(For Mekoness, Sakeyoshi and _tsubasa_.)

For hundreds of years the world powers tried to hide their existance, worked to cover them up and keep them wrapped up as myths and horror movie devices. For what purposes we can only speculate now, now that the world as we knew it has ended. All that we know for sure now is that when the infection finally broke out of their grasp, no one knew the true horror of what was happening until it was too late. The world was swallowed up in a wave of panic and despair. Communication failed, planes fell from the sky, what use to be safe was now the most life threatening of all and whole countries were devoured in the blink of an eye.

What happened? The walking undead. Zombies. But they actually weren't the worst. Humanity always finds a way to make a bad situation even worse. Sure a zombie would pull you limb from limb and eat you but they didn't have a choice. Someone you use to love and trust would beat, rape, and/or rob you and then leave you to be eaten by a zombie. If you were lucky, they would just shoot you and get it over with.

Anywhere people use to gather was a buffet. The more people use to live there, the more zombies now wandered the streets. Big cities became death traps and the more people ran, the more the zombies followed. Even the so-called survivor colonies never lasted longer than a couple months. So to survive you either kept running, avoiding everyone and anything or hid and shot anything - living or undead - that came within 30 meters.

And when you lived around a big city like Las Vegas, it was amazing if you survived this long. Even the weather is against you, the dry heat and lack of insects favors the slowly rotting corpses wandering around but not so much the few living trying to stay alive.

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.

Everyone had theories on where the infection came from and how it all got started. But none of that really mattered anyone, especially now that 'everyone' was either dead or too busy trying to survive to give it anymore thought. Liz still thought about it every once in awhile though. Usually right after she tossed a Molotov cocktail at a newly re-slain corpse from her roof.

Elizabeth - as she use to be known by before society fell apart - had moved to Las Vegas just before the infection hit, during the big housing boom of 3 years ago. Prices for new two-story houses had been amazing and she had been more than willing to go just about anywhere to get away from the only 50 days of clear sky in a year of Seattle. Of course she vaguely regretted that now, the wetness would have sped up decomposition more than a bit.

So she switched over to IT, packed up, moved and basically became a basement dweller. In her defense she had had the forethought to build a bomb shelter/panic room in her basemet and a gym in the unused dining area. As well as a few other choice renovations such as bars on the windows, reinforcing the doors with steel and building the thickest, highest wall around her property that she didn't need a permit for. She hadn't quite anticipated this exact scenario - or she would have built the shelter in the attic - but lord knows her paranoia was what kept her alive to today. Probably the best thing to come out of the outbreak was now she didn't have to pay back the loans for the renovations and other accessories. They were pretty extreme. Her neighbors had looked at her like she was insane and laughed, but where were they now? Dead. She had made sure of that personally.

So when the screams and shots filled the air and the bombs fell, she was prepared. What she wasn't prepared for was the brutality and mayhem of the reality. She had prepared for a battle, not a massacre. Not extinction. And definitely not flesh eating reanimated corpses. She still refused to call them zombies. War had been inevitable, be it conventional, biological, technological or even psychological, and aliens she had accepted years ago but zombies? She still didn't believe her eyes sometimes when a corpse with its spine snapped and half its head missing continued to crawl towards her. Doesn't mean she doesn't still pull the trigger though.

But 3 years in the relative safety of her home - as compared to just about everywhere else - were coming to an end. Her resources were dwindling, maybe enough food for a 2 more months if she was sparing. But she couldn't afford to be sparring, she needed to keep her strength up. There wasn't any other choice, she would have to run for it.

They always kept respawning. No matter how many she killed, their numbers just kept on going back up. The only difference was how long it took for them to come back. She lost count of how many she encountered. The number of cities that she had gone through.

But the look on his face...she would never forget.

"Angel...run!"

They had been together for three months, which was a known record. Unfortunately, that record was stopped. They had stupidly thought that their hideout was safe from the zombies, but they were clearly wrong. They were ambushed by the prior residents of the hideout who had been turned. Ein, the name that she could barely remember, had distracted them enough for her to escape, but he had to pay the price of a sacrifice.

She could only remember running as fast as she could, hitting her knee on the stairs, slamming into the doorframe, and tripping down the porch. The only thing that she did smart, was to arm herself at all times. She managed to get away with a pair of twin semi-automatic guns, a small hand gun that fit in her boot, and a handful of throwing knives and daggers, that she always made to sure to pick up again.

Her ebony black hair was long and tied up into a high ponytail. Her bangs were slightly tousled and cut straight across. Her eyes were green, which was somewhat out of place for someone with black hair. She was native to Las Vegas, as she was borned and raised here. She would always run from one corner to another corner of Vegas, sometimes even to the corners of Nevada itself.

She walked the streets as a lone warrior, afraid of losing a partner, if she was ever to have one.

Bang... Bang, Bang.

Zoey didn't even flinch as she fired her gun, making a run for it now that she'd stocked up. Take that! Slow, filthy creatures, she thought, though she was thankful they were slow. Zoey ran out into the street looking left than right, determining which way was the best to flee.

Right, right, left, right, left... she began following her own instructions as she ran down the street. To where, she wasn't sure. Hopefully to find some sort of shelter. Though Zoey was rather resourceful when it came to finding places to rest, and sleeping with one eye open. Though the zombies were slow, and groaned a lot. Not much in the way of sneaking around for them.

((Accidental Double Post. sorry, still getting used to the new laptop))

While it was deceptively quiet around Liz's house, since she had only personally cleared out the houses directly around her own, she knew there were plenty of undead that were holed up in their former homes just roaming around until they found a way out. It was uncommon for more than two or three zombies to make their way to her area at a time, usually having been drawn by the sound of gunfire when she had to pick some off her walls.

She wasn't worried so much about the monsters anymore though, not since she made the mistake of taking in a pair of survivors. Who had tried to murder her to take her house later that night. She knew she had been naive, but she had been too relieved to talk to other people for the first time in months. She had no doubts there were people out there doing much worse things to each other. Situations like this really brought out the worst in people.

But today she wasn't thinking about that. She was laying belly down on the roof of her house with a rifle in her hand thinking about the groaning sounds steadily coming in her direction. It sounded like a whole lot more than two or three this time.

Angel narrowly dodged another strike from one of the zombies that had been chasing her for quite a while. She thought she had lost it admist running around the streets and ducking in and out of corners, but this one was very presistent. Maybe they were finally running low on food supply, hence not letting her go so easily.

The girl growled and drew a knife from her back and jabbed it into the zombie's chest. She withdrew a second one and stuck it into its forehead. The walking dead fell to the ground with a loud thud. She let out a breath and wiped some sweat from her own forehead. She looked up at the dark sky dotted with stars and wondered if there were any other survivors in this city anymore.