My Secrets In The Apocalypse

Prologue

It had been about a month since the world went to shit. Things were never that great for Riley Johnson before the shift, being in her particular profession required she keep her distance from people. Loneliness wasn't a new thing for her but more like a way of life. But everything had changed with the end of the world.

Being alone wasn't safe anymore, you needed people. Groups were safer than being out there alone. So that's the reason Riley decided to join up with a group of strangers she met in a traffic jam on the highway.

They had been camped out at the quarry for a couple of weeks now and for Riley it seemed that not much had changed. Obviously there was a lack of modern "niceities" like power and running water, but as far as feeling alone, thongs hadn't really changed for her.

There were plenty of people in their group. A nice lady named Andrea and her younger sister Amy, Lori and her son Carl, an ex police officer named Shane, the brothers Merle and Daryl Dixon, an older man named Dale, two guys named Glenn and T-dog, a quiet woman named Carol and her husband Ed and their daughter Sophia, and a few more that Riley hadn't bothered to learn the names of.

Being surrounded by so many people was completely foreign for Riley. She'd had to keep herself from getting to close to anyone for so long that now she wasn't really sure how to handle it.
Suddenly all these people were trying to talk to her and get to know her. It was unsettling and the best thing she could think to do was to just keep to herself as much as possible. So that's what she did and as a result many of the group didn't seem to trust her, not that she cared since she didn't really trust them either.

Sitting quietly by the campfire observing the group had become her go to activity when she wasn't busy doing a few chores to help pull her own weight around the camp. It was in her nature to take in as much information as possible. It was a skill that had been ingrained in her since childhood, always being reminded of the importance of being aware of your surroundings. Always observe everything carefully, know everything that's going on around you, that's the key to self preservation.

More often than not she would end up sitting back at the campfire watching everything and everyone very carefully. She didn't know these people and she would never be stupid enough to stay with this group without understanding what she was dealing with. She needed to understand everything about them, needed to know their habits and routines, their personalities and body language, anything and everything she could learn about them could prove to be useful in the future.

Keeping to herself had managed to put off most of the group members to some extent, but somehow in her few weeks of quiet observation of the camp she had managed to make an enemy of Ed. She would often look up and catch him giving her dirty looks from across the camp or hear him mutter snide comments to her in passing. She had also overheard him telling Shane one day that he thought the reason she never talked to anyone was that she was retarded.
Riley did her best to ignore it, telling herself he wasn't worth causing any trouble over, but she wasn't sure how much more she was willing to deal with before she would have to address the issue.

Merle would throw the occasional offensivecomment her way also but considering he did that with everyone she would justbrush him off without much thought. Occasionally she would catch one of theother men, who's name she hadn't bothered learning, looking at her with asuspicious look. Sometimes she would worry that he might have recognized herfrom her past, but decided to leave it alone for the time being. If it turnedout that he did know something then she would just have to figure out what to do about it when the time comes.