I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

It was still hard to imagine when this whole thing started. Many would claim the world went to shit a long time ago. A majority of those people were probably already dead. After all, if the world was that bad, then they probably didn't fight very hard. Maybe they really had gotten a warning for all of this; just last year crazy outbreaks of 'rabies', 'mad cow disease', 'swine flu'... Whatever it all was, the CDC would always find a way to cover the problem up and calm the public. Well, if there was anyone left there, they probably felt like a real fool. Fabricated lies had not changed the outcome.

It had to have been three months now, right? Twelve weeks ago, people were packing their cars and hurrying towards the city in hopes to get far out of her town before they were quarantined or something; all of them ignoring the warning to stay inside and lock up, wait for a rescue team. Hanji had spent hours trying not to panic, letting herself argue with her mother over the phone about going into the city to bring her parents here where it was safe. The brunette had quickly regretted moving so far away, all for some school. She spent years working her ass of to get where she had been; jam-packed semesters, graduating high school early, summer classes, days at a time were spent in the labs until she could get her chance to play with isolated cells and create clinical trials. The plan had been to transfer back to the city near her parents, but... how selfish of her... To her it had all been fascinating, amazing - she could go into epidemiology if she just kept working!

If her mother hadn't been so insistent, if the roads weren't dangerous and full of people willing to do anything to reach the same destination to meet the military that would be setting up and get themselves to a quicker safety... Hell, she would have died earlier on. Instead Hanji listened to her mother and promised to stay safe in her own home. After going through her house, the brunette threw some clothes and toiletries into a backpack along with her father's old hunting knife before breaking into her neighbors house. The man next door had always been crude, anti-government; he liked to brag about the bunker in his basement - but fear had gotten to him first; she'd seen the hypocrite rush off for the highway like everyone else that morning, and by the looks of the house he didn't take much of anything with him.

It took time fiddling with the radio until she finally managed to hear just how crazy it was out there. As her mother had expected, the traffic was awful and already the streets were full of barbarians raiding stores. To think she'd really thought how silly they'd all feel in a few days when this whole thing blew over. Maybe it was a terrorist attack, or a bad illness, but there was no way the T-V was creating... zombies. Laughable.

She spent probably two days in there just listening to the radio, telling herself not to panic because there was no way an illness outbreak was so bad already. Most towns were vacant, if not considered dangerous and full of these proclaimed 'zombies'. She just couldn't think of a reason to leave - her parents were safe, everything was fine... And in the middle of the night, the radio cut off. She never thought she'd want to hear the 'don't panic' speech again, and hazel eyes just stared at the device, begging for it to start again. Just dead air on every station...

Her phone didn't have signal once she got out of the cellar, and after a few more hours of debate she decided to take a peek for herself. The once busy streets were just... nothing. Completely void of life, dead quiet. The few cars that were around looked broken into, and there was glass everywhere from looted stores. Frankly, she was afraid of breathing too loud and breaking the silence. She would blame the chills she got on the fact it was getting late.

Reality showed it's head when she heard screaming. Hanji wasn't sure why she decided to run towards the sounds of danger, maybe a few days locked up made her feel like a freed animal. What the brunette came to face was exactly what she should have expected - but couldn't have been more surprised of. It was just some kid, probably got left behind or decided to stay. A whole armful of cans had been abandoned in attempts to get out of the situation, but a whole group of just very... very sick people had cornered him, encircled him, and she couldn't look away as he was torn apart. Fear seized her heart, the woman tripped over her feet when she attempted to back away from the scenes. It grabbed a few of those... those things attention, but she managed to bolt back to where she'd been holing up and kept herself in that bunker.

The world very quickly turned ugly. Zombies? Those were supposed to be a thing of fiction. There was nothing that made sense of what she had seen out there; no way the dead were just rising and eating people! There was a bit of relief in not having any real friends, but what of her parents? She had promised to stay safe, but could she really just stay there? She'd go insane! Amber eyes quickly skimmed the shelves, and before she could really think about it, a lot had been dumped into a green duffel bag. The canned goods, dehydrated food, bottles of water, the first aid and sewing kits, ropes, wire, duct tape, a gun and bullets - she'd never been a great shot but what better time to learn but the end of the world? Once in the house she swapped her worn sneakers for his boots - a tad big but nothing that would slow her down, and grabbed the metal bat from the closet. With luck she managed to get back into her garage with ease, tossing road-flares and other supplies into the cheap clunker she would put her life into now, pulling a thick jacket on should anything happen.

Hanji hadn't dared open the garage door until the engine finally turned over, and for a moment she freaked when she ran somebody over; they quickly became her last thought when they started dragging themselves forward with growls and snapping jaws.

It was weird to see such a populated town so void of life; even the highway was filled with abandoned cars and a few walking dead people here and there. She'd never been a smooth driver, but she had never broken so many driving laws at once. It wasn't until the old car gave up on her and her speeding did she find herself ready to steal an abandoned contraption and continue making her way forward. She had hardly managed to grab her flashlight when she was stopped dead.

Before the sun even set loud bombers were flying overhead, drawing attention to every damn infected around her. Begging for the engine to just turn over, the scientist was surrounded by hands pressing against the glass and doing anything to get in. Grabbing the duffel and the bat, swinging like a madman and running even after she couldn't breathe anymore, she somehow found her way out. Her best chance of getting out of there was a freaking billboard. Now that she looked back, that had probably been one of the safest bases she'd had since leaving home.

That was the night she learned how bad it really was. With eyes following the lights of the aircraft that had royally screwed her... There it was, the state's capitol being bombed with no sign there had ever been hope, the whole thing being slowly turned to nothing but a crater. She couldn't remember a night she'd ever cried so much since then or before, she'd never felt more like a child, begging to see her parents again. Even now she still cried for them, letting the guilt eat away at her before she could sleep.

Sometime the morning after she started being thankful for graffiti artists, dragging herself to her feet and breathing in fumes to just get a sloppy looking 'HELP' on the damn 'MUFF-' ad. She would have been more annoyed at the stupid vandalism, but the spray-cans had been a huge help. By nightfall her luck hadn't improved, and back then she'd been such a supply waster... lighting road-flares and throwing them down to the highway in hopes someone was driving by. Stuck on 80, just great... No chance in going back, no chance going to the city. The next morning she got lucky, waking up to someone climbing the ladder to her roost and the sound of gunfire echoing in her ears.

Moses and Dieter; the two guys who saved her ass and took her back to where they and some girl had made base - some shanty garage-shop just outside the city down the next ramp. She shared what little supplies she had, they let her stay and sleep. After her first run they treated her like she was crazy; wasn't it normal to go ape-shit on a group of T-VI? They were the reason her parents were dead, they were the reason she was here; just mindless, cruel jokes that were trying to eat everyone. If heads were baseballs she probably could have made it into a book of records or something. That base lasted... what, three weeks? Amazing... it all seemed to go by so fast when she thought back on it. Dieter got bit, and for a moment he had just stared at her... whimpered like he felt bad. Moses took him out when she couldn't, his girlfriend got eaten, and the two of them high-tailed.

It took nearly two weeks on the run before they ran into another group of people, oh the irony of that base being a church. At least they boarded up the windows, kept the main entrance locked up and had an escape route. After a day Moses got sick - nothing serious, probably just a head cold from exposure but... "No risks", and their leader killed him in cold blood after he fell asleep. She knew Ian was sympathetic, tried to comfort her... Mitabi didn't really talk much, and Rico was cold; Hanji didn't bother trying to trust them, glaring at Verman anytime he spoke to her. She set up her things by the escape route exit despite their insistence on how safe this place was. Yeah right...

This one seems a bit all over the place; Hanji's line of thinking is very rarely in a straight forward path. There are details that are skimmed over here and there, however they will be addressed later on where they make a much bigger impact.