Keep running.

Don't stop.

Don't look back.

My eyes burned from unshed tears as I pushed my body forward despite the way it ached, begging me to rest. If you'd told me a few months ago that I would be running hundreds of miles for my life, I would have asked what magical brew you were on. I wasn't athletic. Running for a few minutes at a time would once leave me out of breath and out of commission for an embarrassing period afterward.

Left, right, left, right. I focused on the steady rhythm of my feet slapping against the jagged pavement to keep the rest of my mind quiet. Alone, I had all the time in the world to think - too much time think. Sometimes I needed quiet to keep myself sane. If I'd learnt anything from the Bad Times, it was that being alone with one's own mind could be disastrous.

This town hadn't been used in years. Ivy sprawled across cracked cement and nearly every window had been broken loose from its frame, some boarded by decaying pieces of wood. It was hard to believe that only five years had passed since The Flare, that this place had once been a bustling metropolis full of people and cars and noise. It was a ghost town now.

It had taken me weeks to get here. I had spent most of them unsure that I was even going in the right direction. We had always hoped that there were other colonies, places where survivors like us had gathered and prospered as much as they could in a world that was no longer their own. There had been rumours of a colony in a park outside of what was once the city of Pittsburgh and so when the Bad Times happened, it was the direction I headed in.

I passed the decrepit sign marked 'Welcome to Pittsburgh' in the early afternoon yesterday. Faded and rusted green, I'd almost missed where it lay in a bed of wild grass. That sign had given me the hope I needed to push myself through the city and toward where I believed the colony lay. I hadn't given much thought as to what would happen if I turned up to the park and there was no one there. I would find a way to deal with that situation if it happened, but I had to believe that there were people there, others like me. It was that hope that kept me going now.

I'd just began making my way through one of the many small towns that littered the outskirts of the city when I had heard noise on a street to my right. Normally I would have put as much distance I could between myself and that noise, but with the possibility of it being someone from the elusive colony out on a scavenge, I went off course to explore. Now I was running from the Cranks who had been the source of the noise, positive that this was the end for me.

My breath fell from my chapped lips, ragged and uneven. My legs and lungs burned and I would have been crying if I had any water in my body to spare. I hadn't eaten in days now, and the last of my water rations in the bag on my back were pitifully low. If I got away from these Cranks somehow and there was no colony in the park, I'd probably die of dehydration.

My pace slowed for a fraction of a second. A large part of me thought - why not? Why not just give myself up to these Cranks and end everything now before I was dealt with a disappointment that I wouldn't be able to survive? I was betting my life on a rumour, some tale we shared between our community as a way to spread hope that this wasn't the end for our kind. For what was not the first time since I'd begun my journey, I wished I'd died with the others. Maybe I would have been better off.

I almost slid to the ground as I turned a corner abruptly. I was met with a large, open road and trees. That was it - the park! I threw myself into the trees and almost fell over an exposed root. I turned my head, ignoring the most important rule when dealing with Cranks: never look back, only to see that they now stood by the tree line, hesitant. My eyebrows furrowed. Cranks never stopped when it came to a potential meal, and so I was confused as to why they no longer pursued me. It was almost as if they were scared of the forest.

Thankful nonetheless for their disinterest, I eased into a light jog. It was green for as far as I could see, trees in every direction. Whatever paths once existed were now covered by shrubbery and mulch. The warmer spring weather had melted the last of the snow and revealed what had been left behind when winter first came. There had to be some kind of clearing, I decided. When we had first begun building I remembered the men working away at removing trees day in and out for weeks to clear space and provide materials to build with.

I stopped at a tree with branches near enough to grab onto and began to climb. It came easy and brought back memories of my mother scolding me as a child for tearing my dress because I wanted to play with the squirrels. My heart hurt a little as it always did when I remembered my mother, but I focused on the pain from the bark scratching against my palms as I pulled my body up higher instead. It took a few minutes to reach high enough to poke my head into the sky. I wrapped my arms around the body of the tree as I scanned the forest for any dips or wide holes which could indicate a clearing.

I closed my eyes and released a breath of relief. There was a large one only a few minutes' run to the northeast of where I stood now. I knew better than to get my hopes up - the chances of there being someone other than myself in this park were slim, but I could not stop the giddiness that vibrated through my body as I clambered down the tree and took off in the direction of the potential clearing.

I felt light on my feet as I flew through the trees, heart hammering more from excitement and trepidation than exertion. After almost three weeks of trekking across barren states, it was almost over. I could be safe again! Because I was so wrapped up in the potentiality of people waiting just beyond the thinning tree line, it made it more than easy for me to miss the two men sitting in one of the trees ahead of me, and so when one dropped to his feet in the path directly in front of me I barrelled right into his chest and would have made us both fall to the ground had he not placed his hands on my shoulders and steadied me.

I tried to step away from him, buzzing from contact with another human being after going so long without it, but he didn't let me budge. The other man jumped from the tree branch as well and the look of wary distrust on his face made me panic. I hadn't thought about how it would look when a strange girl came barrelling through the forest as if there were a legion of Cranks at her heels.

"Who are you?" the man holding me in place asked. His grip tightened on my shoulders and I hissed at the pressure.

"My name is Tanya," I said as I glanced between my captor and his companion. What if they weren't even from a colony? What if they were two rogue men? What would they do to me? I blindly went into this thinking that all people who weren't Cranks were inherently good, but I realised now as I was being held by two men who were obviously stronger than me that my faith in the human race may have been naively placed. Still, I asked, "Are you part of the colony?"

They shared a look, communicating without words. The man who stood by the tree pushed his dark, unkempt hair from his eyes and waltzed up to us.

"We're the ones asking the questions, sweetheart," he said. "Now where are you coming from?"

He glanced behind me.

"And are there others with you?"

My throat tightened as I said, "No. I'm alone. I came from a colony to the southwest of here. Near what was Charlotte."

His eyebrows rose and fell quickly at this information. "Quite a ways away. What brings you to these parts?"

I winced again as the grip on my my shoulders and the man holding me noticed.

"If I let you go, do you promise not to run away?"

I nodded without second thought. The last thing I wanted to do was run when they possibly held the answers I sought. If they turned out to be bad guys I'd just make a break for it, honour be damned. He let me go and I stumbled back slightly, rubbing the skin he'd grabbed.

"We were attacked a few weeks ago," I said, answering the other man's question. "Cranks. Hundreds of them. We didn't have the kind of security we would need in place to hold them off. They took over within hours. I made it out. Barely."

They glanced at one another again and I could tell they didn't believe me.

"It's true," I said, stepping forward. "What would I gain by lying to you?"

"We've never heard of organised Cranks," the dark haired man said slowly. "Is that even possible?"

"They don't start off as the crazed lunatics the worst of them turn out to be," I pointed out. I wrapped my arms around my chest. "Please, could you just tell me if you're part of some group like the one I've come from? We were always under the impression that there were others out there."

"We should take her to see Jerry," one man said to the other. "Let him decide what to do with her."

"We need to make sure she's not infected," the other replied. "Wouldn't be the first time a Crank tried to weasel their way into the walls."

Without even having to be asked to, I stripped off my cardigan to show them my tanned, bare arms. I lifted my shirt to show my stomach and back as my legs were already bared by my shorts. I had no shame, I knew this procedure well as it was one often followed by scavengers to ensure that no one had been harmed by the Cranks.

The tall man who had held me nodded in approval and pointed toward my bag.

"Empty that out," he said. "Got to make sure you're not armed."

I tore the bag from my shoulders and unzipped it before thrusting it in their direction. The dark haired man took it from me and rummaged through it only to find my empty water bottles and packages of what once held food.

"Nothing," he told his companion before giving my bag back to me. "Guess we'll leave it up to Jerry, now."

They each grabbed an arm and began to lead me in the direction I had been heading in before I'd run into them. I wanted to tell them that they could let me go because I had no intention of going anywhere but my words died the moment I saw the wall. It was as tall as the oldest trees in this park and I wondered how I'd managed to miss something so monstrous from the treetops.

The man on my left chuckled when he saw my dumbfounded expression.

"Welcome to the Glade," he said before nodding in the direction of the wall. "Not exactly what you were expecting, was it?"

Okay so this obviously isn't set in the original world that Dashner created. There are enough fics out there with a new character inserted into the original story, and some do it quite well, but I wanted to do something different. I love the characters so I wanted to keep their essence and place them in a newer, slightly different world to see how they would progress in it. I have taken many liberties with this in an effort to make my own world within the world I admire Dashner for creating. This gave me the opportunity to add multiple original characters and really press the canon characters to their limits (at least I'd like to think so…).

Comments are always welcome as I am writing this on a chapter-to-chapter basis and therefore would love feedback to shape how this will turn out! I want to say I'll get up at least four chapters a week, but no promises are made because I don't quite know how my summer is going to turn out!