READ THIS - Story contains graphic scenes that include detailed deaths, and torture. Not for everyone.

Read and review though :) I'll respond to all comments.

Intro

She was everything I wanted to be: Popular, straight A's in school, and pretty. I never saw myself ever befriending someone like her, but I guess the apocalypse can change that kind of thing. We were both juniors when the outbreak happened. It occurred six months ago, but I remember it so vividly.

It was the last day before we went on thanksgiving break, so most of the teachers didn't really give a fuck what we did as long as we were quiet. I spent most of the day watching videos on my phone or talking to what little friends I had. We got an announcement during fifth period that we would be sent home early. Under normal circumstances, this would be great news, but everyone in the county knew that the infection was spreading to our little town of Lansing, Michigan. No one celebrated the unexpected shortened day. Instead, most students were calling their parents in a hurry trying to get home. I always felt at peace when there was chaos around me. Maybe I'm just a contrarian. Or maybe I was just good under pressure.

Don't get me wrong - Before the outbreak, I was a normal kid. I was awkward, but friendly. I was no where near the smartest, but my report card always turned up with honor role material. I had none of the thoughts that I had today, so when I heard that the infection had reached our city, I was panicked to say the least. I was one of the first to get to my car in the parking lot as it was close to my fifth period class, meaning I could beat the inevitable traffic. Before I could enter, I heard a voice say my name.

"Leith!"

I turned around and saw her jogging towards me, her curly blonde hair fluttering in the wind. "Hey, Lillian." I greeted.

"Can you ride me home?" She said bluntly. "It's not far from here. Please, I need to make sure my mom and dad are okay. Those fucking sick people are rampaging the city."

"Fuck... Really? How do you know?"

"It's all over the news. They're not far from here."

I would have never guess that such an exchange would garner a life long friendship. Maybe it wouldn't have if Lillian's parents had survived. When we arrived at her house, bodies were already spread across the street, the blood was... extreme. Lilly saw her parents corpses in her front yard being eaten by a pack of infected. Since then, her and I became partners. I had foster parents, and needless to say, they only adopted me for the check that came along with it, so I felt no obligation to check up on them. Lillian and I found a nice place to hide while the chaos grew to extraordinary levels. It was a house that was in the middle of construction in some neighborhood in the rolling hills, meaning it was hard to access. We spent most nights for the first few weeks in the basement listening to the occasional screams that echoed from outside. At first it was hard to hear, but eventually, we got used to it.

Lillian stayed in contact with her friends from school via her phone, but each of them would stop messaging her randomly at some point. We both knew what that meant. I remember the last text message chain she received from her best friend Lyla two weeks in. It read;

Lillian: Leith and I are hiding somewhere safe.

Lyla: Good. My parents and I are okay. We can try to find you and take you to the quarantine zone.

Lillian: Yeah, sounds good.

Lyla: We're leaving now. Where are you again?

Lillian: Freedom park, the neighborhood just north of the capital building.

Lyla: Okay, we'll be there in ten minutes. Try to get the house address for me so we know where to go once we get there

Lillian: Alright.

The next message was delayed by nearly twenty minutes, and it read;

Lyla: Lillian, you're my best friend and I love you.

Lillian: I know, Lyla. Why do you say that so suddenly? Where are you?

We never got another message from her, nor did we find her once we left the safety of our hideout. Going outside after weeks of hiding was difficult to say the least. The smell of rotting corpses and sights that were too ungodly to explain, we decided that it was time to leave, and set up some sort of home somewhere else. We thought hard, and eventually decided on another neighborhood that was built on a steep hill and only one entrance. We were to set up our new hideout in one of the houses at the top of the hill, away from everything. It was a rich place before the walkers came, now it was just desolate. There were clear signs of struggle: Cars wrecked into each other with doors all left wide open, blood dried in pools around them. There hadn't been many bodies, I only counted four. For the most part, it just seemed like everyone just disappeared without a trace.

I think our humanity was ripped from us the first time we had to kill. They were a young couple, and they were friendly, but they were stingy, smug, pretty much everything we need to justify ourselves to take their life. Lillian and I were on our way back from a supply run in the center of the city when we heard a car pull up next to us. It was the couple. The man asked what we were doing out here alone. This was before people went totally cynical, so we weren't too cautious when it came to strangers. I explained Lillian and I's story, to which the couple sympathized with us and told us of a very large community in the northern, more rural part of the city. I'm not totally sure why, but I noticed a switch flip inside my new best friend. She stared at the couple with a devious frown and wide eyes. It was as if something had possessed her in that very moment. Oblivious to the change of behavior, the strangers continued to talk about all the food they had in the car with them, which was pretty stupid of them. Maybe it was to convince us to come along with them.

"You can be happy there." I remember the woman saying with a snobby smile. She has no idea what we had been through, the walkers we've seen, the death we experienced. It was... obnoxious. After a while, the man grew more and more insistent that we follow he and his wife back to their community. The whole thing just seemed a little too suspicious, and I was not ready to risk losing my own life, or Lillian's life. I saw Lillian's hand caress her handgun that she kept tucked in her waistband underneath her shirt. We glanced at each other, and for some reason that I still haven't deciphered, I gave her a nod of approval. With that, the couples fate was seal. The shots were fast. The first one went clean through the woman's head, killing her instantly. The second, was not aimed properly, and pierced the mans left shoulder.

Lillian seemed to immediately regret her decision, or at least she did until the man tried to get out of the car and run away. I pursued him, and since he was shot, I caught him within seconds. I had him pinned against the ground on his stomach, my knee digging into his lower back. He sobbed, screamed, moaned, it was pathetic. I could tell by the way my friend was banishing her gun, and the way the corner of her mouth curled up into a smirk, the man would not talk his way out of this no matter how hard he pleaded, and plead he did.

The next shot that Lillian let off was fatal, directly in the head. Once both were dead, Lillian and I just stared at each other.

"Well." I scratched the back of my neck nervously, unsure how to feel. Sure we could make off with all the supplies that the deceased couple had in their car, but the way we killed them... It was so merciless.

Much to my surprise, I saw a tear run down her face. "I..." She croaked out.

"Hey." I said calmly and pulled her into a hug.

She cried into my shoulder and let her gun drop to the ground. At that point I decided, only she was aloud to cry and still be strong. Only she could be the one who I trusted, no one else.

"It's alright." I tried my best to comfort her, but after a while, I heard something change in her sorrowful cries.

She was laughing. Why was she laughing? It was subtle, but I certainly heard it. "Lillian?" I asked. "Are you okay?"

She looked up at me, and as I stared into her tear filled eyes that were still red from her sobs, I was something dark, something evil, and I loved it. She smiled at me rested her head against my chest, continuing to laugh. I allowed myself to smile, after all, what we had done was pretty funny... right? All that matters was that we would live another few weeks thanks to the supplies we had just acquired, not to mention the car.

"I'm going fucking insane, Leith." She said with a chuckle.

I sat down on the guard rail and shrugged nonchalantly. "Me too."

"She let out a drawn out sigh of what I can only assume to be relief. "Let's go crazy together."

"Do I really have a choice?" I smirked.

Lillian reluctantly wiped some of the blood from her shirt, getting it on her hands. She grabbed the sides of my face with her hands and used her thumbs to drag some of the blood just under my eye lids. "Of course you have a choice. Everyone deserves a choice, don't they?"

"Hmph, That they do."

"Well what's it gonna be?"

I brushed some of her hair behind her ear as I spoke, "I think I've been crazy this whole time, I just needed someone to act like it with."

And that's how it all began. Months went by, and our nature grew more and more relentless and gruesome. We would actively hunt down survivors just to kill them. We'd take turns on who got to deliver the killing blows, but sometimes Lillian would be very adamant about killing a certain victim, so I gave my turn to her with the promise that it would be mine next time. Even though we had grown to be hostile, we still loved each other, but only each other, no one else. Nothing got in our way. Sometimes we would track down communities and wait for their supply runners to leave the safety of their wall just so we could follow and kill them. It turned into a big game, and we were the only players.

The army had a strong presence in Lansing, and they issued a bounty on our heads. The plus side to that was no one knew what we looked like, as there was no witnesses to what we had done. The only way people knew that it was us behind all the killings was the way in which we killed them: Hands behind their back, and either a gunshot wound to the head, or a gash to the throat. Lillian was responsible for the gun shot, while all my killings were done by knife. I don't think we ever regretted what we did, the adrenaline was too intoxicating. The feeling of freedom, knowing it would never end, and knowing that the world was ours... It made us appreciate the outbreak.

We spent most days searching for supplies, siphoning oil from cars, and sometimes delegating certain days specifically to have fun. Whether it be exploring abandoned parts of town, playing bored games, or even trying to steal furniture from other houses and use it to replace the furniture in our hideout. Whenever we had days like this, it was almost like we weren't dark, like we never killed anyone in our lives. Lillian had this innocence in her eyes that I never understood, but I loved it. Life was easy, it was fun. Well... it was fun until a group calling themselves 'The Brotherhood of Eden' decided to set up their headquarters in Lansing, thus further adding to the ever growing lists of threats Lillian and I had to deal with. However, as usual, we hardly cared about threats, we were simply only concerned with how to live life to the fullest everyday, and unfortunately, worrying about the army or the brotherhood wasn't on that list.

Present Day

I stood next to Lillian as she sat on the wooden railing to our balcony, which had view of the high that was just behind a thin treeline. A convoy of trucks was making its way down the road.

"Brotherhood of Eden?" I asked.

She nodded and shrugged. "Unfortunately."

"I heard that they're vigilantes. You know, someone to enforce standards and uphold the law now a days."

Lillian scoffed in disgust. "Assholes."

"I know, right? They can't control this place."

"They can't control us. They might think that what they're doing is for the greater good, but they don't know that some people have embraced this life, you know?"

I pursed my lips and smiled. "Yeah, I know. Hey, if they get to be too threatening, we can always leave this place.. Find a new one."

"Yeah... It would kinda suck to leave our hideout. Especially after all the work we put into it."

I chuckled slightly and brushed some of the hair from my face. That's something I always liked about her - She never had anything to prove, and she never felt like she had to do something to show that she was tough. She knew when to cut her losses. "We'll try our best. This is still our city... Those Eden fuckers are just visiting. We'll show them."

Lilly looked at me with those dark brown eyes that I loved. "If my friends from school could see me now... what do you think they'd say?" Her voice was sarcastic. I knew that in the end, she didn't care what they'd think.

"It doesn't matter." I laughed. "They're all probably dead anyways. There's this..." I paused for a moment, trying to decide how to word my next sentence. "There's this beauty in death. It's not just something that happens to everyone, it's an art. You and I... we aren't bad people, we're just wise to the fact that killing people is mercy. Better it happen now rather than later, otherwise they'd just gather enough of a reason to stay. We're kinda like artists."

"Hmph... You're the more creative one here. Remember that time you lowered that guy by a rope from a window into a herd of walkers."

I smiled and shook my head. "Yeah... He was my puppet."

"Well you certainly made him dance."

"Ha! I'm pure, my work is pure."

"Damn. I thought I was the fucked up one." She laughed.

"Oh, shut up." I nudged her with my elbow playfully. "I'm just like you; I'm only merciless when we have the lives of others in my hands."

Lillian flipped her legs to the other side of the railing and wrapped her arms around my neck, resting her head against mine. "We're gonna defend our home with everything we've got, and we're gonna force everyone in this city to leave so it'll just be us."

I nodded and said, "They'll regret ever coming here."

A/N - Was it too much? Review.