Beyond Terminus (Book Two)

Prologue

The world as we knew it is gone.

Cities lie in ruins.

There is no electricity, no gadgets, no running water, nothing left of our old civilization but crumbling buildings and rusty old cars.

Undead roam the streets, searching for human or animal flesh to fill the empty void of their bottomless guts.

To survive out here, you have to learn to fight with handheld weapons and guns alike, as well as learning to always go for the brain.

You have to sleep with one eye open, and can't let your guard down.

Children grow up too fast, adults have to forget what they thought they knew.

The soft have to become strong.

The loners have to become teammates.

One second can end your life.

One shot.

One bite.

Nowhere is safe, though some are safer for longer.

You have to make friends quickly, because surviving alone is possible, but won't last forever. If the walkers don't get you, loneliness and insanity will.

You have to trust some, but distrust others. Even if the world has ended, there are people who still have evil inside them.

My name is Hope Dixon. I was once Hope Starling, a lonely girl with a lonely life in Atlanta. I'm not famous, I've done nothing in my life that is incredibly notable, but I've got a story to tell that is far more extraordinary than most others.

When the walkers came, the department store I was in served as a safe haven for a few weeks.

It was in that store where I almost ended it. My eyes were closed, there were walkers nearby, and I was ready to end my lonely existence.

I was stopped. A shovel to my head had knocked me out, and from the second I opened my eyes on that roof, my life was changed.

My current group had found me, and since then, we've become family.

We've lost people, and we've gained people, and no matter who we've come across, we have pulled through. We help each other through grief, we watch each other's backs.

We've fought walkers, of course, but that's not all.

We battled a sickness that had threatened to wipe out our entire group.

We fought against The Governor, a complete psycho bent on taking our prison, and though in the end he was killed, we did lose our home. We were separated, but we found each other again, against all odds.

I think the only thing that keeps me going through this whole thing is love; the love I feel for my family, and the love I feel for my husband.

I'm married to the redneck of the group, a man who, when we first met, was moody, angry, and damaged by his past. It was me, the soft-hearted Christian girl from Canada of all people, who broke down every wall he had put up, who he fell in love with. In turn, I fell in love with him.

If you had asked me before this whole thing, "Hope? If there was ever a zombie apocalypse, would you eventually end up getting married?" I would laugh my head off and ask what drugs you were taking. I mean, who gets married in the apocalypse, right?

I did. I fell in love and got married.

The world works in mysterious ways, doesn't it?

Now, we sit in a train car in a place called Terminus. A place that was supposed to be a new home, but was not what we expected.