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H E R
I am not a person who believes in much.
After the world decided to drop everything and end, with my imminent death most likely breathing down my neck, believing in anything became just a puerile daydream.
But, somehow, I have survived. Even when I should not have. Even when others did not. So, perhaps, there was something to believe in. To hope for.
And, at the very least, I did not lose out in anything by simply believing in something. Whatever it was out there, kept me alive. For some reason, for some purpose. Despite the fact that I was nothing, nobody.
When I had first arrived at the prison, I was merely an orphaned child refugee from a town by the name of Woodbury. To break my heart even further, my father and brother had died just days before when we were at war with the place that was now our sanctuary. I didn't get the full story, but I pried enough information from some of the adults on the bus ride over. Simply put, the man who had been running our safe-holding, who we called Governor and trusted, went insane with his power lust and killed almost all his soldiers, and then screwed off into the great beyond when he realized he was fighting a losing battle. The people at the prison were good, just trying to protect themselves. They were going to take us all in. Put two broken groups together to make one large strong one.
What would they want with a bunch of kids and old people? Sure we had our adults who were capable of actually doing things, but the weak outnumbered them greatly.
My father always used to tell me: "Make the best of things, Ellie-Belly." And I would always respond with: "Dad, I'm too old to be called Ellie-Belly." To which he would say: "Alright, Ellie-Belly-Jelly-Bean."
I pressed my face against the cold glass of the rumbling window. My dad was alive a couple days ago. Then he was dead on the side of the road in a pile of bodies. How was I supposed to make the best of that? I guess I should have expected him not to return, because in the beginning my mother never did, either. It was a new rule in this undead world: when someone leaves, don't expect them to come back.
I don't really understand why God picks and chooses who stays and who goes the way He does. Surely, The Lord's plan didn't intend for my family to fizzle out the way it did. To leave girl on the cusp of adolescence, who was once bright and daisy-fresh, to now walk defenseless in a raw, angry world that festered like an untreated wound.
The faces around me mirrored my own, countenances traced with a deep sorrow woven by the threads of loss and loneliness. Parents dead by the Governor's hand, us Woodbury children. Only a couple among us had a mother or father still living. For the most part, we were all on our own, no longer having an adult to depend on. We were about to turn our new home into a pseudo-orphanage.
