Chapter One: Camp Blue Sky
The idea of surviving had become in the forefront of everyone mind after the zombie apocalypse began and then again after Black Summer. However, several was hard in a world overrun with zombies and a finite amount of supplies, if you didn't have anyone that you could trust with you or didn't have the skills to survive, you ended up dead and in the apocalypse trust was a hard thing to come by. The journey for survival was littered with the loss of loved ones and those who would harm anyone who came into contact with them, on top of the threat of zombies.
Running through the woods off the main roads ended up being the quickest route and in some cases the safest, as it reduced the number of travellers and occasionally the number of zombies one would encounter. Currently the blood covered girl ran through the woods, trying to put as much distance between her and her past as physically possible. A blood splattered hand was tightly grasped around a fireplace poker, occasionally using it to mark which trees she had already ran past. Making sure not to stop whilst keeping an eye on her surroundings in case any humans or zombies were nearby, until she came to the edge of a lake. Glancing around she saw that there was no one or nothing around her before kneeling down and seeing her reflection on the water's surface, her skin was splattered with blood in various stages of drying as was her clothes. Reaching down into the water she dunked her hands under the surface before scooping up the cold liquid and before rubbing it along her face and arms, then moving her now cool, and mostly clean, hand up to rest on her forehead in order to try and cool the heated skin.
Ignoring the stinging sensation as the water came in contact with the cuts that littered her skin, she continued to try and remove as much blood as possible from her body. Her attention was taken from the task at hand by hearing footsteps behind her, slowly reaching down and picking up the weapon by her feet she spun around and faced the two people who had managed to sneak up on her, a man and a woman.
"Easy there" the male of the pair said, as he held his hands up in a 'surrender' gesture. While his female companion remained pointing her gun at the girl. "We thought you were a Z." Thinking back to the reflection she saw minutes ago, the girl realised that it was an easy mistake to make given her appearance.
"Are you lost kid?" the female with the gun asks slightly lowering her gun, to which her response a simple shrug of the shoulders. "Are you heading anywhere then?" another shrug in response was all she received. "Can you talk?" this time instead of a shrug, the response was a small nod.
"Okay then, my name is Charlie Garnett and that there is Roberta Warren, do you have a name?" Garnett asked as he kept his gaze on the girl, noticing that her responses to Warren's questions were non-committal gestures, the response to his question had been for the girl to take a few small steps backwards, before she fell backwards. "Oh shit"
Rushing over to the girl, Warren knelt down next to her seeing that she was unconscious before placing a hand on the side of her head, feeling the heat radiating off of her body. "Charlie, she's burning up."
"We'll take her back to Camp, we can't leave her out here for the Z's to find." Garnett said as he picked the unconscious brunette out of the lakes edge, while Warren picked up her fallen satchel "If she doesn't beat this fever though, I don't think she'll last very long"
….
When she awoke up, the girl realised she was no longer in the woods, she was inside with a room on a bed, her poker off to the side. Looking around she saw the female with a gun from before talking to a bearded man in hushed tones.
"It's been three days Warren, she hasn't woken up and her fever has gotten worse. I don't know if the Little Lady is going to pull through at this rate." The man said.
"Little Lady? You named her now? You name something and you get attached to it." Warren, if her memory served correctly in its fever driven haze, spoke back. "There's got to be something you can do, she's just a kid"
"We needed to something to call her other than the girl, or her. If she wakes up, we can try and get her some aspirin but other than that there is nothing we can do. Well lookie here, Little Lady woke up. How you doing there?"
"Doc you're scaring her" Warren interjected as she sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning over and placing the back of her hand on the young girl's head, taking note of how she flinched at the contact and kept a wary gaze on Doc, "you still have a pretty nasty fever. You feeling alright?"
"I've been better" she softly spoke up
"Well you do speak Little Lady, that's good. I'm Doc and you've already met Warren" the bearded man spoke up, causing her to shuffle closer to the edge of the bed. "Uh, anyway some aspirin for the fever."
Staring at the tablets in the man's hand, the young brunette didn't move repeatedly shifted her gaze from the medication to Doc. Seeing the hesitation in the girl's brown eyes, Warren took the aspirin from Doc and handed it to the teenager which she tentatively took. "Thank you."
"Doc, why don't you go wait outside? I'll talk to Little Lady myself" Warren told the older man, realising that it was men that she was fearful of. "Now, we need to have a talk before we can figure out what happens next"
….
"I hear she woke up, everything alright in there?" Garnet asked Doc once he got word of the girl he brought to Camp Blue Sky waking up.
"She's up and still has a fever." Doc answered as he cast a look back at the room where Warren and Little Lady were. "Though there is something you should know, Little Lady's pretty skittish and only responded to Warren."
"Same thing happened in the woods, the only response we got was from when Warren asked her questions. Nearly ran from my questions. You've nicknamed her?"
"Until we know what her name actually is, Little Lady will have to do."
"I guess so, what's Warren doing?"
"Asking her a few questions, you know why she was running and what happened to her. Something must have happened to her to make her that jumpy."
"You mean other than the Z's?"
"Other than the Z's" Warren's voice cut in as she shut the door behind her, having finished her conversation inside. "So her name is Violet, though she doesn't seem to care that Doc renamed her Little Lady. She's eighteen and is on her own, the person she was travelling before died a few months ago. She is going to stay here Charlie; I'm not sending her out into the world alone."
"Is that all she mentioned?" Garnet prodded, sensing there were a few things that was being left out of the recap.
"She's been through enough Charlie, enough has happened to her that makes her scared to be touched and of men. She's resting now"
"You aren't going to say what she went through are you?" Doc asked as he cast a look back to where the little lady was asleep.
"I'm not making her relive it again" Warren bluntly stated. "She's offered to give us some of her supplies in return for shelter here."
"She has supplies? Anything useful?"
"Some oxy, bullets, no gun mind you, a blanket and rations. Not a lot mind you, if she didn't find anything within a week I doubt she'd make it ten more days."
"Let her keep everything, at the moment we can wait until she fully recovers before we talk more to her. Might need to see if we can scrounge up some clothes that don't have blood on them for her." Garnet said. "I just hope this doesn't come back to bite us."