#despetitsecrits

[someotherdog]

for / @despetitsecrits participants / ingrid & your choice of muse! story / it's a few months after the outbreak, and ingrid has been mostly surviving on her own. your muse stumbles upon her one day and she tries to seem like a tough bitch, but her façade is rather weak and unconvincing. setting / an abandoned pharmacy in a small town in rural new york!

ingrid still couldn’t believe this was her life. gone were the days of running around the manhattan law firm she worked at for the last five years, trying to impress partners that never seemed to remember her name and always looked through her instead of at her. at the time, she supposed it was understandable—her coworkers were usually from blue blooded families that all attended the same ivy league university for generations, while she had much more humble beginnings—but now months on the other side of society’s collapse, it made her retroactively angry. it made her angry for the woman that she had been, so small in actuality when she felt so gigantic back then. she, little ingrid sergeant from wyoming, working in a big city law firm and rubbing elbows with the elite! her high school classmates must have felt so jealous, knowing ingrid left their one-horse town for the bright lights of new york and made real money now. sure, she was unmarried without kids and barely had time to brush her hair, but she had made it. yes, she swallowed the disrespect from the partners and the uninterested stares of her coworkers, but she had reached her goals. she was a lawyer. she had made it out of wyoming. she had won.

it was all bullshit in the end. rather, none of it mattered in the end. people all died in the same way now: in pain, bloodied, far too soon. the end blindsided everyone, arriving unceremoniously and without ingrid even knowing until it was too late. one morning, she was getting off the subway to go to work, and by that evening, the world had ended. ingrid had been lucky to make it out of new york city alive. now, she traversed western new york by herself, because anyone she came across post-outbreak either died or left her for dead. it was harder to survive by herself, but perhaps for the best. the worst part was that she was aimless. her whole adult life existed in the borough of manhattan, but she didn’t have many friends and she hadn’t been close to her family in years. the only place she could think to go was her mother’s home back in cheyenne, but that was almost two thousand miles away; a lot of dead, a lot of danger, laid in between. that plan all hinged on the assumption that her mother was even still alive, which as much as it pained her, ingrid didn’t think was likely. if she barely survived, how the fuck would cassandra sergeant fair? no, there was little hope of finding anything worthwhile in wyoming, so ingrid just… wandered. in search of a purpose. in search of a reason to continue on.

that search brought her to a small town that she didn’t recognize the name of, because the only part of the state of new york that had mattered to her had been manhattan. it had been scarce of people and undead since she arrived a few days prior, and she had made herself a temporary home out of a dentist’s office—it was secluded, had an appropriate amount of exits, and had some medical supplies that would benefit her in the long run. it didn’t have everything, though, and ingrid found herself in need of food and water. that led her to a nearby pharmacy that hadn’t been entirely picked clean. fifteen minutes into stuffing her backpack full of granola bars and poptarts, she suddenly became aware of another’s presence. she froze, hand hovering above the shelf in front of her. from the fact that they hadn’t immediately lunged for her, she had to hope they weren’t undead. she gulped dryly, eyes turning towards them slowly. her voice dropped several decibels in an effort to seem intimidating. to seem stronger than she was. “g… get back. this is my aisle.” her other hand moved down to her belt for the hunting knife she found at the start of the outbreak. it had become her security blanket, though she had yet to use it against another human. “i—i just want these, then i’ll leave. so, uh, stay the f-fuck back.”