Silence

1/8

The breeze made you shudder as you rummaged through one of the cars that blocked the road. Autumn was already there and you were in need of clothes, your legging, tank top, and thin shirt didn't do much to protect you from the cold that was coming and that would get worse in winter...if you made it that long.

No, you couldn't think like that, of course you were going to make it. You were a survivor. You had made it this long. The only one from your group that was still alive, as far as you knew.

You had lost your mother and sister pretty early during the outbreak, but you had managed to flee the town with your neighbors, meeting some people on the way, setting camp in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere, close to the woods, where your little group of ten people had survived by hunting, scavenging and killing the walkers that got too close, luckily not many of them, all of you learning skills from each other, turning into better survivors, into the kind of people you needed to be to survive in this new world.

You had been with those people during summer, until a week or so ago, until you saw them slaughtered not by monsters but by men.

A group of three men had arrived at your camp, asking for help, and you all had taken them in. You shouldn't. They didn't seem to have weapons on them, seeming harmless, but after your group lowered their guard, they were joined by five other men with guns and shotguns, and all of them had begun attacking your people. They wanted your warehouse and your supplies, and they didn't seem to care about who they killed to get it.

That was the first time you'd killed someone, sinking your knife into the throat of one of the men who had grabbed you, trying to protect your people, but they'd better weapons, and you'd seen most of your friends getting slaughtered next to you. The commotion had drawn a group of walkers, and then everything had become even more chaotic.

You'd taken a look at your fallen friends and at the monsters, and you'd run away from the chaos. One of the men had shot you, the bullet grazing your arm, leaving you with a wound that had infected, and that still hadn't totally healed, but you were taking care of it.

That reminded you, besides clothes you needed to look for a first aid kit, or some disinfectant, anything like that. You still hadn't found anything useful, when a certain smell caught your attention, one that by that now you knew very well, the smell of the death.

Smells are something curious. A new smell always catches your attention, makes you notice it, but when you are surrounded by it for a long while, you become used to it to the point you don't notice it anymore. In this new world, that was dangerous.

And so, you'd trained yourself to never get used to the smell of the walkers, no matter it was everywhere. Now you could notice when it was close, when it was too intense, by now the smell of the dead triggered something in your brain that made you go attack or flee mode, knowing that danger was close.

Not being able to hear what was happening around you, you gotta rely on other things to survive. You were observant. You had always been, but now even more. It meant the difference between life and death. Your instincts were pretty good, if you may say so yourself. Training yourself to notice the subtle changes on the smells around, to notice the tiniest movements, had probably been one of your best ideas, and had saved you from being ambushed by walkers a few times by now.

And so when you noticed the stench of the walkers in the air, you rushed out of the car you were in and looked around. You saw a group of them ahead on the road, but they were far enough to not have spotted you. Taking your backpack, you rushed back into the woods.

You went back to your camp, if you could call it that. It was just a tiny square that you had made tying wire to four trees so if walkers approached they would get trapped on it. No one of them had stumbled into it for now, and you were grateful for it, you weren't sure it would work. You allowed yourself a few hours of sleep each night, hoping the wire would stop the walkers and your brain would wake you up if it noticed the smell, but you weren't sure you would actually wake up before walkers got you, and if they wouldn't just tear through the wire. Still, you knew you needed to sleep.