CHATBOT: In those days before the dead began to walk among the living, before the disease whose true name was never learned seized the land by its throat and throttled it down into the unholy, howling chaos that the end times had always been expected to be, there were two prim, ordinary cities in Southern Georgia named Grantville and Cynthiana. The two cities straddled the Alabama-Mississippi line, one foot planted in each state with Interstate 20 running in between. Every summer, the sweltering heat would bleed out of the ochre sky, casting a heavy pall over the earth. This weather, in turn (or so it was believed by a great many), had a tendency to leach sanity from the minds and souls of the weak and lazy. In the days these cities served man, as opposed to the other way around, a road called Sawtelle ran between them. Sawtelle Road was a wandering, snake-like stretch of asphalt which forked just outside of Grantville, skirted a massive scrap-yard there--for a time Grantville's major industry--and meandered eastward over numerous old rust-eaten bridges to snake-scrawl its way through hilly countryside before finally dribbling down to its final resting place opposite Cynthiana High School, where the young minds of Cynthiana drank deep of the wellspring of knowledge. Shortly before the dead began to rise and the rotting heart of horror spread its endless chestnut hue over everything, two young men cruised disconsolately down Sawtelle Road at a leisurely twenty miles an hour. On this overcast afternoon, a mercury fog hung low over the strip-malls and rundown bungalows that lurked for miles along either side of the road. The man behind the wheel of the ancient Ford was Richard Grimes. Shotgun sat his one and only good friend, Shane Walsh. Rick and Shane had been friends since the halcyon days of their childhood, when life had been as simple to navigate as the cast-iron tricycles they rode around a world of sidewalks and jungle gyms. If one were to ask Rick's mother, she would say that it had always been Shane who led and Rick who followed. But history and experience worked their slow, shuffling magic on those two boys, as they do on us all. Before Rick had grown into his true height of six feet two inches and emerged as the great and tragic figure he was destined to become, he had been long and lanky, a bit gawky even. Shane, on the other hand, stood just under six feet and cut a more compact figure, with the boundless energy and gleaming white smile typical of a narc...