It'd only been about a few months. Just a few stinking months and her entire life had been swallowed, shitted out, and trampled on repeatedly.

She didn't know how long she had been sitting on this tree branch 50 feet in the air, but the last thing Adelaide O'Connell felt like doing was climbing down. Her feet still ached from the late night running-from-corpses marathon she did not too long ago.

With her legs dangling above the ground, Adelaide closed her eyes for the first time a few days and buried her head in her hands.


They'd just returned to their campsite, tugging a 12 point buck behind them when they heard the distinct sound of ripping flesh. Adelaide turned to her father, eyebrows furrowed in confusion – what is a bear eating their rations? He put his hand up to motion he was going forward, and to wait back here.

She watched as her father stepped through the bushes, drawing his pistol as a precaution. He disappeared and left her antsy, unsure whether or not she should approach.

"AGH!" That was all she needed to drop the antlers of the buck, draw her Hoyt Vector 32 compound bow ready and rush through the bushes after her father.

The sight that met her eyes confused her. A malnourished female had latched her teeth into her father arm, pulled back and ripped the flesh right off the bone.

"ADDY! Get back!" Her father screamed, reaching for his hunting knife. "Miss! Miss, if you don't stop immediately, I'll be forced to do this! Please, stop!" He shouted at her, trying to give the benefit of the doubt.

The woman just swallowed and started digging her head forward for seconds. Her father didn't hesitate at the moment and slammed the blade into her skull, and she dropped like a fly.

"Dad!" Adelaide ran forward, ripping off one of her long-sleeve layers to wrap around her fathers arm. "Dad, are you okay?" Tears started forming while she wrapped, she could see the amount of muscle and nerve damage that her father would sustain.

He leaned back against a nearby tree, groaning all the while. "How bad is it, Dr. O'Connell?"

Adelaide looked up at him with concern, he was grinning at her. "Now's not the time to be joking dad! I need to get you to the truck, you're bleeding out!" She tugged the ends of the shirt tight as she tied it. Looking around, she grabbed her bow up, attached it to her bag and flipped the bag around to her front so she could carry her father.

"Sometimes, I swear, Addy, you need to loosen up," her father choked out, his voice getting raspy and worn thin.

"Come on, dad," she could tell he was losing blood fast. "Stay with me, promise me you won't faint. I'm almost there, look!" The shape of their black truck was coming up.

She opened the passenger door and strapped her father in before climbing into the drivers seat. As she buckled her seatbelt, she noticed a man limping his way over to their vehicle. She almost opened her door again to ask him if he was alright when her father grasped her arm tightly.

Adelaide looked at her father, his forehead was covered with beads of sweat, but his eyes were still lucid. "Don't." When Adelaide's eyes expressed confusion he said, "his eyes are the same as that woman's… vacant."

She looked up out of her window, just as the man had reached just in front of the driver's window. She stared at him quietly when without any notion, the man slammed his hands and face against the window, snarling and scratching at it.

Adelaide screamed shortly while shoving the keys into ignition, and forcing her foot down on the gas, away and out of there.

While on the road speeding to her work place – Emory University Hospital of Atlanta – and her father working up a fever, the gaunt purple faces of the man and woman flashed in Adelaide's head.

"What the hell is going on?"


Adelaide was running pretty much on empty when she finally leaned back against the tree trunk and closed her eyes just hoping for a couple of hours of rest without disturbance. She should've guessed that since the world went to shits, nothing was ever going to go her way ever again. Ever.

The very second her head had hit the wood, a familiar sound of an arrow hitting wood sounded in her right ear. The pointed tip of the arrow had sliced the top of her ear, causing Adelaide to cringe and grab in on instinct while pulling out her bow with her left hand.

She drew an arrow and pointed it in the direction she thought the arrow came from.

"Shit, the bastard was flyin' high," a male southern accent broke the silence. I saw the black boots of the man as he stopped just outside of my line of sights, a couple of trees blocking him. "Gonna have ta' climb up for that squirrel."

Squirrel? Adelaide turned her head right, where the arrow landed next to her head and saw a squirrel hanging by its eye socket. It was a clean kill, Adelaide admired.

Snapping out of it she turned her attention back to the boots and shouted when he began walking forward, "Don't move, or I'll shoot!"

The boots froze in place.

"Drop your weapon!" she repositioned her arms and stabilized her legs on the branch, trying not to fall off her bird's peak.

She saw a crossbow slowly being placed on the ground, and hands moving back up into her blind spot. "I ain't gonna hurt ya' or anythin', why don't ya' disarm too?"

His southern voice was deep, but put a chill down her spine. "Crap," she muttered under her breath, unsure of what she should do.

Suddenly, a large bird landed on the end of her branch, shaking it unnaturally hard. Adelaide began to lose her balance as the branch bounced up and down. Her hands we preoccupied with her bow when her body flipped over. She let out a loud yelp, but crossed her legs over the branch, barely hanging on to the branch.

Her bow slipped out of her grip as she focused on staying on the branch.

"Ugh," she tried to pull herself up by her abdomen, unfortunately the 3-hour gym sessions a week didn't do her abs any justice. Exasperated, she gave up after a couple of attempted pull-ups and hanged her head down.

A caucasian man covered in dirt and all the forest's treasure entered her view as she hung there like a stationary bat. 'Oh, gosh,' she began to think about the embarrassment of the situation.

He looked up at her, and she stopped breathing for just a second. His face may have been covered in grime, but it didn't do anything but enhance his southern attractiveness. His steel blue eyes cut into hers as a cocky smirk plastered itself onto his face.

"Got yerself a little caught up there?" He draped his crossbow over her shoulder and looked up at Adelaide with smugness.

All she wanted to do was crawl into a hole and cry, but it was a little hard since she'd probably snap her neck on the way down from her branch.

Adelaide shut her mouth and refused to do anything but watch as he picked up her Hoyt and examine it. "What kind of dumbass get's caught up in a tree like that?" He muttered.

She said nothing.

He said nothing.

They just stayed motionless, staring at each other back and forth for a couple of minutes.

Adelaide's legs began to ache; the muscles were getting taut from overworking them to keep their crossed position. She winced as she began to feel the burn.

The blue-eyed stranger seemed to notice, "Hey, look-"

Exhaustion caught up to her in a matter of seconds, she didn't have time to prepare or even notice that her body began to shut down. Adelaide's eyes fluttered shut as she knocked out. Her legs became undone and her body took a one-way flight towards the forest floor.

What she didn't notice during her catnap was that he'd picked her up and threw her over his shoulder. She didn't notice that he didn't just loot her bags and leave her for dead like so many others would have done. And she didn't notice that he was taking her back to his camp.

What she did notice was her dream.

In her dream, a pair of blue eyes cut into her for hours, watching her intently. At first she felt uncomfortable, but then she started to relax. She felt like they were protecting her, watching over her. And she started to fall in love with those sharp blue eyes because they became the first comfort she felt in a long time.