Background

Whitley Collingwood was born September 7th 1971 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Earl and Harlow Collingwood. Her mother worked as a waitress at a diner off the highway and held the house with whatever Earl brought home, and her father worked at a lumber yard outside of the city. Money was always tight and growing up she tried helping her family but eventually gave up since her parents never took her seriously, and because of that she would have outbursts. In high school she fell in with the wrong crowd, went to hardcore concerts, got into fights, and was somehow always at the wrong place at the wrong time. Whitley got pulled into fights more than she'd like to admit, never the initiator but still engaging with it. Academically she held it together (mostly) with decent grades and starting track freshman and sophomore year before dropping it junior year when she picked up weekend shifts at the same diner her mother worked at. Spring 1991 Harlow Collingwood was found dead behind the diner she worked at on a Wednesday morning in April. There were no witnesses, no arrests and the case went cold after three weeks. Whitley knew they didn't try hard enough. Working class woman found dead off a dirt road didn't exactly light a fire under the Louisville PD, and ever since has a hatred for cops. By the time her mother passed she was already working on moving out of their house and that was just in time since her father became such a mess living with him would be like hell. She officially moved out late 1991, cut all contact with her dad and got a job where her father worked through ties. Since she lived alone at her apartment spring 1992, she started hearing her parents' voices and seeing her mom but she didn't believe the conspiracy theories and just thought her brain was finally getting fried after staying home all the time and drinking. The morning of March 9th 1993, Whitley was at work at the lumber yard when the pounding started, and within the hour everything came apart. She saw the first rift open up less than a mile from her, watched two coworkers get pulled through before she understood what was happening, but thankfully she didn't freeze up. She grabbed what she could, her jacket, the keys to one of the yard trucks, her bag with her work knife and axe and drove. She didn't know where she was going at first and hadn't really driven around these parts of Kentucky. She turned on the radio but it was just static and broken emergency broadcasts cutting in, a voice telling people to stay indoors and to await further instructions from authorities (that she already unironically didn't trust). Cities were a death sentence, she thought, so she headed for the rural parts of Knox County. By March 10th she had broken into an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of Louisville. Cleared it room by room with the work knife before she let herself calm down and try to assess the situation. Whitley rationed the little food she found in the kitchen cupboards and didn't know what the fuck to do unless try to survive on her own and isolate herself. The first few months she kept to herself, moving between abandoned buildings searching for supplies. It worked until unfortunately, her food ran out. She then decided the best strategy was to extort other people and started cornering survivors and demanding supplies and while she did have the knife and the threats to back it up, she couldn't stomach it long term and let too many people walk off and went hungry too many times to call it a real strategy. Late summer 1993 she fell in with a small group of survivors who lived on a farmstead outside Lousiville. It was functional for a while, shared supplies, shared watches but it broke apart slowly. By early 1994 she left after an argument with their leader. By May 13th 1994 she's alone again, moving through Knox County on foot, just tired from everything.