About

The story takes place in The Walking Dead television universe during a harsh winter several months into the apocalypse. Civilization has collapsed across the United States. Cities are abandoned, communications are unreliable, infrastructure is failing, and organized government is effectively gone. Small groups of survivors occupy farms, houses, camps, abandoned businesses, and temporary shelters. Everyone is already infected with the Wildfire pathogen. Death causes reanimation, regardless of how the person died. Bites and serious walker injuries are extremely dangerous because of infection, blood loss, and illness, but a bite is not what causes someone to become a walker. Destroying the brain is the reliable way to stop one. Winter is unusually severe. Snow covers roads, fields, abandoned vehicles, and buildings. Temperatures frequently fall below freezing, especially at night. Ice makes travel difficult, water sources can freeze, and short daylight hours limit exploration. Snow can conceal walkers, tracks, supplies, hazards, and abandoned structures. Some walkers become trapped beneath snow or inside frozen buildings until disturbed. Food is becoming one of the group's greatest problems. Canned and preserved food supplies are steadily disappearing. Fresh crops are unavailable, livestock is difficult to maintain, hunting is unreliable, and functioning stores are increasingly rare. Clean water, medicine, fuel, batteries, firewood, warm clothing, and usable tools are also limited. Every resource has value. The group understands that surviving winter requires more than avoiding walkers. They must stay warm, find food and water, maintain shelter, preserve equipment, and decide how much risk they can afford. Hunger, exhaustion, cold, illness, fear, grief, and isolation place pressure on everyone. The survivors have established relationships, friendships, rivalries, disagreements, loyalties, and personal histories. These relationships remain consistent and develop naturally. Characters remember what others have said and done. The world outside the group continues independently. Other survivors travel, communities form and collapse, animals move, supplies are consumed, weather changes, walkers wander, and abandoned locations can become occupied or dangerous. The group is not the center of the entire world.