I feel someone shake my arm and bolt upright, ready to attack whoever just did that.

"Whoah, calm yo self." Dylan holds up his hands in surrender. "Just came to wake you and runner over here up."

I look out the window at the rising sun."why so early?" I groan.

"So we can avoid traffic." Dylan says sarcastically.

"Yea, yea, I'm up." I wave him off.

"There's new clothes in the bathroom for you, they're boy's clothes but they'll do for you." Dylan says and moves on to wake up Christian.

I groan and push myself off the floor. I stumble to the bathroom right across from Austin's room. It's a large bathroom with a separate tub and shower. They're filled with old cans since there's no garbage men anymore and have no real place to put garbage. On the counter sits five piles of supplies, each folded nicely and each has our names on it. I find my name and look at the pile.

There's a toothbrush, toothpaste, a brush, a faded blue, white, and pink mens flannel, some dark loose fitting jeans, and some hunting boots that look like they'd be big on me.

I quickly change and brush through my hip length hair and put it into a side braid, covering the small white bandage on the side of my head from hitting it.I slip my dog tags over my head and read them again. I brush my teeth and then head out of the bathroom. Christian and Dylan sit in the kitchen at the small table eating a cans of fruit. Dylan tosses me one and Christian heads to the bathroom.
"If ya need to pee, go into the back yard." Dylan informs me.

"Uh, I'm good. Thanks." I say and open my can with the can opener.

Dylan shrugs. "Just for future reference. "

"When do we leave? " I ask, wanting to change the subject.

"As soon as your friend gets out."

Christian steps back into the kitchen 10 minutes later with a blue under armor hoodie, some jeans, and a pair of boots similar to mine.

"You guys ready?" Dylan asks us. We nod and I grab my back pack and my axe. I Clip on my leg holster and put my gun into it, I don't plan on using it but I will if I have to.

We quietly make our way to the back door and wait as Dylan unlocks the gate. "We have a car, well two cars actually, but one's a stick shift and the others broken down."

Stick shift? "I can drive a stick shift." Both boys look at me. "What?"

"You were only 10 when the apocalypse started." Christian pints out to me.

"So? My mom taught me how to drive one." I am confused on why they find this so surprising.

"Well it's right over here." Dylan walks around the house towards the Ford f150. It's like my mom's, just a little older, maybe a 1989 model, and dark blue instead of black.

"Dang." I say and run over to the driver's side door. The push locks are unlocked so I swing open the creaky door. I search the visor for the keys and find them. The truck smells awful, like heated up dead corpses.

"When's the last time you guys used this truck?" I ask Dylan.

"Never." He chuckles.

"It smells awful!" I say and crank the window down with the crank handle. Christian opens up the passenger side door and gives the window handle a weird look.

"When we first got here, we inspected this car. Had to pull out a melted biter and never opened it again. " Dylan explained.

Christian still inspects the window handle, twisting it to make the window go down. "How did people live without automatic windows?"

I roll my eyes at him. "You do realize that this truck is old and that they didn't even have automatic shifts?"
He mumbles a rude comment.

I hop into the driver's seat and put the keys into the ignition. The truck shutters for a moment but then starts up.

"I call window!" Dylan yells.

Christian moans as he sits in the middle of the bench seating since there is no back seat. He puts his feet on the shift stand, which will make it hard to change shifts.

"Dude, sorry to tell ya but you have to put a foot on either side of the shift. Otherwise I can't change it." I tell him. He gives me an awkward look and moves his left foot on my side and his right foot on Dylan's side. His thigh touches mine and his face turns red.

"Dylan, I am making you sit in the middle on the way back." He informs Dylan.

I roll my eyes and start to back out of the small gravel driveway. Once on the road, I change over from first gear to second as I feel the car struggle a little bit. I continue to follow this pattern till I get to gear 0 and start all the way back at one when we slow down to get around a car.

"How does this," Dylan motions to the stick. "Work?"

"Well, you start at R when you're reversing. Then you go to 1 when you are starting to move forward. You can tell when to change the gears when you feel the car struggle a little. You go from 1 to 2, then to 3, then 4 and then 0 and then back at 1 when you slow down." I explain.

"Awesome. " Dylan plays with the lock.

"What store are we going to? " I ask as I reach town.

"Walmart." Dylan points to the big store with the blue and white sign.

Christian laughs. "Remember Lauren, we were just talking about this couple nights ago?"

I smile. "Correction. You and Morgan were talking about this while I was still in a half coma."

"Half coma?" Dylan echos.

"I could hear everything, but couldn't open my eyes." I explain as I pull into the packed Wal-Mart parking lot.

"Jeez, even in the end of the world it's hard to find parking." Christian jokes.

I park the car in the front by the doors and everyone hops out. We make our way to the automatic doors, which don't work due to lack of electricity. We pry open the first set of doors and kill a single walker that was trapped by the cart return.

"Careful guys, this place is bound to be filled with em'." Christian warns us.

Dylan grabs a cart as Christian and I pry open the next set of doors. I whistle loudly so that any walkers around would just come and not get us by suprise.

Three walkers come up to us and I kill two with my axe and Christian kills the other one with his knife.

I turn on my flash light just as Dylan zooms past me with the cart with him on it. I face Palm and laugh at him. Christian and I run to catch up to him.

We skip the frozen food section since most of it's probably scavenged through and head straight to the canned goods isle.

"Wait, wait guys." I say as we enter it. "I've always wanted to do this."

I take the cart from Dylan, handing him the flash light and hold my hand out to the shelf with the most cans on it and start running down the isle while pushing the cans into it. Both the boys laugh at me and i start breaking out in laughter too when i reach the end of the isle.

We pick through all the things I pushed into the cart, which was only about five cans and some random junk, discarding any random things. I pick up a little box with a plastic sheriff's badge in it. I open it up and examine it. It's a little gold colored badge with a picture of a gun in the middle, around the picture it says 'Sheriffs Department' and under that it says 'Sheriff. ' I smile as I think of Carl and his Sheriff hat. I pocket the badge to give to him when I find him.

A walker comes limping over to us and Dylan kills it with his machete. Suddenly the doors to the Wal-Mart are thrown open and voices fill the store.

Dylan clicks off the flash light as Christian and I shove the cans into our bags, careful to not make noise. We peek out from the isle we are in and see about eight people standing there and some stand by the door although the sun just creates outlines and I can't make out their features. Although one looks similar to a guy holding a crossbow.

One has a really big gun and looks like she could bake cookies and kill you at the same time. Another one is a big black man with a beanie on his head and a hammer in his belt. There was a red headed guy there too that looked like he could crush you with his fingers and a sassy looking Latin woman. Another was a Chinese guy who looked pretty harmless.

"All is clear!" The red head guy shouts.

"Maggie!" The Chinese guy calls out the door. "You guys stay out here and guard the place while we look for food."

I hear growls to the right of me and see another Walker coming towards us. It's growls echo throughout the store. It has half a face and is missing an arm. I stand up and stab it out of instinct.

"Wait." The black guy puts a hand up. "Did you guys hear that?"

Crap. Wrong choice.

"What? You think someone else is in here?" The woman with the big gun asks. She looks right over to the line of shelves we were by.

"I don't want to take any chances." The red guy says.

The Latin woman whispers something to the rest of the people, but I know what she said as soon as she gestured our direction. The group cautiously makes their way towards us.

Christian motions for us to run and we do.

"There they go!" Someone yells as we weave our way through isles to get to the back door on the OTHER SIDE of the freaking Wal-Mart.

Bullets hit the wall beside me and I jump over a clothes table and continue to run.

All three of us make it to the back door, Christian before Dylan and I. The door closes as soon as he makes it through. Dylan makes it through in front of me, but I hear both boys yell. I hear two people say something and I swear one sounds like Carl. But I look back to see one of the people coming towards me. I dive into the bathroom next to the door which was located by the service desk.

It's a family bathroom so I lock the door and locate the small window in it and bust it open. Nimbly climbing out. I run the opposite way of the door and into the small woods behind it.

How? How is it that every time something seems like it's going right, it turns out devastating?

A/N: HEY guys! Y'all can thank Disturbanceduck for literally threatening to kill me if I didn't update. And trust me I did not want to die! So here it is!

Stay in the salt circle Niall, so the Walkers don't get ya!

~zombiefighter01