MAD MAX, the walking dead

six: STRANGERS

"THERE WAS NO GOD. NO ONE LOOKING OUT FOR HER OTHER THAN HERSELF."

***

Their first day on the road, Max stuck close to Tara.

She wasn't sure why the women gravitated toward each other so often. Maybe it was their closeness in age. Maybe it was Tara's generally happy demeanor matched with Max's occasional sass underneath her (usually) quiet exterior. Maybe it was the fact that neither of them had anyone else, not really. Regardless, being around her was easy. And easy was what Max needed while she was acclimating to being around people again.

Carol Peletier was different.

It was to be expected in the middle of the apocalypse, but both Max and Carol had changed down to their very bones. They were once a shy housewife and a generally pleasant teenager. The apocalypse turned them into two relatively cold people made of nothing but sharpened steel and the blood of their enemies. They'd both killed people. And as far as they were concerned, there was no coming back from that. 

They became what they needed to be in a world they were thrust into with no safety net. But against all odds, they survived. Looking each other in the face was like looking directly into a mirror. And it was going to take some getting used to.

"What did you do, before all this?" Tara asked, completely out of the blue as they walked down the concrete road, the sun beating down their backs. Max was pulled from her thoughts as she turned to look at the brunette walking beside her. The girl looked embarrassed, as she often did after she spoke, but Max answered quickly.

"Lots of things." Max said, glancing at Carol who was walking near the front of the group with an iron grip around her hunting knife and a light jacket tied around her waist. Max and Tara walked beside Abraham and his small group near the back, with Daryl walking a few feet behind them on their other side. "Waited tables at a diner, helped my neighbors with their horses, babysat. I was raisin' money to go to school – college, I wanted to be a teacher."

Tara nodded along with Max's answer. It was nice to talk to someone her age. For the first time in two years, they managed to forget about the horror movie that was their lives and simply talk as they walked. Not that Max wasn't looking over her shoulder, but that could've been counted as normal, given the situation.

"I was training to be a police officer." Tara said, and Max nodded. That seemed about right. "Like...at the police academy. I was only there for about a year before everything happened though. That's where I was – when it happened. My sister, she came to look for me when everything started, she –"

Tara stopped mid-sentence, seemingly coming to the realization that she'd mentioned her sister. Someone from her life before. Max awkwardly cleared her throat when she saw the tears start to brim in Tara's eyes. She didn't need to ask what had happened to her sister.

"I'm sorry." The redhead said. Max looked down at the ground for a moment, biting her lip. She looked up again to see Tara subtly wiping her eyes with the bottom of her shirt as she tried to push away the memory of her sister's body falling, the gun not even lifting from her side as the herd surrounded her –

The pair elected to ignore their previous exchange as they walked through the thick Georgia heat for the rest of the day.

Max itched the inside of her forearms. She loved Georgia, but it was hotter than hell in the woods. The canopy of trees seemed to encase them in green, pinning the warmth directly onto their already-disgusting bodies. The bruise on her arm and her recently relocated knee throbbed with each step.