I remember. I remember the thundering screams crashing through my skull. I remember the crying children, too young to understand what was happening, abandoned by their mothers as the world fled the decaying corpses slowly awakening from their supposedly eternal slumber. It was only a few minutes until the military arrived but by that time the city, for the most part at least, had been devoured by the walking dead. the few people that were left, hiding in the corners or barricaded in the houses were shot down by the armed men and women who stormed the streets below the woodland aria I looked down from.
It was a small town that housed no more than a thousand men, women and children. A poor town nobody had even bothered to name, forgotten by the rest of the world, written completely off the map. But it was my town. My ugly, sweaty, dirty town and no one loved it more than I did, more than I still do. I loved the stream that ran through the entire length of the settlement, I loved the woods that were almost entirely mine, only shared with the other very few people willing to enter the supposedly haunted forest. I lived there in the trees like a wild animal, an urban legened to the townsfolk and I wouldn't of changed it for the world.
I had never spoken to the people who lived in that town and had no desire to either.
I had spent the first 15 years of my life living in one of the broken down hovels they call an apartment with my alcoholic father, he never gave me that much trouble seeing as most of his time was spent sleeping in gutters after being thrown out of pubs, when he was home I did all I could to avoid him but sometimes it was just impossible. He was violent when he was drunk but luckily for him the school never did care about pupil well fare and payed no attention to the bruises and cuts across my face.
When I was 15 I had had enough and after taking my last beating from the man I was supposed to love, I packed a few necessities and fled to the forest where I would spend my days in a tree house I had constructed shortly before.