Carl Grimes Imagines

Imagine: Hallucinations

It's been years since the apocalypse struck down on Earth. But it felt like ages that you have been out in the world fighting for survival.

When you first stepped into Alexandria, you were furious. You loathed the children playing in the well-trimmed green grass in front of the houses--despised the sweet adults that constantly chatted on the sidewalk near a small glittering pond, leaving a bitter taste in your mouth. You  remembered how you felt envious, the way everyone there has had the comfort of supplies and luxuries--not even having to care about if the dead might eat you alive while you tried to sleep through the night--and all you had was, well, instinct.

You came into Alexandria alone and empy-handed, but you hadn't always been like that. You once had a family to protect, and people to protect you. There used to be people you could count on and supplies that wouldn't be gone the next day, but that was all a beautiful memory now that you were alone. Most of your friends had perished along with your family, and not being there to see it all happen, you had been horrifically surprised one day to come back to your camp from a two-day supply run to find the dead bodies of your fellow survivalists crawling on the ground or slowly walking on two feet with sunken eyes and ghostly features. Blood everywhere.

Most nights you now spent in Alexandria were full of unconscious fear, the images of past events over the years slithering into your dreams, leaving you in cold sweats the following morning.

First it was the dreams, and next there were flashbacks. Just like the nightmares you experienced alone at night, except these were when the sun was shining during the day.

But your time in Alexandria so far wasn't so bad. Being there for almost a year, you had obtained a boyfriend. Someone who had understood almost exactly what you had been through and has been one of the nicest people you had met in Alexandria yet. His name was Carl Grimes, the son of the man who had allowed you to stay in Alexandria.

He knew about your dreams, about your flashbacks, and he had tried to help you with it at first, but nothing worked. It seemed to be an inevitable, unfixable curse that you had to deal with every day.

You were walking down the street of a block in Alexandria, gazing at the adults who gardened around their porch, staring at a few children who played on a perfect lawn. But your mind was off somewhere else, thinking about how your mother would have loved this sanctuary, and then you imagined the bloodbath you had witnessed the end of. Walkers everywhere, blood spatters on so many objects, some creating patches of brown grass.

You had always thought about how that could have taken place, did the group try and flee? Did they try and scrounge for their valuables once they saw a herd, but they were too devastatingly late? Did anyone even make it out alive?

And then the flashback came, leaving you dead in your tracks, eyes glued on the window of a house, but not truly looking at anything at all.

The imagery came like someone pausing a video every couple seconds, or like a car skidding on the road. But it didn't make it any less vivid. You remembered the walkers, just so many of them. You wanted to find your parents, to find your friends, but it would have been impossible. You felt the sadness, the disbelief that swarmed within you, taking over every nerve within you and freezing them, leaving you a stone structure in the middle of chaos.

But then everything went away, almost as if it were a bubble, lasting for moments until it popped. Leaving residue that you could still feel deep inside you. You stumbled a bit over your own feet, but you weren't even walking to begin with.

It took you a few moments to realize that you were on your way to your house, the one that was occupied by nobody but you.

Gaining back your senses, you continued on your route, but stopped once again once you heard the unmistakable moan and growl of a walker. You looked around frantically, finding one only a few feet behind you. At first you wondered why nobody was paying attention to the walking dead that was slowly coming towards you, one shoulder leaning downward as if it had a broken arm, tripping over its own feet in the process.