Rock bottom.
Say it twice,
say it thrice.

Zip Code: An awful fucking place just outside of Alexandria.
But Aaliyah was there as she stood in her outfit of flesh and gore, leaning ever so casually against a towering pine, long coils of intestines curling around her throat like a macabre necklace, her hair, once made of soft shades now shining such a deep red that can only be achieved with a slick of blood as walker bile dripped off her split ends.

If you weren't looking close enough, she could have been a stray from the herd.
Or, at-least half dead.
Twice cooked pork her uncle called them,
her nostrils flared at the memory.

To anyone else but her, the stench would be unbearable as flys danced around her head as if she was trash on fire.
That was understandable, especially considering she had been wearing the same tatty clothing every day for nine months,
and she had stolen the black cotton fleece and torn denim jeans from a corpse with so many stab wounds she thought he was mince.

Worse than that, she was literally starving to death, her last lick of water was two days ago from a puddle floating with bird shit.
Rock-
bottom.
And in that hellish place,
there was nothing left to lose.
A pair of purpling eyes narrowed venomously while she calculated entries and exits into the beautiful suburban community only a few hundred feet away, her dainty fingers curling white-knuckle tight around her makeshift spear, -a pathetic broom handle sharpened to a lethal tip.

"Mercy for the lost, vengeance for the plunderers," the white sign bolted onto huge metal gates read.

And she smiled, wide and broad and malicious and wicked, her pointy teeth sparkling in the harvest moon.

She didn't want mercy.
She wasn't lost.
She knew her way around the forest like a smack addict knows a needle, and who were they to bring vengeance?
Cozy in their little burb bubble, with their fancy electricity and clean running water, with their beer festivals and pretty little white houses.
Fuck them.
Fuck their full bellies and fruit crops, fuck their trade routes and clean clothes.
Fuck them for having it so easy while the rest of the world burns.
For smiling while she suffers, for finding friendship in a world of fiends.

Her snarl drooped, replaced by a line sharp as a razor.
She planned to leave them the way she left her last group, those twenty snakes with friendly grins who would have slit her throat for a box of crackers.
Unfortunately for them, they were still lying in their makeshift tents with their open sternums all the way up in chilly North Dakota.

Aaliyah inhaled a long drag of her last cigarette, moonshine orbs glimmering brightly and breath steadily rattling at the thought of ransacking this place and leaving it a flaming heap.

She would take everything.

In this brutal world, you kill or be die, it's all a matter of who's the better predator. And her mercy didn't exist.
Not anymore.
Not after everything.

She'd been watching. For so many day's now she had lost count. Nineteen? Twenty?
Watching in her bed of leaves high in the trees for the best moment.

Tonight wasn't the perfect time to strike. These people were never lazy, always on guard and ready for conflict, their eyes always looking, always watching, always searching for animals like her.

But she was getting weak, finding herself blacking out and hallucinating, desperately trying to devour pinecones and grass, so drained she could barely even crawl.
There was no other option other than curl up and die.

Now it was eleven forty-five at night, nothing but pinpricks of light from the star-spangled sky and the little houselights illuminating her way.

Aaliyah cupped her chin, blinking slowly, her calculating gaze unwavering.

She knew the handsome blue-eyed leader and his girlfriend always went to bed at around ten thirty on the third day of the week, leaving the full lipped Latina and the crossbow wielding beatnik on guard at the front gate.

The chubby, sly guy with the mullet would be in his house, tinkering with a HAM radio.

The man child with the bandaged eye and sheriffs hat paced the streets until eleven, relentless in how his solitary ball scanned the treelines.
But before the stroke of midnight, he had usually kissed the pretty blonde haired child goodnight, retiring to his home to indulge himself in comic books.

But the tall man in the leather jacket, the outcast of the group, the odd man out who nobody liked,
he would be sitting on his own on his front porch until the early hours, lost in his own thought, caressing that baseball bat and talking to it like it was another human being. He was unpredictable, the one wild card.

In a way, he was like Colton.
Ali growled, low and deep, cold air squeezing from her lungs.
Kamikaze, but at least she would die on her feet.

She stomped out her smoke with her filthy boots, sighing at her exposed toe before painting her face with slick mud, worried the ashen glow of her face would be to easy to spot in the darkness.
And to the symphony of the growling biters, the lone wolf slunk into her blanket of shadows, ready to bring hell to this toy town.