((Side note, this is the alt of Shye lala Hooterstweaken))

They sat in stony silence, staring at nothing, acutely aware of everything. Zyrenne had yet to determine if this was real or not. She contemplated the fog of drugs she had in her system, the withdrawals of alcohol, even contemplated her own sanity. Maybe this was it. Maybe it had all been too much. Maybe she was having a complete mental breakdown, and the reality of the situation lay closer to her in a white padded cell with a fancy tight jacket wrapped around her. She couldn’t make sense out of… those… things.

She refused to use the word zombie, undead, walking dead, or even that popular term ‘walkers’, because, fuck, how could any of that be real? She didn’t know what they were. All she knew is what little she left behind, and the uncertainty of what lay ahead. The boy she met while running unknowingly became her anchor to reality, as so often she wanted to test the limits of those things, to test to see if she would wake up. For him though, she fought. He made it all real. Zyrenne had always held an indifference to life and death before, but she didn’t want to see that terrible fate on the boy.

So, it all seemed natural. They traveled together, moved on instinct. A new drive of survival was born within the woman. There was no time to trust, no time to second guess. It was in that nature that the path of the boy and Zyrenne would be forever changed. But a world with no trust introduces a break in humanity that even flawed little Zyrenne had yet to internalize.

Huddled and cold thoughts of sanity and reality ran through her head when they heard a crashing through the trees. The older man came out, dirty, disheveled, lumbering, and entirely too close to the boy, her anchor. And so on instinct she moved, grabbing her trusty bat they she wouldn’t let out of sight now, and drove it down across the man’s skull. It wasn’t until his cries filled the air, that she realized what she had done.

How was she too know? The man looked like one of Them; moved like one of Them! He lay writhing, screaming, the sounds of his pain filling the momentary break of solace the boy and her had found. The little bit of blood that trickled from his skull would bring Them in like sharks in a frenzy. They had to get out of there. They fought to carry the man… but he was dead weight, and They were drawing closer. Finally, the new world dawned on them as they lay his body, propped against a tree, his sobs filling their ears as they ran quickly, allowing him to be taken. Humanity was gone.