Sage ➸ Carl Grimes

Prologue

Before you begin reading this fanfiction, there are a few things I would like to inform you of.

Please be mindful of the following. This story contains content that is advised for the ages 13+. It involves; language, violence, deep depression content and intimacy. Read at your own risk.

SAGE

My hands were heavy. The skin on these small hands were stained with blood of innocents, and the blood of my very own.

These hands held a knife. It was thin with sharp edges, and I would often stare down at it and wonder.

I stroked my fingertips over the smooth skin of my forearm, and felt gentle, uneven stubbles. There were white lines crossing my skin, and I pitied myself for ever marking them.

Once as soft as silk, and now as ragged as stone, I thought. You marked these lines with the blade in your hands, yet you hold it often and marvel over the power it conceals. Is it wrong to love something that has brought you burden, and find it as company in your loneliest moments?

Being alone after the world broke into ashes was a choice I brutally made for my own selfish benefits.

I had a mother and a father and a family on my side.

They were alive and healthy, and I wished I could've been grateful for that.

I didn't necessarily enjoy being alone. It's not a feeling you would pick to be encountering, because in order to strive through it, you have to get used to an aching body. Whomever you are, your soul needs a connection or something to love. And when you're alone in a drowning pool of death, your body responds to your lonesome and can only yearn for a feeling besides dryness. It aches and pleads and trembles and wants. I fed myself stale imperishables to keep my heart beating faintly. I exchanged clothes from abandoned homes to stay hygienic. I drank filtered water to quench my dry lips. But what I did not do was keep my body from aching, because after hours and days and weeks and months of the feeling, you begin to enjoy it.

I did not need the company of others to survive. I was not strong and my capabilities were futile, but I would rather drown in my own dark, oozing blood than have to be another person's burden again.

My family and I were growing a life in a hospital. My father was a nurse before the virus outbreak, and the few survivors fled to the hospital with their workers and families.

Learning to adapt to the apocalyptic era took us brooding months. It was sudden and corruptive and there was no way of foretelling this would happen. We were...lost. Although my parents were strong and knew how to dominate. We boarded up the hospital, had medical supplies and foods and protection. It took us weeks upon months and almost lead up until a year before we became a protected 'camp'.

We saved lives, while others were being taken. My parents wanted only good, but all I could feel was the bad.

My skin was light and smooth like silk, yet I scarred it solemnly. My parents would see these scars and not feel pity for me like I needed them to. They would grow angry, forcing me to handle a gun and fight for their people.

Depression was selfish to them.

Not wanting to kill zombies because all I could see was their previous innocence, was weak to them.

And I, was a burden to them.

I lost my purpose at the hospital. I was an only child, yet I felt excluded. I lost my parents once the dead rose from their graves, yet they had a beating heart and a pulse to prove I hadn't really.

They were too foolish to see that their fourteen year old daughter was falling into pieces at their feet. The hospital lost its meaning. And so did I.

An empty, dark night was when I came to the conclusion that the hospital was a haven, but not a home.

Packing ammunition and food and batteries and clothing, I left a note with a dirty rock and a shredded piece of paper and slipped out the hospital.

I had never been outside since this all started. Only twice, when I was needed to haul in more wounded people and save their lives from death. I had only met the face of a zombie once, and it would always hold in the back of my deepened mind for eternity.

They were weak. Their clothes were torn and shredded, with faded and bloodied clothes from the years of death they experienced on earth. Their flesh began to decay and peel from their bodies, and white, deceiving eyes looked at you as they weakly limped for a meal.

One wasn't an issue. A herd of hundreds would have you torn into shreds before you could cry for mercy.

I conscientiously left my family with nothing but my sorrow and markings.

I hid below with my aching body and thought of my family everyday.

At night I would stare into the beaming sky and see the stars. They twinkled and reminded me of my mother's eyes. When it was gloomy and cloudy in the sky, they would reflect off the color of my father's eyes, and I took after that.

I did miss them. But when I ran a finger over the scars on my wrists, I then felt irate with their unforgiving, cold hearts.

I killed people, too.

I would stay hidden in a still house with a knife in my trembling hands. Survivors would come inside and begin searching for supplies, but I would grab the dagger and send its sharp refinement through the backs of their heads and ended it all smoothly. I would then dispose of the bodies by cremation. I ate very little and never had anyone to talk to after that.

I almost forgot what my voice had sounded like.

I wouldn't talk to the sky or pity to the clouds or beg for an end. I would sit in a dark room and hold my knife, gazing at its edges and the damage it has done on my skin.

Your body aches when your lost.

My name was Sage Riley, and with my knife and my aching body and my scars, I was a survivor.

A survivor of my own mind.

Popping up into this prologue at the end of 2017 to leave you all with a message — the things you will read in this story are dark tragedies but real ones. It will be dealing with depression, mental illnesses, struggling characters and will even touch on suicide. The last thing I want is this book to erupt any triggers or discomfort, so if you experience anything like that, please stop reading. I want everyone to be safe and this book is not to bring up dark things, it's to spread awareness and shine some light on what kinds of hardships people go through. Just because the setting of this story is in the apocalypse, doesn't mean these things don't exist. They are very real.

Also, a friendly reminder that I started writing this when I was thirteen years old, back in 2014. I'm undergoing the process of editing to relieve this story of some of the cringe, so bare with me.

But I held the same intention back then as I do now — to create a raw story and spread awareness of things that may not seem as obvious to you.

Be safe and be generous.

- S