Prologue

When you're born, people will already try to define you. They will tell you that you're a girl, a boy, sometimes both, and you have a certain color of hair and are a certain height and weight. When you're older they will tell you how to dress and how to act, what toys to play with and what words little girls should not say.

It's a load of crap.

People can say what they want, but at the end of the day, it's you who decides the type of person you are supposed to be. Boys are not just boys; they have feelings and can cry and fall in love with other boys. Girls are not just girls, they can lift the same amount of weights or cut their hair short without being a lesbian. And if they are lesbians, I bet you a hundred dollars that being a lesbian is not the reason as to why they cut their hair short.

Course, no one gives two shits about any of this stuff, especially in the zombie apocalypse.

To me though, these things matter. It's important to let people know who you are, because I think it's beyond stupid to be defined by people's perceptions of me. I am not a little girl in a dark scary world who does not know what to do, at least not anymore. At least when I didn't know what to do I owned up to that, I learned. People change, but others don't like change. I didn't like change either, but once the world came to an end, you either adapt or survive.

I am a survivor.

My name is Ariel. Ya, like the little mermaid. My mother was obsessed with Disney, that happened to be her favorite princess. I was teased when I was in grade school about that, being a half Spanish and half Italian girl, I came out with dark skin, blue eyes and dark hair, and as a child a little on the heavy side, I of course, looked nothing like the little mermaid.

I got suspended a few times for getting into fights. My dad was a kickboxing champion. Of course, kickboxing doesn't do much good against people in the apocalypse. My mother went not too long after. Even though she loved me, I don't think she wanted to live in a world where my father didn't exist.

I don't know how I made it out, and sometimes a little part of me wishes I hadn't. But that all went down the drain the moment that stupid ass redneck came trudging from the trees, dead squirrels over his shoulder with a crossbow aimed straight at my face.