One Year After the Outbreak
North Carolina - Ashville
The farmhouse had been abandoned for a year now, but Caitlyn Quinn had made it her own.
She'd found it six months ago, tucked away at the end of a gravel road, surrounded by overgrown fields and thick woods. The family who'd lived here was long gone. She'd found their bones in the basement, huddled together, waiting for help that never came. She buried them in the garden, said a few words over the grave, and moved into their home.
It wasn't much. A two-bedroom farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a well that still worked, a wood-burning stove for heat. The windows were boarded up, the doors reinforced with salvaged lumber, the perimeter lined with trip wires and bells made from empty cans. It was defensible. It was livable. It was hers.
And it was lonely as hell.
Caitlyn was twenty years old now. Twenty years old and she'd spent the last year completely alone, surviving on instinct and the skills her father had taught her. When the outbreak started, she'd been at a friend's house, twenty miles from home. She'd watched the news, seen the chaos unfold, and tried to call her dad a hundred times. No answer.
By the time she made it back to Ashville three weeks later, after surviving on her own, after watching her friend turn, after learning what the world had become - their house was empty. No bodies. No blood. No signs of struggle. Just... nothing. Her father was gone.
She'd waited there for weeks, hoping he'd come back. He never did. Eventually, she realized that waiting meant dying, so she packed what she could carry and started moving. Surviving. Learning.
The farmhouse was the first place that felt like home.
Morning came gray and cold, the sun struggling to pierce a ceiling of clouds that promised rain. Caitlyn woke in her usual spot. Curled up in the corner of the bedroom, away from the windows, her rifle within reach. She'd learned to not sleep too deeply, not to get too comfortable. Comfort killed.
She stretched, her joints popping, and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Her body had changed in the past year. Her soft curves, now hardened by survival, replaced with lean muscle and sharp edges. She was thin now, thinner than she'd like, but it was the thinness of someone who moved constantly, who hunted and climbed and ran. Her legs were strong from miles of walking, her arms defined from hauling meat and chopping wood. Her ass had always been full, round, the kind that drew looks back in the old world. Now it was just as round but harder, more purposeful. Her breasts were still there, a solid C-cup, though they'd lost some of their softness along with the rest of her. She caught her reflection in a dusty window sometimes and barely recognized herself.
The wood stove had burned down overnight, leaving the house chilly, but she'd learned to live with the cold. She lit a fire, put on a pot of water for coffee, and checked her traps.
Nothing. The rabbits were getting smarter, or maybe there just weren't many left. She'd have to hunt today, push deeper into the woods, find something bigger.
After a breakfast of stale crackers and lukewarm coffee, she geared up. Hunting knife on her belt. 9mm in its holster. Rifle slung across her back. She moved quietly, the way her father had taught her, each step deliberate and silent.
"Stay light, baby girl," he used to say. "Heavy feet get you killed."
She missed him. Missed his voice, his laugh, the way he'd ruffle her hair and call her "baby girl" even when she was seventeen and too old for it. She missed the way he'd taught her to shoot, to hunt, to track. Missed the way he'd hold her when she had nightmares, telling her everything would be okay.
He'd been wrong about that. Nothing was okay.
But she was alive. And as long as she was alive, there was hope.
The woods were quiet, the way they always were now. No birds, no squirrels, no sign of life except the occasional distant moans. Caitlyn moved through the trees like a ghost, her eyes scanning for movement, her ears turned to every sound.
She found a deer track near the creek and followed it, moving slowly, patiently. Hunting was meditation now, a way to quiet her hind, to focus on something other than the loneliness. The deer was there, a young doe drinking from the water. Caitlyn raised her rifle, took aim, and fired.
The doe dropped. Clean shot, right through the heart.
She field-dressed it on the spot, working quickly, efficiently. Her father had taught her that too, how to gut a deer, how to butcher it, how to use every part. "Waste nothing," he'd said. "Waste means death."
She was packing the meat into her game bag when she heard it. A moan. Close. Too close.
She spun, rifle coming up, and saw them. Three of them, emerging from the trees, their gray faces fixed on her, their mouths open in that wet, rattling moan. Slow ones. The easy kind.
She fired. First one dropped, head shot. The second one kept coming, she fired again, catching it in the temple. Down. The third was closer now, too close for the rifle. She dropped it, drew her 9mm, and put two rounds through its skull.
Silence.
Caitlyn stood there, heart pounding, breathing hard. Three kills in ten seconds. Not bad for a girl who'd learned to shoot from her marine father.
She walked among the bodies, checking each one. Standard infected. No runners, no mutations. Just the slow mindless dead that had become so common they were almost boring.
She knelt beside the last one, and looked at its face. It had been a woman once, maybe thirty years old. Wearing a floral dress and hiking boots. A tourist, maybe. Someone who'd come to the mountains for vacation and never left.
Now she was just meat.
"Sorry," Caitlyn whispered, and meant it.
Back at the farmhouse, she stored the venison in the cold cellar. A root cellar she'd cleaned out and reinforced, cool enough to keep meat for weeks. She cleaned her rifle, her pistol, her knife, the familiar ritual soothing in its repetition. Then she stripped off her clothes to wash up with water from the well, catching another glimpse of herself in the dusty mirror. Harder now. Leaner. But still her. Still Caitlyn.
She pulled on clean clothes - a faded flannel shirt that hung open at the collar, jeans that fit snug over her hips - and sat down at the radio.
It was an old ham setup she'd found in the farmhouse's basement, along with a generator and enough fuel to run it for hours. She'd spent countless hours on it over the past six months, listening, hoping, desperate for any sign of human life.
Mostly static.
But sometimes, if she was lucky, she'd catch fragments. Voices. Survivors. People like her, clinging to life in the ruins.
She flipped the switch, letting the static wash over her. The familiar hiss and crackle was almost comforting now. A reminder that she wasn't completely alone.
"...repeat, any survivors in the Ashville area... this is Marcus Quinn... my daughter Caitlyn... if you're out there, baby, I'm coming... I'm coming for you..."
Caitlyn's breath caught in her throat. She'd heard that message before. Dozens of times, actually, recorded and repeated on a loop. Her father's voice, rough with exhaustion and grief, broadcasting on a frequency he'd hoped she'd remember.
She'd never been able to reply. She didn't know where he was, didn't know if he was even still alive. All she could do was listen and wait and hope.
But today, for the first time, she noticed something different. The message was clearer. Stronger. Like he was getting closer.
"Still coming, dad," she whispered to the static. "I'm still here. I'm still alive. I'm still waiting."
She reached for the microphone, her hand hovering over it. She could try. She could broadcast back, tell him where she was, tell him to find her. But what if someone else heard? What if something else heard?
She pulled her hand back.
Not yet. Not until she was sure. But maybe soon.
That night, Caitlyn sat on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the stars. The farmhouse was quiet, the woods were quiet, the whole world was quiet. It was peaceful in a way that felt almost wrong.
She thought about her father. About the last time she'd seen him, that morning before everything went to hell. He'd kissed her forehead, told her he loved her, promised he'd be back by dinner.
She'd been at a friend's house when it happened. By the time she made it home, three weeks later, he was gone.
She'd searched for him. Gone to his work, his friend's houses, every place she could think of. Nothing. Just empty buildings and bodies and the constant, terrible moaning.
Eventually, she'd given up. Not on him. She'd never give up on him. But on finding him. On the idea that she could just walk up to him and fall into his arms and have everything be okay again.
She knew that nothing would ever be okay again. But she was still alive. Still fighting. Still waiting. And somewhere out there, her father was doing the same.