Zoey could freshly remember when the out break began and when her normal life ended. She was in school, her senior year. The day before she'd recieved her acceptance letter to CSUN, not her first choice school, but it was in California, and who could argue with that? Being an hour's drive from the beach was much better than 6 to 7 hours, and it was several degrees cooler than her home town of Fairbanks. Though it was literally a short walk from Vegas, Fairbanks was a relatively normal community, nosy neighbors, white picket fences, the works. Everyone on the block knew each other.

Zoey herself was a Plain-Jane, the freckles, brown hair, blue eyes. Of some mix of European desent and Hebrew. Not too tall, not too short, fit, but not abnormally so. Not curvy, but not quite boyish. She dressed in t-shirts and demin shorts or jeans. She didn't attend church, never was much of a singer or dancer, she could barely play the piano, even after taking classes. She wasn't special by any standard.

Zoey needed a little something more adventurous than that. Even living within the Vegas city limits meant a mediocre life. If she were lucky she could become a stripper, dealer, waitress, or showgirl at a casino on the strip. Thanks, but no thanks, Zoey had always thought.

But it didn't matter. Everything changed and the world changed. The outbreak began. Suddenly college, friends, family, didn't matter. Surviving did. She remembered out surviving the massacre of her neighborhood. Blood everywhere. There was no out running it. There was no getting away from it. She remembered the word passing through her mind, Zombies.. but that seemed ludicrous they only existed in movies and horror stories, but she saw them with her own eyes. She saw one of her best friends die and come back and try to attack her. She was luckily saved by someone else. But that person only lasted so long, like so many others.

Zoey continued to survive. She knew she had to keep a move on. She ran for days, or weeks, or months, it all seemed the same, an eternity of horror. Trying to survive or out survive zombies. It was like the world had died, first the phonelines went, then television, lastly the internet. There was no such thing as right and wrong anymore. People would do anything not to become one of those things. One of those disgusting, soulless, monsters.

Some how, even after all the running, Zoey always ended up in Vegas, the city of sin. Funny when she thought of it. Zoey had never done much in her life as far as sinning went, not until these things started taking over. Then drinking, smoking, sex, didn't matter anymore. And anything would be done for a safe place to rest, though nothing was safe for long.

For three years, three long years she'd been running from those... things. She'd learned quickly that anything, and everything was a weapon. Even revolving doors when necessary. Still she kept an arsenal on her. Hand guns mostly, automatics, but other than that, she wouldn't have known anything else about them. Ammo she had wrapped around her, and a back pack of other necessary things, rations, a swiss army knife, a crowbar.

Though even in all this time, she wasn't sure it was better to be alone. Though it seemed destined to be that way, every time she found some one, they'd do something stupid and they would get scratched or biten. Zoey had gotten to the point where she didn't wait for them to turn, she just shot them, right between the eyes, killing them while it was still easy to do so.

The hardest kill had to be this one though. The girl couldn't have been any older that 15, Zoey remembered what it was like for her at 15. That seemed like perfection compared to this.

"Please don't, I don't want to die." The girl begged. No one wanted to die. But she was stupid. She didn't listen, and now she had a bite mark on her shoulder. She was infected.

"I'm sorry..." was all Zoey said before she pulled the trigger. Zoey sighed and looked around the vacant house she was in. At least this meant she didn't have to worry about splitting dinner two ways.