A/N: Is it October yet? I'm ready to kick off the new season of TWD! This is Michonne-centric. Other characters will come into play as it goes on. The rating will probably change later for language and sexual content. Reviews make me happy, and if you read this, thank you!

Disclaimer: I do not own anything concerned with/relating to The Walking Dead. Owning Daryl would be nice, though!

Chapter 1: Crazies

Michonne stood silently under the tall Georgia pines, listening to the wind whisper through the trees, waiting for the crickets to start chirping. The sun, already disappearing below the horizon, took the warm light out of the woods. The breeze carried a slight chill with it instead of the usual humid breath it drew across her skin. Goosebumps prickled on her dark skin. Fall was fast approaching. Just the night before, mosquitoes had hummed loudly, like tiny helicopters, around her ears. Tonight, there were none to be heard. There were only the sounds of the wind and a few timid chirps of crickets beginning to sing night songs. The cricket-sounds were comforting to her. The tiny chirps were non-threatening; they also served as an early warning system. When the crickets stopped making noise, she stopped moving. Something else, someone else, would be too close, and she would want to see them before they (whatever they turned out to be) saw her.

She didn't move with such caution in the day, but she couldn't afford not to at night. Deciding that her earlier false alarm was unwarranted, but still feeling slightly uneasy, she began to move on. She lightly touched her katana, still in its sheath, and jerked the chain in her hands. The katana soothed her, and jerking the chain brought her captive party ambling behind her.

Although, technically, a captive party was usually alive.

The two zombies with iron clasps around their necks hissed and growled as they both came shuffling behind her, responding to their chain-tug. Their rotten, lifeless eyes sometimes rolled in one direction and then stayed in that position for a while. The connective tissue behind the eyes had badly decayed, and Michonne was surprised the eyeballs of the zombies even still sat in their sockets. In fact, one eyeball of one of her captives had already fallen out and had hung loosely, flopping about the dead thing's face for nearly a week before Michonne couldn't handle the flopping eye and had quickly severed the connective tissue with one quick swipe of her katana.

She had seen things that had hardened her and made her less likely to cringe since the world went to shit, but she still needed to remind herself of who she used to be sometimes. The flopping eyeball, swinging back and forth, had reminded her of her old self. The old self that would have cringed, covering her eyes, if she had once seen it in a movie. But this was no movie now. This was real life. And this new life had changed her into someone new - someone more capable of coping with this new world.

A new world where friends and family died... then reanimated right in front of you.

Tried to kill you.

Tried to tear your flesh from your body.

Tried to make you become a groaning, lifeless, human-eater, too.

In her old life, Michonne had been a lawyer. She had seen things in black and white. Right or wrong. The law not only governed her career, her cases, but it also helped to make up part of who she was. There was no room for that same law in this world - the old laws no longer applied. Black and white were thrown out of the window. A world where the walking dead wanted to eat you? That definitely constituted as a gray area.

She had been funny in her old life. Talkative. Engaging. She tended to see the glass half-full, and she loved her life. College had been a breeze, and her career was only getting better. The only misstep that ever made her stumble had been the divorce from her husband. She had always heard that strong career-oriented women couldn't have a family like everyone else. And her marriage to her husband had proven everyone wrong.

They had lived the good life for a while. She was the primary breadwinner of her middle-class family, and her husband hadn't seemed to mind. She had two beautiful daughters with him, and one of her daughters was finally old enough to study fencing - just as Michonne herself had done as a child. The quiet, suburban household suited Michonne, her husband, and her two daughters.

Little did she know that her husband wasn't as carefree as he presented himself to be.

He suddenly asked for a divorce one day, out of the blue. Michonne was blindsided. Irreconcilable differences. That was the box he had checked on the divorce papers. He didn't want to make a scene - he just wanted out quickly and quietly to keep the girls from being caught in the middle of a messy divorce. He told her that he didn't love her anymore.

Michonne knew better. She was an intelligent woman - she had instincts. She knew he was threatened by her career, by her success. If he was truly a strong man, he wouldn't have minded that she was successful. But, like all weak men, her success plagued him. Made him jealous. Bitter. Unhappy, apparently. So Michonne had given him his out, not wanting to fight. She had done everything right. He had been the coward.

But she had already decided she wasn't going to badmouth him in front of her children. She wasn't going to be that bitter ex-wife. She was going to take the high road and focus on working hard for her babies. She wasn't even thinking about another relationship when she met Mike.

Mike had been good for her. Good for her girls.

She had never known that her new start with Mike would also coincide with the new, ongoing downfall of humanity.

Strange things had been appearing on the news for weeks. Deaths. Mass killings. The government kept everything hush-hush, and everyone had started turning to the internet for information. But there were so many things floating around online, Michonne had no idea what was fact and what was fiction. The realistic, analytic side of her kept telling herself that she was just being paranoid. Something was going on, sure, but she had no way of knowing if or when it would affect her. It was something that was going on somewhere else. Not in her area. Not in her life.

And soon, the government blacked out all social media and all news networks.

Then the world literally fell apart.

Michonne had been caught off guard one day while shopping with her girls. A frantic voice had come on over the Public Announcement System while she and her girls were eating in the food court of the local mall:

"DO NOT PANIC. THE MALL IS TEMPORARILY BEING LOCKED DOWN FOR PATRON SAFETY. STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS AND EXITS. PLEASE STAY CALM."

Both of her daughters had looked across the table at their mother, a mixture of fear and confusion reading on their small faces. Michonne had reassured them, but internally she was frightened and confused, too.

About that time, a crowd of screaming, frantic people came clambering from the opposite end of the mall.

She knew she and her girls had to move or else they would be trapped or trampled, so she snatched both of them up by their arms and instructed them to run with her. But the crowd of panicked people surged forward too strong, and she watched one of her girls slip from her fingers and be trampled to death right in front of her.

Michonne didn't have time then to mourn or try to scramble through the stampede to collect her poor daughter's broken body, so she clamped on to her youngest daughter and jumped up to hold on to the railing of the food court's higher level. This position didn't elevate them much, but it gave Michonne a chance to get her youngest daughter out of the way. The little girl screamed and cried for her sister, and Michonne had huge tears dripping down her face. She didn't realize she was crying. She couldn't think, couldn't register a thought, because she was glued to what was unfolding in front of her.

Like a terrible car crash, she couldn't look away. Surely she wasn't seeing people tearing hunks of flesh from other people with their teeth. There was no way she could be watching people bite others, then lunge upon the fallen and rip into their bodies. Smacking, snarling. All the while the victim was still screaming. No, she couldn't be seeing that. She was making it up in her head because she couldn't cope with seeing her oldest daughter trampled to death. That had to be the explanation. But she still felt herself pull her youngest daughter against her to shield her eyes from the sights Michonne hoped she was imagining.

Her daughter then screamed bloody murder, clutching at Michonne, and started trying to jump down from the raised ledge.

One of the crazed people had bitten into her daughter's neck, and the little girl bled out in her arms.

Crazed people. That was what Michonne had kept repeating in her brain as she had found a way out of the ruckus of the mall. She was numb inside - not wanting to believe both of her daughters had just died in front of her. They had been shopping. A girls' day. That was it. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and now they were dead. She couldn't bear it.

A bad batch of drugs or a terrorist attack, biological warfare gone wrong, had certainly been the culprit behind the crazed people who had killed her girls. That had to be it. She had no way of knowing, then, what it really was.

The crazies who spotted her on her way home followed her there, and she was running full speed. She had always been athletic. She loved playing sports and watching football with her boyfriend, but she never dreamed she'd be using her athleticism to outrun a crazed hoarde of cannibals.

When she made it home, she found her front door wide open, but she had no choice but to run in and shut the door behind her. The hoarde was coming.

Michonne watched through the peephole at the advancing throng of crazies, trying to catch her breath, when she heard shuffling behind her. She had turned around to discover her boyfriend Mike and his best friend Terry ambling towards her, arms outstretched, teeth gnashing.

They were gnashing their teeth at her.

They wanted to rip her flesh open and eat her innards just as she had seen happen in the mall.

She felt trapped in a real-time nightmare.

All of those life-shattering, soul-changing events felt like they had happened in another life. It might as well have been. The life she lead now was only for her survival. She had no comforts, no luxuries. She didn't have to wake up her girls for school or get herself ready for work now.

She had to survive.

Sighing, not wanting to think of her little girls or her life before, she pulled the chain which held the two zombies harder so she could pick up her pace.

The two zombies had once been Mike and Terry. She knew they were none of their former selves now, but she still talked to them sometimes. She had lopped off their arms and lower jaws with the katana she had found during a supply run, and she used them as protection. The cannibal-monsters sometimes overlooked her if she pulled the two rotting corpses closer to her.

Protection.

That was what she told herself she used them for, but she wasn't completely sure if she was being honest with herself.

They were also the only semblance of her old life, her old self, that she still had. The only reminders. And perhaps she held on to them because she didn't want to become crazy and cannibalistic like they had. And maybe talking to them - even though they would never answer her, didn't know her anymore, only wanted to eat her - kept her from losing her humanity.

In this new world, she had found there wasn't much humanity to spare.