Leigh Stone

Basic Information
Current year: 2023

Age: 19

Appearance: Tall and muscular, Leigh enjoys showing off as much skin as possible without being weird about it. Which is why, to the horror of her friends, she's usually found wearing a crop top with possibly? a jacket? if it gets cold enough, despite the hordes of zombies out to eat the lot of them. She has coily hair that she scrapes back into a glittery yellow scrunchie.

Background
Michael and Ava Stone were a young couple who moved out to a small village to run a farm together while Ava was pregnant. It was going to be an idyllic family life, until due to complications Ava died in childbirth. Michael took his baby home by himself, cried, then made the decision to stay here and raise the child to the best of his ability.

And Leigh did have as good a childhood as he could give her. She was born for the outdoors, and lucky her, the outdoors was everywhere. For most of her childhood she was happy to run around with her dog and explore, find as much as she could in the land around her, and help out on the farm. At school she struggled with what her teachers told her was basic, and with making friends—most of them came from towns rather than the middle of nowhere. At this point in her life, it didn't bother her. She was happy where she was.

When Leigh was fourteen, their farm helper moved away. Loathe to hire another stranger, it was Leigh who undertook most of what had been his job. This naturally took up a lot of her time, and she began to skip school. As she started to feel more judgement from the school for this, she began to skip anyway. By now she'd earned a good reputation with her classmates for being a laugh, and for reasons she didn't yet understand, she was always extra nice to the "outsiders" in school. For some reason she felt she could relate.

At seventeen Leigh dropped out. She didn't feel as if she was learning anything, and working on her farm was essentially a full time job at this point. It was one she enjoyed, and she didn't regret leaving school behind. But she missed her friends. None of them were prepared to trek out to her farm in the middle of nowhere. Around this time Leigh began to come to the realization that she was trans, and made the conscious decision to ignore it. Until finally someone her age moved into the nearby village of South Falls.

Breanna Carmichael had come all the way from England to stay with her sick aunt, and also felt lonely, so the two made a good match, at first. What started as a casual romance quickly became too much for them to handle. Leigh suggested breaking up more than once, but was always convinced otherwise, and one day, Breanna suggested a road trip up the coast of Maine, and Leigh reluctantly agreed. The night before leaving, she told her father about her intention to break up with Breanna. Her father disagreed, saying he didn't see what was wrong, and things got more heated until it culminated with Leigh screaming at him that she was trans. It wasn't a good moment for either of them and Leigh left for her road trip with Breanna wondering if she'd be welcome when she got back.

Things didn't get better. Stopping off in the coastal town of Leiden, Breanna and Leigh argued again, and it climaxed with Leigh betraying her girlfriend's trust in the worst way possible. After Breanna stormed off, Leigh decided she should give her some space before trying to talk again. The next morning, she was preparing an apology when the zombie apocalypse hit.

Leigh might be strong, but she didn't have the head for crisis, and found herself cornered by zombies. She ended up lying on the floor of a public bathroom with her feet pressed against the door to keep the zombies out, but eventually she got bitten. She stayed in the bathroom, waiting to turn into a zombie, but it never happened. After a while, she realized she was a lucky one—immune to the virus that turned others into cold grey husks.

So she picked up a gun, put on some makeup, and walked out into a world that was dying as maybe the most true version of herself that she'd ever been.