Exhausted {Daryl Dixon Fanfic}

I. Awakening

You know that feeling when everything is just a little too perfect? When things feel as if someone is putting together your puzzle pieces in just the right way? For me, that feeling was most likely a side effect from the sudden path my life took after college. I felt like I had it all, well, almost had it all.
I had managed to put myself through my last year of school and graduate with a bachelor's in physical therapy. I had a position lined up for me at my local pain clinic, thanks to one of my sympathetic professors, and thankfully my medication had began to act accordingly now that I had started counseling twice a week - also thanks to my professor, who had put in a recommendation for me through a friend of hers. So, to keep it short, if I skimmed over the crippling debt I was now in, things were looking up for me.

That's when it hit.

It started as whispers in the crowd, and busy lines when you called emergency services. Then the hospitals were redirecting patients to 'more secure' locations to help with overcrowding. Pretty soon the news stations began advising people to wash their hands as we were experiencing, for all we knew, was the worst flu outbreak in years. Finally, the CDC and military personnel starting closing off towns and panic spread.
I didn't have any family close to Atlanta to contact, and not any that I felt the need to check on anyways. A few friends called to tell me they were leaving, and a couple offered me a spot in their vehicle, but I turned them down in my clueless nature. In my mind, my apartment was the safest option for me. There was no reason to pack my life up and leave as I had in the past, especially not over a bad case of the flu. It wasn't until the emergency broadcasts started that I realized my mistake.
I had everything I had worked towards. An education, a stable emotional plan, a promising future ahead of me - with work, of course - and a small little apartment with a working AC in a new place where my past couldn't get to me. And the next thing I knew, it was gone.
The emergency broadcasts could be heard all over the city through every television and every radio and every car station. The same panicked voice in varying degrees of urgency.

"Get out of the city."
"Evacuate all hospitals"
"Avoid the sick"
"Board up your windows"
"AVOID THE SICK"
"DEATH TOLL RISES"
"MILITARY EVACUATION"
"STAY INDOORS AT ALL TIMES"

After a while the voice blended together and it was the only thing that was heard from the small radio I managed to dig out of some old boxes. Some of the fear heard in the voice had crept its way into me as I half-hazzardly boarded up my windows and shoved my dresser in front of my door. Pretty soon, the phone lines went dead and I couldn't get through to anyone anymore. And that's how it stayed the next few weeks.
I had managed to find the courage to sneak to the lobby here and there for coffee and whatever snacks hadn't been taken. There wasn't sign of any life in the building anymore, and I never opened the blinds. I was tempted to turn the radio off in hopes of saving my sanity from listening to that voice any longer. But then the sirens started. The sirens were only used during hurricane season and, very rarely, when there was a tornado threat. The sirens were deafening after growing used to the eery silence. That's when I heard it. From the corner of my living room the radio faded out and then, in that same panicked tone, the voice whispered the words that would finally awaken us to the true horrors we faced.

"The dead...is...walking again."