❝HEARTBREAK IS ONE THING MY 𝗘𝗚𝗢'𝗦 ANOTHER❞
In which it no longer matters that Evangeline Waters was a hot shot lawyer with a nice apartment and the best daughter she could've asked for. Because if you don't know the right way to stab a dead...
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Evangeline Waters hated the quiet. Ever since she was a little girl, her family's quaint cottage-style house in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, left her feeling uneasy. For the first eighteen years of her life, Carmel-by-the-Sea was home. She liked the warmth, the white sand beaches, and found the people pleasant enough.
But with a population of a little over 3,000 people, Evangeline found it suffocating. There was something about the silence that was overwhelmingly oppressive. So she applied to colleges in every major city in the country. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles, attended USC for law school, and finally accepted a job in Atlanta, Georgia.
Celebrating her new job offer, she went out, had a few drinks, and ended up with a one-night stand. Nine months later, she had a daughter. That was supposed to be the scariest thing that would ever happen to her. She remembered her mother's words when she broke the news over the phone.
"Lily, of course, I was scared. But then, when I held you in my arms for the first time, I knew. You'd become my new reason for being."
And the day Evangeline held her baby in her arms for the first time, she knew too. Her daughter had become her new reason for being. That was supposed to be her life. She was a lawyer. She'd stand in line for overpriced coffee, take her daughter to school, go to work, and repeat. But then the world ended.
The first time she saw it, she thought she was hallucinating. A scream pierced the air, and she turned to look out her office window. A man stood in the middle of the street, another man ripping flesh from his shoulder. Evangeline was stunned. Red blood splattered everywhere as tendrils of flesh were pulled from the man's body.
Evangeline blinked, hoping the world would revert to normal. She thought maybe asking for a triple shot in her coffee that morning was a bad idea. But then someone else screamed. And there was more blood. More flesh being torn from people as they struggled under the grasp of the dead.
The walking dead.
It had been about two months since that day. On one hand, it felt like two years. On the other, it felt like two seconds. Everything was over. No more coffee, no more school, no more work. Evangeline managed to get home. Her daughter, old enough to walk home, had made it back before things got bad.
The power was shut off. Then the water. Evangeline wasn't a survivalist. She had a 48-pack of water bottles and a few canned goods. Luckily, her stove was gas, and with the help of a few matches, they were able to heat the frozen foods she always stocked up on. But that couldn't last forever. And it didn't.
Living on the penthouse floor of her building, they were relatively secure. If the elevator worked, you needed a key to get to their floor. And you needed a key to open the stair doors. Although not many people were willingly climbing ten flights of stairs. There was only one other unit on their floor, and the man who lived there hadn't been home for a while, probably on vacation.
