Summary: On The Abigail, Alicia strikes up a conversation with a stranger on the radio.
When the woman shows up uninvited and steals some of their food, neither of them knows that it is only the beginning of their story. But the dead are not quite gone, and the living are hungrier than ever.
Will the two women get the happy ending they deserve?
This story loosely follows the plot of FTWD season 2 before taking a life of its own.
Alicia never thought that she would get tired of the ocean view. After all, she used to enjoy going to the beach with her friends on weekends. But after two days on The Abigail, she was already longing for land. Between the lack of personal space, the stress of the past few days finally catching up to her, Chris lashing out during Liza’s funeral, and the storm that had hit the night before and had kept her from sleeping more than an hour or two, she was exhausted.
Tired of the wind that wouldn’t stop sending her hair into her mouth, she had retreated with the radio into the room she shared with her brother. When Travis had asked her the day before to man the radio and listen for possible instructions from the military, she had thought that he was only trying to keep her mind off the strangers on the boat that they had not stopped to help. But now, despite the depressing messages she kept hearing, she was glad for the distraction.
Lying on the left side of the bed, she started falling asleep, lulled by an old song on the radio, when she heard a raspy, female voice over the music. The woman was singing, pretty much in tune as far as Alicia could tell, despite sounding pretty sad. Once the song was over, the brunette expected her to continue singing along to the next one, but she was surprised to hear her talk instead.
“Man, that was super nostalgic. Sorry about that. I used to love this song, but it’s not quite the same when you are alone on a boat. Oh well, I’m still alive; I guess there is that. Anybody out there? Hello? If you hear this, give me a shout. It’d be nice to talk to someone else other than the fish before I lose my sanity. They don’t make for great conversationalists, to be honest.”
Alicia could not help the corners of her mouth from moving upward. The woman sounded funny, a bit crazy too, but who was she to judge after all? The world seemed to have descended into madness; a stranger singing on the radio was hardly the weirdest thing she had seen recently. Before she realized what she was doing, her index had pressed the microphone switch. She held her breath and lifted her finger slowly, hoping that the stranger had not heard her, when the voice came back.
“Hello? Is someone listening? Hello? Please, don’t leave me hanging, I haven’t talked to anyone in days. I promise I’ll stop singing if you answer me. Please? Pretty please?”
“Hi,” replied Alicia after taking a big inhalation.
“Hi there. For a second, I thought I had lost my mind and started imagining things. How are you doing?”
“I—I’m okay. And you? You sounded good earlier; I didn’t want to interrupt your performance.”
“Haha, thanks. You should see what I can do after a couple of beers.” Alicia could not stop herself from smiling again, for the second time in less than five minutes. Maybe it was the relative carefreeness in the woman’s voice or the fact that her own family had been pretty much ignoring her for the previous 24 hours. Either way, the young girl did not want the conversation to end so soon.
“My name is Alicia, and you?”
“Elyza, Elyza Lex, at your service, young Alicia.”
“Hey! What makes you think I’m young?” asked Alicia while rolling her eyes. “As far as you know, I could be a 50-year-old crazy cat lady with a bad perm and fluffy slippers.”
The mysterious woman did not immediately respond. Her laugh resonated through the device that the brunette was holding, making her smile. “You’re right, love, I can’t be sure. However, I can’t imagine a crazy cat lady surviving on the ocean or knowing how to operate a radio. Anyway, tell me about yourself? How long have you been out here?”
The conversation continued like that for what felt like ages, but it was probably closer to an hour. Alicia learned that Elyza was Australian and used to have a dog as a child. She had just moved to LA to be a resident in a teaching hospital when the dead had started coming back to life. Since those fateful days, she had not heard from her mother and step-dad back in Sydney and had little hope to do so.
In return, the teenager told her about her brother’s regular escapades, her mother’s protectiveness, and the life on The Abigail with her new makeshift family. She even surprised herself by mentioning Matt and how she wished she had said goodbye to him, back when she had not known that a bite was a death sentence.
Elyza was easy to talk to. She listened when needed, joked at the right time to lighten the atmosphere, and the most refreshing part, she seemed to take Alicia seriously. She asked for her opinion on the situation, wanted to know what the brunette would do differently if she could go back in time, and showed interest in her and her family’s plans. For the first time since they had found Nick at the hospital, Alicia felt like someone was talking to her like the adult she almost was, and not like the little girl with chubby cheeks and eyes too big for her face that she had once been.
Eventually, she had to say goodbye and join her family for dinner, but not before promising Elyza that she would talk to her again the next day if she could.
