Anyone who's been alone in the woods knows what it is to be both completely isolated, and terrifyingly surrounded: Sophia tries to shut out everything, the whispering sounds all around her, the dimmed and patchy light, and the painfully realized fear of being almost certainly dead. Crouching down, half hidden in the roots of a tree, she is so much a child and yet not so blithely ignorant what death would feel like, all that's left for her to do is hide.
"You're a big girl now, Sophia", her mother is down on all fours looking at her, in that way she has that makes Sophia feel wretched for being in anyway a part of her pain. Crumpled into the foetal position under the bed, Sophia clutches her doll to her chest. "It's alright, he's asleep now, and he doesn't mean it." Her mother's eyes drift from her daughter to the floor as she makes excuses for a man they both know did mean it. Carol's latest injuries saved her daughter another bruise on her stomach, or maybe her back, or arm, just under her clothes so that no one worries enough to phone the police. A little girl torn between self-preservation and love for a mother to soft for the world she lives in, history has taught her that the only thing anyone can do in the face of violence and humiliation, is hide.
When the walkers came, Sophia had been afraid, just as everyone had, but deep down in that quiet part that she keeps to herself, she had hoped that maybe it was God that had sent them. Not just to punish people like her father who hurt for the sake of feeling stronger themselves, but to make them hate someone else, to give them something to take their hate out on. She held that hope in her hands in the first days of the end, quietly, tenderly, clutching it as she slouched low in the back seat so that she was hidden from the sound of a city falling apart. When they were safe in the camp with Carl, and Dale, and all the rest, she saw that hope wither, and crumple, just as her mother did when her father struck the first blow. That look came back over her father's face, where you knew that just below the surface, the most evil kind of thought was lurking. The shame of being hurt was almost as bad as the hurt itself, but not quite. Sophia could see the chill in Carl's eyes when he glanced over a fresh bruise on her arm or her stomach as she'd reach up to grab something. She wanted to apologize, to make him feel better, but most of all she wanted to be hidden again, low down in the safety of the car.
Sophia knew now, more clearly than before, more certainly, that God could not have made the walkers: her father's death hadn't meant an end to the plague, it marched on, taking more people, gentle people. Sophia knew that she would be dead soon to, it had become an anchoring certainty. It had been almost two days since she'd been with her own people, since she'd been with her mother. She'd tried praying, but with so many monsters, she knew hers was only one in a countless sea of wasted words. Her only regret in her young life was that she wasn't there for her mother anymore. Remembering that soft, broken look her mother would give her, Sophia rocked back onto her heels and unclenched her hands from around her face. She lifted up the tattered cloth doll from its resting place on the soft earth next to her, and held it in her arms, rocking it gently back and forth. "It'll be alright, Sophia." she whispered, "You're a big girl now."
She never even heard the final monster.