Survive | Daryl Dixon ¹

𝐢. 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐮𝐞

[ i. rescue ]

october 23rd, 2010

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WHEN THE WORLD ENDED, it was supposed to be simple. At least, that was what Astrid Lancaster had always been told. One minute, there. The next minute, gone. Like the snap of one's fingers.

But when the world ended, it was not that simple. There was no sharp flash of blinding light. No tsunamis, no earthquakes. No cataclysmic rupture of the earth from within. No higher power from above, reaching down to pluck unsuspecting people away. There was nothing at all. The world ended, but it ended quietly. So deathly quiet that if someone were not listening, they might not hear it at all. It was like that old saying—"this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper."

What a whimper it was.

The world had long since ceased in its routine and celestial dance, leaving all of humanity to writhe in a twisted existence. Of course, it was not a literal halt, no, but a sudden abruption of everything that had made life before bearable. Now, Earth was cruel. Astrid had once mused bitterly to herself that freezing to death would have been a kinder fate, for starvation now loomed as her executioner.

But that was not even the worst part. Astrid's darkest tormentor did not lie in death, but in the unknown that waited before that crossing. Because she did not know how she had wound up here. None of the world's survivors quite understood the cause of its ending, leaving hearts ruptured and minds without solace. Catastrophic endings, Astrid supposed, did not require explanations. They just happened. They were cruel specters, lurking in answers that could never be found.

In her horrifying new reality, Astrid knew that the once towering cities of America, once proud beacons of civilization, were now perilous traps. Society's collapse had activated a self-destruct sequence. Like a switch, the power grid turned off and did not turn back on again, plunging the world into permanent darkness. In mere days, Atlanta had devolved into danger and death, and Astrid had barely escaped its rotting clutches. That had been weeks ago, though, and it felt as if a lifetime of solitude had passed since then.

Astrid had not always been alone, however. For a while, after the initial fallout of disaster had subsided, she had been sheltering away with her older brother. He had lived a few blocks away from her own temporary Georgian suburbs and had been the closest physical relative Astrid had left to turn to when the rest of their family remained out of state. For long, isolated days, she and her brother had survived together, huddled away in the shadows; and they had survived well until he was taken, too, by the dead.

The dead. Another echo of a newfound doom. In the fresh shadows of a new world, infected hordes of the seemingly undead now roamed the earth. An illness that Astrid, despite her own experience in the medical background, could not understand, and had seemed to take the lives of nearly everyone around her—and yet in its ravaging wave of sick still chose to leave her unscathed. Bites and scratches were how the unnamed disease seemed to spread, and that was how the infection had eventually reached her brother. A ravenous pack of claws and teeth had torn him away before her very eyes, and the only reason Astrid had even been able to escape the threat herself was that the undead had been too busy eating her big brother.