Hello, and thank you for coming over to give this story of mine a chance. In terms of setting, it's placed at a point before Rick meets the group in the city. I've completed the story already, and I'm hoping to have it all published ASAP. I hope you like it. :)

Dear Survivor,

Since you are reading this, you have most likely found this journal on my corpse, or in an abandoned camp ground, or among other books found and restored from this time. Who knows, I could be the next Anne Frank. That's probably an inappropriate comparison, though. If you even know who she is.

I digress. This is not pre-apocalyptic literature. I am not still in school, living the American lifestyle, going to parties, studying for tests, or running laps for PE. Those places don't exist anymore. I'm not sure they ever will again.

Let's start with an introduction. My name is Eden. I'm 18 years old. Or close to it, depending on what the date is. I never got to graduate.

I'm a survivor, too, for now. I might not be as you're reading this. I've been through a lot, and I have no doubts I will go through more.

I was doing quite well for myself, for a while there. I attached myself to a group of kids from my school. We were smart. Or so we thought. We'd played the games, we'd seen the movies. This shit was second nature to us.

For a brief period of time, anyways.

But things changed. Left and right, we were losing people. We went from being a group of 32 to a measly 9. I can't even remember how we lost 23 people in such short time. Or maybe it wasn't short. Maybe it was months. We lost track. Our ipods and cell phones ran out of batteries five days in, and after that, we were all too occupied by surviving – or fucking each other, depending on how you cope – to bother to keep track of the days.

We weren't as smart as we thought we were. Our best weapons were baseball bats we stole from our gym's equipment area. We should have stayed at the school. We should have holed up in the cafeteria or the gym or the change rooms or something. But we didn't. We were stupid. We had it in our heads that if we kept traveling we'd reach someone offering help. Didn't quite work out.

I'm not sure what happened to the others. I don't even know what I was thinking, walking through the city by myself. But they were everywhere. The walkers, I mean. Their mutilated fingers clawing at the chain-link fence I had hid behind. I remember playing games and always thinking I could handle the scary-factor any day.

Things aren't so easy to handle when there's no pause button.

But that's in the past now, because I'm safe here. For now.

And so I'm writing this. I'm not sure why. Maybe I like the idea of someone finding this journal and knowing who I am (or was, depending on the circumstances), what I did, whether I died slow enough to write it down or so abruptly I never got to have an ending. Or maybe I'll be lucky, and when I'm eighty and the world has rebuilt itself I'll be able to sell this off and make money. Whatever my future may be, this is the beginning. We'll see how long this lasts.