a/n: Takes place after that one thing but before that other thing. (approx. mid-Season 9). I have not seen past Season 10, so if things happen to contradict from that point…yeah, I dunno. Sorry. *shrug*

This fic is based off of a very vivid dream, so when we hit the part that seems more like something out of Fallout than Walking Dead, that's why. Blame my tripped-out subconscious.

I'm posting the first few chapters to start you off; hoping to post one a week after the initial release. ;)

x-x-x-x-x

"What do you reckon it is?" Rick hovered over Daryll as he examined the ground, or more specifically, the strange track left in it.

" 'Unno," the tracker replied. ' 'Unno' was a worrying response. If Daryll didn't know what it was, surely no one else would, and that it was unidentifiable meant a threat they weren't ready for. " 's big, though. Tracks're deep. Bigger'n any bear or cougar I ever seen…"

"Is it possible, in any way, you're looking at two tracks on top of each other?" Daryll turned an eye on him, clear that that was the only response Rick was going to get out of him. Rick nodded, holding his hands up in acceptance. "Just thought I'd check…" He shot a look at Eugene, receiving a blank one in return. Eugene might have been smart, but identifying and tracking wildlife was beyond his depth. He was thus making himself useful by keeping lookout while Rick and Daryll postulated about the footprints.

" 'S got a hell of a stride, too. Lookit here…" The woodsman pointed to the next track, left one foot on the ground by the original, stretching his other leg out as far as he could while still remaining upright toward the next, swaying as he balanced with his arms out to the sides, and was still a foot and a half short of reaching it.

"Maybe a lion or tiger? Giraffe? You know, something you're not familiar with? Maybe there's a zoo somewhere near here, escaped animals…?"

Daryll gave him another scathing look through the hair draped over his eyes. "Ain't no giraffe!"

"Well, if you've never seen the tracks, how do you know?"

The tracker tossed a hand at the sign. " 's got seven damn toes!"

The sheriff's forehead bunched, and he crouched to see what Daryll had discovered.

"While the discovery of a possibly heretofore unknown cryptid busts my buttons with curiosity, may I remind everyone that we are out here on a status check mission on that supposedly outbound herd, rather than take survey of the local wildlife."

"Relax, Eugene," Rick called back, eyes still on the weird track.

"And also," Eugene continued, briefly pointing a hand across the meadow they stood in, "we've got inbound."

Rick swore, stumbling to his feet, right hand going reflexively to his piece, ready to draw. Daryll swung his crossbow around from his back, bringing it to bear on their single potential adversary… though if she was an adversary, she certainly didn't look like she was a match for any one of them. Even Eugene could have easily taken her down.

The long-haired blonde waved her hands over her head as she walked sedately toward them, then crumpled at the knee, lost her balance and disappeared completely, enveloped in the tall grass. After a moment and some swearing, she reappeared, dusting herself off and reseating her pack on her shoulders as she approached in no hurry at all.

"Hey!" she called when she was within earshot. "LFG!"

Daryll's face scrunched. "The hell izzat supposed to mean?"

But apparently it meant something to one member of the group, who stood up straighter and announced, "Join party, why slash en?"

"Why!" the woman answered gladly, still several yards from them. "Much obliged!"

Rick and Daryll stared at their companion in the epitome of the silent what-the-heck. Eugene shuffled, doing his best not to meet anyone's gaze. "Please forgive me for speaking out of turn like that. But she spoke to me in my love language, and that is a siren's song I could not but help to answer."

"The hell did you even say?!" Daryll snapped back. "Sounds like a bunch of alphabet soup!"

"She said she was looking for a group to join; I invited her to join us on our travels and travails, as is only common and proper gamer courtesy."

The woodsman's face twisted like he'd just bitten into a lemon. "Nerds," he scoffed.

Rick held a hand up toward the woman, dragging his eyes away from glaring at Eugene. "You know we have a procedure for this!" he hissed at the brainiac before turning attention back to the newcomer.
"That's far enough, miss." At this distance, it was hard to miss the wide, red scar running clear across her face, from the upper left, crossing the bridge of the nose, to the lower right; a scar that, at a glance, marked her as an absolute badass.

"Ooh, all procedure here, are we? Weapons check, I assume?" she said, sliding her backpack to the ground and raising her arms.

Lifting his brows, Rick approached her. " 's a fair guess."

The blonde tossed her hair, revealing half of it to be a partly grown-out side-shave. "Fairly standard. Everyone wants to know what you have on you to kill them with," she said as Rick took the sheathed buck knife at her hip. "Not everyone does a full stop and frisk, though. Wow," she said genuinely as Rick patted her down. "Though, in the spirit of full disclosure, you missed one."

"In the spirit of full disclosure, I knew, but I saw no need to actually go there," the sheriff said, trying to hide a blush.

Daryll grunted, shaking his head. Eugene's eyes widened. "Wait, does that mean she has a knife in her—!"

"—in her cleavage. Yes, it does!" the young woman stated, drawing the tiny knife from between her boobs and replacing it as Rick stepped away. "Keep your friends close, and your stabby-stabs closer. And, of course, there's also this…" She knelt to her pack, unstrapping a Velcro to toss a coil of rope, bloodied at the end and knotted to a small, likewise stained bell weight, at the sheriff's feet. It thumped dully in the dust.

"The hell is that?" Daryll remarked.

"This," she said demonstratively as Rick indicated she could take it and her knife back, "is my Dead Weight." She bounced the iron in her hand. "Highly metaphorical, but also really good at bashing in Deadness skulls." The three men blinked at her, so she explained further. "It's my take on a kusari fundo, chain-ball. Excellent varied range, no reloading, awesome at crunching the Deadness, especially since they're so fray-gee-ley these days, most of 'em. Next Deadness we see, I'll give ya a demonstration."

Rick held up a hand. "Hold up… There's some questions I need to ask you before I let you join our group."

"Oh. Okay, shoot. Not literally shoot; I see that gun there, that's not what I meant…"

"It's okay… we're not that literal," Rick said to allay her fears, removing his hand from his gun belt. "How many Walkers—or, sounds like you call them Deadness— have you killed?"

"Shit, I didn't know there was gonna be a quiz! I knew I shouldda kept better count of my kills! I could be near an achievement or something and I wouldn't even know!" She tapped her fingers against her forehead for a minute. "Maybe… in the 500s? I'm sorry, I don't know for sure."

"It's fine, it doesn't have to be exact," Rick said, and moved on. "How many people have you killed?"

"Umm… I think three."

"You think three?"

"Yeah, well… two of 'em, they didn't really seem to have the purest intentions for me, if you know what I mean, so I had to bust my way free and bash their faces in. Dead Weight also makes a pretty fine brass knuckles, incidentally. But I didn't really stick around to double-tap, just got my narrow little ass outta there. The third was a friend… He got scratched, took to fever. We had to put him down. It was what he wanted, didn't want to come at us after he turned graveside-up."

Rick nodded, and silence took over until Daryll prompted, "Ain'tcha gonna ask the third one?"

He gestured toward the woman. "She's a chatterbox… She already answered the 'why.'" He turned back to her. "Alright, welcome to the group. I'm Rick, that's Daryll, this is Eugene."

"Bienvenidos, and a pleasure making your very fine acquaintance," Eugene volunteered.

"Muchas, muchas gracias," she returned, in a much more authentic accent, taking the Texan aback.

"Hablas Español?"

"Si, un poquito. You can't live in a border state without picking up some Spanish."

"You're from the Southwest?" he asked, though it came out as more of a statement.

She nodded. "Arizona. Tempe. Flagstaff, for a while."

"Arizona?!" Daryll commented. "Clear to Virginia?"

She shrugged and sighed. "Been a long time… Even the best spots eventually get overrun. Some by car, mostly on foot. Gotta keep movin'."

Rick held his arm out, halting the casual conversation. "But what's your name?"

It shouldn't have been that hard of a question, but she looked off across the plain and was silent for a long moment. "Ya know what, doesn't matter."

This time it was Rick who was taken aback. "What do you mean 'it doesn't matter'?"

She grimaced. "It always happens. No matter what group I'm with, eventually… I'm too much for them. I don't need to leave a tarnished name in my wake, so maybe it's just best if I keep it to myself. 's complicated…"

"But what do we call you?" Rick insisted.

She laughed and said in the sing-song tones of a tired old joke, "Call me anything, but don't call me late for dinner!"

Rick looked ready to protest, but Daryll redirected him. "Let's just get back to trackin' the damn herd and get home.

"Right," Rick agreed. They'd been pulled off-track long enough, and they had business to finish. "Eugene, flank right. You, whoever you are, if you want to be useful, flank left… You were coming from that direction, did you see a herd of Walkers come by, about 300 head? Or, for that matter, anything big and weird?"

"Mostly loners off in the woods. Weird how? I'm plenty weird on my own by some definitions…"

"Yeah, that's just it… we don't know."

The unnamed woman shrugged. "Couple 'a headless Deadness. Pretty much the best kind, 'f ya ask me."

"Headless… You mean already killed, skulls smashed?"

"I mean headless… no skulls to be found. Marie Antoinette-ed. Gone topless. Brainpan in the red column."

"Alright, I get it…"

"You sure? I can keep going…"

The man groaned. "Please don't…"

She rolled a shoulder. " 'kay." She gave them roughly twenty minutes of silence before asking, "You happen to know of anything 'round here worth seein'? World's Largest Rubber-band Ball, butterfly house, or anything not swarming with Deadness?"

"What…" was all Rick could manage.

"I'm Bucket-Listing," she explained. "Out to see the weird and wonderful before I'm gone, or it is," she elaborated.

Rick shook his head at her, partially in response, partially in bemused awe that she would be asking about such ridiculous, meaningless things in their current, dangerous landscape and state of the world.

"There is, point of fact, a vastly oversized rocking chair, roughly fifty miles yonder-ways," Eugene put in, earning him a look from Rick.

"Thank ya kindly!" their new cohort replied with a smile. "I'll check it out if I ever get out that way!" Then her grin dropped and she pulled the rope and weight from her side. "Incoming, y'all!" she said as five Walkers emerged from the trees, heading for them. "Gimme a little room, I'll give ya a Dead Weight demo!" she smirked, whirling the kettlebell weight around her head in a wide circle, giving it more speed with each pass until the rope was a white, blurry disc. "Hup!" she hollered, swinging the circle lower, crunching the skull of the closest walking dead, then shifting and bringing it down directly into the head of the second.

"Come at me, bro! Don't be shy!" she taunted the third as it shambled into her radius and the rope wrapped around its neck, momentum carrying it around in shorter circles until the weight smashed its nasal bone into its brain and the Walker went down. A quick yank on the rope from the young woman detached its vertebrae at the neck and she retracted it to swing it in a tight, vertical circle. She stepped up to the next oncoming Walker, dodging slightly to its side as it lunged and bringing the weight around into the back of its head, knocking it flat and motionless. She stomped on it for caution's sake, then flipped the weight to spin on her other side, catching the next dead thing in the chin. She let the rope wrap around her arm until she could catch it, then used the weight to punch the Walker's remaining brain out the back of its skull as Rick, Daryll, and Eugene joined her to take out the rest of the small pack with knife blows and crossbow bolts.

"Pretty impressive," Rick assessed as she wrapped a straggler's leg bones with her makeshift weapon and yanked them—and only them—out from under it, leaving the rest of the Walker scrabbling about on its back until Daryll put a boot through its face.

" 'S all well and good 'f you're out in the open… Whaddya do with it when you're surrounded in close quarters? Can't swing it with a Walker in your face, I'm bettin'," the ranger challenged.

"Oh, naw… Close quarters and crowds, it's punch and stab and run. Spread 'em out far enough, and I can start pickin' 'em off one by one. Right tool for the right kind 'a job, ya know?"

Daryll nodded a concession to that, making his way to the road on the other side of the small wood, and resumed looking for signs of their outbound Walker herd in the waning daylight. The multiple overlapping tracks on the soft shoulder ended up being just what he was looking for.

"Yep, this looks like our boys… headin' right where we want 'em, away from us."

Rick nodded. "That's good. Let's head back to the vehicles and go home. I hear there is a veggie pot-pie waiting for me!"

"Wait, you guys have vehicles? With fuel? And food?" the woman's jaw dropped open.

"I guess we didn't get to that part, did we?" the sheriff said with an amused snort. "We have a community, walled and guarded. Well stocked. Still a few empty homes, where you're welcome to take your pick. Good people. You'll be safe there. But it's your choice if you'd like to stay, of course. I know it can get overwhelming for folks who have been out here for a while. I'm one of them. But if you give it a chance for a few days, I think you'll manage to get used to being around others again…"

She rolled her eyes. "And you call me the chatterbox! Are you kidding me?! You had me at 'We have'! Lead on, MacDuff!"

x-x-x-x-x

Upon reaching the beat-up sedan and Daryll's cycle, Rick tossed the keys to Eugene, who caught them with his usual blank expression. "You good to drive?" Rick asked. Eugene nodded. "Good. I want to catch a nap on the way back; why don't you take shotgun, Ma'am?"

"Oh, uh, sure," the blonde said, taking her eyes off the car and her hands from her hips.

"Something the matter?"

"Oh, no… nothing. It's just, when you said you had vehicles, I was expecting something much more Mad Max, ya know? Skewers, gun turrets… A cattle-pusher or Bigfoot tires at least!"

Rick pondered as Daryll took off ahead of them. "We did have some with armored siding and spears… Most of that had to be stripped off after 'cause it was part of the walls to begin with, and we needed it back in place. But some of those suggestions sound pretty good… I'll keep them in mind."

"I do believe given enough scrap metal and gas for welding, we would have enough on hand to upgrade some of our current automotive conveyances into a Lancelot or Gawain, if not a Sir Kay or Yvain."

Rick nodded, opening the back door for himself. "We'll talk about it later. For now, let's get moving."

"Ten-four and okie-dokie, Smokie," Eugene replied as he stepped in as well as the woman seated herself.

"Ohh, you have no idea how nice it feels to not have to walk everywhere for a change!" she announced when they hadn't been driving for more than five minutes.

"I assure you fully, I do indeed have an idea," the driver replied, and Rick, from the back seat, added drowsily, "We've all of us been there."

She winced. "Sorry, I'll shut up." She waited until Rick was snoring softly before asking her front-seat companion, "Is he always this intense?"

Eugene shook his head slightly, not taking his eyes off the road. "Today ranks a solid two on the Rick-ter scale. Believe you me, Rick dialed up to eleven is a fury to behold, a formidable force of nature, and one you'd do best not to be on the bad side of, Bubba."

She settled back awkwardly, watching the trees go by. "Deadness coming up."

"Noted, thank you."

"It's me that ought to be thanking you, for inviting me into your group."

He nodded. "De nada. Though yours truly may be facing a lecture from El Jefe for jumping the line of command on that one. You know your gamer lingo… Are you exclusively an MMPORGer, or are you more the type to play the field?"

"I'm a geek's geek, man… If you put it in front of me, I'll play it. Ya know, it was probably a good thing the world ended; one more good Steam sale probably would've broken the bank for me."

"By that token, then, you are also, one may assume, into such things as D&D?"

"Lizardwoman fighter, halfling cleric, Ravenner rogue."

"Con-going?"

"Cosplayed as Fem-Drizzt at Comicon once."

"Interest in science in general, with particular emphasis on revering Bill Nye: Science Guy, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson?"

"Bill! Bill! Bill!" she chanted, and laughed, before toning herself down for Rick's sake. "I met him in person once!"

"Did he talk about how we could, 'dare I say it, save the world'?"

"Nah, mostly he just said, 'Bwugghhh, aaarrgghh!' It was, ya know… after. In Akron. He must've been doing an event there, still all in the blue lab coat and red bow-tie… Very sad. It's true when they say never meet your idols…"

Eugene looked down, holding a personal moment of silence. "In all of the zero-point-zero-one percent of the world that survived, according to my best estimates, I do wish that he had been among them.

"I know, right? On the other hand, we don't have to put up with any more Kardashians nonsense…"

"More accurately, we still might, but the chances of Kanye shambling across our particular path are so miniscule that—"

"DEAD!" their new recruit shouted, wide eyed, but giving Eugene enough warning to swerve and only clip the rotting thing, only sending its head over the hood and spiderwebbing the passenger side of windshield, and thankfully not throwing the entire living corpse through the glass at them.

Rick sat up, suddenly on high adrenaline and hyper-aware of their surroundings. "Would you keep your eyes on the road?!" he chastised.

"My sincere apologies… That was, most definitely, my bad," Eugene admitted and turned on the windshield wipers until they knocked the snapping head off the car's hood.

"I'ma add Plexiglas windshields to the Mad Max mod list…"

"And while we're dreaming, I'd also like a pony," Rick added.

All three of them remained in silent dread and on high alert until the car rolled up to the gates at Alexandria.