Episode One: Choices We Make

Chapter One: Lord of the Flies

It was hot. The hottest it had been since the nightmare had begun. Donald wondered if it was summer. He had long since lost count of the days he and his wife had been on the road. They had just left the hellhole that was Macon. It was just as bad as all of the other places they had ever hoped could serve as a haven to them, the two weary travellers who had long grown tired of running for their lives. Strangely, it wasn't the mass loss in human life, the fear of starvation, or the ever present danger of the walking dead that bothered Donald and Alice. They missed the simple things like TV dinners, Newspapers and a warm bed at night. Earlier, Donald had confessed to his wife, Alice, that he would do anything to sleep somewhere other than in his RV tonight. A couple of hours later, the RV's front left tire had burst. Alice, whom had always been a superstitious woman, even in this world, gave her husband the look he had come to recognise after forty years of marriage. It wasn't a look of hate, spite or even condescension. Donald couldn't describe it, but it made him smile every time.

"What do you think?" Alice asked her husband as she continued to read her novel. Donald had always envied her ability to multi-task, and he did so again as he looked up from the remains of the burst tire to reply to her.

"What do I think about what?"

"When will we be back on the road?"

"Whenever we find ourselves a new mode of transportation because this piece of junk isn't going anywhere," Donald said to Alice with regret. They had had the RV for the majority of their married life. It had gotten them through a lot over the precious years they had spent together. And they weren't unfamiliar with sleeping inside the RV either. Donald thought back twenty years to when a house infestation involving some nasty vermin had forced the two to have their house fumigated, leaving the two homeless. Donald had insisted that the two make use of the RV Donald had invested in so long ago that it was beginning to gather dust. Donald, who never liked to see money go to waste, was beginning to fear that he would never find a use for the old trailer. Even though he now couldn't find more use for the RV, Donald did not waste a thought regretting his past worries. The unthinkable had happened. He could never have predicted that he would ever dust off his beloved RV, so that he and his wife could ride into the sunset to escape the grasp of the undead. Donald suddenly realised that he was daydreaming again, and when he did finally return to the real world, he was met with a changed look on his wife's face. It was a look that reeked of hopelessness. And it was another one of those looks that Donald now recognised all too well.

The RV had been the one constant thing that Donald and Alice had, besides each other, that had survived this nightmare. After abandoning their home to a swarm of walkers, the RV had become Donald and Alice's new home. It had been just the three of them and the road for a good three months of surviving. They had even managed to avoid their fair share of walkers on their travels. When they lost the RV, they hadn't just lost a crucial factor in their success in staying alive, but as pathetic as Donald realised it may sound, he realised that to them, losing the RV had been like losing a beloved member of the family. He couldn't bring himself to say it aloud, but he knew that losing the RV had removed any hope of surviving in this hellish world. Alice did not say a word after Donald had presented to her the destroyed tire. She had checked the back of the RV, only to immediately remember the spare tire they had used two months ago when a tire had burst after Donald had hit a walker in the road. She turned, and drowned herself in her book once again. Donald noticed she was reading the same William Golding novel he had once recommended to her almost a year ago. It was about the only thing he had read in recent memory, but was certainly the only thing he had seen his wife read for as long as he had known her. Of course it would take the end of the world to get that woman to read something other than the obituaries, Donald thought to himself.

Realising that Alice was hiding her emotions in the pages of Lord of the Flies, Donald chose to do the same by pulling out a suitcase from under his bed in the RV, dragging it outside (he had intended to carry it, but it was much heavier than he had expected) and letting it fall with a loud thud. The noise did not gage a reaction from Alice, who was too invested in the final chapters of her novel to notice Donald's sudden need to ransack her suitcase. He breathed heavily as he threw aside useless tools that Alice had packed, obviously in a blind panic. Donald wondered if he would ever need any of these everyday items again. He picked up another tool, and wondered again, but he couldn't envision a situation where a bottle-opener would win him his life. There were not wine bottles left to be opened, and even then Donald was teetotal. He wondered if the end of the world was reasonable enough of an excuse to free him from a promise of an alcohol-free lifestyle. Donald chuckled to himself, and set the bottle-opener aside. Alice, who must have noticed the rare sound of her husband's laughter, finally drew herself away from her book.

"What is it?"

"Why did you pack this?" Donald asked Alice, avoiding her question. He held the baseball bat with both hands, practising his grip. He had never been a sportsman, but his father was always an avid fan, and had tried to teach Donald from a young age. His father stopped giving him lessons as soon as he realised that Billy, Donald's younger brother, was the true sportsman of the two. Billy had even played professionally. The baseball bat that he had given to his older brother had been the exact bat he had used to score a home run with decades ago. Donald rarely spoke of his brother and father, but Alice had never needed to ask her husband about them to know how he felt about them. The look on his face when he gazed at his little brother's bat said everything she needed to know and more.

Although he was never usually was the nostalgic type, it must have been a good few minutes before Donald sat that bat down again. These few good minutes of reminiscing had kept Donald from hearing the faint gargling sound of a walker approaching him from the side of the road. The walking corpse's bare feet made soft wet noises as they slapped against the road, leaving bloody footprints in its wake. Bloody saliva slipped from the walker's open (perhaps even broken, it was difficult to tell) jaw. The sounds of the upright corpse finally registered with Donald when it made a loud cry that sounded as though the creature was gargling marbles, but by then its cold dead hands were already wrapped firmly around Donald's neck, and the creature was going in for the kill. Donald had fallen back, right into the undead creature's grasp. It snapped its rotten teeth at his neck, but Donald was doing his best to keep his neck bite-free, wriggling out of the monster's grasp. He fell backwards, and now the walker was on top of him. Donald's limited strength was all that was keeping the nightmarish figure and its venomous bite at bay. Donald wanted to scream for his wife, but all the adrenaline that was now the only thing fuelling him was focused on getting this pile of meat off him. But it wasn't enough. Donald could feel himself losing control. Just when he was sure the creature was going to dig his teeth into him, in a flurry of blood, the walker was thrown from him like a ragdoll. Alice dropped the bloody baseball bate by Donald's feet.

"Are you glad I packed this now?" Alice asked her husband, knowing the answer. Although she was smiling, Donald could see from where he was lying that she was clearly shaking.

Donald picked up the bat as he got back on his feet and dusted himself off. He took a quick glance at the zombie, trying not to think about who it had been before. Although its bloody injuries had made the zombie hard to recognise as another human being, it was clearly female. Through the blood, Donald could still make out a gleaming wedding ring on the girls hand, and he bowed his head. Donald turned his attention quickly from the creature's remains to his wife. This was the first time Alice had been forced to put one of those monsters out of their misery. Usually, if the two were ever forced to, it would be Donald who would do the ugly deed. Donald knew this was something he would have to face eventually, but he didn't know how to justify murdering another human being to his wife. Instead, he just smiled at Alice's jest, which she had most likely made to gloss over the fact that she just bashed-in the brains of someone who was once just like her. Alice did not return her husband's hearty grin. Her face had dropped. Alice looked horrified. At first, Donald was sure that the realisation that she had just taken a life had finally hit her all at once, and that it was tearing her up. But it was something else entirely that had taken Alice's breath away, made her skin crawl, and made her turn pale white. It was something behind Donald.

Donald knew what was waiting for him before he turned. He tightened his grip on the bat, and span himself around. There, waiting for him, was the walker that was refusing to fie, its lower jaw now hanging from its face. Now, both of Donald's hands were on the bat, and his eye was on the ball. As he tightened his grip, exhaled, and prepared to score a home run, for a moment, he was a young boy, practising his aim with his father. With two strikes against him and one chance left, he promised his father that he was going to make this one count. He made the same promise again to his wife under his breath, tightened his breath, exhaled, and threw everything he had against the walker as the bat wrapped itself around the walker's already battered head. Home run. The walker collapsed and slumped to the ground as Donald stopped in his tracks and caught his breath. His victory was short lived, however, when his wife's screams made him aware of the second walker that was now approaching Alice. The zombie, this one a male, had Alice trapped against the RV, its terrifying features keeping her from daring to move. Donald was ready to step in, having discovered a heroic and macho side in him after taking care of the last zombie. But what stopped Donald in his tracks, preventing him from doing what he needed to do, was not the high-pitched cry of the cannibalistic walker desperate to feat on human flesh, it was the wedding ring that still sat nicely upon his finger, matching the ring belonging to the walker that attacked Donald that could only have been his wife. The tragedy kept Donald from moving, and for a moment, Alice thought it was all over. After all of the situations they had made it out of together, they would meet their end here. Alice wasn't prepared to give up just yet. She screamed for her husband. But it wasn't Alice's cries that woke Donald from his seemingly endless trance; it was the scream of a single bullet that tore its way through the zombie's skull, spraying blood across Alice and giving her husband the wakeup call he required. The zombie fell to the ground limply with a thud.

Donald searched for the source of the shot, and quickly found it walking towards him from the opposite end of the road, rifle in hand. The woman was tall, with brown hair and a rifle in both hands. A duffel bag was slouched across her back and her rifle was still smoking from her shot that showed accuracy, skill and a lot of practice. She struck Donald as a hunter who'd survived on her own through this nightmare, but Donald stopped thinking so hard about who she was when he came to realise how beautiful she was. Her hair shone in the glow of the sun, her arms that carried the rifle were perfectly slender, and her lips seemed, as far as he could tell, very kissable. She was wearing combat trousers and a tank top that was fairly low cut, but Donald stopped examining that area when he noticed his wife pick up on where his eyes were going. It didn't take long for the woman, whom Donald had now decided was more like a girl, to reach the two, who still hadn't been given enough time to allow what had just happened to full sink in.

"You should be more careful. If you're going to be traveling around like this, you can't let them surround you so easily." The woman sounded like she was giving orders to soldiers on a battlefield. Her voice was lower than Donald expected.

"We broke down. I didn't see either of them," Donald replied, trying to come across as not completely useless.

"Donald, don't be so rude," Alice told he husband off, although he wasn't sure what for. "You saved both of us. We can't thank you enough." Donald realised what his wife was trying to say, and nodded in agreement.

"It was nothing, really." The woman was being modest. Donald kept on nodding. She gave him a strange look, and when Donald realised he was still nodding like a bobble-head, he stopped himself and started to turn read like an embarrassed schoolboy who was still learning how to talk to girls.

There was an awkward silence until Alice finally made another attempt to break the ice. "I'm Alice, by the way. You've already met my husband, Donald, the klutz." This angered Donald slightly, especially considering he had moments ago tricked himself into thinking he was a macho hero. But when the woman laughed at Alice's joke, he turned his frown into a smile.

"Nice to meet you, Alice. Donald. My name's Lilly." The woman, calling herself Lilly, offered one of them her hand. Donald lunged in to take it, and smiled a warm smile as he shook it.