"So can you show me around?" The Doctor asked. I laughed.

"Please tell me that was a joke. We are not leaving this building until we have to."

"Sorry. Can I at least get some history?"

I shrugged. "I guess. I am – or, was, I guess – a journalism major at the university down the road here. Our basketball team was getting some hardcore national attention and I was pretty popular on campus and in my sorority. Now they're all dead."

It was true. I continued to tell The Doctor everything. Our school was perfect: beaches, national attention for basketball, I was popular in my sorority, my grades rocked and my professors were awesome, I had a great retail job and I was very likely to get a news reporter job in the area since we have a lot of amazing news stations around here. But now, it's gone. It all started at a Sigma Chi party at the frat house. I was there with a few sisters and the basketball team – including my friend with benefits whom I was getting annoyed with (relationships, ugh) – when it happened. We thought that one of the Sigma Chi brothers was just really wasted to the point of being sick, but we realized that his sluggishness and his glazed over eyes were past being drunk. His big brother in the fraternity went to smack him out of it and then got the bite. Thinking it was just a drunk thing, his big ended up hooking up with some girl in another sorority and gave her a shit ton of hickeys. One of them even ended up breaking the skin. Next thing we all knew, those three were in the hospital and biting other patients. Those patients wouldn't show symptoms until a week after being bitten, but once the bite was given it was too late. Symptoms or no symptoms, you were still a zombie. How no one noticed that a bunch of people who were dead were walking around biting people for a week without showing signs of being the walking dead is unknown but it still scares the shit out of you. Over time the time for showing symptoms increased to two seconds to forty-eight hours depending on a person's height, weight, and sex. The basketball team was away at a basketball game for the NCAA tournament when it broke out here so I've always remained hopeful yet doubtful that they've at least managed to be okay. I had heard of a few of the teammates getting bitten but I tried to not let it damper my hopes, mostly because I didn't really want to be the last person in the country. As far as we knew, the zombie outbreak was currently only in America.

The only other people in my region were a few Medics, the closest being about twenty minutes north of here, and the reporters scattered. Some were in Georgia, some about two hours north of here, and one on the east coast. That's what the latest report said anyways. And then there was me. We used to have numbers, but now they just refer to me as Runner.

"Can I ask you something?" The Doctor asked. I simply nodded. "What is the date?"

"All I know is that it's spring of 2013," I shrugged. "I don't know the exact date. I don't like to know, it makes time seem longer. All I know is I'll have to move soon, the restaurant only has so much food."

"Probably sooner than you think," The Doctor's attention averted to out the window. I followed his focus and stood to approach the window. We were on the second floor, and I saw the last thing I had wanted to see or expected. Someone must have turned behind the wheel of a car because a rogue car swerved throughout the parking lot from out of nowhere and managed to crash into the glass of the store. They now had an opening. I picked up my bag and my crossbow and looked to The Doctor at the same time as he looked to me. "Run," he breathed.