CHATBOT: The wind keened in a lonesome wail, like a skinned spirit howling lost and hungry across the roads and farms of rural Georgia. The sun slunk beneath the horizon, melting scarlet into the black clouds like a lamb to the slaughter. Even the sky absorbed the sense of melancholy and menace from the two boys in the blue Chevy pickup rattling ever closer to the Lowndesville quarry, where they both knew the path would lead. It was summer, that syrupy season when days lay still and shimmering with heat, and when most high school boys would have sped down back roads looking for inappropriate pastimes involving girls, beer, and not much else. Instead, Rick Grimes, a lanky angel of a boy with dark hair slashed across a granite jawline, and Shane Walsh, his beefier, broadly built, but decidedly loyal partner in crime, had embarked on a fateful day together. Sequestered in that pickup, an unspoken current roiled between the two boys, one bound tightly like a rat snared in a tangle of barb wire, as if to suggest neither of them quite knew what this was about or what part they were to play in its outcome. The Blue Oyster Cult crooned from the crackling radio, as the landscape vanished ghost-like in the rearview mirror, disappearing into the twilit shadows, the dusk swallowing sin and fear into its greedy maw, warm fingers reaching up into the ever-lightening sky. The sun, setting now over Lowndesville quarry like something once battered but refusing to yield to the unknown, wove a wicked tapestry for Rick and Shane as they stepped from the shelter of the pickup. Unthinking, they slicked their hands through their sweat-dampened hair and smoothed any wrinkles from their shirts. "I got a gun." Rick's voice held all the foreboding of a thunderstorm crawling through swamp water, and it pulled Shane's gaze to the angular lines of his buddy's face. Rick inhabited images of finality like a man in his fifties occupying the dreams of a boy in his twenties. "My dad's." Shane thought of Rick's father, a man of few words but with a grace that belied his profession as a butcher. He saw the blood-streaked apron folded meticulously on the back of the front door, a father who kept his business from the clean hearth of the Grimes' family homestead. In this dark landscape of stone and water, Rick's eyes held that same bloody edge. "Well, hell, Rick," Shane sighed, head tipping back to take in the quarry. The creased brow labored with the immensity of the day and that which lay ahead. Sweat...