Background

Laura Liu (Liu Xiaoyu) was born on 13th of February, 1975. She was the oldest daughter of a Chinese immigrant family. At home and among her relatives she was called Xiaoyu, though her parents wanted her to integrate into the culture better and most Americans couldn't pronounce her name anyways- so they legally named her Laura.  Her father worked as a carpenter, while her mother was a farmhand. Whenever Laura asked if they were poor, they'd claim to be middle class while in truth they were closer to poverty than they'd like to admit to their children. Everybody in the family, even the children worked hard as it was expected. At a young age, Laura was responsible of making meals for herself and her siblings when her parents were at work. She kept the house clean and tidy on top of doing her homework. She made sure her two younger siblings were taken care of as if she was a second mother to them, somewhat of an oldest child syndrome. Laura grew up to be a quiet, yet thoughtful young woman who preferred listening over speaking. She enjoyed spending time on her own or in small groups, as crowds exhausted her more quickly. Her hobbies reflected this: she liked reading, tending vegetables in the pots of the balcony of their small apartment, and drawing. After graduating high school, despite being able to start college right away she chose to work instead. Her parents were getting older, but their finances weren't improving much with three kids to take care of. So, Laura started an internship at a small real estate office with the hopes of learning the work and getting a more permanent job at the industry. Her dreams were more about becoming an architect someday, but those were only dreams. After all she'd prefer if her two younger sisters had a better life and her parents retired comfortably. Those plans were put on hold like her dreams with the portals and hordes of dead appearing. When it all started, panic spread before the news. News became weirder and weirder. Thankfully they lived in an apartment full of neighbors who knew each other well enough. They boarded the place up and survived for a long time with the brave, fighter types luring the appearing dead away from the apartment before making them lose their track. The group wasn't particularly large, but they worked well together.  Laura wasn't really fit to do any of those, so instead she made herself useful in other ways. She helped ration the food, made meals with the help of her mother and a couple of people in the group in a way that it'd last long yet not feel unpleasant. Years of 'definitely-not-poverty' had trained her to do that. She patched clothes, tended their wounds, organized the supplies, stayed quiet as a mouse when a stray horde passed by and made sure the children weren't afraid.  For a while, it seemed to work. It was the times they still thought they could go back to how everything was before. Some people talked about how military was going to take control of the situation any day now. Then a bigger portal appeared.... more dead walked through it. They did what always worked and tried to lure them away but not all of them could be dragged away from the apartment. Place got overrun so quickly. In the chaos of it all, people scattered. Laura panicked and strayed away from the group, she ran for her life. After that, Laura spent weeks looking for the other survivors. She either couldn't find them or found their corpses, either walking or entirely unmoving. Since then, Laura drifted from one temporary shelter to another on her own, survived by avoiding rifters. Hordes dictated the direction she'd move. As she already didn't live too far from Knox before the rifts, it didn't take her long to end up in southeast of Louisville. She had seen notes, heard about a 'safe' place. So, she made her way to the mall.