Chapter 1 : Days Gone Bye

After putting that crawling corpse of a woman out of her misery, Rick was driving his cruiser on Highway 85, en-route to Atlanta. 'Let's give it a try.' Rick thought as he sent out a broadcast via his cruiser's CB radio. "Broadcasting on emergency channel. Will be approaching Atalanta on Highway 85. Anybody reads, please respond." He said as he looked in the rear view mirror for a sign of anyone alive on the distance he left behind. "Can anybody hear my voice? Can you hear my voice? Anybody reads, please respond." Rick said in the microphone after a pause. "Broadcasting on emergency channel. Will be approaching Atalanta on Highway 85. Anybody reads, please respond." Rick tried for a last time in hopes of hearing anyone but had his hopes dashed upon getting only static over the garbled transmission. Ending the broadcast without waiting another second, Rick looked to his left seeing the woods of the countryside as the sun filtered through them glinting on his forehead.

The engine lightly sputtered and soon the vehicle slowed to a gradual stop, signifying Rick's cruiser has run out of fuel. 'Better to leave the cruiser here on the highway.' Rick thought as he decided to head out on foot with a gas can to collect some gas for the cruiser and the duffel bag full of guns. 'Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.' the thought coming to Rick's mind as he thought about taking the whole bag over a couple of extra guns alongside his revolver. Pulling down he sun blocker beside the rear-view mirror, Rick grabbed the family photo he had secured there with rubber bands and stashed it in his jacket pocket. 'They must be somewhere safe. Just a matter of time before I find them.' He thought, finding solace in knowing that the lack of photos in his home is proof enough his family had successfully fled.

Walking up the highway in search for gas, Rick saw a farmhouse come into view. Reaching the porch, he looked at the name plate beside the door. 'SIGGARDS'. Pounding his fist on the door, Rick shouted "Hello? Police officer out here. Can I borrow some gas?" He heard ringing noise and saw a wind chime on the porch corner, hanging in front of a window. peeks in the window where he made the grisly discovery of a couple that committed suicide. Rick tried to locate the keys of the pick-up truck parked in their driveway, but came across a horse on their property while looking. Saddling up, he decided to ride the rest of the way to Atlanta with the bag of guns slung across his shoulder.

Trotting the horse up to the front of the house, Rick was about to get on and leave, not knowing how his life was going to change even more than he thought it could.

~FEW MINUTES AGO~

In the vast expanse of outer space, barely outside of Earth's orbit, two spaceships were locked in a death match. One was a huge brown warship belonging to the warlord ruler of the planet Vilgaxia, dominating the fight against a smaller teal explorer ship. The larger ship's captain declaring that no being shall deny him his goal, was hellbent on acquiring the smaller ship's cargo.

The battle came to it's conclusion, as the warlord ordered his robotic minions to board his adversary's ship. The warship shot a tractor beam to reel in the teal ship, but was unsuccessful as the beam was repelled by the teal ship's defensive force field. Angry at this, the warlord ordered to fire the huge hypercannon of the ship, at just enough power to destroy the force field. But as the robots worked on to carry out their master's order, the teal explorer ship fired a well-aimed shot, destroying the warship's control room and engulfing it in a fiery explosion, annihilating all inside. This caused the hypercannon to malfunction, and instead of using a portion of the power, which would have been appropriate to destroy the teal ship's shields, it decimated the smaller ship with a giant blast, not smaller than an asteriod. The teal ship was also reduced to a fiery mess, but in the last moments before the blast connected, it was able to launch a pod that was pushed by the force of the blast into the orbit of Earth.

~BACK TO RICK~

As Rick took a last look at the house, he saw something twinkling in sky. "A shooting star?" Rick thought out loud, knowing that while portrayed in media as an event of the night, it didn't mean it can't happen in the day. However, Rick deduced though, that to be visible in the bright afternoon sun, it either had to be really big, or really close by.

The latter turned out to be correct as the supposed 'shooting star' as if hearing Rick words and acknowledging them, changed course, heading in his direction. However, it crashed before it could reach his position, making a small crater on the left side of house, opposite to the wooden picnic table and the adjacent field with the horse Rick now had.

Getting off the horse, Rick waited for a moment as the dust settled before walking over to inspect the crater. Standing on the edge, he saw that now the white hot light had faded away, it was a sleek metal capsule, the size and, to an extent, shape of a Jeep tyre. "Is that a satellite or something?" Rick thought, but before he could ponder on its nature, a thought came to his mind, of the earth around the crater's edge being shook loose and being unstable to hold his weight. As he was about to slowly move away, the dirt gave way and the ground crumbled beneath his feet sending his sliding down to a tumbling stop.

As Rick sat up and dusted off himself, he saw his watch below on the ground. Realising his watch must have come off his left hand while descending, Rick picked it up and placed it in his pocket, as memories associated with it went by inside his head. This was a Kenneth Cole his dad had given him on his 10th Birthday. Rick never knew much of his mother, only that her name was Verdona and she had been a stranded tourist who'd been helped by his father. His father Maxwell Tennyson was a different story.

Rick knew more about his father from the stories his Aunt Vera told him growing up than from actual interactions he had with the man himself. Max had been in the AirForce, that much was evident with all the pictures she had of him in the uniform, which was where he met the man he'd soon be calling his brother-in-law, Carlsen Grimes.

Ever since that one night in that bar where he'd met his future wife Verdona, which Vera recounted her Maxy Waxy had been walking around with a moonstruck expression on his face for the rest six days of the week since then, something had changed in her little brother as his aunt had told Rick.

Max soon afterwards resigned from the AirForce and seeing the reason of having Vera walk into his life walk out himself was motivation enough for Max's fellow fighter pilot Carlsen to ask Vera out when they met on Max's going-away party.

As Max went on to learn and work somewhere else, whenever Vera asked about it Max would always say it was someplace foreign and leave it at that, escaping from giving a name, his appearances at her home were few and far apart, until one day he showed up unannounced, at their half brother Gordon's wedding nonetheless.

Once when Rick asked about this Gordon, Vera closed the discussion by saying that their father Mark Tennyson had an affair with someone called Lenora Gildewood post some marriage troubles with their mother Meredith. Max showed up, with a lady she presumed to be Verdona, surprising everyone except Gordon himself who had been secretly in a correspondence with Max via letters for almost an year at that point. Vera had then told Rick that Gordon and his wife Betty Jean had also followed Max and had moved to where he worked, joining alongside him.

A few months later, Max had again visited his sister, this time with a little bundle of joy that was an infant Rick. Vera had instantly taken a liking to her nephew, and so had Carlsen, the couple being unable to have children of their own.

Over time, Max was there for most of Rick's first few years, however post Rick's 4th birthday one day Max came home to his family and told them that he had to again leave like before, something about being posted to field work from desk work.

After that, Rick seldom saw his father. Although he made time for them for about half of the major holidays and his birthday for the next 15 years, that was pretty much it.

Completing highschool at 17, Rick had wished his father had attended his graduation ceremony, Max had been unable to make it and had promised that he'd be there for his college graduation.

At 19, he and Vera had to deal with the tragic loss of Carlsen passing away. Rick in his hurt and grieving mental state, had thought of Max, who was always in their life only once in a blue moon and the man who he had looked up to as his father figure most of his life was now gone from their lives forever, never to return. In that moment Rick had made an impulsive decision and as Vera had changed her name back to Tennyson, Rick had gone to court the same day, an hour later, returning home to his aunt as Rick Grimes.

Brushing past the torrent of memories the watch had brought, Rick stood up and walked closer towards the supposed satellite.

The supposed satellite, as if sensing his steps, opened up before him, and a dim green glow in the shape of an hourglass rose from it under the dominant sun's rays. 'A watch?' Rick thought as the light extended from the hourglass, revealing it to be the centerpiece of a watch-like device. "What's a watch doing in a satellite?" Rick asked himself out loud, curious as he stepped closer to the pod, subconsciously outstretching his arm, as if grab it. As he did, the watch jumped from the pod, right onto his left wrist, latching itself to him.

"Argh! Get off me! Get the hell off!" Rick swore with gritted teeth as he frantically tried to pull the Omnitrix off his wrist, to the point of stumbling and almost falling over. Quickly climbing out of the crater, Rick tried to pry away the thing from his wrist using a stick as a crowbar, but the stick snapped in half, causing him to lower his head in dismay.

Feeling that despite being stuck to him, the strange watch wasn't hurting him in any way whatsoever and recalling his previous goal, Rick walked back to the road to see the horse not where he had left him. "Goddamn it!" Rick exclaimed in frustration.

It turned out he was upset over nothing as the horse was just a few yards away from the house, munching on some grass by the side of the road. Approaching it once again, Rick slowly saddles up again. "Just go easy, okay? I haven't done this for years." He said getting adjusted to riding a horse after a long while. "Whoa. Whoa whoa whoa! Easy now. Easy, boy. Easy. Easy." He said trying to steady the pace as he rode the horse down the fields.

After an hour's journey on horseback, Rick finally arrived to the outskirts of Atlanta as he took in the sights. One side of the freeway was empty while the other side of the highway was packed with Hundreds of cars trying to leave the city that had been since long abandoned, wrecked or burnt. Continuing to ride down the empty side of the highway to enter Atlanta, he discovered that the entire city to be deserted, with the streets littered with dead bodies and abandoned civil and military vehicles. Passing by a burnt out bus, Rick and horse catch the attention of two walkers inside who crawl out. "Whoa. Steady. There's just a few. Nothing we can't outrun." Rick said, calming the spooked horse they speed up.

He looks up on a tank around the corner and sees a dead body being pecked by crows. As he rode past the tank, he heard unmistakable whirring of the rotors of a helicopter and looking around in the air, caught the reflection of one passing by through the glass walls of a skyscraper.

Feeling hope that if he could signal it and hopefully get onboard, the helicopter could take him to a safe zone, one where his family might be. Rick sped up the horse to try and follow it but bending round a crossroad, led himself into a mass horde of hundreds of walkers.

The crowd greatly spooking the horse, Rick off to the road as the walkers surrounded the horse. With the walkers distracted, he barely managed to scramble underneath an abandoned tank, losing the bag of guns out on the street in the process.

Taking notice of him, walkers tried to reach under and grab at him as he crawled further under the tank aiming towards getting out the other end, before looking up front and seeing them coming at him from the other end too. He shot many but realised the futility as more just replaced them.

In despair, placing the gun to his head, he thought of his family for supposedly the last time. "Lori, Carl, I'm sorry," he stated and was about to pull the trigger when he saw an open hatch in the floor of the tank, climbing up and inside the tank, shutting down the door just before the walkers could get to him.

As he sat in the tank catching his breath, Rick saw a corpse of a trooper and took the pistol from it's vest. The movement stirred up the walker and it turned towards Rick to bite him, as he freaked and shot the trooper in the head with his Colt Python. The bullet fired from point blank range, didn't miss its mark at all, but the decaying head proved much less resistance as it came out the other side, ricocheting back into the walker's torso, but causing a deafening echo that reverberated inside the enclosed space of the tank.

Dazed and disoriented, Rick climbed his way to the top of the tank, lifting his head out of the open top hatch to stop the ringing in his ears. Spotting the bag of guns that he dropped, he saw it quickly surrounded by the walkers.

One by one, they began to take notice of him and started climbing the tank to get to him. Panicking and still a bit disoriented, Rick grabbed the handle and jumped off the steps, pulling shut the hatch sealing himself inside as he fell down on his butt, his left hand hitting the interior.

Rick, unsure of what to do next, was taken aback by the faint green glow which had filled the tank. He turned to his left and saw the weird watch being the source of the light. Realising that he must have accidentally hit something, Rick saw the watch's faceplate sprung up with it's hourglass transitioned into a diamond encasing a black silhouette.

Rick looked down at the faceplate, his eyebrows raising before he pressed it back down without a thought.

Triggering a bright green flash, Rick saw his arm turning black, the darkness spreading across to his whole body followed by bright green circuitry. Somehow pressing down the faceplate had the watch transforming him into something else.

As the transformation finished, Rick looked down at his new body. His torso and entire front side was white, while the back had the black exterior with bright green circuitry all over. The green circle on his head, which was supposedly his eye as well as his mouth, which glowed as he looked down at his palms in shock. "Whoa." He let out. Suddenly, the tank's radio crackled, breaking his stream of thoughts on what he was now. "Hey. Hey you, dumbass. You in the tank. Cozy in there?" a voice said. Rick looked up, staring at the radio.