Ok, so we have a new character! Here is his face claim and his quote, I'm not gonna change the Cast part now.

Idris Elba: Damian McCollum

"You can't protect everyone, as much as you want to, you just can't."

Now, on with the chapter! I hope you enjoy!

Ethan's POV

Carl and I ran towards the barn, we saw all of our people holding weapons up and the new guy was standing there with his hands up. Carl drew his handgun and kept running, I also drew my handgun and we reached the group of people at the barn.

"Who the hell are you?" Carl asked instantly.

"My name is Damian McCollum, I'm one of the leaders of a group not far from here." The man answered. He held his hands above his head, I saw a handgun and a knife on his belt and a rifle slung over his shoulder next to a large tan backpack.

"Why are you here?" Carl asked.

"My people, they wanted to attack you, steal your stuff, but I convinced them that it would be better to have you join us. I'm here to convince you that joining us is your best option." He answered.

Well isn't that delightful, people that wanted to kill us a little bit ago want to be best friends now. Please, spare us the bullshit.

"Oh yeah, you think so? Well, you're wrong. Joining people that wanted to kill us doesn't sound like a good idea at all." Carl said sassily.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

"I told you already, they realized that we need more people, as many as we can get, so that we can fulfill our goal." Damian responded.

"And what the hell is that?" I asked, speaking for the first time since the conversation began.

"To retake the world. Rebuild civilization. We want to start small, take back a city. Go in, kill all the Dead, begin to repair buildings. We need people for this to succeed." He responded.

Well, isn't that just an extremely noble cause. I'll believe it when I see it.

"Yeah, well, you and your people go have fun getting yourselves killed. All the cities around here are so full of walkers that you'd need an army just to take one, and you'd lose a lot. So, we're not gonna go get ourselves killed for your dream." Carl said as he pushed Damian back slightly and turned to walk away

"Well, it looks like we'll have to do this the hard way then. We need weapons, ammo, food, other supplies, all of which you seem to have, so we will take that from you." He said as he stepped back.

Carl turned back around and put his gun right to the man's forehead, and would have pulled the trigger had he not spoken.

"I wouldn't do that kid! If I don't get back to my people they're gonna come a lot sooner than you'll expect. They know where we are, they know how many of you there are, if you kill me they will come and end you within the hour." He said.

Carl moved the gun away and lowered it, then pulled the trigger, Damian screamed in pain and fell to the ground, blood seeping out of his left leg.

Holy shit! He just casually shot him, like it was no big deal at all!

"There you're not dead. Now leave. And tell you're people that they can come whenever they want, tell them to come ready to die. Start walking." Carl growled as he walked away from the bleeding man and towards the house he and I had checked.

All of us were staring at Damian and then Ezekiel went over and helped him stand.

"You heard the man. Leave at once." He said then followed Carl back to the house.

Carol walked up to Damian and pulled his knife and handgun out of his belt, then yanked the rifle off his shoulder.

"These are ours now. Bye." She said and nodded to the woods where he must have come from.

"You're all insane. You can't expect me to get back to my people with a gunshot wound and no weapons. They will come, and they will kill all of you!" Damian shouted.

"Let 'em try." Mom said as she walked with Carol up to the house.

"Have fun." Tony said sarcastically and then walked away as well.

Finally, Enid and I walked away as well, I kept my eyes on Damian as he stumbled towards the woods.

"Watch your step, don't want to trip and fall on your ass. That'd be extremely embarrassing." Enid said as she looked over at me.

"So, do you have any idea what we might have just gotten into? We have no idea how many people he has, and we just shit him and stole his stuff. I'm thinking they won't be happy about either of those things." I said as I turned around and walked with her up to the house where everyone else had gone.

"Whatever it is we've gotten into, we'll fight through it. We'll survive. We know what we're doing, I'm assuming you and your group do to since you've survived this long. I know that we can handle whatever these guys can throw at us." She responded.

We walked in silence for a little bit before I decided to ask a different question.

"What's Alexandria?" I asked.

She looked shocked by the question and gave me a weird look.

"It was a community. Where'd you hear that? There's no way you could have know about it otherwise." She said.

"Carl. I heard him mention it when we were searching the house. I figured it was a place where you all had lived." I said.

"Yeah... it was great, but I had actually moved to a different community when everything went up in flames, quite literally." She said sadly.

"What happened?" I asked.

"Well, there was this group, they called themselves the Saviors. They forced other groups, other communities to work for them, through fear, brutal strength... slaughtering some of us to prove they could." She started, I saw water brim her eyes when she said the last part.

I guess she lost someone she cared about for that very reason.

"After a while of being pushed around someone decided it was time to fight back, his name was Rick, he was the leader of Alexandria, the place where we lived, well, most of us, at least for some amount of time. The other two communities that fought back were called The Kingdom, and The Hilltop. We all banded together, fought against the Saviors and their leader, Negan, and we were doing pretty well." She continued.

Obviously that didn't last...

"We were all gathered at a meeting to plan our next moves, what would have been the final moves to ending the war, and they attacked us. Destroyed everything. Carl, Carol, Ezekiel, and I are the only ones who survived. Well, that's if you don't include Ezekiel's pet tiger." She said.

"That's... awful." I said, mainly because I couldn't think of anything else to say.

She scoffed and looked at me.

"Yeah, you don't say." She said.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound heartless, I just... I don't know what else to say." I responded.

"It's fine, I knew what you meant." She said, a small smirk appeared on her face and she punched me in the shoulder.

"Ow! What was that for?" I asked as I rubbed the place she had punched.

She can punch hard! What the hell!

"Because I could. I do it to everyone." She said as we walked up onto the porch and got ready to enter the house, but she kept me from opening it when I tried.

"Hey, before we go in there, I just want to make sure you understand what I'm about to say." She said as I looked at her weird.

"Ok, what?" I asked.

"Don't bring Alexandria up around Carl... he lost more than most of us there... a lot of people he cared a lot about, I mean, we all lost people there, but he lost almost everyone he had ever known. He tried not to show it, but it broke him, he's been devastated since it happened, and I just want to keep him from breaking down and beating the shit out of you if you bring it up." She said.

I nodded silently, letting the information sink in.

"Good, now let's go see what everyone else is up to, huh?" She said as she opened the door.

"Yeah, let's do that." I said, still thinking about everything she had told me.

We walked in the living room and I saw Carol in the kitchen cooking something, Tony and Mom were in there with her. Ezekiel was sitting in an armchair in the living room and he was staring out the window that faced the forest where Damian had come from and gone back into. Carl was nowhere to be seen.

"Hey, Ezekiel, where's Carl?" Enid asked.

"He went upstairs, said something about needing to play some video games." He answered without even looking at us.

"Come on, let's go see what he's up to." Enid said as she walked up the stairs.

When we got to the top of the stairs I led the way to the room where the Xbox was and we saw Carl sitting on the bed playing a game, which I recognized as GTA IV, a game I had wanted to get forever and finally convinced my mom to let me get it a few weeks before the world ended.

"Hey." He said as he paused the game and looked over at us.

"Ezekiel said you were up here." Enid said as she sat next to him.

I didn't know what else to do so I sat down on his other side.

"Enjoying yourself?" I asked.

"Not really. I've been to busy thinking about what just happened out there so I keep getting killed." He answered.

"What are we gonna do about that group?" I asked quietly. "We've probably pissed them off now." I continued.

"We'll fight, if it comes to it. We'll survive." He answered.

Enid suddenly got up and walked over to a bookshelf and started looking through it.

"Video games not your thing?" I asked.

"Nope. I prefer reading." She answered.

Why? Video games are so much more entertaining.

"Well, you have fun with that." I said as I turned back to the TV screen, Carl had started playing again.

"There's nothing good in here, I'm gonna go look in the other rooms, have fun with your video games." Enid said as she walked out of the room.

"Wanna play a different game?" Carl asked as he gestured to the pile of games by the Xbox.

"Sure, why not." I said as I walked over to the stack and looked through it, I pulled Call of Duty: Black Ops and showed it to him.

"Looks good to me, put it in." He said as he grabbed the other controller off of the nightstand.

I put it in and then went back and sat on the bed next to Carl once again. He gave me the controller and we got ready to play the game.

"Oh look, how appropriate." He said as the Zombies game mode appeared.

Heh. Playing a game about killing zombies while in the middle of the apocalypse, kinda ironic.

"Let's see if we're as good at killing zombies in a video game as we are in real life." I responded, he clicked the button and we started to play.

After a while we decided we were bored of the game and we turned the Xbox off to conserve power.

"That felt so... normal... you know how long it's been since I played a video game?" I asked.

"Longer than me." He said.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Well... in the last place I lived there was power, and video games. It's gone now, I don't want to talk about it." He answered.

I nodded and we sat in an awkward silence for a few minutes.

"Anyway, it felt so normal to just play a video game. Two friends sitting on a bed playing an Xbox, it feels like we've been shot back to the past." I said, trying to break the silence somehow.

"You almost got everything you just said right, there's just one little thing that wasn't." He said as he looked away from me and got up off the bed and walked towards the door.

"And what's that?" I asked.

"We aren't friends." He said as he started to leave.

"Excuse me?" I asked as I jumped off the bed and followed him.

"You don't know me, I don't know you, so we sure as hell aren't friends." He said before walking down the stairs.

I stood there staring at the stairs in stunned silence.

"He'll come around. He just needs some time to adjust to how things are now." I heard someone say from behind me.

I turned around and saw Carol leaning against the wall.

"I hope so. I really would like to be his friend, but he's making that very hard." I said.

"Like I said, he'll come around." She said as she walked towards the stairs. "Come on, dinner is ready, I had come up to get you guys and Enid." She said as she started walking down.

I followed her, my stomach growling at the thought of food.

Hey guys, I'm sorry it took so long for me to get this part posted, I've been having update issues for a while now, but I'm finally able to post again! Yay! I already have the next chapter written so I'm gonna post that right after this.

Question Time!

1. What do you think about Damian?

2. What do you think is gonna happen with Damian and his group?

3. What do you think about their goal to take the world back, city by city?

4. Any thoughts on Enid and Ethan's chat on the way back to the house?

5. Any thoughts on Carl and Ethan's chat after the game session?

Ok, that's it for now, I hope you enjoyed the chapter!

THANKS FOR READING!