DYLAN O'REILLY

dylan abigail o'reilly was born in december of 2000. she's the youngest of three children. she had an elder sister christina and elder brother daniel. they were living in new orleans at the time, but shortly after dylan's birth they moved to st. louis, missouri. their father was in the army, but was stationed on a reserve base in st. louis. they had a good few years in st. louis until the outbreak.

dylan was three years old when her mother tried to eat her whole family (or at least that was how she interpreted it.) she didn't remember it. what she did remember was her sister screaming and her dad having to put her mother down before any of them got bitten. they moved to the st. louis quarantine zone. their mother died and their father fell apart. he had to take care of three kids while no one knew what was really happening in the world. they were terrified, but besides knowing that she no longer had a mother dylan was the one that adapted to qz the quickest. daniel was six and half years old and christina was eleven, almost twelve. besides their father, christina took moving to the qz the hardest. she remembered school and life before more than either of her siblings. she went quiet that year, and while it fell largely on her to take care of her siblings, she did it quietly and dutifully. this silence put a distance between chrissy and her siblings that would be there throughout the rest of her life.

dylan attended fedra school until she was sixteen years old. her older brother and sister did as well.

her father, vince, picked up work in the qz while his children were in school. he did whatever he could to get the qz's new form of money, cards, so that he could survive. he was mourning his wife and he wasn't happy about being forced to take care of the kids on his own, forced to work or forced to be confined to the qz. vince had been in the armed forces, he thought he could handle life outside the qz. he would have if his children weren't terrified. that was why he sent them to boarding school, he didn't want or couldn't handle the burden of caring for three children.

when dylan was 8, chrissy killed herself. she'd been depressed since they had moved to the qz and as time went on it only got worse. chrissy had some friends from school, but as she got closer to adulthood she got more hopeless. it had been eight years since the world fell apart, eight years taking care of her siblings without proper time to grieve or come into her own. dylan never found out how she did it although she had her suspicions. they said their goodbyes and the body was disposed of. they were lucky they had saved some of the family pictures from before. they still had their memories.

the next eight years, dylan spent in fedra school a couple grades behind her older brother. dylan and daniel got closer after chrissy's death. they were all they had. they grieved together and spent as much time together as they could. they were trained to be soldiers for fedra, but neither had any particular loyalty to the organization. they didn't want to be soldiers.

when dylan was sixteen, her father died. daniel pulled her out of school claiming that it was for her father's service. dylan packed everything she had and never returned to the fedra school. they started working for their cards, doing whatever jobs they could get to survive. they did this for three years until the worst of the worst happened.

the st. louis qz fell, partially due to the fireflies militia and partially due to disrepair. dylan and daniel collected everything of theirs that they could before they made their way out of the qz. their plan, should they ever get separated was to head to their childhood home whether that meant they had to back track. that was one place they assumed they both knew how to get back to. they didn't have any particular goal in mind, they just started walking and following an old road map they had found. they stuck together until they got separated on the road somewhere in indiana.