Chapter Text
The silence of the city gave Trini an uneasy feeling. While it wasn’t a big city by any means, the lack of shuffling and groaning did little to subdue her nerves. She peaked her head around the corner of the building and tightened her grip on her backpack; she needed those supplies to get into the base, and she couldn’t afford to drop them if a horde snuck up on her. The emptiness of the street amplified the silence. Cars littered the streets of the small downtown area, decorated in dried blood and rotting corpses. The smell of smoke and ash permeated the air, and clothes and desecrated remains filled in the gaps where cars could not, acting as remnants of the night that everything truly had gone to hell.
~
Five Weeks Ago
Trini’s music was blaring through the headphones around her neck. She kept pausing every few steps while she walked her brothers down the sidewalk after school, so that Mateo could jump over the cracks. Diego held onto her other hand while he told her all about his day at school. He was just about to get into what happened during recess when the screaming first started.
Trini instinctively pulled the boys to her side as she looked around for the source. A woman was lying across the road, while a man was attacking her. Passerbys ran over to pull him away, but were shocked to find that the man was holding the woman’s throat between his teeth. Most ran away at the sight, but Trini was frozen to the spot in shock. Some brave, if not too brave, bystanders tried to fight back against the man, but many ended up with a similar fate as the woman. It wasn’t until the fallen woman picked herself back up and began attacking others did Trini’s shock end and her instincts kicked in.
Run.
She grabbed onto the boys’ hands and began sprinting away from the scene. Almost instantaneously, chaos erupted all over town. It seemed that more and more of these things just kept pouring out from shops. Trini skidded to halt as the glass from the restaurant ahead of them shattered, these monsters pouring out from the broken window. Frantically searching, she pulled her brothers down an empty alleyway.
The footsteps of the monsters grew louder, and Trini grew panicked at the sight of a seemingly dead end.
“Trini! They’re getting closer!”
She turned to face Mateo, pulling him and Diego closer to her in an attempt to shield them from the horde approaching. She held them close, hoping it would convey as an unspoken apology. That she was sorry for getting them stuck. Sorry they wouldn’t get to see Mami or Papi again. Sorry that they wouldn’t get to grow up and have families, and fall in love, and live to be 100. Tears began to fall from her face, tears of regret and shame that she couldn’t do better by them. That she couldn’t keep them safe like she had always told them she would.
She didn’t know what made her look up towards the sky. Maybe it was to catch a glimpse of God. To see the Devil. To not look at death approaching them, baring its bloodied teeth and grasping at them with its cold, unforgiving claws.
Whatever reason it was, it brought her eye to the fire escape that was just out of reach from the dumpster. In her panic and fear, she hadn’t noticed it; it was so rusted it blended in with the brick wall of the apartment complex it was attached to.
“Boys, climb on the dumpster, now! Hurry!”
The boys scrambled up, and Trini followed suit, narrowly missing the undead that had approached them. The boys were screaming in fear, and Trini had to hold back her own scream at the mass of hands and heads that were lunging towards them, desperately trying to sink into the trio. The girl lined herself up with the ladder above them and jumped up, barely grasping onto the bottom rung. Using all of her strength and adrenaline, she managed to only pull it down halfway, but it was enough.
“Let’s go, mijos. Up the ladder. Wait for me on the landing.”
Trini hoisted the boys up onto the ladder, one after the other. The boys clung onto each other while they waited for Trini to join them. Trini practically sprinted up the ladder after them, not wanting them to be alone without her any longer than necessary. Once she got herself to the landing and pulled the ladder out of reach from the horde below, the boys flung themselves onto their sister, and they all collapsed into tears. Trini held them tightly, pressing kisses against their heads and vowing to herself that she would never let something like that happen again.
~
Trini closed her eyes tightly and shook her head, pulling herself out of the daydream. Focus.
After a few more moments, Trini began walking in the middle of the road, her eyes flickering all around her as she made her way to the edge of the city. By nightfall, she’d be inside the facility, finally seeing her brothers for the first time in what felt like years. She fought off the small rush of emotion that had begun to build up inside of her; losing focus out here was a death sentence if you weren’t in control.
Too many times, she’d come close to learning that lesson the hard way.
Minutes passed, and Trini was able to exit the downtown area without being detected. Her steps quickened as she approached the sign announcing the city limits. A soft shuffling sound up ahead had her slipping out the machete from its holster on her hip. A lone walker was bent down on the ground, someone seemingly already taking out its legs in an effort to escape. Its skin was rotting and torn into chunks on his face and arms; its clothing was shredded and stained brown with blood. She quickly approached it from behind, raising her machete up and bringing it down in one quick motion. Its body collapsed with a surprisingly loud thud, and she quickly retreated into the forest. She heard a growl or two up on the road, so she looked over her shoulder as she ran to see how many were following. She sighed in relief to see that none of them had followed, but it quickly turned into a gasp once she felt herself falling.
Luckily for Trini, the embankment was only 5 or 6 feet deep.
She still scraped herself all to hell rolling down it though, and the blood dripping over her eye was cause for concern, but the walkers didn’t hear her and were stumbling back towards Angel Grove, so she figured it could be worse. She laid down for a minute to catch her breath, and then slowly sat up. The base has medical supplies, just suck it up and keep going, she told herself. Trini carefully ripped off one of her sleeves and fashioned herself a bandage around her head.
I probably look like fucking Rambo.
She got up, mindful of the soreness that resonated throughout her body. Dios mio, I need a nap. And a drink, she mused to herself as she began trekking through the forest. Definitely a drink.
~
It had been hours, at least she assumed by the setting sun, by the time she exited the woods. Her body was aching, and her eye was beginning to swell, but the base was finally in sight and her spirits were already lifting. She could already imaging the moment she gets to see Mateo and Diego again.
The roaring of multiple walkers pulled her out of her head faster than she had gotten into it.
The growling jolted her head around so fast she almost giving herself whiplash. There was a smaller horde, somewhere around twenty or so. They seemed to be like all the other walkers that plagued the world; grotesque, nightmarish, and the biggest pain in Trini’s ass that she had ever experienced. Unlike the other walkers she had dealt with in recent weeks, however, these seemed to have eaten recently. They began to approach Trini at a much faster, more alarming pace than the walkers back on the road. She found herself sprinting before her mind could comprehend what she was doing. Trini was lucky that the edge of the forest was so close to the base so that she had a shot of outrunning the undead. As she approached the base, she started waving her arms maniacally in the air, hoping to catch the attention of the guards at the entrance. When that didn’t seem to work, and the growling was too close for comfort, she began screaming at them.
“Hey, fuckers! A little help, please?!”
That seemed to catch their attention, and Trini picked up the pace as the gunfire whizzed past her. Within seconds, she burst through the small opening of the gate, stumbling onto the ground while guards ran past her, taking down the small horde and ensuring that the fences were secured.
Her head was pounding at the wound above her eye, and she gasped for air for a few moments, waiting for the adrenaline to fade away. The gunfire began to die down, and Trini placed her hand against her head as she sat up. The sound of a gun cocking and the feeling of warm metal pressed against her temple made her breath hitch. A deep voice spoke out from behind the weapon.
“Get up.”