A/N: Hey everyone! I'm going to skip the intro and get into the nitty and gritty. Enjoy!

-1-

I can't quite recall how I got here.

I sat there on one of the swings that was irritatingly squeaky and trailed a booted toe through the orange dust under me. My lazy swinging back and forth made that grating noise almost rhythmical as I stared off out of the abandoned, overgrown playground filled with peeling paint and memories with no one left to remember them. I zoned out and stared at a situation that had more shit in it than a goddamn sewer.

Depending on how you looked at it, the previous statement was wrong. I know how I got here. To America. To the state of Georgia in America's famous 'Bible Belt'. That was a no-brainer. But I didn't recall how I got here. To nothing but surviving with the clothes on my back and the will to live not because I had anything going for me but because I was simply still a little too scared to die.

I unconsciously clacked the sides of my combat boots together as I gently swung. The sound was muffled in my ears.

How I had managed to survive this long, I had no fucking idea. Maybe I was lucky. Or just majorly UNlucky. I honestly couldn't tell the difference after all the shit I had been through. Call me crazy, but living as a nomad in a foreign country with no home and no hope, running into only roamers, thieves, psychos and raiders was not what any sane person would call 'decent living conditions'. A sudden gust skimmed the thin top layer of dirt and blew it into my tired blue eyes and I stopped swinging to rub the stuff out of them. I pressed the heels of my palms into my sockets and rubbed, starting to feel the grime and grit work their way out. I tilted my head forwards and my greasy ginger hair slithered forwards down my front, exposing the nape of my neck to the beating sun. I could feel it grow instantly warm and I growled to myself. This heat made me wish I was back home in England with my mother. Or in Scotland with Dad, it would be a little cooler up there than London.

And just like that the tears came, and I no longer had the heart to stop them. I no longer saw any reason to hold them back. They dripped down my arms and stained my army jacket as I felt my chin quiver. I hadn't allowed myself to cry, honestly didn't see the point of it, but in the suffocating heat the dam I had built inside me came crumbling down. And knowing my history with crying, now that I had started I wouldn't be able to stop. My shoulders shook with silent sobs and I swallowed down all of the wails and screams that threatened to come up my throat. I didn't want to bring any unwanted attention to me, and though the area around me had stilled to the sleepy chirping of crickets and the occasional creak from the boughs of trees, I was not so foolish as to believe that there was NOTHINGout there.

I don't know how long I sat out there for. It could've been minutes. It could've been hours. Hell, it might've been days for all I cared. I just prayed to whatever would listen that this was all a bad dream. Some horrific nightmare I was having and I was tossing and turning in my sleep in my hotel bed and Cora would wake me up any time now. But I knew it wasn't a dream. No dream could go on this long, be this horrific. I pressed my lips together in a thin line as one thought crossed my mind over and over again and I whimpered, the loudest I had been this entire time.

I wanted my old life back.

But it was all snatched from my grasp when everything happened. Who knows, maybe Britain had held out against this…whatever it was. After all, it was cut off from mainland Europe and therefore Asia too. If they'd collapsed the tunnel under the Channel and killed off the first of them to appear in the country, they could have held onto law and government. But I guessed I would never know.

Everyone I knew and loved could be dead and I wouldn't ever know for sure.

That thought almost made me cry harder.

I heard a soft, pitiful whine from my right and knew I had to snap myself out of it, pull myself together. I took a few shaky, gulping breaths and wiped my hands on my jacket after clearing the rest of the tears off my freckle-dusted cheekbones. I looked over to see Liesel, the Border Collie I had met along the way, sitting there in the dirt and eyeing me with those compassionate innocent eyes. She gave another low whine at seeing me so sad but I gave her a miserable smile and reached out a hand to tickle her, something which she quickly accepted. Thankfully my voice stayed hushed and steady as I spoke to her.

'Good lass, good lass…'

She licked my hand in comfort before I leant back on the swing and gripped the chain with both hands, letting out a heavy sigh that sank under the weight of this infernal heat. You'd think that I'd have some semblance of what to do when I'd been living in hell for so long, but no such luck so far. I didn't know what the FUCKto do. Like, AT ALL. I had so many options before me – not something you'd expect when there were no options left – but I couldn't figure out which one to pick. The way I saw it, I had about five choices to choose from.

I could find a hideout somewhere and hunker down. Not too bad an idea it would seem but there was one huge problem: nowhere was safe anymore. Roamers had made their way through so many places and wrecked so many buildings that most of them would be impossible to fortify, especially since I was by myself and wouldn't have the muscle to do extreme heavy lifting. And say I did decide to go with that option, where would I go? A cabin in the woods? The woods were so large that someone could walk straight past it if it was hidden well enough and never realise. The thing was, most other survivors had probably taken to the woods with the same idea. An apartment tucked away in a city like Atlanta? No one would be stupid enough to enter the city, despite all the roamers that had left in the hunt for food. However, the place would still be crawling and with all the dead ends and tight spots, the place would most likely be a death trap. The coast or maybe offshore somewhere like an oil rig? The ocean is unpredictable, and one day a massive wave could just come down and crush my way off an offshore haven and leave me stuck in the middle of the sea. Perhaps not. And the same goes for a boathouse or something akin to one. Big storm + no warning = house swept out to sea with me probably still in it. I think I'll pass that one too. If I found a good spot somewhere that would most likely see me through a long while, then maybe. But I wasn't going to go out of my way looking for it.

I could find other survivors – who had at least some grip on sanity – and maybe even find a safe zone. But that would be difficult, not only because of how risky it was but also because I had no idea where to even start LOOKINGfor a safe zone. All the safe zones that the American government had set up around the cities had collapsed, most other ones had either fallen like the first ones or had slowly descended into madness. Human nature is a cruel thing, and when your safety is threatened…you'll do anything to survive. I could well imagine that people had turned to eating each other if they were starving, leaving babies to die since they are so hard to care for. Raping. Pillaging. Slaughtering. And sanctuaries and fortified towns were top prizes in other people's eyes. Despite the fact that there was usually strength in numbers, you would be more vulnerable since what you have, others want. And there was no guarantee that the people in the sanctuaries were any better. They could take people in to make them work as slaves or something. No, perhaps it wasn't the best choice after all.

I could stay on the road. After all, that's what I had been doing ever since Savannah got destroyed. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, I had just aimlessly wandered around Georgia since it began. After all, it was probably the safest thing to do in this world. Anywhere you stayed could get overrun by roamers, other groups and gangs. No matter where you are, there are still just enough people in this world that someone would find you eventually. Whether they were nice or not was down to pure gold luck. But the same could be said about travelling. Someone could find you, a not-nice-anymore someone, or a roamer could come up behind you with minimal warning. Finding a place to break for the night was always something of a problem, since if you weren't picky enough then your chances of making it through the night dimmed significantly. And each morning posed a question of which way you would go and where you might end up. Whether you would end up making it through the day to face the same problem again the next night. I continued to do this one since I had no idea what else to do, and it had kept me alive so far. Without a doubt this looked both the most logical and also the most hopeless.

The next choice looked both the best and the worst: suicide. There was so much death constantly surrounding me, the survivor, I didn't think that anyone would look twice at a teenage girl's body lying in a ditch somewhere. Death was quite commonplace to me now. The thing was…it never should be. You should grieve when someone you know dies and you should have others that help you move on and continue with your life, living it in honour of those who passed away. Nowadays if someone you were travelling with died due to a bite or bullet it was standard to just shrug, move on and walk away. If it was a friend then you might be able to grieve if you had any tears left to shed but even that was something of a rarity now, and there was no one to lean on and seek comfort from both because it was such a normal thing and because in this world, the thing that came first was yourself: if you were at risk due to their death you needed to get up, move on and continue surviving almost like nothing had happened. After all, there was a good chance that everyone you would know or ever meet would die right in front of you now. The most awful thing about it all was that usually it was one who killed the other. Yeah, people murdered each other all the time back in the previous world but then there was some sense of law and closure. The question of whether I wanted to actually stay in this hellhole of a world was something that had pressed on my mind since it all went down, and honestly I didn't know what to think on it. If I could ever muster up enough courage to end my own life I would have to do it right, so I didn't end up alive and badly injured. I had a gun: a bullet through the brain would probably do the trick. Problem was…I didn't know what was on the other side. Was it the faces of my family and friends? Was it the world turning like none of this had ever happened? Or was it just everlasting darkness and crushing loneliness? Personally I didn't want to take that risk.

The last option was more delusion than anything else, and yet some part of me still hoped that it was possible: going across the Atlantic somehow and getting back to England. There was no guarantee that it hadn't ended up just like Georgia or worse but I wanted to be able to know, see for myself. I wanted to know if my family had made it, or my friends, or even the stranger I bumped into that one long-forgotten time and never saw again. True it would be nigh-on impossible, but some secret part of me dreamed no longer of a shining career or an exciting life, but of finding a working boat with all the supplies and fuel I could ever need, and sailing away across the desolate Atlantic and landing back on the shore of England. Travelling to London, or Edinburgh, or York. Finding that the people there had survived, managed to hold onto law and government and society. Being reunited with my family, my parents hugging me and telling me they thought they would never see me again…

I am pulled back into the (unfortunately) real world to hear Liesel growling at something. I slowly moved my head and gazed over to her to find that she was stood straight up, ears perked upwards and her jowls curled in a full-on snarl at something that I didn't even have to guess at anymore. I looked to see where she was focused on, only to see a group of five roamers shuffling their way around the fence of the park, most likely having caught the scent of fresh meat if they were moving that fast, but there was no way that they could've seen me sitting on the swing from that distance. I froze for a few moments, blinking stupidly, and quickly stood as I tucked my too-long hair behind my ears. I leant forward and stooped to pick up my red backpack and swung it around my shoulders, the black katana I had miraculously managed to find shaking a bit on my back. I made my way quickly back to the entrance I had come through, and my head whipped around to see Liesel still in the same spot, looking at me with those big brown eyes.

'Come Liesel. Come on lass!'

She bounded after me as I made my way out of the edge of the town and back into the treeline of the Georgia woodland, the trees just barely giving me cover to get away from the roamers.

Break over. Back to surviving.

A/N: More introductory/inner monologue than anything else, but I hope this chapter wasn't for nothing and gave you a bit of an outline about the character of Katrina. We'll be getting to Gabriel's church and her secret in a few chapters. :P