///CHAPTER ONE
: colours

The trees all look familiar. They always do. Each day, walking around with sunken in eyes, a starved body and aching bones. It doesn't change.

For so long, day after day, I've been walking upon the same grounds.

667 days listening to the same old empty air. Air not even the birds will sing into anymore.

Days walking in the same worn out converse, wearing the same bloodstained clothes, in the same beaten and bruised body.

Years pacing around the same woods, watching the same leaves of the same gnawed up trees blow in the sway of the same sharp wind.

If I'm not tied to the trees at night, then I'm unblinking in a rundown neighbourhood.

Night after night lying on the harsh oak of dusty floors, rotting away as my eyes bleed into the ceiling of empty houses that have been left rotting for years.

Much like me, they echo with the grainy echo of old memories; distant static whirling from wall to wall as a putrid reminder of the happiness that once glowed within the structure.

I intrude. I just lie there in the dark, on the cold floor of somebody else's home. Another family lived here once, I think.

I wrap my arms around my futile frame, each night somewhere new, feeling my rigid bones prod further and further through my skin. I rock back and forth, experimenting with a pathetic sob and counting the faint beating of my debilitated heart. I can't even cry.

"If you don't like it, change it." She says.

I'm thinking about everything as I trudge through the forrest; how I'm probably going to force enter another house in another neighbourhood tonight.

Since it's gotten colder ive been leaning towards houses at night rather than the whole tree dilemma. I've also recently been too burnout to climb them. Nor my bones or my body work like it used to anymore.

I'm just trying to walk through the woods, drag myself through all hell in peace, and here she is biting at me once again.

I waft a sharp branch in her direction as I walk forward — the main intention being to pluck her little eyes out. This is a practice I do all the time when she's walking behind me.

I also throw things at her often, just to get her to shut up.

Then I realise who she is and I double back on myself, kneel infront of her on the ground. Cannon event. Half of my mind is present and the other half is equally as dead as her.

My hand lifts to her face and I wipe her tears, kiss her cheek. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it." I stroke her hair, bring her close enough to smell her. But it's not her.

I sniff, nose nuzzled in her hair. Sniff again, and again. Pull back and I realise I'm rolling around the ground again.

The dead is fierce in my arms as i struggle to breathe, gasping as my hands frantically search around the dirty ground around me. I've dropped my knife.

The weight creaks over me, bringing the biter on top of my struggling body. Its bones rattle as it tries to bite closer and closer to the skin of my neck. I screech, shoving my hand to its face, just for the surface to give way to slush.

"Fuck!"

Suddenly I've wriggled my way down, using my palms to push it off of me in enough time for me to flip it over again completely.

Breathing hoarse, i take the disintegrating skin of its scalp, the straw like hair acting as a frail rope around my fingers. And I smash it back into a rock beneath the leaves. But it's not enough. I grunt, yanking its head towards me once more before thrashing it right back into the same pool of gush.

Then all goes silent once more.

I cough, swinging my leg around and throwing my body onto the ground next to the thing.

Then i stare at the sky through the trees for almost as long as it takes for a completely new shroud of clouds to pass.

But then the silence becomes deafening again, and I hear her across from me, scurrying in the bushes.

She calls my name.

She's playing in the bushes, fucking playing in the bushes as if she didn't almost get me killed.

God I hate how she plays these games, some shitty spin on hide and seek.

I lift my body shakily to my feet, brushing off my jeans as I shove my fallen knife into the waistband of my jeans.

"Milah, quit fucking with me." I pad my mouth instantly. "French,"

I watch the world spin, I'm dizzy again.

"Excuse my French."

I stop.

Because hold up. What am I even saying?

Not this shit again.

She's not even there. She never was, never is. She's not playing some dumb game. She's not here. She's not fucking here.

But someone's behind that bush.

The branch crunches.

It's not beneath my weight.

I drop, my knees landing in the leaves as my eyes sear wide.

There's another loud thud through the trees; the rough green of the nature around me sending streams of audible shook through its branches.

I stay put behind the array of huge bushes, blinking tediously as my heart races outside my chest. I feel shaky, uneasy. But it's not because I'm scared of what's behind the bushes. I'm scared of what's not behind them.

Afraid to admit how much of a delusional freak you are.

My fingers curl around a branch, searching within the scene unraveling infront of my tortured eyes.

A boy.

And suddenly I'm met with the second person I've ran into in the past few weeks. Well I don't actually know whether the first person was real or not. I don't know if he is either. I tilt my head, watching his struggle.

The kid is in my eyes, probably fourteen. Strands of stringy brunette shagging upon his eyes, it dusts the back of his neck and the collar of the blue flannel that drapes around his shoulders.

My breathe hitches as he falls to the ground, his body struggling beneath some of the dead. He has a gun, but he's fucked himself up, dropped it beneath the leaves.

The biter snags him, almost. I jump on my heels then pull myself back, biting at my lip.

My heads got something against the way he moves. I don't think he's real.

There's too much illusion that kills me by each day. I'm literally delirious.

I'd say it's just greif, to save me the benefit of the doubt.. but that doest eliminate the fact I was just trying to hug a deceased flesh eating monster that quite literally wanted to bite out my jugular.

Why? cause I thought it was my two year old sister that's been dead longer than she ever was alive.

I see things, mixed up patterns and weird colours, people that aren't there. If you couldn't tell already.

He curses under his breath, floundering like a man in fire as a dead one bites centimetres from his pasty pale skin.

I contemplate leaving again but there's an urgency in the grass I'm knelt upon that tells stories of how fate awaits each step i take.

If these feet fail me by the natural thoughts in my mind rather than the feeling in my gut, i'm not gonna end up in a place that benefits me in the long run.

Whether he's real or not. Fuck it. Help him. He looks pathetic rolling around like that.

A twig snaps beneath my feet at the sudden pace of my body's departure, somehow breaks me right back into reality again - almost as quick as my sense had subsided.

Yes it's still somewhat possible for another person to be living two years into this zombie massacre. That's more than possible. You're here aren't you?

With that, I'm out in the open, harsh breathes flowing steadily though parted lips.

Cold hits the damp of my skin in the heat, the sun soaring down in its deadly sorrow; a frown draping with each ray burning the surface of my pale skin.

I blink back the white and unsheathe the knife from my waistband, pinning the overriding body to the ground beside the boy.

The blood spurts back onto my hands as the boy beside me grabs his gun, firing off a bullet into the other biter.

Then he falls back beneath the weight of his body, another figure crawling up his leg.

His eyes of blue pixel shoot through me as I find myself plunging my knife into the base of the last mushy head.

I look around, wiping the knife on my jeans as I sit there in the leaves. We've taken down the three of them. And he's skilled with a gun.

Then all of a sudden he's swiftly pulled himself to his feet.

I follow in suit, awkwardly moving my hair out of my face.

He stares at me, eyes projecting surprise and fear twisted into one. It hits me like some ice shard, impaled by his cerulean eyes.

One blink and the barrel of his gun is centimetres from my nose. So close I can almost smell the metal.

My eyes meet his. And I scoff. Wow.

I'm not sure why he's acting tough. The way he breathes and fidgets with his fingers by his side tells me he doesn't quite know what to do with me.

I think holding his gun with just one hand might even be a task for him.

I watch him closely, the way his small perched nose twitches as he thinks. His baby face twisting into a scowl as he asks "Who are you?"

His voice is weirdly deep, although masking curiosity poorly. Or maybe that was just because i hadn't heard the words of a teenage boy for years.

My ears twitch as i attempt to understand his words. I stand there clueless, which spreads some appalling nature along his features.

He scoffs, eyes growing wider by each second I don't answer him.

I wonder if he'll shoot me if I run away.

I blink and step back, watching his initial reaction: tilting his head, asking me the same question, in the same tone.

Fuck it.

I run, hitting his elbow in the process of running by him. I feel him swing around, hear the leaves beneath his feet as he chases after me.

Are you shitting me?

I pace to nowhere and he's grabbed my shirt, pushed me to the floor before I can even comprehend what I'm doing.

I can now finally say that he's one hundred percent real. None matters when i'm thrown into a fit of coughing beneath the weight of a heavy foot on my stomach. He pins me down.

"Carla." I heathe, trying to simply catch my breath around his boot.

"Are you alone?" He asks me, tone bored as if to hide his apprehensive attitude. "Does it look like—" I start, only to be cut off by his weight becoming heavier against the surface of my sensitive stomach. "Yes!" I whine.

Then he falls silent, looking around like he doesn't quite believe me. By then I'm lost in the clouds again, only coughing to regain his attention when I'm bored.

"Okay. Okay, stand up." He gestures with his hands. I then stand up, trying hard to focus on his searching eyes, angered by my attempt of fleeing.

He squints, "Where did you come from?" I look away, shrugging "I could ask you the same."

It's all rather weird in my eyes. The way that a few minutes ago, i was behind the trees with a girl i had been picturing in my head for months.
Then suddenly within the space of a few seconds, i've found myself in front of a random boy who was not trying to harm me in any way, but rather have a conversation with me.

His gun had been placed back in his holster minutes ago.

He sighs and shifts his weight, eyes moving to the ground beneath his dirtied boots. "Look we've been alone for a while, you're the first person we've come across in—"

"We've?" I stop him, his eyes travelling back to the blue of my own.

"Me and my dad." He confirms.

I go to speak again but he's quick to interject.

"You look as though you could need some food, water, anything. Come with us." His gaze shifts around my face, trying to read some expression absent.

"How many walkers have you killed?"

My eyebrows drop and I shake my head in confusion.

"Look, i don't need anything, and i certainly don't need to be told what i apparently do. Thanks and all but—"

He huffs out an exasperated sigh through his nose.

"What?" I scoff.

"At least spend the night, get some food."

—

Later that night i find my back pressed to the cold of a dark wooden floor, walls forcing me inwards. My mind lays awake almost the whole night, digging deep through webs and material cushioned flush against my back.

It's not that comfortable, but i know that the comfort of refreshment in my mouth relived of water, and the soft rumble of my stomach no longer being a rough - is enough to surpass the slight amount of discomfort founded in the sleeping arrangement.

Afterall, it's a hell of a lot better than anything else i'm used to.

Carl promised me food and water, and a one way ticket out of this house by dawn. He told me on our walk back to this house that i had no need to be skeptic in my steps, that he was a boy of his word.

I'm not sure why everything tells me to believe him, it's so overly against all the survival skills i'd previously been taught.

Well, that's a lie. Except one; go with your gut. It's telling me to trust him so i can't really blame myself.

That's why I'm lying here in this stuffy living room, meters away from the couch that holds the weight of his unconscious father on my left, shoulders then align with the sleeping boy of his word to my right.

His soft breathing is the most i could hear past the light chirp of birds outside. For some odd reason it's calming to sleep somewhere with protection. Somewhere other than a rocky forrest patch, or a tree for that matter, alone and cold.

Carl (that's his name by the way) turns beside me, bringing me to notice his vulnerability. It surprises me how he'd resulted in saving me almost straight after running into me.

Somehow he'd seen enough trust in an unknown girl to bring her here, and i'd found enough within him to follow. I even found enough to let my eyes fall closed in the hush of the night.

And as soon as the dust of my eyelashes brush against my cheeks, i fall asleep under the blanket of protection. In a broken world full of terrors around every corner, i feel myself ignoring what could have been another nightmare.

In the new world, all that was left was uncertainty. You couldn't be one hundred percent sure wether you could trust the first person you ran into or wether you couldn't.

It should have been an awful feeling of unknowing - falling asleep in this house, but for some reason through all the uncertainty, i'm certain that these people are just as vulnerable as i.

And that we are just people in the world, instead of untrustworthy terrors.

My mother always used to whisper words of knowing when you know. "When you know, you know. Trust the feeling in your tummy." accompanied by a soft tickle to the skin of my stomach. That's why i put it forward as my most important survival skill.

Even if my gut feeling could get me killed one day, i didn't care for as long as it brought me serendipity in the time being.

With my hand over my sunken in stomach, i tell myself that i know enough to fall under the sleep i lack.

—

Uhmmmmm so guys how are you today!

Sorry for late update that's completely my fault schools been a mess

This feels so rushed