"Nick." I heard a soft, faint voice. "Hey, get up. Nick?" My eyes fluttered open as Annie's face came into view.

"Rude…" I muttered with a faint smile as I pulled myself up. "Good thing you're too damn cute for me to care." She chuckled as I kissed her on the cheek and then slumped back into the cozy embrace of the plane seat. I saw her father in the corner of my eye. He was focusing on flying the plane, but still had a faint sense of anger in his eyes.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered. "Would you two please save it?" I knew he probably wasn't the happiest at the moment. After two long years of searching, he had just reunited with Annie…or Katey, as he prefers to call her by her first name…only to find a guy he doesn't know in a relationship with her. I guess that's a good reason to be skeptical of me, but I think he knew I was good at heart. Better than the last asshole she was with, that's for sure.

"We're landing soon," Annie said. "Dad wanted to run you and Dick through the procedure." I turned behind me and saw Dick half asleep, taking up the whole back row of the plane.

"Whatever," he muttered. "Soon as I can, I'm ditchin' you guys. I gotta get back to my home and reunite with my buds." I smirked at him.

"By buds, you mean smelly, fat, redneck truckers?" I asked him. Annie and I laughed pretty hard. I think I even got a smirk out of Chuck.

"Well, some of em'," he replied. "I'm really just lookin' forward to gettin' the hell away from Romeo and Juliet and the hard ass over there that slightly reminds me of Elvis."

How many days had it been? Not that long before I was fixing up cars, getting my ass chewed out by my strict, but loving boss, Rhonda. And now? I'd killed…a lot. But that's not what scared me the most. The fact that I had become good at killing is what brought a chill down my spine. Not just the undead…but the living as well. Back to the present, I turned back around to the front of the plane. Isabela was sitting next to Chuck, in front. I forgot she was there, she didn't talk much. I didn't really know what to make of her.

"Here's the plan," Chuck began. "In case you two boneheads forgot, we're going to my place, in Spring Valley. There's an old abandoned car lot there. We should have enough space to land."

"Should?" I interrupted. Chuck looked to me.

"If we land anywhere else, the cops will know. We'll be arrested, and if they find out she is Isabela Keyes…"he looked in her direction. "… Then you can forget about a cure." I stubbornly looked to Annie, then looked back and nodded my head.

"As soon as we land," Chuck continued, "We need to hide the plane and get out of there. It's still night, so we should be able to get in unnoticed." Chuck looked to Dick. "You're free to go where you want once we're out of there, but you can't discuss anything about the cure. No one can find out until it's ready." Dick slid back in his seat.

"Thank Christ," he said. I looked back at Annie, who had her arm wrapped around mine.

"We did it," I said to her. She smiled, and pressed her lips against mine.

SPRING VALLEY, NEVADA

I felt the burn of a needle going through my arm, and seeing blood fill up the syringe. I didn't like that. I had seen enough blood for one life.

"I need to synthesize this," Isabela said quietly. "I'll need some time; you should all get some rest while I work." I turned to see Chuck staring into the television. It was Channel 6 Action News, showing a massive mushroom cloud that had settled. In the corner, I read 'LOS PERDIDOS, CALIFORNIA'. In a way, I was sad. I grew up in that city, and served the people there for the longest time. I was the best mechanic in town, I knew tons of people that I talked to everyday. People who are gone now. Then I remembered.

"God, I hope Rhonda and Gary made it out of there," I said. Chuck turned to me.

"I've known Gary for the better part of a decade," he said to me. "There's no way that fat bastard didn't make it out. You have my word." I smiled and turned to Annie, who was slumped on the couch next to me. "Okay you two," Chuck started. "Better get some rest. We have a big day tomorrow, and it's already 3 AM. "Katey, you can sleep in your room, and Nick, you get the couch."

"Uh, sir?" I began. I looked at Annie, then back at him. "I was actually thinking…" he turned his menacing stare directly into my eyes.

"No." He said, and that was that. He quietly went upstairs. Isabela had already gone into the office with some of her equipment she got from the lab back at Los Perdidos. I turned back to Annie.

"Sorry Nick, it's gonna take some time for him to warm up to you," she whispered.

"You know," I replied. "This is the first alone time we've ever had." She smiled as I pulled her close to me, and we were silent for a while. I looked into her eyes and saw that she was troubled. I dared to bring it up to her.

"Look, I'm sorry about Red—"She quickly glanced up at me.

"Don't say his name." She said sternly. I knew I needed to stop. They were friends after all, partners for a time. It must have been hard on her that he was so quick to turn on his family for money. But I knew he was bad news the moment I saw him. I knew he couldn't be trusted. So I did what had to be done in the end.

5 HOURS LATER

I felt the sunshine on my face as I left the land of sleep. I was in a warm bed, and could feel Annie's embrace against my chest, still sound asleep. I made a long yawn and slowly opened my eyes, hoping to see her beautiful face. Instead, I saw Chuck's stern glare.

"Shit—" I jolted upward and quickly fell out of the bed. I was wearing only my mechanic themed underpants.

"WHAT IN GOD'S NAME WERE YOU DOING WITH MY DAUGHTER?!" Chuck's intense scream attacked my freshly woken mind. I looked down at Annie, who quickly pulled the covers up and scrambled to find her shirt.

"Sir, I…" I said quietly. "I swear it was nothing—"

"If you weren't the cure for mankind," Chuck interrupted. " I would SNAP YOUR NECK RIGHT HERE." Chuck said, inching closer to me. "Now get the hell up, both of you. Isabela is waiting." As soon as he walked out of the room, I scrambled to my coveralls and slipped back into them as quickly as possible. Annie went through her wardrobe and put on a pink sweatshirt and blue jeans.

"Not really your look," I said, smiling. She looked up at me.

"It was a long time ago," she said, walking past me as she grabbed a zombrex syringe from her bag. "Hopefully this is the last zombrex I'll ever need," she said, jabbing the needle into her arm.

We were all circled around the kitchen table. Isabela pulled a syringe out of her lab kit.

"I managed to extract and synthesize what I believe to be the formula that permanently dissolves the larvae," she began. "I then mixed it with the normal zombrex formula, which should render the infection dead." She then looked up. "But it needs to be tested." Annie held out her arm, but Chuck grabbed it.

"Honey," he said. "We don't know what this will do. I can't let you be the lab rat here." Annie jerked her arm out of Chuck's stern grasp.

"Dad… I have to do this," she said hopefully. She held her arm out to Isabela again, who extracted a dose of the formula into the syringe and gently pressed it into Annie's arm. She didn't squirm or anything. She'd taken enough needles in her life. When Isabela pulled it out, Annie looked at her arm, where the bite mark her mother gave her 13 years prior still remained. She began to grown in pain and fell to the floor.

"ANNIE!" I yelled and kneeled beside her. Chuck quickly followed. I checked for a pulse. It was slowing. "No…" I said. "Please God…" Then something caught my eye. The bite mark was fading. Annie slowly opened her eyes. She looked at her arm again, now completely bare of any marks.

"Goodbye, mom," she muttered, slowly placing her head back down. I grabbed a pillow and placed it under her head, giving her a kiss as I stood up.

"It works…" I said. I turned to Isabela. "I really works." Isabela smiled.

"I must get back to the office to create more doses. I have the formula now, Nick. I can synthesize the cure, I don't need any more blood." She walked away.

"I have some old friends I need to call," Chuck said, walking out of the room. I sat down, staring at Annie, who was still recovering. I remembered the last week. Red, Hemlock… the people who almost killed me, who almost destroyed the one chance for a cure to mankind. And then something else hit me. How important was I? The cure was in my blood. I was some kind of chosen one or some shit. Of course, I wouldn't get any credit. I was just the clueless test subject. Isabela was the one who successfully created the cure. If only I had known at the time how far she had went to make that clear…