Author's Note: In no way, shape, or form am I associated with AMC's The Walking Dead, its cast, crew, or producers.

I'd like to think that I would be a good person if it weren't for the End. That I'd still be some suburban woman, waking up at five in the morning with a cup of coffee, fighting the alarm, and barely making it to work. The daily grind. Maybe I'd have a husband by now. Kids. Things would be different. Things wouldn't have changed me. At the same time, however, I think- maybe I was like this all along. Maybe the End was just a catalyst for whatever was meant to happen. That I'd been dammed all along. Screwed up. But it's useless to live for the maybes. The only thing worthwhile is living for the nows. I'm living for the nows. It doesn't matter how clean the nows are- or how messy. What matters is that you don't decide to dwell on the past.

Past. Such a passive word. Sometimes, people think that 'the past' is a substitute for 'forgotten' or 'it never happened'. That's a lie. Everything happened. Everything will continue to happen. Future will always become the past and past will always alter the decisions you make in the future. But you cannot dwell on them, or they will consume you- and your future will become endless renditions of the past, evolving into new and different nightmares. But, dear friend, I'm getting ahead of myself. You haven't heard it all yet. I should probably go back to the beginning, but I wont. That stuff doesn't matter. You should hear it from the start of my bads. That's the only way you can formulate a fair judgement.

I'm Emma Brennan. I'm not a good girl.

I suppose I'll start my story with running. Running is always a good way to start.

I had spent most of the End running. Running from the Monsters. The damn reanimated corpses that haunted every living moment in this new life. They kept me running.

At first it was us running. I wasn't alone. But I soon became alone when they were taken from me. My family. I thought I'd felt real pain before, but then I felt what it was like to lose them. I don't like to think about what happened, or if I could be stopped it, or if it was even unavoidable. After they were gone I realized that I was also figuratively running. Running from the past.

I called the months of loneliness the Darkness. The Darkness loomed for a long time. I didn't feel like I had anything to live for, because I honestly didn't. Keep myself alive day by day to, what, mourn? Cry? Ponder the astronomical void they left behind? It wasn't living- it was simply surviving, which for the record is not the same as living. I'd tried to off myself, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. They wouldn't want me to have done it. Still, a night wouldn't pass that I didn't twiddle my fingers over that trigger, felt it's cold metal burn my skin. Feel it taunt me with its brutally realistic objective. It was a poetic ritual; sleep, wake, eat, not die...repeat. Stuck in a perpetual feeling of uselessness.

Those months were bad. They were bad. But I myself had not become bad yet. I hadn't become bad until I met Him.

I reject my earlier statement. I'll start my story with Him, rather. The man who made me who I am today, for better or for worse. The man who brought me to life again. The man who changed me.