Above all things, he was a hunter. Before The Change he had been strong, but hesitant. Something had happened to him in the months since the world had ended. He no longer cringed as he severed heads of the creatures that had destroyed his life; he relished the feeling of flesh and bone as his swords cut through the necks of vermin.

         He had lost everything - his family, his home. He travelled alone. He feared nothing. He sought them out, and as they swarmed him, mouths foaming for human flesh as he killed them.

         He wanted to bring the world to its knees.

         His mission, since the beginning, had been to reach the area beyond quarantine. As The Change claimed more and more, the quarantine grew.  The borders were so large he had no idea where to go anymore. He kept his map with him at all times. He was miles outside his home, a shell of the living city it once was, now overrun with animals that feasted on living flesh.

         He took the swords from a man he found lying dead by the side of the road. He did not know whom the dead man was or where the swords had come from, but he knew that they were a sign. Kill them all. Don't stop until they're all dead. He walked and walked until he did not care what day, what month, what year it was. He walked until his past was far behind him.

                   He had been staying in the farm country for a while. Walkers had not been able to find him here. There was an orchard he ate from, a stream where he boiled the water and drank it. He slept in trees because they could not climb. He travelled through a hilly place, walking during the day and setting up camp at dusk. The Walkers did not sleep. He was aware of them at all times.

         He was walking on a golf course, relishing the sun, letting it warm his skin. He remembered it was his birthday as he heard screams coming from the other side of a hill. He was ruthless and he fought for himself, but he knew that if others were Changed he would only have more creatures to slay.

         Over the hill, in a bunker, were a girl about his age, and a boy who looked older. There were three Walkers, and they were clearly overmatched. The boy had a lead pipe and he was whacking them, while the girl was fumbling with a double barrel shotgun.

         He stood at the top of the bunker for a moment, deciding. The terror in the boy's eyes was clear. These two were not experienced killers like he was.

         "I'M GOING TO HIT YOU IF YOU DON'T MOVE!" the girl screamed, aiming her gun. Her voice was shrill and pierced the calm afternoon air.

         From the top of the bunker he leapt, pulling his swords from where they were sheathed on his back as he flew through the air. He landed on a Walker, sinking his swords into its neck, leaping off and turning quickly to strike another. He kicked it down and turned to the last Walker. With a smirk on his face he lifted the sword in his right hand and punched it through the Walker's head, killing it. With the three monsters dead at his feet, he turned to face his companions.

         The girl had not put the shotgun down; her blonde hair billowed in the wind as she pointed the gun, cocked and ready to fire. For the first time in a long time, Blaine laughed and stuck out his hand.

         "I'm Blaine," he said. "You should put the gun down. I just saved your lives."

         The girl glanced at the boy and lowered her gun. "I'm Quinn." She shook Blaine's hand. "And that's Puck."

* * *

         Quinn and Puck were actors. They had met during a theatre festival three years before the change and hadn't left each other's sides since. She would take a bullet for him, and knew he would do the same. They were not hunters, they were survivors. When The Change came they had nothing but each other. At night, she liked to listen to his heartbeat. It was a reminder: a-live, a-live.

         They were damaged. She had tried to save her parents, tried to go back for them once The Change had hit. The virus reached them before she could. She couldn't shoot them, couldn't kill her own parents. He did it for her. They were linked from that moment on. "I will never leave you," he told her. They ran from The Change and desperately made art. They performed wherever they could. As the virus took over the city, they wrote about the death of the earth. They wrote about the death of each other.

         The virus came from zoos, from the water, it came from the establishment, the government. Some people got it and some people didn't - it spread like the viruses of the 1980s, through blood drives and one-night stands. People wore surgical masks on the subway, but it didn't help. The antibiotics and the vaccines stopped working. People died.  And then strangely, they came back to life. They did not talk or think or breathe, they merely desired living flesh. The world ended.

         The Change caught up with them in a basement theatre. They were doing performance art about the virus, lights flickered, projections displayed the hideous creatures they knew were just outside the doors. In the middle of a monologue in which Quinn was supposed to remove her clothes, someone coughed, sputtered and died. Quinn stopped. She looked at Puck. His eyes told her what she felt in her gut: the show must go on. She continued her monologue as she watched the audience Change. It was a moment she could not forget, a moment she saw every time she closed her eyes.

         The most vivid moment was a man who looked like her father Changing. One moment his eyes were calm, full of interest at her words.  The next, they rolled back in his head, his breathing shallow, mouth lax. She saw her family before her eyes, dead and unfeeling. She saw their heads severed by bullets. She closed her eyes and readied for the inevitable bite, instead feeling a warm hand in her own.

         "Not today," he told her. And they ran. They ran until it hurt in their costumes, her feet bare because she could not run in five inch red high heels. They walked for days. They walked so much that she threw up and fainted somewhere outside the city, exhausted and spent. He carried her. When she woke up she was not strong but she carried him as best she could. They had a gun, killed Walkers, skinned squirrels. They clung to each other, the only thing standing after the world had tumbled down.

         Blaine was silent as Puck told him their story. Quinn held his hand and stared at the ground, her face betraying no emotion. They had decided to travel together to reach the area beyond the quarantine, to reach freedom and a new life.

         Blaine was hesitant towards them. He didn't know much about them, but he knew staying with them was better than travelling alone. Their gun was useful, and Quinn was a good shot. Since encountering the creatures in the bunker, they had seen no Walkers. They travelled even at night, stopping every two days to climb trees and sleep. They were mostly silent, and Blaine liked that. They were bound by an insatiable desire to live.

         There was no food or water, there hadn't been for days. Standing by a highway, smacking her lips, Quinn whispered: "We need to find a convenience store so we can get food, or we're going to die." They followed the signs along the highway that lead to a rest stop, the sun beating over them.

         Blaine had a headache, he couldn't see straight, his vision hazy. Days without water had brought him to the brink of exhaustion. They barely spoke to each other because it took too much energy. And then, it emerged like an oasis in the desert: a truck stop. Abandoned cars littered the parking lot, left by those who thought they could outrun The Change.

         They stopped where the concrete of the parking lot met the grass just off the highway and stared at the building.

         "It has to be crawling with them," Puck murmured.

         "How many shells are left in the gun?" Blaine asked.

         "Enough," Quinn replied.

         Puck's grip tightened around his pipe. "Should we go for it?"

         "If  there's too many, we can't stay. We have to get out," Blaine said, meeting Puck's eyes.

         "How many is too many?" Quinn wondered aloud.

         "Fifty?"

         "Twenty," Blaine answered. "The most I've ever killed at one time is five."

         "So you're suggesting five for each of us?"

         "Something like that," he sighed.

         "I have more than five shells, so if things get too hard I can help both you guys," Quinn said, beginning to walk forward, Blaine close behind.

         "Wait!" Puck cried, stopping both of them. "What happens if…what happens if one of us doesn't make it? There's never been this many before. If one of us gets bit -"

         Quinn took Blaine's hand and reached for Puck's. Puck stepped forward and met their hands.

         She looked into Blaine's eyes. "If something happens, the others keep going. If something happens, don't stay, don't fight. Kill them. Kill them, because dying is better then living like that for one minute." She turned to Puck. "Don't cry. Just keep going."

         "Not today," he told her, and Blaine felt as though he had walked in on some private moment. They squeezed each other's hands, and Quinn pulled them into a tight hug. "I'm glad to have known you," she whispered in Blaine's ear.

         They broke apart, and Blaine said, "No one is going to get bit. We kill them, and we get food, water, maybe sleep there if we can burn their bodies…and then we keep going."

         They stared at each other for a moment, and then broke out into a run. Puck reached the door first, yanked open the door and staggered back.

         "There's too many!" he cried, but Quinn pushed past him with her gun and began to fire. Blaine counted the bullets. One, two, three, four…ten…fifteen…

         "NOW! GO!" Quinn screamed, bending over to pick up her empty shotgun shells.

         Blaine ran into the stop and saw them begin to swarm the moment they caught his scent. He counted quickly and saw that there were only ten Walkers left, the fifteen that Quinn had shot lay dead on the tile floor of the stop. Puck's fingers choked his pipe as he smashed the head of a vicious Walker wearing a pair of pajamas, its blood spattering on his face. Quinn had charged forward and was beating a female Walker with the butt of her gun.

         Blaine ran into the thick of the mob and sliced the heads of two Walkers quickly with his swords. A Walker grabbed him from behind, and he elbowed it in the teeth, turning to deliver a kick to its chest. Quinn saw the Walker struggling to get up and smashed its head with her gun.

         Blaine let out a cry as he slaughtered another pair of Walkers, and two more. He turned to see if there were any more, but Quinn and Puck just stood among the bodies, splattered with blood and panting.

         Blaine and Quinn made eye contact, and the blonde smiled. "Let's clean this place up," Quinn said, and began dragging a Walker's carcass outside the truck stop. It took them two hours to drag all twenty-five Walkers to the middle of the parking lot and set the bodies on fire. Quinn found some bleach in the janitor's closet and they mixed it with water from the taps and rinsed their bodies with it.

         They look the rest of the bleach solution and rinsed the interior of the truck stop from stem to stern. Quinn took it upon herself to sort through what food was there, disposing of anything rotten and adding it to the parking lot fire. It called attention to life, but Walkers feared the bright orange flames and the scent of burning bodies masked that of the living flesh close by.

         At nightfall, they gathered in a booth at the stop for the first real food any of them had had in months. Quinn and Puck had got a grill at the McDonald's working and had scrounged together a dinner of hamburger patties (found in the freezer of the same McDonald's), potato chips, peanuts, yogurt cups and protein drinks from the convenience store in the southwest corner of the stop. They ate for two and a half hours. They locked the doors of the stop and barred the windows with what they could find.

         They took sweatpants and hoodies emblazoned with logos for tourists and wore them, they found car blankets and slept in booths, Quinn and Puck curled together so that she could hear his heartbeat. Blaine slept with his swords, thankful for once that he didn't have to be afraid of the morning.