Hello, this is my first time trying to write fanfiction. I really appreciate any feedback that you can give! I will update as frequently as I can. I do not own anything from the Walking Dead. The only thing I own in this story is the OC and the plot that I created.
Rayne never considered herself a particularly outdoorsy kind of person. Most of her life was spent in the comfort of a home with air conditioning and running water. She never pictured herself trudging through a forest with a pistol strapped to her leg, a machete hanging from her hip, and a bow strapped to her back. The zombie apocalypse really has a way of changing people, she thought and smirked at her own little joke.
The deer that she was pursuing was in her sights. She was crouched behind a bush, careful to not stir any leaves or snap any branches. The doe had escaped her twice already because of her carelessness. While Rayne was not the best shot with her bow, she could at least hit larger targets nine times out of ten. The machete was, by far, her preferred weapon. It was quick, efficient, and, though it put her in grabbing distance of the walkers, it guaranteed her a kill when smashed into a decaying skull. She hated guns, always had. She hated the noise, the recoil, and even the feel of the cold metal in her hand. Now, she has even more reason to hate them. They attracted both the living and the dead. The latter she did mind quite so much as the former.
Rayne quietly rose from her position behind the doe. Taking a breath to steady herself, she drew back the bow string and let her arrow fly. The arrow pierced the doe's chest and sent the deer stumbling a few feet. With a pained yelp and a few shallow breathes, it fell to the ground dead.
Rayne could not help the feeling of pride that ran through her every time she made a successful kill. Ah yeah, she thought. There is going to be meat tonight!
Just as she was about to step from her hiding place behind the bush, she heard a snarling sound to her left. Before she could so much as blink, the walkers were on the doe. They tore into the deer, spilling blood and guts all over the forest floor. The scent of rot and decay reached her nose and turned her surprise into anger.
"Hey!" Rayne yelled.
One of the two walkers turned from the meat and tried to stumble towards her. Rayne dropped her bow and freed the machete from its holder. She stepped forward, swung the machete, and promptly buried it into the skull of the walker. It dropped to the floor with the machete still buried into it, dead...again. The other walker, now realizing they had company, started to stumble towards her. Rayne ripped the machete from the first one and gave the second one the same treatment…again, and again, and again.
"God dammit!" She yelled as she brought the machete down repeatedly onto the now mushy skull.
She brought the machete down one last time. The thing that laid before her that once resembled a human skull was now a pile of mush on the forest floor. She wiped her machete off on a patch of clean grass and attached it back to her hip. With one last forlorn look at the now ruined deer, she started her trek home.
The light from the sun was just about gone by the time Rayne got home. She never hunted near her cottage just in case she ran into another human. The cottage she resided in was perfect for an apocalypse and she did not want to risk it being taken from her. It was small and nestled deep into the woods. The ivy and other vine plants had just about taken over the exterior, which made it almost blend into the forest that surrounded it.
Rayne was lucky. The couple that used to inhabit the house were avid gardeners and kept a thriving garden in back of the house. While Rayne did not have what most people would consider a green thumb, she managed to keep alive a few tomato plants, a cucumber plant, several green bean plants, and a bell pepper plant. She was even able to harvest the seeds and replant them when the weather got warmer after the cold killed off the original plants. Walking out back, Rayne grabbed a tomato that looked like it was mostly ripe for dinner.
"Could've been deer," Rayne grumbled to herself as she bit into the tomato. "Gonna turn into a freaking vegetable if I keep living like this."
Admittedly, the hunting had not been good lately. Not many animals ventured even remotely close to where she lived. In fact, almost no living or un-living things got close to her home. Walkers were rare and she had not seen a human in the entire year she lived here. She wasn't sure if there was something off about the area she lived in or if there just were not that many wild animals anymore due to the walkers. She munched on her tomato and pondered the question. Rayne never reached a conclusion about that, but one thing she was sure of was that she did not mind eating tomatoes until the world completely ended so long as other humans stayed away from her home. She had seen what humans could do, and it terrified her.
