The hunting cabin appeared through the morning mist like a ghost of the old world. It was small—barely more than a single room of weathered cedar and a slanted porch—but to Rowan, it was a fortress. Tucked into a dense hollow far from any paved roads, it was exactly what she needed: a place where the world couldn't find her, and where she didn't have to be anything for anyone.
Inside, the air was stale, smelling of pine resin and old dust. But in a locked locker behind the kitchen counter, she found her salvation. A compound bow, its limbs sleek and black, sat nestled alongside a quiver of carbon-fiber arrows.
She pulled the string back, her new heart beating with a steady, powerful rhythm. In her past life, the mere weight of the bow would have left her breathless. Now, her muscles moved with a terrifying, efficient grace.
The next two weeks became a repeat of sweat and silence.
Rowan turned the clearing in front of the cabin into a shooting range. Every morning, before the mist had even burned off the trees, she was out there. Thwip. Thunk. The sound of the arrow burying itself into a burlap sack stuffed with dried leaves became the heartbeat of her new life.
She practiced until her fingers were raw and her shoulders ached. She learned how to compensate for the wind, how to hold her breath at the peak of the draw, and how to ignore the blue Apex Feed screen that flickered in her peripheral vision.
[SKILL PROGRESSION]: Archery Level 3 (Intermediate)
Viewer Tip:"Finally! A real weapon. Now go hunt some biters, it's getting boring watching you shoot straw."
Rowan ignored them. She wasn't training for the viewers. She was training so that the next time she tasted blood in her mouth, it wouldn't be because she was the one being pinned to the ground.
Between training sessions, she scavenged. She found old cans of peaches and a rusted but functional wood-burning stove in a nearby shed. She spent her evenings reinforcing the cabin, nailing boards over the lower windows and clearing the brush around the perimeter so nothing could sneak up on her.
Sometimes, in the quiet of the evening when the forest was still, she would sit on the porch and forget. For a few fleeting minutes, the TWD universe didn't exist. There were no monsters, no Rick Grimes, no tragic scripts. It was just a girl, a cabin, and the woods.
But then the sadness would hit—a cold, heavy wave. She thought of the hospital room she'd left behind and the peace she'd been denied. She thought of Mrs. Gable's lavender scent fading from the flannel shirt.
She wasn't okay. Not yet. She was still a woman mourning her own death while trying to live a life she never asked for.
But as she looked at the bow leaning against the doorframe, Rowan felt the uncertainty of the camp begin to harden into something else. She wasn't just a sick girl anymore. She was a predator in the making.
"I'm not ready for the world yet," she whispered to the darkening trees. "But when I am, it won't be ready for me."
Rowan discovered that the cabin's previous owner hadn't just been a hunter; they had been a survivalist.
On a dust-choked shelf above the stone fireplace, she found a small collection of weathered paperbacks. Their spines were cracked, and the pages were yellowed with age, but to Rowan, they were more valuable than a crate of ammunition. Titles like The Forager's Harvest, Field Dressing and Survival, and North American Freshwater Fishing became her new bibles.
In the hours when her muscles were too exhausted to pull the bowstring, she sat on the porch with a book propped on her knees, memorizing the shape of edible tubers and the dangerous mimicry of poisonous mushrooms.
She practiced the patient, silent art of setting wire snares in the undergrowth, a grim necessity because a wire loop was a whisper while a gunshot was a dinner bell for the dead. Down by the creek, she followed the hand-drawn diagrams to untangle old fishing lines, learning to read the ripples of the water to find where the trout hid in the shadows.
Her study extended into nature's pharmacy, where she obsessed over identifying willow bark for fever and yarrow for stanching wounds. The fear of her old helplessness—the phantom ache of the heart patient she used to be—drove her to hoard this knowledge like gold. While the Apex Feed flickered in her vision with complaints from viewers who found her education "low excitement," Rowan remained anchored in the domesticity of survival. She learned the grounding process of preserving meat and repairing the cabin's cedar walls, finding that every new skill she mastered acted as a nail in the coffin of the girl she used to be.
After days of good weather the sky finally broke, turning the forest into a sodden, grey tomb. For three days, a relentless pouring hammered against the cabin's cedar shingles, the sound like a thousand fingers tapping for entry. Inside, the air turned cold and damp, smelling of woodsmoke and the wet wool of Mrs. Gable's flannel shirt.
Rowan was trapped. She paced the small floorboards, her new heart drumming with a restless, frantic energy. The silence of the woods, which had once been her sanctuary, now felt like a vacuum. Without the daily rhythm of archery and foraging, her mind became a dangerous place.
She overthought the "script." In her head, she traced the movements of Rick Grimes, the downfall of the farm, and the bloody rise of the Governor. She knew exactly where the death traps were, and the knowledge felt like a curse. Every time the wind howled through the eaves, she imagined it was the sound of a distant horde or the engines of a raiding party. The more she learned to survive, the more she realized how much she had to lose. She wasn't just a spectator anymore; she was a variable, and variables had a habit of being eliminated.
By the fourth morning, the rain finally tapered off into a thick, clinging mist. The cabin felt too small, its walls closing in on her with the weight of her own paranoia. She needed to move. She needed to prove she was still the hunter, not the hunted.
Rowan ventured further than she ever had before, crossing the ridge that marked the boundary of her known world. At the edge of a forgotten county road, she found a two-story farmhouse, its white paint peeling like dead skin. The silence around it was heavy, expectant.
She moved through the house like a shadow, her bow gripped tight. She was looking for salt, batteries, maybe a heavy coat—anything to justify the trek. But as she reached the kitchen, the air changed. The smell of woodsmoke was fresh. A discarded can of beans sat on the counter, the metal still bright and unrusted.
Human activity.
Panic flared in her chest—the old, cold prickle of the hospital bed. Her first instinct was to run, to vanish back into the trees before the "story" caught up to her. She didn't want allies. Allies were just people who eventually turned into monsters.
She turned to slip out trough the door, her steps ghost-quiet on the linoleum. She reached the door and stepped out into the damp afternoon air, only to freeze.
"Well, look at what the rain washed out," a gravelly voice rasped from the shadows of the porch.
Rowan whirled, reaching for an arrow, but the sharp snick of a hammer cocking on a revolver stopped her cold. Three men stepped out from the corners of the house. They weren't soldiers, and they weren't the heroes from the show. They were rough, their clothes caked in filth and their eyes bright with a hungry, predatory light.
The Apex Feed in her vision began to pulse a frantic, neon red.
[HIGH-STAKES ENCOUNTER DETECTED]
Current Viewers:12,400 (Trending!)
Chat 402: "Finally! Kill or be killed! Don't let them take the bow!"
Rowan didn't look at the screen. She looked at the man in front of her, the one with the gun pointed at her heart. The woods were silent now, the rain gone, leaving her alone in the dirt with the very thing she had tried so hard to outrun.