take shelter ✮°。( nick clark ) ☑

00; prologue

The Walking Dead. 

What the world will soon know to be the future, and be the start of the Apocalypse. But, that is just in the movies right? It's not real. It's just a fantasy brought to a screen. I mean, God wouldn't do that to us, right? He wouldn't shut down the world, and bring a plague upon us. 

The mere thought itself caused a deeper shiver to roll down Octavia Nolan's spine. But, that was the way the world had changed. The dead had begun walking, and humanity was on the brink to extinction, well, to Octavia is seemed that way. 

Octavia is known for cures and fixing things that is terminal or curable. For this case, no one even knows if a cure is even out there, even about the whole origination of the illness, if it even is an illness. To this day, after weeks of surviving the terror of the walking dead, Octavia still had no clue as to what was really going on to those who are outside growling and prowling the streets. 

She remembered the first outbreak that she had witnessed herself like it was yesterday.

Over 5 weeks ago, an ordinary day doing her morning shift at the hospital, she had walked into the storage unit for a medical bag with syringes, medicines, medical tools like a breathing mask, et cetera, where she had seen one of them. All she was doing was preparing for a patient's arrival, but she felt she was too late for this one. To this day, she still feels her heart pound in the exact fear from that moment. She had seen the walking dead in the living flesh.

The girl in front of was dead. Octavia knew she was. The dead had somehow gotten trapped in the storage unit, the stench of death still emitted from her. The same ratted hospital gown was still draped around her. The image still plagued her mind.

As a nurse, she wanted to help this girl, but couldn't find a way to do that. And that day, she had told her attending, the main doctor on the floor - he had just laughed. He didn't believe her, in fact, no one believed her. All there was, a bunch of cackling, a jokes about how Octavia had fantasized up the walking dead. Somehow coming to terms that she may have taken in too much medical marijuana in the unit, thinking she did that in between breaks. 

Soon, that impossibility that they threw at her verbally, caused her to slowly come to her senses, declaring the body she had seen (though clearly alive) was a figment of her imagination. How could Octavia possibly be sane when she clearly saw something that could be so damn impossible? 

She questioned her sanity for the longest time. But, she still had a inkling in her mind telling her what she saw was real. That she wasn't imagining anything. She was scared to look anyone in the eye without thinking them to laugh, and poke fun at her experience (though they did that already). She was a walking joke to them. Her experience became one of those "scary" stories they would tell patients when they wanted a good story to hear, or just wanted entertainment. 

Honestly, she would still be the crazy nurse if it weren't for a new patient who had a similar experience to her. Except, like herself, no one believed him since he was known to be around the junkies, unlike herself. But, that didn't stop her from believing him any less.

That was Nick Clark. A family friend of Octavia's that was around her age. The look he gave her when she told him that she believed him gave the two a similar feeling of relief, though sparked a fear in the both of them as they realized what they had both encountered. 

Everyone was dead.

Those were his words. And, to make it worse, his mother's fiancé (both of whom worked at the high school in the area) had sparked the idea that what he saw was just a "nightmare", a "hallucination." Like he had dreamt of it because he had gotten high before it occurred.