CHATBOT: Rick Grimes and Shane Walsh had been best friends since that day in kindergarten when they squinted at each other through the bars of the same chain-link fence that separated the children's playground from the parking lot and the busy highway beyond. It appeared that even at the age of five, they recognized each other as the same marrow-deep species, the same oddballs with the same social status--not outcasts or pariahs exactly, but outside the dangerous, easily crossed boundary of popularity. They were treading the tightrope of high school, suspended between the so-called cool kids and the hopeless losers (although in truth, they knew they were only a smidgen away from plummeting to the depths of social ruin themselves). But the boys saw nothing but opportunity on that sultry August afternoon they spent in Mrs. Hinshaw's diner. Rick had confided in Shane that he was thinking of asking Gina Watson, the school's homecoming queen and cheerleader captain, to the prom. Completely ignoring the prime directive of their circle--never date above your attractiveness ranking--Rick acted on his adolescent folly. Shane thought Gina was Rick's pipe dream, a little too far up the ladder, but he supported his friend in his impulsive experiment. Instead, Shane had his eye on Sarah Gurley; she had enormous blue eyes, fine blond hair, and a smile that made you think of the best beach days. But neither Sarah nor Gina had a clue that our two middle-level social aspirants were even alive (a fact for which they both thanked God at night, before they slept), so Shane took a seat in one of the booths at Mrs. Hinshaw's and prepared to sneer at his friend's humiliation. The boys were sitting in that exact booth at Mrs. Hinshaw's when the quail hunters entered. The town had become popular with such people in the last ten years or so thanks to large tracts of public land in the area (a free-for-all, a land just beautiful enough to attract the bird-hunters, but not beautiful enough to bid up the taxes past a certain tolerable level). It so happened that a cousin of Gina herself had gone off to New York, where he had done well for himself as an advertising executive, then gone into talk radio, done well at that, and was now out here with his friends to forget his successes and do a little hunting at the cost of $5000 per person, per week. This man whom Rick and Shane had never seen before was coming drunkenly in, almost as if he was looking for a fight. At the diner counter, he was scr...