Before we get into the story, I wanna say a couple things.
First, I'd recommend reading my first story, Too Far Gone, as this is a spinoff of that story and there's going to be a lot of callbacks to that story and its events later on. So, if you haven't already, I'd strongly recommend it.
Next, for those of you who followed TFG, you'll know that I try to keep my story uploads to one chapter a week to keep up with my personal schedule and everything. You'd also know that I have a very busy life, and only do this for fun when I have free time. Furthermore, with my incredibly busy schedule, there's going to be points where I miss a week or two because of just about anything. I'll try my best to keep this consistent, but I can't guarantee that. With that being said, I'm gonna try to make this a chapter a week, uploading on Fridays, and it'll probably stay that way through the duration of this story.
Without further ado, enjoy.
Chapter 1: The Rules of Survival
I didn't ask for this. Then again, who would? Six years, day in and day out, fighting to survive. I stopped praying for this to end years ago. No one would hear me, anyways. Maybe when I was younger, more naive, I would've hoped this shit would be done by now. Now, I've accepted the inevitable. This is how life is.
A fucking zombie apocalypse. It's pretty simple. Someone got infected, died, came back, killed someone else, and the cycle continued, eventually infecting enough of the world to bring it to the state it's at today. I won't pretend to be a scientist and act like I know what I'm talking about with most of this, because that'd be a lie, but the rules of survival are pretty simple: Don't get bitten. That one came pretty naturally when Mom came home that Saturday in July of 2010 with a bite on her arm. Hours later, she was inches away from tearing a piece of my face off. If it weren't for quick thinking from my Dad, I'd have been dead, just like Mom.
The second rule of surviving is to make sure you can do what needs to be done. It's shitty, but it keeps you alive. My Dad, who had raised me, defended me, watched over me and my brother all our lives, needed me the most, to make sure he didn't come back. At 14 years old, you're not supposed to do things like that, but I had to step up.
So I did.
I fulfilled my Dad's final wish.
And it killed me inside.
But it was what he wanted.
The third rule of surviving is don't get too attached to people that aren't your family. I learned this one more recently when our group was ambushed by some walkers in the middle of the night. Mom was long gone and Dad had been gone for about a year, so my brother and I were taken in by a family, Sierra and her girlfriend, Angie. We had been on our own for maybe a year when we met them, and they welcomed us with open arms along with their two kids, Jackson and Alyssa. The walkers came, and my fight or flight response was to run. I narrowly escaped our camp with my brother, brought to tears by the sounds of our adoptive family getting torn to shreds. We never looked back, too terrified to even think about it.
All that remains after these ordeals are the two of us: me and my brother. I'm Brett Sanderson. 18 years alive, and a third of them I've spent surviving this mess. My brother's Benjamin, but usually I'll call him Benji. He's two years younger, but he's my best friend and frankly, I don't think there's anyone I'd rather have my back in a fight.
The two of us started in Appleton, Wisconsin, where our parents, Byron and Allison, settled down and started our family. When the dead started walking, we moved East, toward Michigan and Ohio, usually hunting and scavenging for supplies, not staying in one spot for too long. That was enough to sustain us for a while, but when Dad died in Cincinnati, Benji and I decided to move on, going North towards Pennsylvania and New York. Eventually, we went South, winding up where we are today, in the woods of West Virginia. Who knows where we'll wind up next?
I pull out my knife, about to ambush an unsuspecting walker a dozen or so yards ahead of me, but I freeze when I hear something whizz past my head and plant itself in the walker's skull. I turn back around to see my brother walking toward the walker he'd just shot, removing the arrow from the skull with ease and loading it into his crossbow.
"Hey, watch it." I scold him. "You almost hit me."
He grins and shrugs. "Relax, Brett. I came nowhere close to hitting you."
I sigh and shake my head. He's probably right. He's had that crossbow since we looted a Sporting Goods store in Ann Arbor, and ever since he's became a crackshot with it. Still though, it doesn't hurt to be careful in this world. Staying careful keeps you alive.
The two of us go deeper in, the woods thickening and the midday sky turning toward the late afternoon.
"Hey. You see this?" Benji asks me as I turn back to see him looking at something, rope coiled around a tree, leading upwards. I follow the rope up to see a giant rock, suspended in the air and hanging by the rope.
"What the fuck is this?" I ask back to him, walking over to get a closer look.
"Maybe it's a trap? I don't know. Maybe for killing walkers." He suggests, and I nod in agreement. It makes sense.
"Doesn't seem very efficient, but I'm sure whoever set this knew what they were doing. Keep your eyes open and watch out for any more." I tell him. Looking around, we keep making our way further into the woods. Sure enough, there's more of them, and not just the rock traps. Swinging log traps and snares litter the area, and off in the distance, almost blended in with the wildlife, a large building, surrounded by a wall covered in moss and foliage.
We walk closer to it, and everything seems quiet. I take off my Brewers cap, rubbing my head and pushing some of my messy brown hair back before putting the cap back on, still getting a look at the place.
"What do you think this place is?" I ask my brother, the two of us trying to figure it out.
"A school, maybe?" My brother informs me.
"What makes you think that?" I ask him skeptically.
"The sign in front." He points in a sarcastic and matter-of-factly way at a sign off to the side, right by the front gate. Sure enough, that's it. 'Ericson's Boarding School for Troubled Youth' the sign reads, clear as day.
I snicker at my brother and roll my eyes. "Jackass."
The two of us walk closer, and before either of us can react, a figure comes over the wall. Arrow drawn, they fire.
The searing pain shoots up and down my body as the arrow pierces the flesh just above my right knee. I cry out in pain as I hit the ground, clutching my knee as I crawl behind a tree for cover.
Benji dives behind the tree to check on me. "Are you alright?"
I groan as I try to stand up, and curse as more pain flares up in my knee. "No, not really! There's an arrow in my fucking leg!"
"We're not trying to attack you! Can you please stand down?" My brother calls out to our attacker, only to be met with another arrow finding its home in the tree trunk.
"Brody! Stand down!" a guy's voice yells out, and the onslaught of arrows stops. My brother pokes his head out to see what's going on, and I slowly get up to do the same.
As I come out from behind the tree, I look to see who ended the attack, a guy, around my age, with a weird sorta haircut, very short on the sides, his messy blond hair in a sort of mullet in the back and front.
"Hey, man. Your friend shot my brother. Can you help us?" My brother pleads to the boy, and he looks at us skeptically.
"Are you alone?" He asks us, and we answer with a nod.
"Just the two of us." I add, gingerly stepping over to my brother.
He eyes us over, sizing us up for a moment before nodding. "Come on. We've got someone who can patch you up."
Benji gets under my right arm, helping supporting me as we walk through the gates into a run-down courtyard, with more than a couple kids around my age or younger staring back at me. In fact, I don't see a single person that is visibly older than me here. So, where are the adults?
"Ruby." He signals to one of the kids and a girl with bright red hair and rosy cheeks gets up from a couch and hurries over to him. "Check out his knee and get him patched up. Brody got him with an arrow."
She looks at him with an unsure expression before she starts walking toward one of the buildings and motions for Benji and I to follow. Not wasting any time, we follow her inside.
She pulls out a small cot for me to lay down on as she pulls out some tools and other things. Putting on some gloves, she turns to me with a concerned expression.
"I'm not gonna lie to you," She warns me, "This is gonna hurt like the Devil." I give her a nod as she gets ready for what she needs to do.
Without any other warning, she grabs the arrow and starts slowly pulling on it, and I let out a shriek of pain as the fiery sensation burns even harder. She didn't lie, it hurts like Hell. But with one final pull, I feel the arrow removed from my knee, a small stream of blood now pouring out of me and staining my faded blue jeans.
"I'll need you to take these off so I can get to the wound. Can you do that?" She asks me, and I sorta blush from the situation.
"Yeah. Yeah I can." I unbutton my jeans and raise my butt to slide them off, wiggling them down my legs to my ankles, leaving me in my boxers and flannel on the cot. With the wound exposed, she grabs a bottle of clear liquid and a rag,
One again, she tells me the dreaded words. "This is gonna hurt a lot more than me pulling the arrow out, but I need to clean the wound."
"Just do it." I groan as I see her dampen the rag with what I assume to be alcohol. I brace for the pain that's about to come.
"Aaaaaargh!" I let out a painful scream and my body seizes up as the alcohol is exposed to my wound, the burning sensation spreads all around my leg and she cleans the wound. Benji looks on from right next to me, absolutely terrified, but just as quickly as it came, the pain begins to die down as she finishes cleaning it.
"You're a lucky man." She tells me with a smile. "Doesn't look like any major artery damage. Little bit of muscle damage, but that'll heal. You're gonna be sore for a while but it looks like I'm just gonna need to bandage you up."
"That's great!" Benji says before I can react. I sigh in relief as she gets up and grabs some bandages. From behind me, the sound of the door opening and footsteps entering.
"How's he doing?" The guy who let me in asks Ruby as he stands next to Benji. As she wraps the bandages around my knee, she looks up to Marlon.
"It's nothing serious, Marlon. Just needed to stop the bleeding and wrap it up. He'll be fine." She informs him as she finishes wrapping me up.
"Glad to hear. I wanna show you guys around if you want to stick around."
My brother and I both look at each other kinda uneasy, remembering that night with Sierra and Angie, and the promise we made afterwards. And yet, here we are. This guy is offering us a place here, in a secluded area that seems pretty well-fortified. This could work, so I shoot him a small nod. Still uneasy about it all, he hesitates before nodding back to me.
"I think that's a good idea. We've been on the road a few years, maybe settling down here is a good idea." I shrug as I sit up and put on my jeans.
"Great. So, for a formal introduction, I'm Marlon. I'm what passes for a leader around here. Obviously, you've already met Ruby, she's our medic."
"I'm Brett. And this is my brother, Benjamin." I nod to my brother behind me.
"Glad to meet the both of you. Let's introduce you to the rest of the kids. You seem like very capable people and frankly, it'd be a great help. We recently lost a couple of people and, well, things haven't been great around here."
"We'll help out however we can." Benji quips from behind me, and I smile back at him in pleasant surprise. Benji's always wanted to avoid groups, so to see him want to step up for these guys comes as a huge surprise to me, but a welcome one nonetheless. He gives a smile and a nod as he leads the two of us out, toward the courtyard we just passed through.
Marlon walks with a nice slow pace, leading us through hallways, littered with paintings and pictures of older adults, almost all of which now littered with graffiti. I take it these people were not particularly liked.
"So this is it. Ericson's Boarding School for Troubled Youth. As it suggests, we were all students here when the dead came back, and just about all the adults ditched us, so we decided to take matters into our own hands." He tells us as we approach a large set of double doors.
"No adults… How does that work?" I ask him skeptically.
"Well, it's just like any other group, except the kids are in charge. I won't say it's easy, but it works. And hey, we've made it this long, haven't we?" He informs me as he opens the doors, leading us to a very official-looking office. "The control center. This is where we plan out anything we need to."
He walks over to a desk and I hobble over, he starts pointing at locations on the map.
"A map of the area?" I ask him, noting the different areas. There's lots of woods all around, traps all over the place, a river that runs to the SouthEast, and a train station way out to the SouthWest. Otherwise, it seems completely off the grid. The only way you'd find it is on accident, as Benji and I did.
"Yep. It's pretty closed-off from everyone else, but it's nice to know the area. Plus we have traps set in the area, so we can keep track of those. I'm sure you guys saw a few of them on your way here." The two of us nod.
"What about this? The safe zone?" Benji asks, pointing to a red outline surrounding the area.
"So, anything in this area is considered secure." He explains to us. "Outside that area… things seem to go wrong. People disappear, people die, it's just not safe. I'm sure you guys know how bad it can get out there, but the others, they just wouldn't get it, you know?"
I nod back to him. I guess he's right. The students here have been in these walls during this whole thing. They might have no idea what it's all like out there.
Marlon's interrupted by the door opening behind us, a girl around my age walks in. Skin pale as ice, light blonde hair, and piercing green eyes, glaring at me and my brother. Next to her, a bulldog, who starts to growl at the sight of us.
"Who are these guys?" She snaps to Marlon, and Marlon sighs behind us.
"Chill out Violet. This is Brett and Benji. They're brothers and they're staying with us."
"Oh joy." She rolls her eyes. "New mouths to feed, just to probably become walker food a few months later."
I cross my arms and shoot her a scowl. "Hey. My brother and I are both very capable people. And I can promise you we are a lot more than just mouths to feed around here. We're survivors that have spent years out on the road by ourselves, and I can also guarantee we're better shots than anyone here. Especially Benji here. Rifles, handguns, or even his crossbow, he'll beat out anyone here."
She scowls at me, but smiles a bit. "Well alright then, Mr. Deadshots. I guess we'll see how you do here." With one last skeptical look at us, she turns to walk out, the bulldog staying and growling, glaring its teeth.
Marlon whistles behind us. "Rosie. Lie down." Completely obediently, the dog does just as Marlon asks, laying down on a small bed, looking back at us.
"This is Rosie. She was the Headmaster's dog back when this was a school, but when Hell rose and the adults bailed, they left her with us, and she's been with us ever since. I know she's a little intimidating at first, but she really is well-trained. Go on, let her get to know you. She won't bite." He smiles, walking over to lightly pet her.
I join him, slowly reaching my hand out to the dog. She sniffs me once, twice, a third time before licking my knuckles and laying down peacefully. I gently pet the dog, and she softly sighs in response, getting a smile out of me. I love dogs, although I haven't really seen many since the apocalypse started.
"I think she likes you. Anyways, now she knows your scent and won't bark or growl when she sees you."
"Benji?" I ask my brother, looking on from a distance. He simply shakes his head, uneasy expression on his face.
"I'm alright. Maybe later." I figured as such. He's been a bit uneasy around dogs and I never figured out why. Oh well. I won't force him into it.
"Alright then, how about we go and meet the others?" Marlon suggests.
The two of us stand up and we all leave the office, and Marlon tells us one last thing before opening the doors to the office.
"One last thing. People are gonna be on edge. We just lost two people last week that were pretty good friends with the rest of us. It's why Violet was like that just now, and things aren't gonna be much better with the rest of them. They're scared, and they're counting on me to make things better around here. I'm hoping that having some new faces around here will change that, but if it doesn't, don't take it personally, alright?"
"Yeah, I get it. And don't worry. We'll be friendly." I assure him.
"Perfect. Thank you guys." He smiles to us, relieved. "So, shall we?"
There's a final rule of survival. If life gives you an opportunity, you fucking take it.
It's been a minute, hasn't it? I said at the end of Too Far Gone that I was planning on maybe doing a separate story for TFS, and after playing through the first two episodes, I just kinda said fuck it and started mapping out the story. Special thanks goes out to user undyingrage98489 for Benji, his OC.