like anyone who caught it, they asked. No matter how he answered, the truth was obvious in the evidence on what he was capable of.

He can think of nothing to say, nor does he want to. Instead, he lets her go, with no forgiveness still to be had on her leaving them, especially a pregnant girl, to die.

She may try to paint the picture like she was still on their side, but Nick learned, as they all did, that Ana Maria had only one side—her own. If it saved her own skin she'd turn in anyone, anything, to stay untouched. That scar on his arm? He'd bet anything she was simply biding her time on when to use it against him.