Author's Note: Hello again! I had every intention of uploading this a couple of days ago but things got crazy with school and work and I didn't get the time to finish it off. A couple of things, I went back to the first chapter and changed Cassandra's age from 28 to 25. Not a huge deal, but just so you know. Also, Daryl shows up in the next chapter which I am already working on. I know it's hard to be patient for our favorite good old boy to make his appearance but I really wanted to establish who Cassandra is and how she's been surviving before I shoved her in with characters we already know. Is anybody else as excited as I am for season 3 tomorrow!?
It was all kind of a blur after that.
Cassandra remembered sprinting full out between buildings, cutting across a parking lot, ducking in between cars when the moans got too close. At some point she had swung the little girl off of her back and around to her front, clutching the girl's body awkwardly to her chest struggling to maintain her grip despite the fact that her body was drenched in sweat.
There was another blank spot in her memory at that point but somehow she knew they'd ended up in a car with a girl Cassandra vaguely knew as one of Jessica's fellow medical student's although she didn't remember her name before being told hours later that it was Lacey. Together they'd sped off of the Harvard campus, Lacey jerking the wheel frequently to avoid hitting either the creatures or the people who were darting in and out of the road.
Their original plan had been to head towards Boston. Cassandra's mother would be there and it stood to reason that if the government did have any kind of a defense mounted it would be strongest in the city.
It wasn't long before Cassandra began to doubt this strategy though, reason seeping in through her panic. A city might mean more security but it also meant more people, and in this case more people almost certainly meant more infected. Not to mention that even a strong military presence clearly didn't mean much, look at how fast the National Guard had been overrun in Cambridge.
She'd done her best to keep the fear out of her voice and reason with Lacey but it had quickly escalated into both girls shouting through tears, the toddler Cassandra still clutched to her lap screaming over them both.
"I'm going to Boston," Lacey had finally cut her off, her voice shaking and bordering on hysterical. "We can't do this on our own, we have to get help, I'm going!"
"Then let us out," Cassandra had hardly been able to believe the words as they came out of her mouth, hearing them as though through a fog from very far away.
Lacey complied, pulling over to the side of the highway, cars whizzing by frantically as others rushed toward Boston. Cassandra had stumbled out of the car in a haze and had barely cleared the vehicle before Lacey was speeding away. She couldn't really blame her. The world had gone to hell and there was no time to second-guess your decisions.
You just had to do decide and go because standing still was suicide.
A few weeks later Cassandra found herself perched on top of an old Ford pick-up truck, staring off into the woods that bordered the road somewhere in Georgia. The little girl, who hadn't spoken a word since chanting "momma" in the auditorium, was asleep in the cab below her.
Cassandra heard a soft whimper from the girl and froze, listening hard for any signs of distress. A soft sigh was the only additional sound from the girl's sleeping area and she allowed herself to relax slightly. She had no idea what the girl's name was and so far all attempts to coax it, or anything, out of her had failed miserably. She'd taken to calling her Emma simply to have something to say when those big blue eyes were looking up at her full of fear and confusion. Cassandra didn't know why she wasn't speaking, it wasn't like she had any experience with kids. She worried almost constantly that Emma had been so traumatized by her encounters with the zombies and losing her mother that they had destroyed something vital in the girl's mind.
To be honest, of all the things Cassandra worried about constantly, Emma's mental state was one of the less pressing.
Ever since Lacey had left them on the side of the road Cassandra and Emma had bounced from group to group, teaming up with anyone they encountered who seemed remotely trustworthy. She'd tried to limit their strategy to joining up with groups of people that included other women and children thinking that would probably lower their chances of being taken advantage of. They never stayed with one group long, moving on as soon as someone made a decision that she disagreed with. She never got too close to any of them, never committed herself to being indispensable to anyone's survival but her own and Emma's. They were encountering less and less people as the days wore on and Cassandra tried hard not to think about what that meant.
The truck that was currently their home she'd picked up only the day before. Previously she'd hitched rides but yesterday they'd hit a roadblock of cars that stretched for miles. While some of the others had debated what to do, Cassandra had asked one of the other women to watch Emma and gone exploring as far she dared. She'd found the truck and decided with its sturdy design and lack of dead bodies residing inside that it was as good a car to commandeer as any. She'd managed to get it turned around and woven back through the other cars just in time to attend the meeting where the group finally decided on backtracking to DC.
Cassandra had known right then it was time to move on. They'd already tried to get into Washington about a week ago, but the city had more roadblocks than any other place they'd encountered. All of the barricades, tanks and barbed wire fences hadn't yielded a single living person though and she no longer held out hope that the government was still functioning with a waiting vaccine.
She no longer held out much hope at all.
Despite being told she was crazy for heading out on her own, Cassandra had packed up a few supplies for herself and Emma and taken off in the opposite direction from everyone else. She hadn't been able to convince them to part with one of their guns, though she supposed she didn't really know what to do with one anyway other than pull the trigger and pray.
She'd seen plenty of people do that in the last few weeks and most of them weren't still around.
Cassandra shuddered at the thought, pulling the sleeves of her oversized sweatshirt down over her arms and tucking herself into a tighter ball as though she could banish the cold and her memories at the same time.
The truth was that despite the fact she'd purposefully kept herself and Emma from becoming too ingrained in any one group they'd traveled with that didn't make her immune to the horror of seeing people she knew torn apart right in front of her. There were just so many of these things now everyday they didn't see someone killed was a miracle. As far as she could tell she was still alive due mostly to good luck.
She hadn't climbed those bleachers back at Harvard because of survival strategy, she'd done it because she was weak and afraid, even before the risen dead had burst in to kill them all. She hadn't made it out of Cambridge because she had a get away car waiting, she'd just randomly run into Lacey while running around with no clear purpose. And she most certainly hadn't survived their numerous encounters with the zombies since then because of any particular skill, a fact a voice in the back of her mind constantly reminded her of. She just ran when she saw them coming and so far she'd had enough dumb luck to run in the right direction.
There was no telling how long that dumb luck might last but she didn't really think much of the odds.
Cassandra's eyes burned in the corners and for a moment she thought she was going to cry but no tears came. She raised her sleeve-covered hand and wiped briskly at her eyes anyway though it did little to calm the prickly sensation. She thought she might have been too dehydrated to cry after giving Emma her share of their last bottle of water earlier but it also occurred to her that she probably just didn't have any tears left anyway. Her mind may not have adjusted to living in the horrors of the new world but her body was getting there.
Her formerly pleasantly round face already had taken on sharper angles and her size 8 jeans were gapping at the waist. She'd always been so proud of her long blonde hair, loved the way it set off her brown eyes. Now she tried to avoid all reflective surfaces but she'd seen enough.
She'd done her best to try to make sure that Emma didn't feel the pinch of their limited supplies but there was only so much she could do. Often the little girl refused to eat what Cassandra was able to find anyway, and no amount of coaxing from the older girl seemed to make much of a difference. As far as she could tell the little girl wasn't physically showing any signs of malnutrition. Her face still had all of its baby roundness, her blue eyes were still bright and her soft brown curls hardly even looked dirty.
Cassandra settled in, gathering her limbs even closer to her body and prepared to wait out the night. Waiting for morning or an end to all this, which ever came first.
Shortly after dawn Cassandra slowly stretched out her frozen limbs, the ache in her joints drawing a low groan from her that she immediately tried to stifle. She rose to her feet on top of the truck and did a slow rotation watching for any sign of movement. Nothing. As far as she could see was nothing but abandoned cars on one side and trees on the other.
She slid down onto the hood of the truck and then hopped lightly down to the ground. She knew that she needed to try to scavenge supplies from the other vehicles and then get them as far away from this graveyard as possible. They were sitting ducks if they hung out there much longer. Her heart clenched at the thought of leaving Emma alone though, even for a few moments. She didn't really have any choice. If she woke the girl and took her with her and they did run into any trouble there was little chance that Cassandra would be able to keep the girl alive and fight off the attack at the same time.
Cassandra brushed her hair out of her face and gripped her temple as the start of a horrific headache began to creep up on her.
If she was honest with herself she knew that if she ran into trouble there was little enough hope of her fighting off an attack even if she only had to worry about herself. That kind of thinking may have been honest but it definitely wasn't helpful so Cassandra forced herself to push it aside.
She peeked into the window of the truck and saw that Emma was mercifully still asleep. Doing her best to clamp down on her guilt Cassandra made sure the doors were locked and swung a backpack she'd found a couple of weeks ago over her shoulder. She had taken about half a step away from the truck when an awful thought stopped her in her tracks.
What if she never came back and Emma starved to death in that truck? It was better than letting the girl become one of those things but it was still enough to bring the familiar burning sensation back to Cassandra's eyes.
She swung the backpack down over her shoulder and onto the ground. She dug around inside for a few minutes before locating half a sheet of paper and a black sharpie. She quickly scrawled out a note, her hand shaking fiercely.
Little girl inside.
Not infected.
Please take care of her.
Cassandra capped the sharpie and tossed it back into her backpack before placing the note under the windshield wiper on the truck. She could hardly believe that the last time she'd had occasion to write something down was that last day in Cambridge, trying to work on her thesis.
God, for years her life had been about being a student, academics, the written word.
Lot of good all that education was doing her now. Lot of good anything was doing her now.
Sparing one last worried glance for the little girl sleeping in the truck, Cassandra forced herself to walk in the other direction, towards food, towards hope, or more likely towards an incredibly painful death.
Cassandra sighed.
Well, at least she was starting the day optimistically.