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Alicia opens her eyes to pain.
She feels like she’s on fire, like there are embers beneath her skin and she’s burning up from the inside. She opens her cracked, dry lips and tastes blood as a shocked wheeze escapes her aching throat.
Water…
She needs water.
Dark spots dance across her blurry vision, and Alicia blinks, lifting her head and immediately regretting it. She hisses at the sharp throbbing that pulses through her skull in time with her heartbeat.
It’s too much—everything is too much, and her head falls back to rest on the rocky ground. The jarring motion hurts, too.
Alicia closes her eyes and breathes.
She thinks she almost blacks out—maybe she does, because the next time she blinks her eyes open, it’s darker and colder. She can see where she is now, can feel herself lying on her side on an uneven shore. The ocean and the sky seem to stretch on forever, near-identical shades of dusky blue that blend together at the horizon.
The muted colors grow steadily darker as the glow of twilight fades, and it should be beautiful. It should be, but all Alicia can think as she stares out at the sea is that it looks like a void, ready to swallow her whole.
She doesn’t want to fade away.
Her clothes cling to her feverish skin, soaked through with sweat, and shivers wrack her body. It hurts, shivering, and she wants to stop. She tries to stop, but her body won’t listen.
There’s no room in her mind to remember what came before—to remember what happened to her and how she ended up here, on this beach. She doesn’t know why she’s burning.
Alicia shivers. She twitches, her whole body shaking in an involuntary spasm, and she chokes on a scream at the pain radiating out from her left forearm. She doesn’t know why it hurts, either, but it’s the worst thing she’s ever felt. Her eyes sting and burn. Tears run down her grimy face, and one thing she does know is that she doesn’t have the water to spare.
The tears fall anyway.
She’s too weak to move, too weak to do anything except moan and let her eyelids flutter closed. As she’s dragged back down into the darkness, Alicia wonders if she’ll wake up this time.
(She does.)
Alicia comes awake with a lurch and a gasp, and when she opens her eyes, they’re wide and panicked.
Because she remembers now.
She sits up with a hoarse sob, ignoring the fire in her veins and her pounding headache and the desert in her throat, because there on her left forearm is something far, far worse. A red crescent mars her tanned skin, twisted and ugly and sticky with half-dried blood.
She was bit.
Madison tried to save her, but the mass of rotted hands pulled her away and tore her apart, and her last words as her agonized gaze locked with her daughter’s were ‘Alicia, run!’
Then there were the screams.
(Those screams still echo in her ears. She doesn’t know how to make it stop.)
Her mom is dead. Everyone is dead. And, as Alicia stares down at that damning bite on her arm, she thinks that soon, she will be too. She doesn’t know if she’s more scared or relieved.
It’ll all be over soon.
She bows her head and topples over sideways, falling back into the void.
She opens her eyes to the sun rising over the water, casting a rainbow of color into the sky. The bright light sends spikes of pain through her skull, so she looks at the ground instead. Her head feels heavy, her brain thick and foggy and confused. It’s almost like she’s hungover, but she immediately dismisses the thought.
Alicia sits up, bracing herself on her shaky right arm, and squints down at her left.
The bite mark’s still there, as red and raw as ever.
She should be dead.
But she’s not. Alicia stands slowly, clenching her teeth through ragged breaths, and she’s alive. She desperately needs water, and hunger twists up her insides, but the fever is gone, and she’s alive.
Alicia stands there, frozen, blinking rapidly at the bite that should have killed her. Her lips twitch, and something like hope unfurls in her chest.
“Holy shit!”
She walks.
The sun rises, the colors of sunrise shifting into a bright cornflower blue, and with the daylight comes the return of the sweltering heat. She’s burning again, but this time it’s from the outside, and she laughs in elation, in disbelief.
How is she alive?
Alicia decides right then that it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that she is.
So she walks. Her steps are limping and uneven, and a part of her wonders wryly if she isn’t a walker after all. But she keeps stumbling on, cradling her injured arm to her chest, and prays that she’ll find water soon.
Water she can drink, she amends, glancing irately at the endless sea. There’s a poem about that, but she can’t remember how it goes. Something about being surrounded by water and not a drop to drink.
It fucking sucks.
Alicia knows that she won’t make it much longer without some—not in this heat, not when so much of her moisture has been stripped away as sweat and blood (and tears).
And how messed up would that be, if she survived a walker bite only to die of thirst and heatstroke?
Alicia is a fighter, a survivor. Every step is a battle, pushing her battered body just a little farther, and this is a war she refuses to lose. She walks so that she can live. She walks, and the physical pain—her arm, her head, her throat, her sunburned skin—distracts her from her memories, from the truth that’s contained in a single word.
(Alone, alone, alone.)
They find her anyway—the memories. They turn her feet to lead, make her clumsy and slow, whittle down her resolve like a horde of walkers banging against glass.
It doesn’t break, and Alicia keeps going.
She finds water and immediately bursts into tears, and she feels like she’s losing her mind.
It’s a stream—a thin one, trickling down the slope and flowing into the ocean. But it’s clear, and it’s fresh, and though it’s tepid at best, it feels blissfully cool against her skin as she falls to her knees, cups her hand, and drinks.
Alicia drinks until it feels like her stomach will burst.
There are no signs of walkers or people, and she feels like shit, so she risks lying down, propping her injured arm on her stomach to keep it up off the dirt. She stays there for a while, waiting for the water to hit her bloodstream, for some of the fog in her mind to clear.
Eventually, it does.
She doesn’t realize how nauseous she felt until it lessens, and as she pushes herself upright and drinks some more, she begins to really believe that she can survive this. Shuffling closer to the stream, she splashes some water on her face and neck and sighs in relief at the heavenly sensation.
She feels it in her bones—Alicia Clark doesn’t die today.
She decides to follow the stream. There’s no way of knowing how much farther she’d have to go to find another source of water, and with her backpack lying abandoned among the walkers many miles away, she has nothing to store water in.
Alicia never wants to feel that thirsty ever again.
Soon, the rocky coastline gives way to long, scratchy grass and low shrubs, and the change of scenery is a welcome one—no longer is the midday heat radiating so harshly from the ground, reflecting off baked earth. The greenery, sparse as it is, keeps the ground cooler.
The landscape around her is barren, empty, and quiet, so when she winds around a rocky outcropping and hears a strange whispering of grass, a kind of rhythmic crunching, she doesn’t immediately recognize what it is. But as she rounds the corner and a rasping groan meets her ears, there’s no mistaking that.
She sees it a moment later, staggering into view and heading right for her. Alicia sees the walker, and she’s not afraid—not until she reaches for the belt where her pistol should be and her fingers find nothing there.
It’s the same feeling as missing a step as you’re going down the stairs, like a split second of freefall, of dazed, paralyzing fear. Her weapons are gone—her knife stuck in a walker’s skull and her gun dropped in pained shock the moment those yellowed teeth sank into her arm.
The walker’s coming closer and closer, and she has nothing to defend herself with. She has nothing at all, but as she braces herself—to run, to fight—the walker moves right past her. It ignores her like it would ignore someone drenched in walker guts, and Alicia gapes after it, turning in place to watch it slowly shuffle away.
She looks down at herself, but her clothes, while rumpled and dirty, are otherwise clean.
Her gaze lingers thoughtfully on the bite mark on her arm.
Could it be…?
Alicia stares at the retreating back of that lone walker for a long while. Eventually, she turns around and does her best to put it out of her mind.
She keeps going.