User:ChocoholicBec

Time and the stresses of being sane in an insane city has taken their toll on this young woman. She looks tired to the bone, her blue dress almost matching the shadows beneath her eyes. Her sensible leather shoes are scuffed, and her white doctor's coat has an old bloodstain above her heart which hasn't quite washed out.
Her long red hair is plaited neatly away from her face, the braid tied off with a torn black ribbon.
She walks quickly, but favours her left leg, as though some long-ago injury still pains her.
Her once-lovely face is careworn and harried, with premature lines and one long white scar down her cheek marring her classical beauty.
Her dark eyes are haunted and red-rimmed, but have a spark of humour in them.
Her lips, too, have the hint of a smile even when there is nothing left to smile about.
She looks to have once had a curvaceous figure, but she is now very slim, almost too slim, her ribs protruding.

---

She had once had the opportunity to escape this hell.

She had moved from Adelaide to Malton when she was five. Her parents had divorced, and her mother wanted to be at least a continent away from her father. Rebecca, then called Becky, came with her.
Her life was mostly ordinary, apart from that. She had a cat, a mother, a step-father and her half-brother Jeremy, born when she was ten. She also had two step-sisters her age back in Australia, Esmeralda and Cassandra.
She loved learning, and skipped two years of school, graduating age sixteen with excellent marks. She decided she wanted to become a doctor.

She was seventeen when the first reports of zombies came. The Dead Who Won't Stay Dead, the newspapers called them, or The Living Corpses. She didn't much care - she had just been accepted into medical school, regardless of her age, and was too excited about it to worry about monsters from childhood nightmares.
Her mother and step-father were scared. Her mother was pregnant again, and they decided to move somewhere safer, until the reports of zombies stopped. Becky didn't go with them. Instead, she moved into a small flat in New Arkham, sharing with her best friends from high school, Roseanne and Lauren, and paying her rent by working as a waitress at an all-night cafe.
After a few months, Roseanne and Becky got in a vicious fight (involving copious amounts of both swearing and insults) and Roseanne left to stay with her boyfriend.

Then the zombies began getting closer. And closer.
Lauren left. The cafe that Becky had been working in closed down as, one by one, its customers and staff left for safer places.
It didn't matter. The university, in a last-ditch effort to attract more students as the zombie plague grew, was offering free, zombie-proof accommodation to all students.

It didn't stay zombie-proof for long.

So she ran. She hid out in hospitals when she could, so that she could use her small amount of training to the best of her ability, but also anywhere else that was safe. She stopped calling herself Becky, too. Instead, she started introducing herself as Bec - it was so much easier to yell a one-syllable name. Then she added 'Chocoholic' to the front for an extra nickname. Zombies weren't the only dangers out there. When people didn't know who you were, it was easier to trust them in this world gone mad.
ChocoholicBec.

Her mother rang her once, while she was running around looking for a place to sleep for the night.
"Becky?" she asked. "Sweetheart, I heard on the news that they're going to put a quarantine around Malton tomorrow."
"Who are 'they', Mum?"
She didn't answer that. "Becky, if you leave now, you'll be okay. Becky, please!"
"Mum," she said. "I haven't got time to talk right now, but I'm staying here. This is my home. I'll call you soon. I love-"
The phone cut off.
She never talked to her mother again.

So she ran some more.

She quickly learned how to scale buildings, how to climb inside a locked and barricaded safehouse, how to make her first aid kit last as long as possible.
How to kill.
How to die.

She was maybe seventeen-and-a-half when she died. An ill-timed jump made her fall three storeys to the ground, leaving her seriously injured, her right leg badly broken and crumpled uselessly beneath her and a shard of glass embedded in her cheekbone. She crawled along the street, hoping that she could find a building not too heavily barricaded to enter, but collapsed before she could.
A stray zombie found her lying there unconscious and killed her.
She awoke a day later, the pain in her leg gone and a strange fuzziness in her head telling her that all was not well. She looked down at her body, noticing the strange greenish and mottled colour of her skin, the stench of rotting meat and the dried blood covering her body. She slowly realised what had happened.
I am dead.
Then there was only one thought in her head as she slowly shambled along, looking for a Necrotech sign.
I want to live.

She managed to make it to what was called a 'revive point', where those with the know-how and the technology could, literally, bring the dead back to life.
The walking dead, that is.
She stood there for a day and a night, swaying as she waited for somebody, anybody to help her.
Then somebody came.
He injected her in the back of her neck with some strange, glistening substance. She collapsed, seemingly dead, while the liquid coursed through her veins. As it went, it healed, until the muscles were pink and healthy and the skin bright and smooth, as if she had only died a second before.
When she regained consciousness, she saw someone standing above her. Her eyes were blurry and she couldn't see his face, but she noticed that he was wearing a doctor's coat with some kind of emblem on the pocket.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Bec. I'm Bec. ChocoholicBec."
He reached out a hand to her. "Are you okay, Bec?"
She took it and stood up, wobbling and wincing as her broken leg touched the ground. "No. No, I'm not." Her voice cracked and she started to cry. "My leg's broken, and I want my mum, and I want to go ho-ome!" Perhaps the worst part was that she didn't know where home was any more.
"There, there," he soothed, hugging her gently. "I'm sure the quarantine will be lifted soon, and you'll be able to go home to your mum. You look awfully young to be wandering Malton on your own. Don't you have some kind of group you belong to?"
"N-no," she sobbed. "I had a few friends from medical school who I was with, but they're dead now, they're all dead."
"I'm sorry."
"That's okay. It's not your fault."

She leaned on his shoulder, and they hobbled along and to a desolate-looking yellow-brick building with a curved roof, with 'Tikhon General Hospital' in metal letters (some of which had fallen off or gone rusty) and 'FAKs and cheesy poofs inside!' spraypainted across the walls.
"So, you said you were a med student?"
"Yeah." She sniffled and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. "I was in first year med school when all this-" (she waved her hand around) "-happened."
The man knocked on the door rhythmically. A voice yelled out from inside, "Go up the drainpipe, you know where it is. If you don't know where it is, then go away!"
"Elbert, it's just me. I've got an injured survivor here, says she's a med student."
"Well, that changes everything!" A middle-aged man, with a mop in one hand and a bag of Cheesy Poofs in the other, appeared at the door and opened it, ushering them in. "Welcome to Tikhon Medical, youngster. I'm Elbert Gray. There are Cheesy Poofs in the basement, hot showers on the next floor, don't get any mud on the floor 'cos I just cleaned it, and if you see a zombie in a straitjacket with a target painted on his chest, don't kill him, he's one of us."

Bec blinked.

"Oh, poor love, she's hurt. And exhausted, I bet." A tall red-headed woman appeared next to Elbert. "I'm Gavina." She shut the door behind them and shooed the man who had helped her and the other man, Elbert, away. "Here, I've got a first-aid kit." She bandaged the lesser injuries, dabbing some alcohol on the bites and scratches first, before clucking her tongue over Bec's broken leg. "Monk?" she yelled. "Chelsea? I think she might need surgery. Do we have any anaesthetic left or will we have to ply her with alcohol until she falls asleep?"
A woman in an odd mishmash of clothes, including a nurse's cap, bustled up, along with a man in shorts, a hoodie and a baseball cap.
"Yes," said the man, Monk, "that leg needs surgery, you're right. Chelsea, tell Target Zombie to get the ether for me, and if he inhales it all again I'll shoot him with a scalpel."

In almost no time at all, she woke up in a hospital bed, her leg painful, but straight and in a cast. Chelsea, the nurse was sitting next to her.
"You feeling okay?" the woman asked. "That was a nasty break. Took the doctor ages to get out all the little chips of bone. I'm Chelsea, by the way, Chelsea Dagger."
Bec nodded woozily. "Yeah, I'm okay, bit woozy. I'm Bec, ChocoholicBec."
"I'll call you Chocoholic. That okay?"
"Yes, all right."

And so it went. Bec stayed at the hospital. Her leg healed, but still hurt after the cast had been taken off, and the scar on her face healed white. In time, she joined Tikhon Medical, and tended to those who, like her, found the hospital and were in need of comfort and healing.

---

http://www.myspace.com/chocoholicbec
http://thenameless1387.livejournal.com

The real Rebecca is seventeen years old. She lives in Adelaide, Australia, and likes reading, writing, drawing, messing around on computers, cats, goldfish, and - of course - chocolate.