wastelands → the walking dead ¹

[ 020 ] the first forty-eight hours.

WASTELANDS.

chapter twenty, the first forty-eight hours.
[ season two, original episode ]

TWELVE HOURS IN.

SHE CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT. She's dehydrated, exhausted, malnourished. She hasn't slept in two days. The only sleep she did get was the fifteen minutes inside the cabin before she was woken by the walkers banging on the cabin. Her entire body feels weak and achy.

She has crusted blood on her face and arms and clothes. Bruises litter her legs and hands from where she fell down a bluff while running from the walkers.

The walkers moved on six hours ago. Odessa assumes they became distracted by an animal or something. It was big enough to get their attention off the cabin where their potential next meal remains.

She stays like this for twelve hours. Curled under a desk with her knees pulled to her chest, her gun in hand and shaking with fear.

Her hair is dampened with sweat and her face has tear stains in the dirt on her face.

She wants her dad. She desperately wants someone to rescue her. Odessa Grimes thinks, that for sure this time, that she's dead.

TWENTY HOURS IN.

She should have stayed in the goddamn cabin.

But now she wanders through the woods aimlessly. She lost her sense of direction twenty hours ago when she was fleeing from the walkers.

She thinks of Sophia's dead body dropping every couple minutes and how that will be her. She thinks of how Carl and Rick and Lori will react to seeing her dead body. They will either find her as a corpse or a walking corpse. She does not like the idea of either. So she keeps walking.

She hopes and prays and wishes someone would find and save her unlike they did with Sophia.

She wanders and wanders and wanders.

When she comes to a clearing in the woods, she collapses, gasping for air. She can't breathe. She feels like her ribs are crushing her lungs and someone is squeezing her heart with their fist. She feels like fingers are digging into her eyes.

She grips the earth below her, dirt digging into her nails and rocks cutting her hands. Her vision blackens and her hearing turns to static.

No one is coming for her.

TWENTY-THREE HOURS.

They are coming for her.

Daryl tries to track her footprints but loses the trail. Rick is with him. He cries to himself about the disappearance of his daughter. Lori, however, foes not leave the farm. She said it is because Carl isn't going. Carl begs to go and look for his sister but after what happened last time, his parents day no.