Author's Note:This is the second of four TWD prequels I am doing and the first chronologically. This one starts at the onset of the global outbreak, a little before FTWD starts and continues up until the point where Rick is first discovered by the group in Atlanta. This will have a slight AU element here but for the most part I am sticking to what I know of canon from the show and comics. Will have Carl's perspective and Michonne's of the early days of the outbreak started within the next few weeks and depending on how these all turn out I might merge them all into a full blown TWD AU storyline.
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Chapter I
Glenn Rhee, a pizza delivery man was stuck in bumper to bumper traffic along the 285 loop heading towards the south side of Atlanta. It was worse than it usually was today and it usually was pretty bad. A lot of people ordered pizzas during evening rush hour and Glenn couldn't blame them. He wouldn't want to go out in this mess to pick up food and well these days a lot of those in his generation were just too damn lazy to cook it themselves. Regardless of the reason why he was stuck in traffic the fact remained, he was stuck in traffic.
"Thirty minutes or it's free. Fuck you Atlanta." Glenn cursed the traffic.
He honked his horn as if it would make the big red truck in front of him move along any faster. This is what he had dropped out of college for? To shuttle pizzas around for a bunch of inconsiderate fucks to shove in their faces and for what, a measly 12.75 an hour? Half these jerks didn't even give good tips and he had been robbed at the door more times than he'd like to admit. Then there were the stupid high school and college kids that had pizzas sent to people that didn't even order them. Those were always a waste of Glenn's time. His parents had wanted him to become a lawyer or some shit that didn't interest him at all. Overbearing and un-fucking-believably demanding, those were the two words Glenn could best describe his parents with. It wasn't too surprising after years of living with their rigid structure that once Glenn got out on his own and discovered the ease of the slacker lifestyle he soon embraced it, a decision he was regretting now.
He thumbed through the dials on his dashboard radio. A bunch of crappy top forty songs, cookie cutter country and hip hop as always. He stopped it for a minute on a news broadcast.
"At the present time the Center for Disease control is advising Atlanta residents to stay indoors. They are expecting to have the situation under control within the next twelve hours." the report stated before Glenn cut it off and switched over to a CD.
A Motorhead song came on from Glenn's mix CD and he turned up the volume to drown out the noise of the other cars around him. He might have been Korean but he was a Georgia boy first and foremost and well "The Hammer" was close enough to Southern Rock as anything Glenn would get. The traffic continued to creep along and Glenn grew impatient as a few more tracks played through on his CD. Giving up on the direct route he decided he had a better chance taking the city streets than the highways. Once he crept forward enough to reach the nearest exit he exited the highway and got onto the surface streets where he hoped to make better time towards the address which had ordered the pizza. Fortunately he knew Atlanta like the back of his hand. He had been up and down nearly every street and back alley of this town if not for his job then for his own business on his own time. He could navigate this place without even looking at his GPS. As he went through the city at a decent pace compared to the gridlock on the loop Glenn's phone rang; it was probably his boss wondering what was taking so long. Fucking traffic, that's what was wrong Glenn thought to say when he picked up the phone. Before he could say hello his attention was jolted elsewhere.
Thud! The sound of a body hitting the front of his car startled Glenn. He looked away from his phone to see the shadow of a figure tumble around the side of his vehicle and fall behind him. Holy fuck! He had only looked away for a second. Glenn immediately stopped the car and got outside. He felt both nervous and angry at the same time; nervous that he didn't want to hurt anyone and angry that this idiot shouldn't wave been walking across the road to begin with.
"Hey mister, are you alright? I'm so sorry I didn't see you there and. . ." Glenn started to apologize.
The person he hit was lying on his stomach on the ground behind Glenn's car. He only saw the man's legs and shoes, white loafers stained with patches of dirt and smushed grass. The man's legs twitched and started to move. "Good, he was still alive." thought Glenn. The truth as Glenn would soon find out is that this man was never alive to begin with. He had died some time before he ever found himself standing in that road. The man got up slowly and awkwardly, with an unwieldiness possibly indicative of brain damage with significant loss of motor skills. Raspy sucking sounds and a deep guttural growl emanated from behind Glenn's rear bumper as he carefully started to peek around it to check on the person he had hit.
"Hey, hey you, you ok?" Glenn asked again.
There was no response, no intelligible response that is. The man started to push himself up and with clumsy, slow often misplaced movements pulled himself to his feet using the back of Glenn's car. The man's head slumped sideways; Glenn could see that the pavement had sanded away part of his left cheek and that his shirt was a little torn. The man also seemed a bit pale, leached of all color like the blood had stopped flowing within him. Kind of the pale chalky grey-white of a corpse. His eyes were glazed over and distant looking, like they had that "thousand yard stare" thing going on. Glenn also noticed something else on the man, a deep bite mark where his neck met his shoulder, tearing through clothing and skin, leaving a large reddish purple chunk of flesh opened away. Something had got him good; Glenn was surprised this man was still walking. By the look of that wound he should've bled out through the jugular and not even been on the road for Glenn to have hit him.
It was then that the man staggered towards Glenn with jerky motions making foul raspy hissing noises. That was when the moment of truth occurred to him. That was when the man actually tried to bite Glenn. It was a vicious attack, like that of a wild rabid animal. He pushed the man backwards knocking him on his butt several feet away. As impossible as it sounded Glenn knew the truth, this man wasn't a man at all. This man was the walking dead. That bite mark where he should have bled out, turns out he actually did bleed out and died, then by whatever means he came back. Glenn had heard stories about stuff like this happening the past few months. Deceased loved ones who fell ill to an unknown disease suddenly being resuscitated and trying to consume the flesh of those mourning their passing. It was mostly stuff in the realm of conspiracy junkies and bunk internet sites; you know the ones with pictures of Bigfoot and aliens all over them. Glenn would sometimes look at those late at night for a good laugh or two. Now while they might have been wrong about ET and the Illuminati controlling the weather turns out they were right on the dead coming back to feast upon the living and Glenn was staring the proof of this right in the face.
Glenn hurriedly got back into his car and slammed the door closed before the man, or the thing the man had become managed to pick itself back up and come after him. The dead man flung himself onto the outside of the car, its hands and face pressed up against Glenn's driver side window. Glenn took off leaving the walking dead man, or walker as he now called it to fall flat on its face and hands as he drove away. He saw that even after that fall the thing got up and continued to stagger after him, until lastly he saw it drawn towards a pedestrian passing by. Glenn drove out of view before he saw the conclusion of that encounter but he could only assume how it might have played out. Either the living man got gnawed upon and eaten or he managed to re-kill a dead man, if such a thing was possible. Fuck it wasn't supposed to be possible for the dead to walk in the first place, how the hell do you kill something that has no life within it?
Glenn drove at a frantic pace towards his destination, jarred and unsettled by what he had seen. He still had a job to do and walker or no walker this pizza would get to the person that ordered it. He didn't see anything else so unsettling the rest of the way to his destination but what he had seen had left him on edge, shaking with his hands on the wheel in disbelief.
He arrived at his destination, a dark jungle green single story house with maroon doors and trim. A chest high chain link fence surrounded a front lawn of rough grass, yellowed in places from over watering. There didn't appear to be anyone home. The blinds were closed, the lights were off, there were no sounds coming from inside and there were no vehicles in the driveway. Still Glenn got out and took the pizza to the front door. He knocked on the door and waited. A couple minutes passed without a response so he knocked again, tapping his foot impatiently waiting for the customer to show. "God dammit this had better not been another prank order." Glenn grumbled to himself.
All the sudden a gunshot rang out and caught the delivery man's attention. Glenn ran back to his car and stood at the passenger side of it as he caught the second gunshot being fired. A woman fired a .38 slug into the abdomen of a man coming at her with arms outstretched. The man recoiled with the force of the bullet but kept coming as if the pain didn't affect him at all, only the initial impact when the bullet struck the skin and tore through to the other side. The man's movements were familiar, just like the dead man Glenn had hit earlier on the road. Glenn watched the woman shoot a third time straight through the man's chest. Blood and bits of human entrails flew out the exit wound and dropped down onto the ground leaving a broken line of red on the asphalt leading away from the man that had just been shot through the heart. Still he remained standing, still he kept on coming. Glenn tossed the pizza in the back seat of his car. These folks clearly weren't home; they probably saw this coming and got the hell out of here before something like this happened to them. That's what this was, the start of something big, the start of something terrible. Though he had only seen two of them he knew there had to be more. This wasn't just one rabid zombie-like person breaking out of funeral home down off Fairburn; this was a full blown outbreak. Glenn watched in horror as the dead man fell upon the woman who unloaded the weapon into his chest as she was torn to pieces. The back of the walker popped open in various places spurting internal liquids like a fountain while the woman's own vital fluids drained from the bite marks on her neck, face and chest. Beneath the two as the one man feeding frenzy commenced a pool of blood expanded at their feet. There was so much blood, it was everywhere around them. No matter how much the dead man ate it never seemed sated. That is until the unthinkable happened; until the woman started to move again. The woman got up and seemingly the ravenous devouring man no longer had an interest in feeding upon her. The pair now turned their attention towards Glenn, frozen like a deer in the headlights before this gory spectacle. The start of the zombie apocalypse had begun and Glenn was standing there with a front row seat to watch it all unfold before his eyes.