AN: So, this is the beginning of something new. We're starting at the very beginning, with a few (or a lot) of changes from the way things were. I won't tell you too much, because you can simply read it for yourself.

I do hope you'll enjoy it, though. I've wanted to play with something like this for a while, and the talented gracefull-mess inspired me to finally start working on this. (I'll plug for her. She's on Tumblr, so you should look at her images there. You should also check out her videos on YouTube!).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this little adventure! I appreciate having you along with me!

I own nothing from the Walking Dead, if that needs to be said.

I hope you enjoy our start! Let me know what you think!

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"They're too close to Merle," Amy said, leaning up toward the dash like she could get a better look at what was going on outside the dirty windshield that way.

"Sit your ass back," Daryl said. "Put your seatbelt on."

Amy laughed to herself.

"We're moving like—fifteen miles an hour, Daryl," she chided.

"I know how damned fast we're movin'," Daryl responded. "I'm driving, ain't I?"

Amy laughed to herself, and she shook her head, but she did sit back in her seat and she did put her seatbelt on. She rested her elbow against the window and slumped in her seat.

"They're too close," she repeated. "If he hits his brakes, that asshole's going to hit him and it's going to be Andrea he kills."

Daryl laughed to himself, a little nervously because the asshole in question was, in fact, a little too close to his brother for comfort—especially given the somewhat rough terrain of the roads they were on and the amount of loose rocks and sand on the road.

"If he hits him, he might spin 'em out, but I don't think he'll kill 'em. We're movin' like fifteen miles an hour. You said it yourself."

Amy turned around in her seat and peered out the back window of the truck. Daryl kept glancing in the rearview mirror, himself. He spent just about as much time looking back there as he did looking in front of him.

The most important things in the world, to him, were in the rearview mirror—and the things that came in a close second to that were a car length in front of him.

It was less than two weeks ago when the cracks in the world had first started to show. It had all started with some strange stories on the news—some virus or something was killing people. Then there came the news stories about mysterious murders—bodies found ripped apart, shredded. Those were followed by reports of drug addicts that were so driven out of their minds by whatever the hell they'd taken, that the police had no choice except to kill them in violent and threatening confrontations.

Daryl had watched the news, like everyone else, around everything else that he had to do in life—all the things that filled the hours between sunrise and sunset. He'd talked about the news over beers with his family, but it had always been something that was distant. It didn't involve the Dixons.

And the Dixons, really, had enough shit to deal with that they didn't need to worry too damn much about what was happening somewhere away from them.

They had almost started to ignore the crazy news—like a buzzing noise in the background that soon became undetectable to those who had heard it for so long. But then it all started to get closer to home.

The electricity going out had been the first thing that had caught everyone's immediate attention. It just stopped, suddenly. Radios were still working, though, on battery power, and cell phone towers were still up. Daryl had figured that it was some kind of local issue. He'd expected to hear of some kind of meltdown at the power plant. He'd sat down at the kitchen table, with a beer, to listen to the news. He hadn't quite known what to expect, and he certainly hadn't known what to make of it as he'd listened. Daryl could still remember the feeling—the dizzy feeling that came like just before passing out, and an ice-cold rush in his veins—that followed hearing the report that corpses were murdering people in masses.

Corpses. Walking corpses.

It was too late to be an April Fool's joke and far too early to be some kind of Halloween trick. Daryl had put down the beer he was drinking right then. He'd checked it on his phone. He'd called his brother, Merle, and, reaching his sister-in-law, Andrea, instead, because his brother was out working in the yard, he'd told her to check in on her family—just in case.

That was when the shit had hit really close to home.

The news told everyone in the tiny towns, like East River where the Dixons lived, to head toward Atlanta. Places were being shut down, under a nation-wide emergency, to allow everyone to evacuate to their specified evacuation zones. Resources were being pumped to those given locations. Daryl and his family were in East River, and their zone was Atlanta. They were putting up emergency shelters to try and keep the population safe until the CDC could figure out what was going on, and the government could come up with a better plan for how to contain whatever this was.

Daryl's sister-in-law had found her little sister, Amy, running down the road that her parents lived on, screaming and crying, about a half a mile before she reached her parents' house. She'd barely pulled the car off the road before she'd called Daryl's older brother, Merle, to come and meet her. She didn't know what was going on, and Amy was too hysterical to communicate with her rationally.

Andrea's first thought was that Amy had gotten into some of the shit that Merle sometimes took if he fell off the wagon. That's what she told Daryl, later. That hadn't been the case, though, and by the grace of God, Merle had been in his right mind. He'd come directly there when Andrea had expressed that she was truly terrified, and he'd gone with her to her parents' house to investigate whether or not what Amy said was true.

It was better that Merle was clean because, if he hadn't been, it wasn't even a guarantee that the police would have believed them when they called to report that there were two corpses roaming freely inside the house—and that their youngest daughter had found them like that when one of them had thrown themselves against the glass window in the door, scaring the shit out of her when she'd gotten home from spending the night with a friend.

The Dixons didn't always have the best track record with the police, but they'd listened to what Merle had to say, and they'd come out to the house, especially in light of everything that was going on. The police had handled the situation. They'd offered their condolences to Andrea and Amy, forbidden any of them to go near the house when they'd promised that none of them had opened the door, and they'd wrapped the whole damned house in "Crime Scene" tape to be dealt with later. The corpses, it seemed were being handled by a higher power than local authorities.

They'd advised Merle to take his family and get to Atlanta—as everyone was supposed to be doing—as quickly as possible. That was the only way, they said, that anyone could ultimately guarantee their safety. Merle would do everything he could to try and guarantee the safety of his family.

The most important thing to Dixons was family.

On the whole, life had been hard—in one way or another—for every damned one of them. Each of them had more emotional baggage than they would have had physical baggage if they'd packed up every single thing they owned. None of them pretended to be perfect.

Dixons didn't require perfection.

Really, they only required, of each other, that they wake up each day and try to be a little bit better than they'd been the day before—even if they failed more often than they succeeded. None of them required the blind belief that their loved ones lacked flaws. Every single one of them had a pretty decent dose of realism.

Dixons required forgiveness, and they required loyalty, but they all offered it in return.

"He shouldn't have even brought that thing," Amy mused. "It's loud and they said that the people that were—like that? They said they could hear things. Sounds. They could follow sounds, and they could see things. He's putting Andrea in danger."

"I reckon it was Andrea that made her choice to get on there with him," Daryl said. "Merle wasn't gonna leave the bike any damn way." Daryl rolled down the window, lit a cigarette, and hung his arm out the window to stop Amy from bitching before she even got an idea to do so.

Amy Harrison wasn't his most favorite person in the world. She was twelve years Andrea's junior, and that made her twelve years Daryl's junior. She was twenty-five, and she'd been spoiled all her life so that you would never know she was as old as she was. There had always been a certain amount of drama in Andrea's life surrounding Amy—and, therefore, there had been a certain amount of drama in Merle's life, and Daryl's by extension, surrounding the young girl.

Still, she was Andrea's sister, and that made her family. And, to Dixons, family meant everything—no matter how dysfunctional it might be, at times.

Back in East River, as soon as Merle and Andrea had gotten away from her parents' house with Amy, they'd called Daryl and gone back to their place.

Daryl hadn't asked too many questions, and he hadn't wasted too much time wondering what things meant or what they ought to do about this, that, or the other. Nothing really mattered to him except keeping his family safe and, if taking them to Atlanta was what was going to keep them safe, they were going to Atlanta.

He'd told Carol, his wife, to pack for the three of them, and he'd set about packing some gear for them while she'd gathered clothes, food, and personal items for both of them and their daughter, Sophia.

Carol was amazing at shit like that. She just knew how to pack and make it look effortless. She'd packed the back of their truck right up like they were going camping, and she'd kept Sophia calm the whole time she was doing it. They were going on a trip, and it was all going to be fine. They were all going together. They would stay together at all times. Nothing was going to happen to any of them, and they were all going to be just fine. It was an adventure, really. At least that's how Carol had painted it all up for the ten-year-old.

When they'd gotten to Merle and Andrea's house, Carol had even helped Andrea get her car packed, since Andrea was clearly in shock. Carol had helped her decide what food was best to take, and she'd helped her make everything fit into the back of the car as neatly as if Mary Poppins had packed it.

For a few moments, standing out in the yard with his brother while Carol and Andrea got everything ready to go, Daryl had started to believe exactly what they'd told Sophia—it was all going to be all right and this was nothing more than a Dixon family adventure.

They'd left East River with Merle on his bike, Daryl and his family in their truck, and Andrea in her car with Amy. It had been smooth driving for a little bit, but then traffic had slowly started to pick up. Daryl wouldn't have thought too much about it, really. Travelling down I-20, toward Atlanta, usually meant you were going to run into some traffic. It was only the fact that he saw more and more cars pulling trailers and carrying large amounts of luggage that had led Daryl to accept that they weren't the only ones heeding the government warnings to head toward Atlanta.

They'd kept the radio playing low, so that they could hear the announcements being put out on local channels, but Carol had kept morale high by engaging Sophia in conversation, alphabet games, and games of I-Spy.

When traffic had come to a complete stop, and remained that way for a while, Daryl had gotten out to stretch his legs and see what was going on. He'd invited Carol and Sophia to do the same, but he'd advised them to stay close. He recognized people all around them. Despite the fact that there were people from all over Georgia, and possibly from other surrounding states, there were plenty of people from East River and other small, surrounding towns that had slipped right into the flow of traffic before they'd been stopped with Atlanta on the horizon.

Nobody knew what the hell was going on anymore than Daryl or his family.

Some people on the road shared stories of coming into contact with the Walkers—what Daryl had chosen to call the ambling corpses. There were stories of encounters that were too close for comfort. Everyone assumed that the crowded road and stand-still traffic was probably owing to the government blocking off the roads leading into the city. If they were establishing shelters, they would want to do so without the crowd getting too out of control or rowdy. They would, more than likely, settle in the Atlanta natives before they started ushering in others and handling things in the most organized way possible.

Everyone was in pretty good spirits, really, all things considered.

They greeted some of their old neighbors, and they got to know some of their new traffic-jam neighbors. As the day wore on toward night, people shared food, and a few of them worked to get small fires burning on the side of the road to allow for some simple cooking.

They all accepted that they were likely to spend the night out there, with the traffic forever growing behind them and not moving in front of them, before the authorities were ready to open Atlanta to everyone.

Sophia had been sleeping in the backseat of Andrea's car, where she could stretch out the best, and Amy had been sleeping in the backseat of the truck, which was almost as comfortable, when the chaos had really begun.

Andrea, Merle, Carol, and Daryl had all camped out on the road around their vehicles. There was nothing to do, so they simply sat together in silence and waited until they were tired enough that sleeping cramped in the cars was preferable to sitting awake outside. It really hadn't been a bad night. The weather was clear and, for the first time in what Daryl imagined was a long time, Atlanta was dark. They could see the stars.

It was Merle that had remarked on the novelty of being able to see the stars, so close outside of Atlanta, just before Andrea had commented on the oddity of the fireworks.

This didn't seem like the time to shoot fireworks, she'd said. Yet, still, the sky had lit up—again, and again, and again—in bursts of bright orange light.

Daryl would never forget the distant screaming. He'd never forget how it moved closer to them, like it was being carried on waves, as people ran down the interstate screaming about everything that was happening. They were bombing Atlanta. The helicopters flying overhead weren't bringing supplies, they were bringing chemical bombs.

With hardly any communication, they'd all ended up somewhere. They'd ended up in the same positions they were in this morning. Carol had gone to get Sophia, and she'd driven Andrea's car. Daryl had gotten in the truck with Amy. Andrea had crawled on the back of Merle's bike.

Merle rode ahead enough to see what there was to see, and he doubled back to get Daryl. Daryl cleared the way to make it to the median with Carol behind him—waving the pistol out of his glovebox only once at one asshole that had somewhat threatened to cut her off – and he'd followed Merle to put distance between themselves and the city.

Merle wasn't always the most dependable person, especially not when he was off the proverbial wagon and looking for artificial comfort for his mind, but when he was dependable, Merle Dixon was the most dependable asshole that had ever lived.

With his head clear, his wife on the back of his bike, his whole family behind him, and the need for survival—for all of them—burning in his gut, Merle Dixon was the most dependable that he was ever going to be. Daryl trusted him, so he followed him, explaining to Amy what was going on when she woke up and crawled into the front seat.

The rock quarries were far enough away, and secluded enough, that they would be safe there from the government—at least for a while. Merle had slowed, circled around, and spoken to Daryl through the window only long enough to let him know the plan. Then, he'd ridden down to the vehicles behind them—a few assholes that figured they had nothing else to lose, perhaps, and would follow the asshole on the motorcycle—to let them know what was going on, as well. He'd come back to lead the pack, and Daryl had let the squad car in front of him that had been determined, for whatever reason, that he needed to be up front, too.

They were off main roads, now, and following rough little side roads that only those that knew the area decently well would know about. Daryl and Merle had hunted up there hundred times. They'd brought their families to camp at least twice since Daryl and Carol had started seeing each other. Merle knew right where they were going. Soon, they'd be at a good spot—with decent food to be found, enough water for all their needs, and enough concealment that the government would be unlikely to notice them or worry about them.

They could stay there indefinitely. They'd have a safe place to figure out what the hell was going on and to regroup. Whoever the hell wanted to follow them was welcomed.

None of it really mattered to Daryl—and he knew Merle felt the same—as long as their little family unit was fine.

Whatever the hell the future brought; they'd deal with it—the Dixon way.

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AN: I hope you enjoyed our start!

Don't forget to let me know what you think!