after the end of the world.

[alicefelldown]

alice + joel

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the price i paid —

[alicefelldown]

you don't know the hell i've been through (♫)

[ Five years ago, the world ended, and no one saw it coming. No one expected it to be this bad. They'd tried to fight back, find a way to rid themselves of the first infection, only to have a second spread just as quickly. 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 was 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. Seven, 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 being found by the corporation that was supposed to be the hero and turned into the villain.)

But for all the time she's spent roaming like a nomad since the world ended for the second time, 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. Large sprawling cities are the worst, becoming a patchwork of different infected zones blending into each other along the edges. It takes time to learn the signs of either, and so she prefers to stick to the smaller cities and towns where most people were evacuated early on, leaving a hope of actually finding supplies in her scavenging... and of encountering relatively few of the dead.

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 supreme — 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, and sometimes it seems like the environment in certain areas is actually adapting to better suit the new dominant organism.

It's what she faces now, a thing she doesn't fully understand and isn't as equipped to fight. She'd followed the road, weaving her bike through small town after small town, avoiding any large metropolis as usual unless her radio picked up a distress call. But night is setting in, and it's too dangerous to travel in the dark, so as the sky begins to shift into shades of red and orange, she pulls into a smaller city where she can sense only a hint of infection in the distance. Maybe it was cleared recently, or maybe the dead have just wandered off in search of better feeding grounds. There is something out there, though, so she shuts off the bike and walks it instead, not wanting the sound of the engine to garner any unwanted attention. And when she sees the beginning of vines at the end of an alley she passes, she moves a little faster, keeping her eyes open for anything moving in the growing darkness. ]