All disclaimers that apply to a work of fanfiction apply here. I don't own any of the characters, except for the ones I've created. This'll be AU because it's a fanfiction, so it is therefore clearly not cannon, source material, etc. So, enjoy. And review because I don't think I'll continue it without some form of an audience. So, enjoy and leave some feedback.

It was sunny out, humid for certain. Definitely too hot to be walking miles at a time without water. But the last farm house had turned up dry cabinets and drier pipes. She hauled the saddlebag up higher on her shoulder and adjusted her sunglasses as she gnawed on the end of a tuft of dried hay. She stepped up to the asphalt and looked both ways. The cicadas were unusually loud; it wasn't even noon yet. She looked both ways again and listened. She didn't expect to hear the once familiar rumble of a car engine. What she expected to hear was the moaning and shuffling.

But for once it was quiet. The sun was shining and it was quiet. It was a normal day in the country. She stepped out onto the road and started walking, tapping her bare thigh with the broadside of her machete and readjusted her grip on the handle.

Another day of walking. She barely took note of clicking behind her, even when there was a stinging slap against her leg. She looked down and the reddish blur that trotted around her and kept moving, ignoring the stray as it ran circles around her at a leisurely pace. She could barely feed herself. No way was she going to try to feed it, too.

"Walk on, Muttley," she snapped under her breath as she kicked a rock out the road. "Just keep on walking."

The only sound was that of her boots and the clicking of paws. It was eerily quiet. The birds never sang anymore. Cars never drove by and birds never sang. She kicked at another rock and stared straight ahead with a blank expression. The stray at her heels left out a huff and she turned and looked off toward the tree-line at the snapping of twigs and rustling of leaves.

They always looked the same as they stumbled out of nowhere, their eyes blank as their jaws gnashed and they blindly reached for her. But the faces never changed. They were always the same with their grey and rotting skin, their tattered and decayed clothes. Right down to the same aimless staggering existence, they were all the same.

She turned back around to stare at the road. The key was to keep walking. You kept going and you only stopped when you had to. Even after several steps all she could hear was the groaning and moaning of a single solitary one of them. She turned back around and stared at it as it continued to shamble about like a drunken sailor. Even from several yards away it was reaching for in desperation. It obviously hadn't eaten in a long time. The dead outnumbered the living now.

Finally, she stopped and turned to look at it. One lone Roamer. She looked left and right, beating her machete against her thigh with a bit more force. She tapped her foot. "Can't just leave it like that," she muttered to herself. She sighed out her nose and then spit out the hay she was still chewing on. She twirled the handle of the machete in her hand with practiced ease as she drew herself up. "Well. Time to do to work," she said in resignation and stepped forward to meet her undead opponent.

The sun was shining and it was quiet. It was a normal day in the country.

The Walking Dead: Butterflies and Hurricanes

"Look here, Muttley," she said as she sat back, leaning against the tree while she cleaned her machete. "Just 'cause I ain't run you off yet don't mean I ain't been thinkin' bout it." She watched the dog in irritation as it sat a few feet off, paying her no mind. Instead, it was glancing off toward the tree-line. She wiped some of the Roamer blood off her arms and scowled down at her chest. "I don't even think Mike Rowe would do this. Probably dead already anyway."

She pushed off the tree and retied her hair as half of her messy bun had come undone. It had only taken a second to get rid of her attacker, but it was never easy physically. When she looked back up, the dog had lowered its head and backed up with its tail between its legs. It wasn't growling. She whipped around and backed up toward the dog. Now that she was less focused on her clean up, she felt it. There was a certain stillness that came over when they approached en masse. Like a deadly freeze ready swallow the world in death. She couldn't hear them but she couldn't hear the cicadas either and that wasn't good.

"So, I may be willing to negotiate," She half-whispered to herself as she continued to back up. She wasn't sure how far off they were, but decided to err on the side of caution and took of at a healthy sprint, barely aware of her four-legged companion loping along beside her.

She stopped when her companion slowed to a trot and took in several deep breaths and then started walking again. She wasn't big on talking anymore. Wasn't anyone to talk to. And the people she had run across hadn't really want to say much more to her than it took to tell her to hand over her supplies. And she'd never been big on talking to herself unless it was internal and those conversations were always direct and to the point.

She definitely wasn't about to start up a running monologue for a dog, that was for damn sure. Instead, she continued to stare down the length of road before her, occasionally glancing behind her to make sure nothing had come up behind them. The dog didn't seem to mind the silence and she wouldn't have cared even if she had. Eventually, she stopped and looked up. The sun was beginning to hang low in the sky. She needed to find some place to make camp. Her usual up a tree routine wouldn't suit with the dog with her. She turned around in a circle a bit before remembering the gravel road she'd passed not ten minutes beforehand. It was worth a shot. She started back that way. It was a long leisurely walk. With the canine beside her, there was no need for her to be quite as alert as usual.

There were open fields in on either side of them, the gravel road was lined with fencing and not far off was the burnt out shell of a barn. She stopped and scanned her surroundings. Then she started down the rest of the way toward the farmhouse. It seemed like it had been a nice farm once. As she neared it, she noted that there were no vehicles save for the scorched RV remains next to the barn. She ascended the porch slowly and rapped on the front door then waited. Nothing. She went through her usual routine of checking each room, only barely aware of the dog as he also wandered through the house doing his own inspection.

Satisfied that the premises was Roamer-free, she began to block off the exits and pulled all the curtains. Then, she began the slow process of meticulously going over the house for any supplies that could come in use. There was a wealth of canned goods. She found a couple flashlights, but no ammo. There was a half full tube of toothpaste and another almost full tube of Neosporin and a box with several Band-Aids in an upstairs bathroom with a shattered mirror.

And then it was time for sleep. She collapsed on the bed, passing out almost instantly. She jerked away a couple hours later. It was always like that when she woke up. Naps-and that was all she afforded herself-were few and far between. She'd sleep again in an hour or so. It was time to find new clothes. She tried on several tops. Some were a little baggy, which wasn't ideal. It gave the Roamers something to grab onto when fighting and that was something you wanted to avoid. She pulled out a few tops and managed to find a few pairs of tights and a mini sewing kit in the back of a drawer in the hallway upstairs.

She hung a heavy quilt over the living room window and lit a lantern after it was dark out then spent a couple hours sewing patches onto the holes in the one pair of jeans she carried with her. The dog was sprawled out on the floor at her feet. Once she done, she shimmied out of her shorts and pulled on the jeans. The fabric she'd used to patch the jeans hadn't been very thick and it wouldn't provide much warmth when winter arrived, but it was better than nothing.

She did another once over of the farmhouse and considered, not for the first time, staying on through the winter. She could easily board up the windows with whatever wood hadn't completely burned out in the barn fire. She had already gathered up the Roamer bodies that littered the property and burned them, while she kept watch. She occupied the time trying to train the dog that constantly followed her. It was obvious that he had been craving companionship and she wouldn't deny him of that until he became a liability.

He followed her when she went hunting and he'd shown extreme promise at tracking and had managed to help her pin down a couple rabbits. But she'd never been very adept at skinning and she'd managed to butcher both jobs. The dog, which was a purebred bloodhound as best she could tell, ate well that night. She ate a can of pears and another of creamed corn.

The day she finally decided to board up the house was the day she saw another one of the living. She'd taken the dog out to explore the woods more thoroughly and they'd just reached the edge, coming up on the road leading into the farmhouse when she'd heard the distinct rumble of a truck. She ducked behind a tree and cursed to herself. While she'd taken care to hide the bulk of her supplies, she had forgone hiding most of the food and a couple of handguns. Those no longer belonged to her. Once she could no longer hear the truck, she backed away into the woods and circle around the farm to the back of the property. She'd marked all the trees surrounding the great oak and was able to find it in minutes. She climbed up in it with ease and settled back in the tree, squinting into the distance.

It was a lot of men. "Time to go," she sighed as she threw her saddle bag out of the tree, followed by the rucksack and hopped down. She glanced back at the farm once and sighed. It had been a nice place. But this was a much needed wake up call. She couldn't stay in one place for too long and this was evidence enough. It was sheer luck that she had gone out so early. It was time to get moving and stay moving.

The dog had taken off. It had taken him awhile to figure out she wasn't coming with him anytime soon. They weren't done with her yet. But there he was crouched down low in some bushes not far off. Pacing back and forth, paws sending leaves up into the air in his frantic state. But it was okay. She wanted him to get away. He was a good dog. The only companion she'd ever had who'd truly looked out for her as well as she'd looked out for him. The look in his eyes had hurt her more than what was being done to her at the time. He'd looked helpless, lost all over again. Just as he had when she'd seen him wandering around in the woods.

She'd stopped trying to fight them off after the third one. It didn't hurt anymore. She was too numb and the concussion she was working on was helping. She couldn't even really hear their voices anymore. Or even the thump of her head as it bounced off the ground in a disjointed rhythm.

It was black when she opened her eyes. There was a fire crackling. And their bodies were laid out around the fire, which was much too big. There was shuffling nearby. Much too close. They'd made a fatal mistake. They'd played with her so long they exhausted themselves. The one closest to her was laid out with her machete barely clasped in his hand. "Some guard you are, you stupid fuck," she thought as she army crawled toward the weapon. Everything was screaming inside her. She managed to grasp the machete with stiff finger as she dragged herself toward the unconscious guard. She plunged the sharp end of her weapon into his neck, straight through his windpipe. The moaning was audible now. She fumbled to her feet and watched her breath crystalize in the cold atmosphere surrounding her. And then she moved on to the next man, repeating her actions five more times. The last one she left for the roamers to finish off. He had been the first. He would be the one to scream. And then she staggered in the opposite direction of the moaning. And she stopped only when she heard the first scream. Just long enough to catch her breath and give her aching bones a rest and then it was back to staggering. She didn't even notice when she found the road. She kept staggering.

Sometimes, there would be something behind her, shuffling behind her and then passed her. And she wondered vaguely if it meant she had died. If she were one of them. If this were her new existence. One of the herd. There had been blood everywhere. They'd cut on her and bled her a bit to drain some of the fight out of her. That had been the easiest part. Maybe they'd bled her too much.

They flowed like an unstable river after her before they slowly ebbed into a trickle and she was left with only a handful. "I must be one of them," she thought as they blundered past in slow motion.

That was the blur that passed caught her off guard as it kicked up the dead leaved littering the asphalt. How could she have missed the blare of the engine? It grated on her deadened senses, made her ears ring and her equilibrium tilt further off its axis. And for the first time in what seemed like years, she managed to focus. There in the middle of the road was a motorcycle. And astride it, sat a man. The ringing in her ears turned to cruel, taunting laughter as she followed his line of sight. It was pinned to the machete in her hand, the small rucksack on her back. He killed the engine and flicked down the kickstand in one fluid motion as he continued to watch her and she froze. The laughing was louder as it echoed off the inside of her skull. It was so distracting she nearly missed the exact moment he froze and a terrifying realization finally surfaced in both their minds. She was human.

In she watched with sharp, pained breaths as his eyes traveled the length of her. It caused her to stumble to her left and off the road. She broke for the trees, leaving the remnants of the heard behind her and she ran blindly for the first time. There was no sprinting. There was only fear as it drove her to run until the cold air filled her lungs and froze them in agony just at the moment her legs gave out and she collapsed. She pulled herself up to the foot of a tree and twisted around to lean up against the trunk and reached for her rucksack. She pulled out the revolver and wiped at her forehead with a shaky hand. And she resigned herself to waiting. The revolver was too heavy to lift just now. She couldn't even turn her head towards the sound of rustling leaves to her right. "Side ambush, you would play dirty," she thought hazily as she tried desperately to inhale enough oxygen to meet her body's requirements.

And then there was flurry of reddish brown fur and whining. And then was crying. "You came back," she sobbed, laughing as she did, "You came back for me!"

The whining increased when she reached out for him and the dog settled down next to her. "You came back for me," she repeated. And she couldn't stop crying. She was hysterical until she wasn't. Until even her tears were finally dried up and her body was too broken to continue working. "I didn't expect it to last this long."

She looked down at her lap as she dropped a hand on the hound's head and her gaze travelled down to the tops of her unbuttoned shorts to stop at her inner thighs, crusted in a thick coat of dried blood.

"This," she wheezed. She was just so tired. "It's a good day to die." And the world went dark.