Post by Deleted on Jun 3, 2015 7:18:27 GMT -5
Full Name:
Nancy Marie Beckett
Aliases:
‘Nance’
Avatar Photo:
imgur.com/z37egG6.jpg
Age:
18
Race:
Caucasian
Gender:
Female
Alignment:
Chaotic Neutral
Occupation (studies and job before the outbreak):
High-school Drop-out/ Mechanic
Hometown (city, state, country):
Still Water, West Virginia, USA
Relationships (relatives, friends,...):
Adam Beckett (father, deceased)
Rose Marie Beckett (mother, deceased)
Bobby-Ray Beckett (brother, alive, location unknown)
Weapons (currently in possession):
Remington Model 770
1 x 300 Win Mag
2 x 308 Win
13” Bowie knife
Glock 22
1 x 40. S&W
Items (clothing, backpacks, first-aid kits, etc...):
1x Camping backpack (approx. 55 litre)
3x tins of canned food
2 x Bottles of water
1 x half-empty First Aid Kit
1 x bottle Oxycontin (23 pills)
Change of shirt, some underwear
1 x Roll of duct tape
1 x Spool of climbing static rope (100m)
Mode of transportation:
1979 Chevy Silverado 4x4 with camper shell (brown/white) (http://imgur.com/xzBCuZQ.jpg)
List 3 or more good personality traits:
Resilient
Resourceful
Pragmatic
Self-Reliant
List 3 or more bad personality traits:
Anti-social
Self-loathing
Stubborn
Bad Temper
List 3 strengths:
Excellent marksman
Mechanic skills
Hard Worker
List 3 flaws:
Diminished hearing/sight
Volatile
Physically weak
Describe your character's life before the Apocalypse:
Nancy was born and raised in the small mining town of Still Water, West Virigina, nestled into the Appalachian mountains. She had one older brother, Bobby-Ray, who was three years her senior.
Her father, Adam, was the owner and head mechanic of the only auto garage in town, but turned to alcohol to cope after his wife, Rose, was killed in a car accident when Nancy was three years old. Soon after he lost his job in the mines and began mixing his liquor with backyard meth supplied by a cook on the outskirts of town. From there he quickly became a wrecked shell of a man.
As a result, Bobby-Ray became a father figure to his little sister and the two siblings learned to be independent and raise themselves. Nancy idolized her older brother who took her hunting, taught her how to shoot a rifle and skin a deer.
As the family business began slipping under the neglect of Adam’s substance abuse he pressured Bobby-Ray to follow in his footsteps, but the teenager rebelled. Their relationship deteriorated into physical abuse as Adam resorted to beating his son out of frustration and Nancy was always the one to help tend Bobby-Ray’s split lip or bruised ribs in the aftermath.
She began to help out in the garage instead, hoping to take the pressure off Bobby-Ray and assuage some of the arguments, which worked for a while, until Bobby began to resent their father for making Nancy feel obligated to do the work to keep the peace. It merely proved to be one more thing for them to argue about.
Nancy did enjoy working in the garage however and developed a fondness for mechanics from a young age. By the time she was thirteen she could strip down the Hemi engine in their old truck and put it back together. Adam took advantage of her passion and leaned on his daughter more heavily as she got older, which infuriated her protective brother, who could see Nancy’s school and friends suffering.
When she was sixteen, Bobby-Ray and Adam had the worst fight yet when Bobby-Ray found his father’s meth stash and flushed it down the toilet, which resulted in the town sheriff being called in the middle of the night after Adam tried to stab him. Afterwards, Adam Beckett threw his son out of the house and swore to shoot him if he ever caught the boy around town again.
Nancy was heartbroken as she said goodbye to Bobby-Ray, who promised to keep in contact with her and come back when he had his life sorted out. Bobby-Ray moved to Morgantown and tried to find work, ending up joining the US Army to earn money.
Meanwhile, Nancy was left to look after Adam and try to keep the business afloat as debts started building up. She was forced to drop out of school before graduation to work in the garage full time after Adam nearly overdosed and she struggled to keep her head above water until her brother came for her…
What happened to your character on Outbreak Day?:
It took longer for the dead to reach Still Water, given its isolated location and reports from outlying residents began to crop up. It started with rumours that a group of local teenagers were running around the woods at night playing a joke, but soon people began to go missing.
One night Nancy heard her father leave, the screen door creaking behind him as he tried to creep down the stairs and she knew he was going to see Greg, the cook outside of town who supplied him with rocks. She tossed and turned most of the night, resolved to confront him yet again when he arrived home and dispose of the stash.
It was not until just before dawn she heard someone crashing around the old cars behind the house and assumed her father was back, full of meth and in the middle of another episode.
Taking her rifle out with her to investigate, Nancy wandered out into the frozen backyard, ready to confront her father only to stumble into her first encounter with one of the dead.
Adam Beckett had never made it back to the garage alive.
His savaged corpse flailed against one of the rusted car hulls, his left leg completely torn off and his body mutilated by vicious bites and torn flesh. At first Nancy moved to help her father, shocked by his injuries, but when Adam tried to attack her she reacted on instinct and shot him in the chest at point blank range. And as she sat sobbing next to his body, trying to make sense of what had happened, she was confronted with her ‘dead’ father lunging at her a second time!
Her next shot put the muzzle of the rifle right against his forehead when she pulled the trigger and this time Adam did not move again…
For a while, Nancy wrestled with the reality of the scuffle, trying to make sense of it. She could not understand what had happened to Adam, let alone how he had survived having his chest blown open. But even as she collapsed in the cold grass, she learned it was not just her father…
More corpses had been drawn by her shots, wandering from the trees towards the garage, some of them townspeople she recognised. Forced to flee, Nancy got in their truck and headed for the middle of town to find the sheriff. What she discovered as she drove through the quiet streets of Still Water were more dead people shambling from houses and across the road.
By the time night fell she had joined what was left of the town’s survivors inside the police station, barricaded into the small brick building listening to the howls and moans of people she had once known as they fought to break inside. Sheriff Clarke was among them, the only law man left in Still Water was a young deputy named Logan and even Nancy could see he was scared out of his wits.
The siege lasted for two days as their food and water dwindled and the situation became desperate while they waited for help…
It finally came when the sound of trucks roared into the middle of town. A few officers from Camp Dawson had gone AWOL and followed Bobby-Ray when he rushed back to his hometown to save his little sister. Between them, they managed to clear away the cluster blocking the doors and broke inside.
Nancy threw herself into her brother’s arms, sobbing and weak, as Bobby-Ray scooped her up and carried her to the truck, promising he would never leave her again. With more of the dead moving towards the station, they began to become overrun as they tried to evacuate the survivors and a few were taken by the snatching hands and rotten teeth of the horde. By the time they left town, there were only eight, including the army personnel…
Describe your character's life after the Apocalypse:
Soon after escaping Still Water, the group learned the fate of those who were bitten: they lost another survivor when he succumbed to a wound he had hidden on his leg and after watching his body try to pick itself up to attack those witnessing the horror, he was quickly put down. His death taught all present a deadly lesson- that even a scratch from the dead could kill.
As they wound their way down through the Cumberland Mountains, Bobby-Ray began to relentlessly drill Nancy with shooting practise and survival lessons, fearing the same fate would befall her if they weren’t careful.
For a month the group scavenged and worked their way south through West Virginia, growing smaller as they lost members to confrontations with other survivors, the Dead and the cold as winter began to fall in earnest.
It was just outside a small town near Hillsboro that they encountered their worst threat. The night was stormy and the weather was bad, but they were desperate for food so Nancy, Bobby-Ray and a fellow survivor, Kate, braved the heavy rain to head in and search the stores.
Nancy resented Kate for her close relationship with her brother, the two fellow recruits forming a friendship and romantic interest at Camp Dawson. Despite Kate’s best efforts, Nancy was still cool towards her, jealous of sharing her brother’s attention with the woman.
In the middle of the storm they were attacked by a group of bandits, but the trio escaped and fled to their truck. They were chased onto a deserted road as they tried to lose the pursuers in the storm and Bobby-Ray hit a patch of black ice, sending the truck skidding, rolling a number of times into a ditch.
The truck came to rest on its battered roof as gas began to pour from the shattered undercarriage into the cabin. Nancy had hit her head and broken her leg in the backseat, barely conscious through the pain as Bobby-Ray fought to get himself loose first. Kate was tangled in her seatbelt and struggled with his help to get loose even as the marauders opened fire on the vehicle.
Bobby-Ray pushed Kate out the other side of the broken door, trying to help his sister next, but a stray bullet hit him in the shoulder and shattered his rotator cuff. As he struggled through the pain, choking on gas fumes, a shot from their attackers suddenly ignited the engine and the truck began to become consumed by flames.
Kate took action, dragging Bobby-Ray out even as he fought her, kicking and hollering. He broke free of her outside the truck and despite the hail of bullets rushed back to try to get the back door open even as Nancy came to, panicking at the heat from the flames. He looked into her terrified eyes through the cracked window, watching the smoke and fire fill the car and scrabbled in the rain to get her out. It seemed futile; in minutes the truck was fully ablaze and Nancy had begun screaming in pain. The bandits were surrounding the truck and Kate was begging Bobby-Ray to go. She screamed at him that Nancy was as good as dead and they had to run.
When he looked into Kate’s eyes, seeing her fear and back at the burning truck, he could no longer make out his sister through the smoke and fire. His gut twisted at the sound of her cries as he made his decision: he fled with Kate into the trees as the raiders went after them, dodging their shots and trying to block out the dying calls of Nancy chasing him through the storm…
Even as Bobby-Ray left her, Nancy fought, flailing as the fire burnt her legs and climbed her body. It was only with sheer adrenaline that she managed to finally break her window and claw her way out of the wreck. Collapsing into the mud, she passed out, expecting to die alone...
Over the following week Nancy experienced a hellish afterlife as she passed in and out of consciousness, faces and voices brushing past her through pain, nausea and fever. It seemed like years before she finally opened her eyes on an overcast day and was lucid enough to realise she was laying in a little bed with a tranquil, green feild outside the window…
A retired teacher named Jack owned the farm which was situated near the crash site. He had investigated the fire and gunshots that night to find Nancy badly burned, but still breathing. Taking her back to his house, his wife Helen tried her best to treat the girl. Helen had been a nurse for over forty years at the nearby hospital and although she had her doubts about her chances of survival, she tried her best to nurse the girl.
Helen explained that Nancy had suffered third degree burns to her legs and most of her body. She had lost the use of her left eye and her face had been badly affected; her left ear was melted off, along with most her hair on that side. Her chest, left arm and both her hands and forearms had been soaked in gas and burned. Her lower half was the worst, with the burns on her legs extending into the muscle and covering her completely from toe to thigh.
Nancy was nearly unable to speak, croaking out single words through a raw throat. Helen explained her airways had been burned by the smoke and she would have scaring on her lungs and larynx as well. She could not predict if her voice would return.
It took four months for the bandages to come off. And in that time Jack had to scavenge medical supplies from a local clinic such as painkillers and IV fluids to ensure her survival and antibiotics to treat her when she developed infections through the open wounds. Nancy hoped Bobby-Ray would come back to look for her, but as several months passed, she knew he had abandoned her.
Nancy developed a hatred for looking at her reflection from an early point. Her once long, soft blonde hair had all been shorn off to treat the burns to her skull and when she tried to grow it back it came out grey and patchy, hanging thin and lank over the rippled scars wrapping the left side of her head. She often reached to touch her left ear only to remember it was gone, replaced with only a small, useless hole in the melted flesh. She discovered she could not hear on that side, just as she could not see from the clouded, vacant eye peeking out from under the drooped ridge where her eyebrow had once been.
She hated the tight feeling of her skin, clawing at it when she bathed, staring down the length of her body at the horrific keloid texture of her legs. She experimented with hitting them with various things like books and shoes, discovering she was numb in many places where the fire had eaten into her muscles. One foot was completely numb and both her thighs felt like lumps of rubber. She even went as far as to stick a steak knife into her right leg one evening to test the extent of the ruined nerves, much to Helen’s horror.
Her voice came back slowly, but sounded as alien to her as the reflection in the mirror; her familiar feminine alto was gone, replaced by a sandpaper husky whisper that hardly carried her native accent.
Just as Nancy was struggling to come to terms with all these changes, hating the body she now found herself trapped in, Helen began to visit her less and less…
Nancy noticed Jack tending to her needs more as the weeks rolled on, until finally he admitted that Helen had been diagnosed with breast cancer just over a year before the outbreak. It was advanced and aggressive and there was nothing they could do.
Nancy took it upon herself to push her recovery, ignoring Jack’s pleas to ‘take it easy’ as she tried to help around the farm while Helen spent growing hours in bed. She was stubborn and determined, occupying herself with small chores at first such as cooking or washing dishes, until finally she began to venture outside.
Jack found her pawing over his old Chevy Silverado in the garage one morning and discovered the girl’s love of engines. He told her if she could fix it, she could have it and the truck became Nancy’s focus during her recuperation.
She started venturing further out from the house to help with gathering supplies, this time for Helen as the woman became bed ridden and no longer left her room. Jack’s mood grew quiet and depressed as he knew the end was coming for his wife and Nancy felt uncomfortable, spending most of her time with the old truck.
The girl was delighted when she found a Remington 770 during one of her supply hunts, including the ammunition, looted from a dead hunter and began to practise her shooting on a daily basis. Her talent with a rifle had not diminished, but her aim took some adjusting with the loss of her twenty-twenty vision. None the less she was determined to be better than she had ever been under her brother’s instruction and learned to compensate.
It was near the end of winter, just over a year after Nancy had been brought to their home, that Helen passed away. The girl helped Jack dig her grave behind the farmhouse in silence and laid flowers from their garden there. It was cruel that the woman should be able to pull Nancy back from the brink of death only to succumb herself. Jack became withdrawn and talked less and less. Still, Nancy never saw it coming… until the gunshot went off one night.
Nancy raced in from the garage and found that Jack had shot himself in the head, laid out on the bed where Helen had died. She was furious that he had chosen to leave her like that, using her anger to push away the grief.
It took her two days to dig his grave on her own and she buried him next to Helen. The next day she had gathered all the supplies from the house she could, loaded them into the back of the Chevy and boarded the farmhouse up. Then she drove away and did not look back.
Ever since leaving the farm, Nancy has been wandering from one area to the next, keeping to herself as much as possible. She secretly hopes to find some sign of Bobby-Ray, but at the same time she hates herself for getting her hopes up.
With her scarred face, she avoids groups of people as much as possible- their staring makes her sick to the stomach. She loathes her appearance and roughed voice, preferring to be left alone to make her own way in the apocalypse…
Nancy Marie Beckett
Aliases:
‘Nance’
Avatar Photo:
imgur.com/z37egG6.jpg
Age:
18
Race:
Caucasian
Gender:
Female
Alignment:
Chaotic Neutral
Occupation (studies and job before the outbreak):
High-school Drop-out/ Mechanic
Hometown (city, state, country):
Still Water, West Virginia, USA
Relationships (relatives, friends,...):
Adam Beckett (father, deceased)
Rose Marie Beckett (mother, deceased)
Bobby-Ray Beckett (brother, alive, location unknown)
Weapons (currently in possession):
Remington Model 770
1 x 300 Win Mag
2 x 308 Win
13” Bowie knife
Glock 22
1 x 40. S&W
Items (clothing, backpacks, first-aid kits, etc...):
1x Camping backpack (approx. 55 litre)
3x tins of canned food
2 x Bottles of water
1 x half-empty First Aid Kit
1 x bottle Oxycontin (23 pills)
Change of shirt, some underwear
1 x Roll of duct tape
1 x Spool of climbing static rope (100m)
Mode of transportation:
1979 Chevy Silverado 4x4 with camper shell (brown/white) (http://imgur.com/xzBCuZQ.jpg)
List 3 or more good personality traits:
Resilient
Resourceful
Pragmatic
Self-Reliant
List 3 or more bad personality traits:
Anti-social
Self-loathing
Stubborn
Bad Temper
List 3 strengths:
Excellent marksman
Mechanic skills
Hard Worker
List 3 flaws:
Diminished hearing/sight
Volatile
Physically weak
Describe your character's life before the Apocalypse:
Nancy was born and raised in the small mining town of Still Water, West Virigina, nestled into the Appalachian mountains. She had one older brother, Bobby-Ray, who was three years her senior.
Her father, Adam, was the owner and head mechanic of the only auto garage in town, but turned to alcohol to cope after his wife, Rose, was killed in a car accident when Nancy was three years old. Soon after he lost his job in the mines and began mixing his liquor with backyard meth supplied by a cook on the outskirts of town. From there he quickly became a wrecked shell of a man.
As a result, Bobby-Ray became a father figure to his little sister and the two siblings learned to be independent and raise themselves. Nancy idolized her older brother who took her hunting, taught her how to shoot a rifle and skin a deer.
As the family business began slipping under the neglect of Adam’s substance abuse he pressured Bobby-Ray to follow in his footsteps, but the teenager rebelled. Their relationship deteriorated into physical abuse as Adam resorted to beating his son out of frustration and Nancy was always the one to help tend Bobby-Ray’s split lip or bruised ribs in the aftermath.
She began to help out in the garage instead, hoping to take the pressure off Bobby-Ray and assuage some of the arguments, which worked for a while, until Bobby began to resent their father for making Nancy feel obligated to do the work to keep the peace. It merely proved to be one more thing for them to argue about.
Nancy did enjoy working in the garage however and developed a fondness for mechanics from a young age. By the time she was thirteen she could strip down the Hemi engine in their old truck and put it back together. Adam took advantage of her passion and leaned on his daughter more heavily as she got older, which infuriated her protective brother, who could see Nancy’s school and friends suffering.
When she was sixteen, Bobby-Ray and Adam had the worst fight yet when Bobby-Ray found his father’s meth stash and flushed it down the toilet, which resulted in the town sheriff being called in the middle of the night after Adam tried to stab him. Afterwards, Adam Beckett threw his son out of the house and swore to shoot him if he ever caught the boy around town again.
Nancy was heartbroken as she said goodbye to Bobby-Ray, who promised to keep in contact with her and come back when he had his life sorted out. Bobby-Ray moved to Morgantown and tried to find work, ending up joining the US Army to earn money.
Meanwhile, Nancy was left to look after Adam and try to keep the business afloat as debts started building up. She was forced to drop out of school before graduation to work in the garage full time after Adam nearly overdosed and she struggled to keep her head above water until her brother came for her…
What happened to your character on Outbreak Day?:
It took longer for the dead to reach Still Water, given its isolated location and reports from outlying residents began to crop up. It started with rumours that a group of local teenagers were running around the woods at night playing a joke, but soon people began to go missing.
One night Nancy heard her father leave, the screen door creaking behind him as he tried to creep down the stairs and she knew he was going to see Greg, the cook outside of town who supplied him with rocks. She tossed and turned most of the night, resolved to confront him yet again when he arrived home and dispose of the stash.
It was not until just before dawn she heard someone crashing around the old cars behind the house and assumed her father was back, full of meth and in the middle of another episode.
Taking her rifle out with her to investigate, Nancy wandered out into the frozen backyard, ready to confront her father only to stumble into her first encounter with one of the dead.
Adam Beckett had never made it back to the garage alive.
His savaged corpse flailed against one of the rusted car hulls, his left leg completely torn off and his body mutilated by vicious bites and torn flesh. At first Nancy moved to help her father, shocked by his injuries, but when Adam tried to attack her she reacted on instinct and shot him in the chest at point blank range. And as she sat sobbing next to his body, trying to make sense of what had happened, she was confronted with her ‘dead’ father lunging at her a second time!
Her next shot put the muzzle of the rifle right against his forehead when she pulled the trigger and this time Adam did not move again…
For a while, Nancy wrestled with the reality of the scuffle, trying to make sense of it. She could not understand what had happened to Adam, let alone how he had survived having his chest blown open. But even as she collapsed in the cold grass, she learned it was not just her father…
More corpses had been drawn by her shots, wandering from the trees towards the garage, some of them townspeople she recognised. Forced to flee, Nancy got in their truck and headed for the middle of town to find the sheriff. What she discovered as she drove through the quiet streets of Still Water were more dead people shambling from houses and across the road.
By the time night fell she had joined what was left of the town’s survivors inside the police station, barricaded into the small brick building listening to the howls and moans of people she had once known as they fought to break inside. Sheriff Clarke was among them, the only law man left in Still Water was a young deputy named Logan and even Nancy could see he was scared out of his wits.
The siege lasted for two days as their food and water dwindled and the situation became desperate while they waited for help…
It finally came when the sound of trucks roared into the middle of town. A few officers from Camp Dawson had gone AWOL and followed Bobby-Ray when he rushed back to his hometown to save his little sister. Between them, they managed to clear away the cluster blocking the doors and broke inside.
Nancy threw herself into her brother’s arms, sobbing and weak, as Bobby-Ray scooped her up and carried her to the truck, promising he would never leave her again. With more of the dead moving towards the station, they began to become overrun as they tried to evacuate the survivors and a few were taken by the snatching hands and rotten teeth of the horde. By the time they left town, there were only eight, including the army personnel…
Describe your character's life after the Apocalypse:
Soon after escaping Still Water, the group learned the fate of those who were bitten: they lost another survivor when he succumbed to a wound he had hidden on his leg and after watching his body try to pick itself up to attack those witnessing the horror, he was quickly put down. His death taught all present a deadly lesson- that even a scratch from the dead could kill.
As they wound their way down through the Cumberland Mountains, Bobby-Ray began to relentlessly drill Nancy with shooting practise and survival lessons, fearing the same fate would befall her if they weren’t careful.
For a month the group scavenged and worked their way south through West Virginia, growing smaller as they lost members to confrontations with other survivors, the Dead and the cold as winter began to fall in earnest.
It was just outside a small town near Hillsboro that they encountered their worst threat. The night was stormy and the weather was bad, but they were desperate for food so Nancy, Bobby-Ray and a fellow survivor, Kate, braved the heavy rain to head in and search the stores.
Nancy resented Kate for her close relationship with her brother, the two fellow recruits forming a friendship and romantic interest at Camp Dawson. Despite Kate’s best efforts, Nancy was still cool towards her, jealous of sharing her brother’s attention with the woman.
In the middle of the storm they were attacked by a group of bandits, but the trio escaped and fled to their truck. They were chased onto a deserted road as they tried to lose the pursuers in the storm and Bobby-Ray hit a patch of black ice, sending the truck skidding, rolling a number of times into a ditch.
The truck came to rest on its battered roof as gas began to pour from the shattered undercarriage into the cabin. Nancy had hit her head and broken her leg in the backseat, barely conscious through the pain as Bobby-Ray fought to get himself loose first. Kate was tangled in her seatbelt and struggled with his help to get loose even as the marauders opened fire on the vehicle.
Bobby-Ray pushed Kate out the other side of the broken door, trying to help his sister next, but a stray bullet hit him in the shoulder and shattered his rotator cuff. As he struggled through the pain, choking on gas fumes, a shot from their attackers suddenly ignited the engine and the truck began to become consumed by flames.
Kate took action, dragging Bobby-Ray out even as he fought her, kicking and hollering. He broke free of her outside the truck and despite the hail of bullets rushed back to try to get the back door open even as Nancy came to, panicking at the heat from the flames. He looked into her terrified eyes through the cracked window, watching the smoke and fire fill the car and scrabbled in the rain to get her out. It seemed futile; in minutes the truck was fully ablaze and Nancy had begun screaming in pain. The bandits were surrounding the truck and Kate was begging Bobby-Ray to go. She screamed at him that Nancy was as good as dead and they had to run.
When he looked into Kate’s eyes, seeing her fear and back at the burning truck, he could no longer make out his sister through the smoke and fire. His gut twisted at the sound of her cries as he made his decision: he fled with Kate into the trees as the raiders went after them, dodging their shots and trying to block out the dying calls of Nancy chasing him through the storm…
Even as Bobby-Ray left her, Nancy fought, flailing as the fire burnt her legs and climbed her body. It was only with sheer adrenaline that she managed to finally break her window and claw her way out of the wreck. Collapsing into the mud, she passed out, expecting to die alone...
Over the following week Nancy experienced a hellish afterlife as she passed in and out of consciousness, faces and voices brushing past her through pain, nausea and fever. It seemed like years before she finally opened her eyes on an overcast day and was lucid enough to realise she was laying in a little bed with a tranquil, green feild outside the window…
A retired teacher named Jack owned the farm which was situated near the crash site. He had investigated the fire and gunshots that night to find Nancy badly burned, but still breathing. Taking her back to his house, his wife Helen tried her best to treat the girl. Helen had been a nurse for over forty years at the nearby hospital and although she had her doubts about her chances of survival, she tried her best to nurse the girl.
Helen explained that Nancy had suffered third degree burns to her legs and most of her body. She had lost the use of her left eye and her face had been badly affected; her left ear was melted off, along with most her hair on that side. Her chest, left arm and both her hands and forearms had been soaked in gas and burned. Her lower half was the worst, with the burns on her legs extending into the muscle and covering her completely from toe to thigh.
Nancy was nearly unable to speak, croaking out single words through a raw throat. Helen explained her airways had been burned by the smoke and she would have scaring on her lungs and larynx as well. She could not predict if her voice would return.
It took four months for the bandages to come off. And in that time Jack had to scavenge medical supplies from a local clinic such as painkillers and IV fluids to ensure her survival and antibiotics to treat her when she developed infections through the open wounds. Nancy hoped Bobby-Ray would come back to look for her, but as several months passed, she knew he had abandoned her.
Nancy developed a hatred for looking at her reflection from an early point. Her once long, soft blonde hair had all been shorn off to treat the burns to her skull and when she tried to grow it back it came out grey and patchy, hanging thin and lank over the rippled scars wrapping the left side of her head. She often reached to touch her left ear only to remember it was gone, replaced with only a small, useless hole in the melted flesh. She discovered she could not hear on that side, just as she could not see from the clouded, vacant eye peeking out from under the drooped ridge where her eyebrow had once been.
She hated the tight feeling of her skin, clawing at it when she bathed, staring down the length of her body at the horrific keloid texture of her legs. She experimented with hitting them with various things like books and shoes, discovering she was numb in many places where the fire had eaten into her muscles. One foot was completely numb and both her thighs felt like lumps of rubber. She even went as far as to stick a steak knife into her right leg one evening to test the extent of the ruined nerves, much to Helen’s horror.
Her voice came back slowly, but sounded as alien to her as the reflection in the mirror; her familiar feminine alto was gone, replaced by a sandpaper husky whisper that hardly carried her native accent.
Just as Nancy was struggling to come to terms with all these changes, hating the body she now found herself trapped in, Helen began to visit her less and less…
Nancy noticed Jack tending to her needs more as the weeks rolled on, until finally he admitted that Helen had been diagnosed with breast cancer just over a year before the outbreak. It was advanced and aggressive and there was nothing they could do.
Nancy took it upon herself to push her recovery, ignoring Jack’s pleas to ‘take it easy’ as she tried to help around the farm while Helen spent growing hours in bed. She was stubborn and determined, occupying herself with small chores at first such as cooking or washing dishes, until finally she began to venture outside.
Jack found her pawing over his old Chevy Silverado in the garage one morning and discovered the girl’s love of engines. He told her if she could fix it, she could have it and the truck became Nancy’s focus during her recuperation.
She started venturing further out from the house to help with gathering supplies, this time for Helen as the woman became bed ridden and no longer left her room. Jack’s mood grew quiet and depressed as he knew the end was coming for his wife and Nancy felt uncomfortable, spending most of her time with the old truck.
The girl was delighted when she found a Remington 770 during one of her supply hunts, including the ammunition, looted from a dead hunter and began to practise her shooting on a daily basis. Her talent with a rifle had not diminished, but her aim took some adjusting with the loss of her twenty-twenty vision. None the less she was determined to be better than she had ever been under her brother’s instruction and learned to compensate.
It was near the end of winter, just over a year after Nancy had been brought to their home, that Helen passed away. The girl helped Jack dig her grave behind the farmhouse in silence and laid flowers from their garden there. It was cruel that the woman should be able to pull Nancy back from the brink of death only to succumb herself. Jack became withdrawn and talked less and less. Still, Nancy never saw it coming… until the gunshot went off one night.
Nancy raced in from the garage and found that Jack had shot himself in the head, laid out on the bed where Helen had died. She was furious that he had chosen to leave her like that, using her anger to push away the grief.
It took her two days to dig his grave on her own and she buried him next to Helen. The next day she had gathered all the supplies from the house she could, loaded them into the back of the Chevy and boarded the farmhouse up. Then she drove away and did not look back.
Ever since leaving the farm, Nancy has been wandering from one area to the next, keeping to herself as much as possible. She secretly hopes to find some sign of Bobby-Ray, but at the same time she hates herself for getting her hopes up.
With her scarred face, she avoids groups of people as much as possible- their staring makes her sick to the stomach. She loathes her appearance and roughed voice, preferring to be left alone to make her own way in the apocalypse…