Dead Girl Walking || The Walking Dead Fanfiction

chapter one | Someone Alive

20.11.2012

Chapter One | Someone Alive

 EVEN now, everything was foggy. He couldn't quite remember how he had managed to stumble from his room to the hallway, but here he was, surrounded by a devastation one would expect to see in a movie about the apocalypse. Only, this one felt real. Enough to drag his fingers along the broken wall to guide him to an intersecting corridor where the nurses desk sat abandoned and dishevelled. 

 He painfully arched over the wall to reach for anything that he could use to aide him. Fingertips dragged over scattered paperwork of the patients who had been admitted, stationary that had been thrown about ... Something felt rough, but in the shadowed corner where no natural light reached, he couldn't see what he was feeling until his tips met the plastic of a landline. Hope filled him and he took it quickly in hand -

 Dead. 

 A painful sense of frustration filled him as he dropped the phone onto the counter. "H-hello?" he rasped in hope, praying someone would hear him. 

 Nothing. The sensation of trying to grind his teeth in frustration led Rick Grimes to realise he didn't even have the strength to be annoyed. It was as if the deadline had sucked the last of his energy from his body and left this carcass stumbling around in the hallways. His vision was blurry and his throat felt like sandpaper. He couldn't tell if his jaw was locked with tension, but he hoped so; to feel even a little human again would be worth the pain. 

 As best as he could, Rick glanced behind him in wonder, baring the weathered face of a man whose body had been through a torrent of events that he had not been consciously aware off at any one moment. Would going back help? The possibility was there, he could have missed something in his desperation to find help but he didn't quite remember the way back. It all looked the same, a daunting hallway of broken wall, scattered papers and hospital equipment and fallen wires from the disturbed ceiling. 

 There were no answers back there. One soul wondered lost and a little bit - Imagine that, he thought to himself, I'm afraid.

 Rick looked at his options ahead: a corridor that looked very much like the one he had stumbled up and a set of doors to his left, where he could just see the fallen light fixtures fighting for the last of the electricity pumping through the building. The backup generator was probably running on empty, leaving the darkness to swallow him whole as he struggled to make his decision. Either way seemed as threatening as the other and yet, he found himself drawn towards the doors. 

 He didn't think much of it when he pushed his weight against the oak in the hopes they would fall open and he could make his way through. He didn't look ahead, because he only imagined that the hallway looked as terrible as the one threatening him from behind. Fallen ceiling panels, wires dangling at strangling levels, a scattered mess that didn't quite make sense to his foggy mind. 

 When the door jammed at finger-width opening and seemingly pushed back, making a slurping noise as the fibres between the doors absorbed any noise of the doors joining together again, did Rick come to his senses. So he tried again ... with the same result. The door opened just enough to wriggle his fingers through and then closed. That should have been enough to push him the other way, but a nagging feeling in the back of his mind told him to inspect what could possibly be keeping him out. 

 Rick pressed his forehead against the glass, surprised to feel that it was misty with dust and some dark substance that had stained and cracked over time. Squinting against the flickering lights made no difference and that's when he saw it. At first, it seemed like a trick of the light, the shadows swallowing whole the hallway to scare him a little more until the fallen strip stayed illuminated just long enough to outline the mass on the floor.