Chapter Text
Cassidy would never forget the day her world was turned inside out—the fear on the faces of her peers when the first walker appeared in the school hallway, their looks of utter dread and astonishment at the ghouls that would soon envelop the delicate sense of peace she was able to find on a Friday like that one. The days were long gone when she could retreat home after class and just relax with her mother or her younger sister, Caroline. Back when meeting frightened faces and the undead was not her norm.
The day of the initial outbreak started as any other. There was nothing special about the day, save for her mom being on a therapeutic getaway in Georgia. Cassie didn't understand why she needed to fly from Oklahoma out to Atlanta for that, but she couldn't blame her for needing a break from her father.
Sitting in German class, Cassie was busy drafting poems in her journal while chewing the string of her oversized zip-up instead of focusing on the worksheet she should've been working on. She wrote with her earbuds in, listening to Chevelle on her iPod while fighting the urge to nod along to the beat of the song when she felt a hand tap her shoulder.
Yanking one of her earbuds out quickly, she was met by the face of the boy who sat at the desk to the right of her, vigorously pointing to the cracked screen of his iPhone 4.
When she focused on the pixelated video playing on the phone, she was met with a horrifying depiction of a shootout between cops and a few dead-looking men. But their bullets weren't killing the men, and the creatures turned their attention to the bystanders, beginning to chomp and rip at their flesh.
"What the fuck?" Cassie exclaimed, shifting her focus away from the device as soon as the gore was shown, towards the boy. "Why on Earth would you show me that?" Assuming it was a clip from a movie, it annoyed her more than it disturbed her.
"Look at the street sign in the background—that's just three miles up the road," he stated ominously.
Rolling her storm-blue eyes, she raised her dangling earbud back up to her ear, but froze in place upon hearing his ensuing words.
"My brother sent it to me. He recorded it literally five minutes ago."
Since he was still holding the phone out, she squinted and tucked her sandy-blonde hair behind her ears, getting a better look. Sure enough, in the back of the video was the corner store she frequented to buy marijuana from the shop owner's son. Her heart dropped. The video didn't look fake at all, and the men in the video were gnawing at the townsfolk like starved animals.
Before she had time to truly react, an announcement played on the loudspeakers around the school. "Attention. An active shooter has been reported on the premises. Lock down immediately. This is not a drill. Take shelter in the nearest secure room, lock the doors, turn off the lights, and await further instructions from law enforcement."
Ripping out her headphones entirely, she searched the classroom for the reactions of those around her. Her classmates seemed unnerved, but not frantic. Not until their teacher wrapped up the phone call she was taking.
The woman was trying and failing at maintaining her composure, breaking out into a silent sob. She choked back tears while she told the students to pack up their belongings immediately. Cassie and her classmates followed their teacher's instructions rapidly. While doing so, the woman abandoned them, calling out for them to go to their families as she slipped out of the door frenetically.
At that point, the class, filled with seniors, was confused and scared; nevertheless, they left the classroom amid a flurry of slamming chairs into desks and dropping notebooks. As they pooled into the hallway, the expressions of her peers turned into gruesome displays of terror, followed by shrill cries and a stampede of students fleeing the corridor. That scene would eternally plague her thoughts; she'd come to see the hopeless desperation of the students in the eyes of every survivor she met.
It was there, in the long, slim hall, where she set her sights on a rotter for the very first time. With the hallways mostly empty, the undead creature snapped its attention to the noisy group of young adults, limping at a fast pace over to them. It was no different than any other walker she'd later encounter, but she would never forget what it looked like. What it felt like to see a monster with its meat rotting off the bone, its limbs twisted in gruesomely unnatural angles.
Cassie felt as though her feet had been glued to the floor and duct tape fastened around her mouth. Her fight-or-flight was triggered, and she chose to freeze, though it wasn't much of a choice. If a hand hadn't reached out, tugging her away from the monster, she wasn't sure if she'd ever have survived that day. This likely accidental tug successfully drew her back into reality, making her realize she needed to get to Caroline and then out of the building as quickly as possible.
Separating from the group, she mustered up the courage to trudge across the building alone for her sister. If only I'd had enough credits to graduate, maybe this wouldn't be happening, she mentally criticized herself for missing so much school in the previous semester, now having to make it up.
When she reached the sophomore area of the building, she had to duck around the corner to hide from another walker. Shutting her eyes tightly, she prayed to God that this was just a dream and that she'd wake up in her childhood bedroom. Though when she opened her eyes, she was only met with the maroon-red lockers on the opposite side of the hallway.
Cassie decided that she had better get to Caroline before one of them did, so when the monster was out of sight, she flew towards the class her sister was in.
Whilst running through a blur of fluorescent lights and lockers, she slammed against the chest of a girl taller than herself by a few inches. She could recognize that copper-red hair from miles away—Caroline.
"Caroline, oh my God," Cassie beamed, puffing out a breath of relief. She wrapped her arms tightly around the midsection of her sister for a short moment, smelling the familiar scent of vanilla perfume. "We need to get home. Have you seen them?" she inquired frantically.
Hugging her back reluctantly, Caroline replied in a crude tone, "Seen who? The shooter?"
"It's not a shooter—hopefully. No, there are people roaming the halls, but they aren't people. They look rotten," she said, trying to make sense of what she saw, but it was simply beyond sensible.
"You're scared of some ugly hick?" Caroline laughed dismissively. "I'm pretty sure it's a drill, anyway. I dunno, I've been in the bathroom and haven't heard any shots." She shrugged, holding her makeup bag in one hand and straightening out her bellbottom jeans in the other.
Cassie could scarcely believe the composure her sister held. "I can't explain. You'll think I'm crazy. Just, please, Caroline. We need to leave. Now," she asserted more confidently than she felt while glancing around the hallway.
"Okay, damn. If you wanted me to skip with you, you could've just asked. I need to grab my bag first."
Another walker rounded the corner behind Caroline.
Spotting it instantly, Cassie pointed it out. "That is why we need to go. Forget about your backpack. Let's go!" she blurted, clasping her sister's hand and taking off towards the main doors of the school.
The truth is, Cassie had no clue where to go once they vacated the building. As they left the doors, they were met by a wreckage of cars on the main road and students and teachers alike attempting to drive home but merely adding to the pile-up. Other students were yelling and fleeing, too. To add to the chaos, various rotters were encircling the school, more being drawn in from the noises of crashing cars and panicked humans.
Realizing they had no choice but to run home, that's exactly what they did. Leaving Cassie's beaten-up car in the parking lot, they surged the whole mile-and-a-half back home. The August humidity made them sweat bullets, forcing Cassie to tie her camouflage jacket around her waist mid-sprint. Her legs ached remarkably by the halfway mark, but once she abandoned her backpack and remembered what she was running from, her adrenaline picked up, and the pain disappeared.
On the streets, there were a ton more cars than usual, all of them in a hurry, running red lights and speeding past stop signs without care.
Panting, the girls crashed into the weather-beaten door of their house after passing a handful more walkers along the way and outrunning them all. They were greeted with their dad lying on the old couch hungover from his nightly twelve-pack of Busch Light. The TV against the wall that usually played the news at all hours of the day was silent, depicting pure static.
J.R. shielded his eyes from the ceiling light as Caroline flipped the on-switch. "Girls? Are y'all supposed to be home already?" the man groaned, lifting one of the trucker hats he wore every day and combing a hand through his short, light-brown hair.
"No—What's wrong with the TV?" Cassie couldn't help but ask. Out of everything going on around her, that was what stuck out the most for some peculiar reason.
"Leave the television for me to worry about, now. You're tellin' me you two are home when you should be at school?" he began to raise his gravelly, deep voice, staring at the girls with a look that alarmed Cassie more than the oddities outside.
"You don't understand. We had to leave, Dad. There are..." Caroline's voice trailed off, not able to describe what they ran home from.
As if on cue, there was a loud BANG at the door. It burst open and two walkers spilled into the living room, taking hold of Cassie's right shoulder with its decayed, callous fingers that contained unimaginable strength. It dug into her skin like rusted hooks sinking into flesh, inducing a pain-filled cry from Cassie as her blood started to flow down her back.
In a flash, their father managed to whip out his switchblade and dig it into the top of the ghoul's head all the while Caroline was screaming bloody murder. The fingers of the creature were ripped violently out of Cassie's skin as it was thrown to the floor by her father. He reached the other one and ended it the same way before it could hurt Caroline.
Regardless, it had wounded Cassie, and ferociously at that. There was a mixture of her bright crimson blood and the green-grey grime left behind by the walker's calcified fingernails. It took a chunk out of her skin. Five distinct trenches gouged deep into the top of her shoulder, leaving the edges of her skin frayed and uneven.
J.R. came to her aid the moment the chaos was over. "Are you okay, baby?" He drawled, coming to her aid to examine her like a doctor might, not a father.
Completely in shock, she only managed to nod and advise him to shut and lock the doors before proceeding to dress her injury in the kitchen alone.
While pouring rubbing alcohol over her shoulder and wincing sharply at the burn, she overheard her dad swearing like a sailor and telling Caroline to "check on her sister." Like that would help anything.
After taking proper care of her injury, Caroline sat with her for a while, reciting short Bible verses and insisting God had a plan. More often than not, however, she simply ranted about the impossibility of their situation or cursed the Devil for it.
They attempted to use the landline to call their mom's cellphone number later that night after boarding up all of the windows, but calling was of no use, failing instantly.
After that, Cassie decided to go to bed, but she couldn't find sleep no matter how hard she closed her eyes or counted sheep. All she could think about was whether her mother was alive. Plus, the constant, throbbing ache coming from her bandaged shoulder that Advil only did so much to ease served to make it worse.
Every day that followed that one, she slowly changed, pushing herself to be harder, tougher. She really only spoke when it was essential unless Caroline managed to cheer her up. Cassie convinced herself she needed to be the strongest she could to protect her sister since their dad was wasted more often than not.
When he wasn't too intoxicated, he aided the girls in becoming rougher around the edges, teaching Cassie how to handle weaponry and gifting her his Smith & Wesson AR-15 along with the switchblade he used to kill the walker that ripped a chunk out of her. He gifted Caroline his Glock-19, and she practiced with that.
For a month and a half, their father was convinced that if they just stayed in Broken Bow, waiting for their mother to come home, she would magically fix everything. Deep down, Cassie knew she was never coming back and there was nothing that could remedy their situation. If Darlene Fisher had any plans of coming home in the first place, Cassie knew the outbreak thwarted them completely.
During that time, she became adept at handling her assault rifle and going on scavenges alone speedily. Once her shoulder healed enough, J.R. would send her out for arbitrary items when he drank too much to go himself. Usually, she ended up at Walmart or one of the rundown convenience stores around town, grabbing booze and cigarettes, often taking a pack for herself. She would encounter a fair amount of rotters, defending herself when needed, and got good at wielding knives, driving them into the brains of the undead—even though she almost puked the first time she did it.
On occasion, she would wander cautiously into abandoned houses in hopes of finding weed. Sometimes, she did and would climb on top of the roof of a house and smoke. As she inhaled, she would feel the fog rolling into her mind, burying the sound of the world outside under layers of static. It made her feel the way she did before the outbreak.
Days turned into weeks of ostensibly limitless scavenging and defending herself, killing rotters with her father and Caroline occasionally, trying to pretend like everything was okay in front of her family, and writing every night in her journal.
One of her favorite things to do, one of the few things keeping her going, was journaling. She documented her day each night before she went to bed. Proof of life was necessary to her; evidence that verified she lived a meaningful life.
Though the days dragged on, and with them brought mounds of sorrow and an abundance of questions. Why is this happening to me, God? Is this what the Bible meant? Are we living in the end times? If I had sinned less would this be happening? Why? She never got her answers no matter how many evenings she spent on her knees before her bed, praying to the Lord to save her soul. And after searching for a "why" every day for a month, she firmly decided there was no "why." Things simply happened because they did; her dad was a drunk because he liked drinking, and the outbreak happened because that's what viruses do, not because God was testing her, and not because the Lord had left them behind in the Rapture like Caroline kept suggesting.
She gave up on hope, though she never had much to begin with. Cassie started to spend most of her days lying in her twin-sized bed either staring at the ceiling, reading, or journaling until she could be of use. She reminisced on the past most of the time, wishing that she could come home again to the sad smile of her mom every day after school, when they had running water and electricity. The pages in her journal piled up with melancholic poems and drawings that would concern her family had they snooped through it, but they would never find it hidden under her mattress.
When her father informed the girls that they were going to travel to Georgia in search of their mother, Cassie gave no argument, despite having little expectation of finding her there. Even if she had given in to a dispute, it would've fallen on deaf ears; it was J.R.'s way or the highway.
The Fisher household packed up its necessities into J.R.'s red pickup truck and left the next day. Cassie made sure to bring her journal, her favorite items of clothing along with some of her mother's, and a photo of her family, which she stuffed into her wallet that she didn't need to carry anymore, but it simply felt right resting in her pocket below her utility belt that sheathed a hunting knife, both of which she snatched from her dad's toolshed.
They made good progress on the journey for a bit, taking the rural state highways that cut across the dense pine forests and familiar, rocky hills of the Ouachita Mountains, only killing a couple of rotters out of necessity.
The trouble began in Arkansas when they were blocked by an abandoned military checkpoint near the Mississippi River. By that time, it was the end of the first few days on the road. The base was hardly an obstacle and more of a blessing since they found tons more ammo and weaponry after shooting excesses of the undead. Looting corpses had taken a while to get used to, but by now it was like taking candy from a baby to Cassie. Caroline didn't seem to mind it at all, not even at first, so long as the corpse was deceased for good.
They had been forced to abandon J.R.'s beloved pickup back at the base. With their gear now packed into backpacks, J.R. found and began to hotwire a small SUV left on the shoulder of the road after trekking a mile on foot.
While moving vehicles, a swarm of rotters crept up on them, forcing Cassie and Caroline to draw fire, Caroline using her Glock-19, Cassie her AR-15, which she kept slung diagonally across her back, rubbing against her healing shoulder wound, but she pushed through the pain with clenched teeth. The girls shot them down side by side and managed to fend them off until their dad got the car started, and they sped off.
By the next day, the alcohol withdrawal had taken its toll on J.R., and he was taking his toll on his daughters. He was erratic, praising Caroline one moment for being a spitting image of her mother, the next being infuriated at her for the fact, cussing and gesturing wildly with a handgun. Cassie was greatly unnerved by her father; in these moments, he was unpredictable, and not even her logic could talk sense into him.
By the time they reached Chattanooga, Tennessee, he'd become even worse. When they went scavenging, all he looked for was beer and spirits, forcing Cassie and Caroline to be responsible for grabbing food, water, and other supplies. Being made to sleep in a car with him was even more awful than his attitude. He told them it was too dangerous to take shelter in a new location every night, so they simply stayed in whatever car they were utilizing that day.
Eventually, they crossed into North Georgia. The roads there were totally empty, but given that they were taking gravelled backroads now, that wasn't too abnormal. Food and water were running low since they hadn't been scavenging in the last few days.
Caroline fell ill—just a fever, probably the flu. Cassie did well to hide it, but she was secretly, profoundly worried for her sister's well-being and began praying to God again for her sister to heal. Maybe he could answer one last prayer.
To cope with his daughter's declining health and his wife's disappearance, J.R. had taken to getting too inebriated to drive most days, forcing Cassie to take the wheel.
On one particular evening right before the sun dipped into the horizon, she was begging her eyes not to shut after pulling an all-nighter in hopes of getting Caroline to Atlanta faster, but they lost their map days ago, so they were driving aimlessly.
Snoozing off momentarily, she jolted up when she heard a THUD against the front of the car. She was so startled, fearing that she hit a person, that she instinctively jerked the wheel to the side. The stolen Honda Accord spun out rapidly, veering off into the asphalt. Caroline let out a weak yelp from the back while their dad was waking up from being passed out in the passenger seat, cursing in confusion.
Just before Cassie could take control of the vehicle again, they brutally crashed into a thick line of trees. The piercing crunch of metal gave way to a sudden, suffocating silence. As the smoke began to rise from the crushed hood, blackness swallowed everything around them.