CHAPTER ONE
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     SHE STARED AT THE BOTTOM OF HER EMPTY GLASS, loathing the fact that she had ended up there again. Another night spent with a bottle and the suffocating quiet of the room. She was entranced and enveloped inside of her own thoughts. Her own destructive and hopeless thoughts. Staying trapped in one place for endless hours had gotten to her.

     A loud boom followed by a series of alarms snapped her out of this stupor. Her eyes trailed to where it was coming from and she sighed, pulling herself up from the chair reluctantly. She followed the series of pathways that would lead her to the lab, the only feasible place as to where the noise could be coming from.

Arden didn't bother wearing her lab uniform anymore. She didn't think that a cure was within the realm of possibility, not with the dead walking around. Science only went so far and after weeks of fervent trying, their tests had yielded no results. But Jenner was still trying. Still investing his time in what she saw as a lost cause.

When she rounded the corner she found a soaked Dr. Jenner, putting his clothes back on defeatedly outside of the decontamination shower. She cleared her throat and his eyes snapped up to her.

"The samples...I lost them all," he mumbled quickly, his voice sounding close to breaking. He breathed slowly, clearly trying to contain all of the disappointment he was feeling.

"If you hadn't lost them, would it have really changed anything?" Arden questioned skeptically, with a hint of irritation in her voice.

"That was a chance," Jenner stressed. She was tired of listening to his deluded perception of what he thought was a hope for humanity.

"I can't take this anymore. There are still people out there. That I believe," she snapped. Her mind drifted to an aching place and she took a breath. "My family is still out there. I can't - I won't stay here and pretend I'm finding a cure."

He looked utterly shocked at what she had just said. But she didn't care. So instead of waiting for his reaction, waiting for his justification of why they were doing such things, she left. Turning on her heel sharply, she hurried back into the hall.

The echo of footsteps behind her was apparent. "Don't! It isn't safe out there!" he called out after her. She scoffed and shook her head, not ceasing her rapid steps.

"If all hope is lost, why not let me go? You always said those samples were one of the only chances," she responded. She heard the footsteps behind her stop and at that point, she had already reached the door. "Let me out."

"You're going to regret this," he warned shakily. It seemed that he was more afraid of being alone than concerned for her own well-being. But Arden wasn't even bothered. She had felt actual motivation for something for the first time in a long time.

"Maybe I will," she said carelessly. The panic on his face was worsening. She turned to face the door and demanded him to open it once more. "Let. Me. Out."

"If you go, I won't let you back in," he threatened weakly, not making much of an impact on her.

"I don't care," she pushed on. She heard a sigh of defeat and fading footsteps. Less than a minute later, the door was grinding open with the blinding light of the world stinging her eyes.

She stepped outside and took a breath of real fresh air. The door crashed closed behind her and Arden finally got a firsthand look of what the world had crumbled to. The cars surrounding the building looked old even though they hadn't been sitting there for long enough to look that way.

Any surrounding building looked halfway through collapsing, everything in the vicinity looking just as dead as the corpses that now walked the earth. The ones that weren't walking were dead, flies swarming them as they littered the area. The streets were barely streets anymore. It was more like a graveyard.

She started out with a brisk and quiet walk as not to accidentally wake any of the dead, knowing that if she followed the road she could make it to Atlanta. It would take time, but she could make it.

Arden walked along the road for about an hour or so before she heard a deep, guttural groan emit from the trees beside the pavement. She had made it away from the CDC without any encounters, much to her surprise.

The rotted corpse limped towards her, stumbling over a tree root. She was utterly shocked and disturbed. Nothing she had seen in a lab could have prepared her for this. She had faced people leaving the safety of her so-called haven, but never had she faced one of the dead.

It had a large sword sticking out of its torso like someone had run it through the monster and attempted to run away without retrieving their weapon. A certain level of fear was pumping through her veins as she stumbled backward while the dead thing approached.

Arden found herself backed up to the other side of the road. Her eyes searched around for anything that she could use against the thing, the sword being out of her reach. She finally found a rather large rock, heaving it up from the ground as the thing tried to grab her. Before it could hold on, she threw the rock at its head causing it to stumble back and fall on the ground.

This, of course, did not stop it as it tried crawling towards her. She scrambled to pick up the rock and smashed it into the skull of the corpse. Raising the rock above her head with difficulty, she brought it down upon its head again and again until it halted all signs of movement.

Her hands began to shake and she released the rock into the pile of brain and skull. It made a squelching sound when it hit, making her all the more disgusted with herself. Tears began to run down her face as she realized four very important things.

The first thing was that the thing that she had just killed had once been a person. A person with a life and a family and friends. The second thing was that person was no longer really a person at all. What she had just killed was a monster trying to eat her. The third thing was that this was how the world was now and this would not be her last time killing something. And the fourth was that she would have to do what it took to survive.

She took a deep breath and composed herself, wiping away the tears with her bloodstained hands. Carefully, she removed the sword from the stomach and wiped it off with her shirt. It wasn't in terrible shape, although she wondered where someone would have gotten a sword from considering her location. Another thing that struck her as odd was that the sheath of the sword was slung over the shoulder.

A disturbing thought hit her before she quickly waved it away, instead focusing on prying the sheath away from the body. She sheathed the sword and slung it over her own back, knowing that she would definitely run into more of the dead.

Standing up, she could hear more groans getting louder. She walked another thirty minutes down the road, the constant thought of a corpse jumping out at her putting her on edge. Another two of them stumbled out of the woods and this time she unsheathed her sword, ready to do what had to be done.

Approaching them quickly, she stabbed one in the head with minor inconvenience. That seemed to be the effective way of killing them, judging from where she had found the sword. Arden rounded on the other one and did the same, feeling a burning anger towards the things that were now laying at her feet.

The world was ruined and being in that lab for so long, trying to find a cure was finally opening her eyes to that. Being outside for the first time since the dead had plagued the earth was finally making her realize that this was the beginning of the end. And now she had to find her family, or else she wasn't sure what she would be doing anymore.