Before the dead started rising after a mysterious virus swept the earth, Ellie Mae was driving down a dirt road with the wind in her hair and her best friend by her side. For the first time in a long time, she didn't have a care in the world. It was nice, at first, not having to worry. Except she did. So when word started spreading that "zombies" were rising, the pair of friends immediately put the truck in reverse and headed back home. And that's when everything went to shit.

But every story starts with a beginning, and for Ellie Mae, it was growing up in Texas with her father and mother on a ranch just outside of Dallas. She didn't have any siblings, but she was lucky enough that she didn't have to grow up alone. She found her partner in crime in her next door neighbor, and with their excess energy and curiosity, the pair of them drove their parents crazy and made it extremely hard for the other kids to keep up with them.

By the time high school started and teenagers were forced to think about what they wanted to do with their lives, Ellie already knew that she wanted to help her father with the ranch. Her mother was less enthusiastic about it, but there was no denying how much her daughter loved workign with the horses. She was a country girl at heart and grew up knowing how to get her hands dirty, so she couldn't picture herself staying cooped up inside an office building with crisp white walls and the sound of manicured nails typing away at a keyboard filling the air. But fate had other ideas, and when Ellie was thrown from her horse at the age of seventeen resulting in a broken back, any dreams of helping with the ranch slipped right through her fingers.

But Ellie wasn't the kind of girl to give up, so she adapted and after years of physial therapy, she was able to get back on a horse. During that time, she went to college with her best friend in Georgia and ended up working as a riding instructor at an equestrain facility in Atlanta. Just like the saying goes: those who can, do and those who can't, teach. Ellie loved her job, but there was always the feeling that something was missing. So, in typical best friend fashion, Ellie was swept back home to Texas for an impromptu vacation where she could spend time with her family and the ranch, before being persuaded into going on a week-long road trip back to Georgia.

And that's when everything went to shit.

A flu that no one had ever seen before moved across the nation causing the girls to be quarantined along the way back to Atlanta. When it was sure they weren't infected, they were released, but just in time to find out that the dead were rising like it was some kind of bad horror movie. Except this was real life, and after making a hasty phone call back home to make sure their family was alright, the girls put the truck in reverse and headed back to Texas. But they never did make it back home, though they did catch up with Ellie's best friend's brother, who had promised to find them. But things went bad along the way, as they usually do in these kinds of situations, and Ellie's best friend was killed and turned... and killed again. Only a few of them made it out of the small group of survivors that had banded together at the start of the outbreak, and they had to see and do horrible things to survive. Things she will never talk about again. It was the something that pushed them over the edge, and after an indiscernible amout of time, they finally caught up with another group of survivors who were just trying to make it.

Except now she's not so sure they can survive. Walking around aimlessly isn't surviving, it's death and this is hell. She knows the group needs some kind of sign they're going to make it, and soon.