[ Three years ago, the world ended, and no one saw it coming. No one expected it to be this bad. One outbreak should have been easily containable, but two? Society splintered as infrastructure crumbled, and in the end, the population fell to a fate literally worse than death. In the aftermath of that fall, nature began to reclaim what humanity took from it, while the infected roamed the earth, hunting what's left of the living.

In short, this is hell, but it's no less than she deserves.

She'd tried. She'd failed. It's her fault that the cities are filled with the shambling dead, survivors scattered and clinging to what scraps of life they can find, everyone trying to simply make it from one day to the next. It doesn't matter that years have passed since all of this started, since the Hive and Umbrella's failed attempts at controlling the T-virus, since the Red Queen failed to stop the outbreak. It doesn't matter that Umbrella is truly at fault for everything that happened. Alice carries the weight of her own failure with her every day, the burden of it just as heavy as her hatred of Umbrella, because she knows she could have prevented all of this if she'd been a little more careful, a little faster, a little stronger. She is crushed by the guilt of every person she's lost and the responsibility for all the thousands of lives still out there.

(She wants to hope it's more than just thousands, but hope left her a long time ago, right around the third month of traveling alone when she's come across another school full of infected children. Those nightmares still linger with her, the children's faces inevitably morphing into Angie's.)

Saving people becomes the only way she can keep going. The only way to alleviate that gnawing guilt. One life, two. Twelve, on a good day. She protects them, sees them to shelter, and moves on. Days pass without her seeing another living soul, sometimes weeks, and the only thing to break up the hours bleeding into each other are the satellite tracking alerts that help her stay off the grid.

(A small part of her clings to the possibility that Umbrella has fallen just like everything else, but until she knows for certain, she just can't risk it.)

But for all the time she's spent roaming like a nomad since the world ended, she's stayed where it's safe. The wandering dead are what she knows, and even the occasional escaped experiment is simple enough to deal with or avoid, but there's more out there in the world. There are patches where she can almost feel the overlap, where there are hints of something else out there, the other infection that helped destroy the world. Where the T-virus had spread, the cordyceps outbreak happened near-simultaneously, with cities around the world falling practically overnight. For three years, she's steered clear of the areas where cordyceps reigns — but nature doesn't follow clear boundaries and the lines keep moving on her. As carefully as she tries to keep track on the dozen maps stuffed in her pack, things change in the months between. 

It's what she faces now, a thing she doesn't understand and doesn't know how to fight. She'd followed the road, weaving her bike through small town after small town, avoiding any sizeable city as usual unless her radio picked up a distress call. But night was setting in, and it was too dangerous to travel in the dark, so as the sky began to shift into shades of red and orange, she'd pulled into a tiny town where she can barely sense any infection. Maybe it was cleared recently, or maybe the dead have just wandered off in search of better feeding grounds. Holing up in a house was always an option, or a store if there was somewhere left with supplies, but the vines on the fifth house stop her in her tracks.

Are they vines? They look like veins, spreading out along the door and up across the windows, spilling out onto the porch. She's seen them before and gone the other way, but there are more across the street, and further down they pile up toward a roof. Stopping the bike, she shuts off the engine and listens, though for what she's not entirely sure. ]