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THE WALKING WASN'T the worst part. The endless stretch of road she walked along wasn't what was bothering her about the journey she had decided to undertake. It was the five walking corpses that she had killed, thinking about how unfair it was that she even had to do so in the first place as she did it. It was the dawning thought that her family might not be alive.
That was what made her upset. The fact that she had left the nearly irrefutable safety of the CDC to chase people that were likely dead or impossible to track down. Her feet ached after the constant hours of walking, her tongue felt dry and her stomach growled. Everything felt like one big mistake. She felt utterly hopeless.
Arden's feet stopped moving and she stood in the middle of the road, staring at it like she challenged it to just swallow her whole so that she wouldn't have to deal with any of her problems anymore. A rustling noise emitted from her left and she unsheathed the sword and quickly stabbed into the skull of the body.
Just as it fell to her feet she heard the faint sound of an engine down the road. Her sword was lowered, the tip of it just barely scraping against the pavement. The first working vehicle she had seen since she left approached her, an old looking RV. A few cars trailed behind it. Actual people.
She didn't move or flinch at the cars coming, there was no way she would let them go right past her. Luckily for her, the vehicle slowed to a stop a few feet in front of her. Every car behind it came to a halt and she let out a breath of soft relief.
She couldn't tell who got out first or from which vehicle in her shocked haze, but the first person she registered was a man clad in a sheriff's uniform. "What're you doing out here?" he questioned first in his southern drawl, as if it was some strange thing that she would be traveling alone in the middle of nowhere. Well, now that she was actually thinking about it, it did sound quite strange. And she had no clue how that would appear to this man.
"Trying to get to Atlanta," she told the man. At that point, several people had exited the cars and were all looking at her. This made her feel remarkably out of place.
"Don't go there," another man in a baseball cap who suddenly appeared from behind the sheriff man warned. Arden's attention was torn from the sheriff to him and they glanced at each other for a moment before the sheriff spoke again.
"It's gone. Everything's ruined there, it belongs to the dead now," he elaborated. She felt her heart sink. Was it even a slim possibility, if any, that her family could still be alive? Her gut screamed that they couldn't be. And the way these people were speaking, she would be dead for sure if she even tried to look. "Looking for someone there?"
"Not anymore," she responded quickly with the slow shake of her head, slowly replacing her sword back into its sheath.
"You're welcome to come with us," a woman who held a young child's hand next to the sheriff told her. A few thoughts raced through her head at that moment, all conflicting with each other. What about her family? Could she trust these people? What could the harm really be?
