Chapter Text
9 months, 23 days, and 7 hours.
Roughly.
You'd lost count by now, but you figured that was a good estimate for how long it'd been since you left home. Left everything you knew and loved because of some damned apocalypse. You always thought it was a fantasy, and all those doomsday preppers were just nutjobs who'd lost their minds and turning to the survivalist way of life was far more simple. Maybe they were right though, maybe you should've listened. Out of everyone, they'd be the last ones standing.
Honestly, you didn't even think you'd get this far. You thought you'd last a month at best, having run away on your own after all. You never had anyone anyway, no parents, no siblings, no friends; no one to care for you. It'd always been that way, and you tried your best to not let it bother you, even though it did when you lay awake at night in your tent, listening to the faint sounds of walkers and wildlife in the distance. You were all alone, and maybe that's how it was meant to be. With your set-up in the woods, you were convinced you could live here until the end of time, slaughtering walkers and hunting animals, although poorly, for as long as you needed. You didn't need protecting.
~~~~~
The fire outside your tent crackled lightly, embers flying across the forest floor, landing at your feet. Your boots were well worn by now, but it's not like you could just pop in to the nearest shoe shop and grab a new pair - you'd have to make do. Probably until you suffered an inevitable death. Everyone had to die eventually, maybe sooner rather than later would be better.
You poked the fire with your knife, sending a hiss into the sky, followed by a plume of smoke. Hunger crept into your stomach like a leech, sucking the energy from your body. It had been a day since you'd last eaten, and even that wasn't a substantial meal. Finding food during the winter was far harder than you'd anticipated, and all the nearby towns had been overrun. You'd never be able to take all the walkers down by yourself.
Maybe that was the true kicker of being all alone. You'd die of starvation. Arguably the most embarrassing way to die when you're constantly being attacked by the undead, but probably the preferable way to end it.
Sometimes all you wanted to find were people, new people who wouldn't know about your past and would treat you as an equal, but there was always a threat. Nobody would help you out of goodwill. People always wanted something, especially at the end of the world.
~~~~~
9 months, 25 days, 3 hours.
You'd still not eaten, and the forests felt more barren than they'd ever been. It had felt like endless days of stumbling around the forests looking for the smallest animal, a single berry, or some leftovers someone had accidentally dropped while they were escaping a horde. Every single muscle and nerve in your body felt numb except for your stomach, which felt like you'd had a bullet shot straight through it. Maybe this was what walkers felt like, forcing every morsel of flesh into their mouths in a futile effort to escape constant starvation.
Black spots fluttered in your vision, not long before you tripped over a stray branch and had to cling onto the nearest tree to keep yourself upright. Heavy breaths fled your lungs, heart pounding so hard you thought it might explode.
Your pulse ran wild through your head, beating as loud as footsteps that were racing right within your skull. A few hard blinks snapped you out of it, eyes shooting to the emerald canopy above you.
Then you heard the unmistakable growl of a walker, only inches from your ear.
Its arms were strung out towards you, flesh dripping from its face, mouth wide open anticipating its next meal. The creature had clouded eyes, as if they'd been frozen over, fixated on you as you stood almost completely still. A desperate hand fiddled with the knife strapped to your left thigh, fumbling maniacally yet you couldn't find purchase.
You'd left it at your camp.
Panic set in, yet you were so tired you couldn't move. This was how you were gonna die, and you'd not even lasted seven months.
You shut your eyes praying, waiting for its teeth to sink into your skin. A wet, presumably bloody, hand grazed your wrist, before the growing stopped entirely, and the hand fell away. It hit the ground with a thud.
You didn't dare open your eyes for minutes, almost as if the nightmare would come fleeting back to you if you did. Eventually, you tentatively came back to your surroundings, searching for the creature, or any companions it had brought with it. However, to your surprise, you were completely alone, except for the corpse on the ground.
A hole had been pierced straight through its skull, but you couldn't quite tell what by. It looked to be shaped somewhat like a bullet, but you'd never heard a gun go off, and you definitely wouldn't have missed that, even in your ravenous state. With how almost perfectly round it was, it most certainly couldn't have been a knife either. The only thing that could've killed it was an arrow, not that you'd seen many bows on your travels, and whoever had fired it had taken it back without even making you aware of their presence. Must be a good shot.
You decided you couldn't stay here for much longer, not before more walkers came your way looking for a meal. You'd still yet to find one for yourself. As you attempted to amble on, you kicked something right by your foot, that definitely wasn't the rotting corpse. Looking down, you saw a heap of fur, outlining ears, legs, a small tail. It looked to be a small hare that had perhaps got caught up in the mess. However, upon picking it up, you noticed something even more intriguing about it.
An identical piercing straight through its skull, exactly like the walker had. Clearly you had a guardian angel looking after you.
~~~~~
The trek back to camp was a bizarre one, and you had hardly noticed how much land you had travelled as your thoughts raced over and over about the stranger who had saved you, and why they had never shown their face. You had relied so much in that moment on the sweet relief of death that you had become completely oblivious to your surroundings, and you knew that couldn't be good. Vulnerability was creeping in on you, and nobody ever lasted long out here when they'd been captured by it.
After what felt like hours, you finally reached your tent, fire still crackling dimly. Stepping over the tripwire, very nearly catching and flying straight over it, you threw your bag onto the floor and practically collapsed to your knees in exhaustion. You crawled to your knife haphazardly, which you'd stupidly left right by your tent, and slowly began to release the hare's skin from its body. Touching raw meat always made you wretch, but it had become something you had to bear. If you had let small things like that bother you, you'd have been dead right from the beginning. You'd always had a backbone, don't get it twisted, but the apocalypse had got you hardened up for good. Nothing would ever break you down again, even if you were starved for days.
Casting the soft, brown fur away from you, you threaded it onto a long shaft to roast over your fire, adding a few more sticks to keep it alive. Thankfully Georgia had a fairly dry winter this year, or the cold would kill you off quicker than any walker.
Your teeth sunk into its warm, delicious, tender meat, prising it from the bone. Delicious may have been a bit of a stretch, but when all you'd eaten were birds and squirrels for weeks on end, a hare was like eating an expensive steak back when life was normal. You had to appreciate everything you got out here, before some neverending peril took you out.
Somehow you'd survived. Even you didn't know for yourself whether that was a good thing.