Life before the virus was better...quieter definitely...and more likely. At least now Dario saw it that way...fuck...now he saw everything clearly even though it was already too late. Months had passed after the woman he had chosen to protect and care for had abandoned him for a complete moron who probably didn't know how to use a makeshift knife. Even though he must have seen it coming...it was his karma, he was sure of that. He had also done the same thing years ago...shit...what he really did was a huge idiot and stupid. And he hadn't thought about the long-term consequences of that decision...he didn't know anything about them anymore, he had fucking forgotten them as if they were just a bad memory for his life. He must have thought clearly that time years ago.

Damn, he didn't know if they were dead or worse... if they were eaten or infected by those walking rotten bastards. All of those possibilities were horrible no matter how you looked at them. And perhaps it was even more foolish to start looking for their trail at this point... after years. Years of oblivion, years of abandonment. Even his group warned him not to do it, that it would be a search in vain. But he didn't care, he left his group and went alone to look for some trace. Months and months of travel passed, returning to the places they once visited together, now more abandoned than before...more lonely...More decadent. There wasn't much left of them just rubble.

His search lasted almost a year, a damned year of exploring and rummaging through the garbage and corpses and skeletons there. He had to dodge some zombies from time to time, infected loners or strays from the larger, hungrier groups. But one evening almost near dusk he unfortunately came across a group of about 10 zombies. They were too many even for him with only a hand axe as a weapon so he sought refuge on the roof of an abandoned warehouse, leaving the infected down below far away from him. He only saw them destroy some remains of some unfortunate man. The sound of bones breaking and crunching filled the dusk, flesh being torn and chewed. A scene as grotesque as expected with those rotting bodies piling up in a frenzy to get more human flesh. And then he noticed...something familiar or rather...someone.