Title: Vestige

Summary: All she can do is survive. All she has to do is keep on living, in hopes that maybe, someday, things will get better.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. Also, the original idea for this story comes from Neko-Graphic, and her story "Welcome to Hell". You should read it, it's an amazing story.

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Chapter One

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The Beginning of the End

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When Sakura was a little girl around the age of five, her father taught her how to survive. Together, the two of them would go out into the mountains near their rural village for weeks at a time doing nothing but keeping each other alive.

Most of the time, Sakura hated this. What's the point? She would ask petulantly and stomp her little foot. To her father's credit, he never became angry at her. He knew that it would be hard for someone so little to understand the necessity of being able to rely on only oneself. With years of practiced patience the man would kneel down in front of his pouting daughter and pull her into a tight hug which she would reciprocate, albeit grumpily.

"You'll understand when you're older, Sakura dear, I promise. For now, let's check the traps and see if we've caught anything for dinner, shall we?" would be his calm reply, every time.

Fifteen years later, Sakura was finally beginning to understand what her father was talking about.

Fifteen years later.

It seemed like the world had ended. From her apartment near the outskirts of Tokyo, Sakura had heard the news on her television one morning while she prepared her ritualistic cup of coffee. It was a parasite, the news anchor said, that infected people, destroyed the cortex of the brain and took over your motor functions, allowing it to control your body and attack others. Please stay inside at all times, the lady on the television said, right before a cameraman shambles on screen and took a chunk out of her neck.

"On my god," Sakura gasped, taking a small step away from the screen just as screams emitted from the speakers for a few seconds before the TV displayed nothing but static. What the hell? Sakura thought, hands covering her mouth in horror. What was going on?

What she had just witnessed couldn't possibly have been real, could it?

Could it?

Sakura reached for her phone and thumbed through her contacts before she came upon the number of her best friend. She pressed enter and held the phone up to her ear.

There was nothing.

Eyes furrowed, Sakura pulled the phone away from her ear and stared blankly at the screen. There was no signal. The pink-haired girl was going to cry out in frustration and fear but was cut off when the power went out.

The young woman stood in her kitchen for a minute, illuminated by nothing but the morning sun as it shone through her living room windows. She stared, wide-eyed, at the blank television screen in front of her for a few minutes, deciding if she was going to start hyperventilating or not. She decided on the latter.

Realization came to the pink-haired pre-med student, who quickly walked back to her bedroom, threw open her closet door and reached for a hiking backpack that sat, neatly tucked in a back corner, covered with shirts and shoes.

It was her emergency backpack. In it were two changes of clothes, 2 flashlights, a water filter, a first aid kid, three-day's supply of non-perishable food, a bottle of antibiotics and Tylenol, a heavy-duty pocket knife and host of hygiene items. Pulling it out of her closet, Sakura threw it on her bed and reached to the floor of her closet for her hiking boots.

Sakura wasn't really thinking. She knew that what she had just heard was an impossible situation coming to life, and most likely the end of the world as anyone knew it. She also knew on an instinctual level, however, that no matter how impossible the situation sounded, it was a good idea to take her father's years of coaching and play it safe.

So she pulled on her boots, reached for her rain jacket that lay across her desk chair and pushed her arms through that, slipped her backpack straps over her shoulders and headed for her front door. As soon as she was outside, she heard the panic. Everyone had gotten in their cars and the sounds of yelling and honking were overpowering. On top of those sounds, though, were the low moans that seemed to bypass Sakura's brain and headed straight to her heart, which set it pounding wildly. It sounded like death.

The green-eyed woman knew she had no weapon to properly defend herself. All she had on her was her pocket knife, which she figured would do jack-shit against an undead monster. So she did the only thing she could think of.

Hiking her backpack up higher on her shoulders, Sakura set out for the mountains, five miles from her apartment building, at a jog.

Six months later.

Sakura sprinted like her life depended on it, because her life depended on it. She ran down the abandoned streets of Tokyo at full tilt, her breath coming in sharp pants. Behind her, shambled hundreds of undead.

The noise they made was like something out of a nightmare, with their eerie moans and skin-crawling gurgling sounds. As the woman's feet pounded the pavement, she risked a glance backwards to see that she was gaining some ground. With renewed energy, Sakura turned a corner into a dark alley and kept running. She made a few more random turns before she stopped dead in a small square between what appeared to be four apartment buildings.

A large group of zombies turn their heads at the sound of her entrance.

"Shit," she panted, eyes already searching for a new way out just as the shambling army following her began to make its presence known in the small courtyard as well.

Sakura reached into the front pocket of her backpack and pulled out a pistol she had filched off of an abandoned police car a few weeks ago; even though she knew it would be useless. But maybe someone would hear the shots and have the decency to help her.

She really doubted it, but she had no other option.

The stench at that moment, as hundreds of undead monsters converged on her, was particularly overpowering. It smelled like rotting flesh and decaying life and if Sakura wasn't so concerned about getting out of there, she might have puked.

With the monsters stumbling towards her on both sides and no obvious way out of the situation, Sakura contemplated turning to barrel of the pistol towards her temple and pulling the trigger. She wasted half a second of her nonexistent time to glance down at the heavy metal machine in her hands before deciding that she'd rather go down fighting then take the coward's way out. So with that thought, she raised the gun, aimed, and started firing.

This seemed to make the mob angry as members of their own started falling and their moans became screeches of animalistic rage. After she had downed about five of the undead beasts, something caught Sakura's eye on the other end of the courtyard; a door, slightly ajar, on the second floor of the apartment building that lead out to a balcony. No zombies had come out of that door to investigate the noise, so Sakura came to the conclusion that that room had to be zombie-free.

Sakura made her decision just as zombies from both sides reached her, arms outstretched and trying to grab at her flesh. She shoved the pistol into the waist of her jeans and smacked an incoming festering appendage out of her face as it tried to reach for her hair, turned to her right and ran towards the wall. She kept her arms up around her face to buffer more limbs that reached for her and stuck near the wall, trying to run around one of the groups to reach the wall with the open door.

At one point, when she was feet away from being directly under the balcony, one of the infected managed to grab a fistful of her light pink hair in a death grip. Sakura cried out at the feeling of pain and absolute terror that shot through her as it pulled her backwards towards its decaying body, the monster intent on tearing the flesh off her neck.

"No…!" she cried loudly, one hand gripping the monster's in an attempt to loosen its grip and the other reaching into her side pocket to pull out a switch blade.

With expert fingers she flipped it open and in one quick motion, brought it up near the base of her ponytail and sheared her ponytail right off her head. She had no time to think about her actions; instead she took the next few strides that would put her directly underneath the balcony and planted a foot on the wall, using it as leverage to push herself up, arms outstretched.

Her fingers wrapped around the base of the wrought iron fencing and with all of her strength, Sakura pulled herself up. Once she grasped the top of the railing and swung herself over onto safety, the pink hair girl collapsed, breathing frantic and chest heaving from fear.

I almost just died, her brain whispered to her, and she thought for a minute she might be going into shock.

Her newly cut hair tickled her cheekbones and blew slightly in the wind as her head bowed forward in an attempt to catch her breath.

The abominations below her were moaning their protest at their lost prey, arms reaching up to try and get to her. The balcony she was sitting on, however, was a few inches above their outstretched fingers and they couldn't get her from there. For the moment, she was safe.

With a slightly hysterical giggle, Sakura pulled herself up and fully opened the door that lead to the empty apartment she was currently taking refuge in. It was dark – the curtains were drawn and there was no source of light inside the small complex, not that she expected there to be. The young woman pulled the pistol out of her pants and zipped it back up into her backpack, swapping it out for a flashlight, which she flipped on.

The small living space was trashed, like someone had raided it. The dining room table was flipped on its side, facing the door, and the chairs were mysteriously missing. There were no signs of life – or nonlife, she supposed – and Sakura took the opportunity of her relative safety to set down her pack and look around.

Her first stop was the kitchen. When she began opening the cabinets, she expected to find nothing, but to her surprise, they were incredibly well stocked. Stacks of cans of nonperishable food sat a few rows deep, in the majority of the cabinets. The rest held tens of bottles of water. The stove was a gas stove, and sitting on the counter next to it was a pot, a lighter, and a pile of cups of instant ramen.

At the sight of all of the food, Sakura's stomach rumbled and her mouth began to water. She had been living off trapped squirrels, the occasional rabbit and whatever she managed to scavenge from different abandoned shops the few times she wandered back into the city from the wilderness.

That was the reason for Sakura's current predicament. She had decided it was time to head back into the city, see if she could find some more food to help ease the almost constant ache in her belly. Eating nothing but squirrels wasn't healthy, and she knew that she was becoming dangerously thin.

With not a thought as to why that much food was being stored in the small apartment, Sakura ripped open a styrofoam cup of ramen, pulled open a water bottle, dumped it into the pot and lit the stove with the lighter, setting the water on it to boil.

Sakura was finally satisfied after she had consumed three packages of instant ramen with a fork she had found in one of the drawers. Her body satisfied for what felt like the first time in years, Sakura continued her tour of the flat until she found the only bedroom.

"Oh, yes. A bed," Sakura moaned in pleasure and with no preamble, fell on top of the unmade mattress. In minutes, with an unhealthy lack of wariness considering she was in an unknown place surrounded by monsters that wanted to eat her, Sakura drifted into a deeper sleep than she had had in months.

つづく