Story takes place from the first episode of the second season. Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, or anything previously part of the Walking Dead. Lou is mine though. Fierce bitch. I' m not one for stories where it takes a week for people to fall in love but like most fics on here, this tale shall be Darylcentric.

Chapter One:

The sound of groans reached her ears as her eyelids fluttered open. With a sigh, Louise Earl groaned quietly and rubbed her hands over her face, trying to block out the sunlight for just a few more minutes. Every morning when she woke up it had become a habit to hope, just a little bit, that the day, week, month before had been a dream. That people weren't roaming chewing on each other and that everything was the way it had been before. But it never was. And after another morning waking up to the same thing, the fun of dreaming had worn short. The sun was streaming in through a crack in the tarpaulin that covered one of the sides of the tree-house she was sleeping in and if she was honest with herself it was a little more than a tree-house, more like a tree-fort. It belonged to her brothers when they were growing up. Built by her grandfather and rebuilt by her father, the house in the trees was something to behold. Despite being so out in the open, inside when it was sealed it was pretty warm. The blankets and mattresses helped too. But it wasn't winter yet. Lou knew that by the time winter rolled around she would have to find a house somewhere. There was no chance she was going back to her family home despite it being only a mile away. When the roamers hit them, they took her brothers. The strange plague of undead cannibalism in a single swipe knocked out her family, her family history and everyone she knew she loved. Her parents had run off with another neighbor to try and seek solace in the Lord. Lou almost laughed when they had shouted their plans. Louise had a completely different idea of what to do. God wouldn't save them now.

Peeling back the layers of blankets and sleeping bags she wandered over to the hatch in the ground. A small cork was wedged in a hole in the wood and she pulled it out slowly, looking down to what lay underneath. Three walkers had found their way over night. Attracted to the smell of the dead deer head that was hanging and rotting from a piece of rope under one of the branches. They hadn't seen her yet but they were straining up towards the meat. Lou smiled. Her plan had been working perfectly every night. Ever seen a roamer climb... no.. That's because they really don't. The walkers were about two stories below her and couldn't reach her. The only way she would become stranded is if a number of the dead gathered that she wouldn't be able to take out from where she was, but she had a plan for that too. Pulling her dark hair from her face and tying it into a ponytail, she padded to the other side of the room and sat at the table staring at her reflection in the piece of mirror propped up against a few tatty books. The last month had aged her. The sun on her face had brought out a few freckles whilst giving her a golden tone but she could see wrinkles forming that she never had beforehand. She needed to fix her eyebrows but time wasn't so much of a luxury when it was daylight. She rubbed her fingers over her face trying to wake herself up a little more. What she would have done for a cup of coffee to shoot some life into her.

Dark brown eyes stared back at her when she finally rest her hands on the tabletop. Scrunching her nose she stood and pulled away from the table. She needed the bathroom. But had to deal with the creepers below beforehand. Pulling off the T-shirt she slept in, she changed into her underwear and pulled on a new shirt and jeans finishing with her hiking boots. Next to her bed sat her bow. A medium sized woman's bow she had used for hunting before the apocalypse. Her father had treated her like one of his sons when he was alive. Teaching her everything he taught them for life in the woods. Survival, hunting, fishing, trapping, the list went on. She had run out of ammo for her guns a good long while ago so knew she had to move onto something more practical. Checking the tension in the string, she pulled on her archery gloves and pulled back the hatch in the floor to access the forest below. A quick whistle attracted the nearest roamer to underneath the hole where she was standing. His teeth bared, hair thin, stretched over his skull. His clothes were falling off his body. He was old, decrepit, not recently turned. A few weeks ago, she had taken to studying them as they scrambled below her and marked down all she found in her notebook. The differences between them, the things that denoted age of change, possible weaknesses over time. This one would go down easily. With a barely working voice-box he groaned and creaked, snarling and gnashing his teeth.

The first time she had shot down the zombies she had lost a lot of arrows. Her shots weren't as clean as she wanted and the first one she had encountered ended up looking more like a pin cushion than a clean kill. There was also the hassle of retrieving the arrows. This was solved with a quick modification to the arrows themselves. A hole she had cut and hand drilled into the base, just above the plastic feathers, threaded with a piece of fishing wire then tied to a half ring screwed into the floor of the tree-house meant after firing the arrows, she could pull them back up to shoot again and again. It was a struggle. The arrows sometimes were off balance and the fishing line itself was hardly satisfactory, it was slippery and pulling it up time and time again had caused callouses on her hands that when combined with the manual work made her hands look more like a lumberjack than a woman's. Sliding the arrow into the string and laying it against the bow she lined up her shot. The arrow went in smooth straight through the soft part of the creepers temple, skewering him straight through the head. His body went slack and the arrow half pulled itself out. Giving the fishing line a yank the rest of the arrow came sliding out and the walker fell to the floor. 'one down' she thought to herself with a smile. Some would say she was crazy to attract the walkers rather than just let them roam past. But if she didn't kill them, they would kill someone else. She would rather clear as many as she could. She pulled the arrow up. The other two were attracted to where the first had fallen and shifted their bodies into her aim. They were down as swiftly as the first. Bow around her shoulder, arrows in the quiver she strapped onto the side she took a hesitant few steps down the first few wooden blocks nailed into the side of the tree. Holding onto the top of the hatch she cautiously looked around. Didn't seem to be any others. She stayed squatted for at least five minutes watching everything and listening for everything. The only sound was the rustling of the leaves in the trees and across the woodland floor. Taking the next few steps carefully, she jumped the last few. One boot landing half way through the skull of one of the dead. Poor son of a bitch. Should have run faster, climbed higher, survived better.

After the chore of moving the bodies, dragging them across the ground for a good few hundred meters to the charred out pit that contained the bones of at least a hundred walkers, she lay them down on the bed of sticks. Up in the tree-house she took one of the newspapers off the stack in the corner and the packet of matches from one the shelves. They would burn. Every creeper she cremated was the same one who killed her brothers and destroyed her family. They all had the same eyes. They were all the same. Murderers and animals controlled by instinct roaming and destroying everything they touched. They all had to be put down. And if this was her life for the rest of however long she lasted, that was good enough for her. If every one hundred killed meant another survivor lasting just a day longer, it was worth it. After the fire had been started, the match setting alight the crumpled newspaper balls she had made she turned her back on the mass grave and started on her days chores. After finally relieving herself and giving herself a quick wash down in the river, she had traps to check, bushes to comb through and a deer to catch. It was at least two weeks since she had caught her last. Combined with this she had the 3 mile route to the nearest farmhouse to check on how they were doing. They had a few survivors left there and although she had only briefly known them during the time before this, she was determined to help them.

It started a few weeks ago when she had been walking through the woods and spotted another person for the first time in a good while. She recognized him instantly. It was Otis, one of her fathers acquaintances from one of the neighboring farms. He was trying to follow a deer through the trees to get a good shot with his rifle. As he lined up his shot, a twig crunched under his foot startling the animal causing it to flee. Poor guy, Lou shook her head. His size meant that stealth was an issue. He didn't have the skills to track the deer to where it fled. From her spot in the bushes she watched him wipe the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and turn around back towards the Greene property. She followed him. She couldn't help it. If there were other survivors she needed to know she wasn't alone. Following him had shown her their were indeed survivors. Otis and his wife Patricia, Hershel and his children. They seemed to be doing OK. She watched from afar through her binoculars. Despite having a farm, she knew they were running low on food. They relied on the kills to feed the family. After all you can't survive on eggs alone.

It was then she decided to help them. It wasn't hard for her to give them a hand. She had been hunting since she could walk and could practically move silent and unnoticed through the trees she had lived in her whole life. She went back and had tracked and killed the deer Otis missed. Her arrow puncturing it through the skull while it grazed. The creature had never even seen her. The hard part was working out how to transport the deer to their farm. At 5 foot 7, she was average height with an average weight, although all the fat on her body had been stripped and skin was now stretched over muscle over bone. She had tried dragging the buck through the woods by the antlers but didn't get too far before realizing it was going to be an impossible task. She left the body in the bushes while she tried to come up with a solution. That's when she had a revelation. Back at her parents farm there had been a pallet with wheels for moving the heavy crates her father would have delivered. One short trip back and the deer was loaded onto the pallet and she managed with more ease, despite the roughness of the terrain, to transport the deer into the field which lay next to the Greene farm. Dragging it off the pallet, she stood over it watching the farm house from the field. When a figure of a man stepped from the house, Hershel, she put her fingers in her mouth and gave a sharp whistle. Hershel Greene looked up towards her, blocking the sun from his eyes. She waved her arms, pointing at the deer at her feet, before turning around and starting the few miles to her home. Watching from the forest edge, she watched Hershel and Otis walk towards the deer, kneeling by it. Between them, they carried the deer back to the farm to the waiting people.

And that was it. Once a week she would make the same delivery at the side of the fence of whatever she caught. Sometimes it was a string of fish, rabbits and small animals, if she and they were lucky, it would be a deer. Hershel started leaving small packages in return for her. A few eggs, some vegetables from their garden, all the things she couldn't grow herself. He never asked her to join them and she never asked. They just lived in this mutually beneficial relationship. The only time he had acknowledged he thought he knew who she was, was a note left one day, nestled in between four eggs. 'Thank you Miss Earl' was all the black ink had said.

It was today however, that everything was going to change. The sun in the sky told her it was about 2pm on her return from the Greene farm when she got to her tree-house. She had had no luck with deer this week. They would have to settle with a string of fish caught in the river. In return she had a small parcel of eggs and a few potatoes tucked under one arm. With the bow over her shoulder and quiver at her hip she climbed the blocks up to the tree-house. That's when she heard the noise. In the distance a soft rumbling. It was a vehicle, a motorbike maybe. She hadn't heard anything like that in a long time. Closing her eyes Lou could pick out the sound of maybe a few more cars. She waited to hear the sound of them passing along the highway and drone into the distance. But the sound of them leaving never came. They had stopped, engines all turning off at once. She was maybe a mile and a half away from the main highway, well hidden through a dense patch of woods. If these strangers were going to go anywhere near the Greene's farm then she was going to check them out first. Loading her backpack with a bottle of water, arming herself with her hunting knife and bow and arrows she closed up the latch and as cautiously as always left the safety of her haven and headed across the woods to the highway. After a brisk jog she had made it to the side of the road, climbing up the embankment slowly and cautiously she hid a good hundred meters away from where the strangers were in the backseat of an almost fully abandoned car. The previous occupier was still in the front seat and another passenger was leaning over in the back seat next to her as if it were staring out the window.

There were a lot of them. Ten maybe eleven including two children. They were armed and according to what she could see from the situation a bunch of strangers pulled together in a terrible situation with a broken down old RV. She watched them interact from the distance. There was a couple with a son, talking while a dark haired fellow and an Asian boy popped up the front of the RV. Everyone else was spreading out to loot the vehicles. They were picking over a few cars she had already checked and a few she didn't. Unfortunately to her they found the water supply truck she had been siphoning water from but they didn't look like they would be able to be taking all of it. They had been on the road side for at least thirty minutes before they had moved closer and closer to her. She shrunk down into the car-seat, dragging a blanket off the floor to cover herself as she crouched in the back of the car. They wouldn't reach where she was sitting. She was sure of it. They had already started moving back in when the madness started.

A hoard was moving towards them slowly and they hadn't spotted it. Lou saw the older man on the top of the RV flatten himself down fast while people started scrambling under cars to hide. 'Clever' Lou thought to herself. The trick is not to move. They react like a lot of animals, moving attracts them and if they don't see you or hear you, they will usually pass on. She didn't have time to move, or time to run. A guy they had called T-Dog from their group had strayed about ten cars from her and if she moved now, he could call her out or maybe even shoot her thinking she was a walker. Instead she flattened herself down into the back of the car, hiding herself under the blanket and dragging the body of the woman next to her on top of her. When she was sure she was hidden, she slowed her breathing down spying through the open door on the drivers side through the edge of the blanket. The shuffling of feet and slow drawn out moans of the walkers got louder as they moved closer. The first few of the hoard were coming close. They must have been about twenty meters away by now. Lou's heart was pounding in her chest rattling around in her ribs as she tried to keep herself calm. A calm head meant survival. Getting scared was not an option. When you start getting emotional mistakes are made and that is when people get sloppy. She heard fast moving feet and a human's unmistakable sound of pain. Shit. Someone got bit by one. Didn't get under the car fast enough stupid bastard. She closed her eyes tight for a few seconds almost letting out a thought of prayer for him out of past habits before opening them again, moisture rolling down one cheek. As suddenly as the noises of the wounded human started, a figure appeared behind a walker right next to the car she was hiding in. When did the humans get so close to her. She was getting stupid. The man took a bolt and rammed it through the back of a creep's skull, before pushing the body onto the wounded party member. Lou stopped breathing when he then leaned into the car she was in and ejected the driver, dragging the body on top of him. She lost sight of them for five minutes as the hoard passed through the cars, almost as if they were migrating. Like locusts, destroying and killing everything as it moved.

When they finally passed, she watched the man who had saved the life of 'T-Dog' help him up, retrieve his arrow and walk him back towards the rest of the group at the RV. Slowly sliding up pushing the body off her she watched the backs of the two figures leave. Pulling her binoculars from the floor of the car she watched as the man who was previously wearing the sheriff's hat sprint into the woods down the embankment after two walkers. What was he doing the crazy son of a bitch. What could possibly be so important it warrants chasing walkers down. Unless the walkers were chasing something else...

When he had finally returned he was frantic. The little girl had gone missing, chased by walkers and he had not come back with her. 'She couldn't have gotten far and no one knows these woods like me' Lou thought to herself. Slipping slowly out the side door of the car, she moved back down the embankment, bow ready and drawn in case of any stray walkers. The group were so preoccupied with their situation they had let down all their guard and didn't even notice the figure of a woman sliding down the embankment one hundred meters away, then disappear back into the woods she came from.

If this girl was in her woods and still alive, she would find her.