Catherine

> *"I'll crush you!"*
>
>

Catherine is a Bystander Survivor and STR type Tank.

## Background

Catherine treated these words like her bible. She had been eternally devoted to her husband until she witnessed his skirt-chasing first-hand and introduced his temple to the head of a golf club, paralyzing him for the rest of his life. During her subsequent stint in prison, she discovered her love of working out. She admired the changes to her body, which fueled her on further. By the time they released Catherine, she had achieved a remarkable physique and quickly became a known figure within the women’s bodybuilding circuit.
Catherine then opened a namesake gym that did very well. Even after the apocalypse started, people still made their way there. During the chaos and confusion that was the beginning of the apocalypse, she opened her gym to the public as an emergency relief station. It no sooner became a nightmare as the dead began to reanimate and hunt the living. She and the other survivors barricaded themselves inside, but only Catherine survived the ordeal.
She disposed of the dead that littered the gym, mopping up blood as if it were an everyday occurrence. She kept at it until every surface sparkled, like the first day she had opened for business.
She turned to working out as a familiar comfort There was a small backstock of protein supplements, but not enough to sustain her for a prolonged time. She was eventually forced to brave the outside of her gym for other things to eat, equipped with the makeshift gear she had fashioned out of gym equipment. The gear proved durable but unwieldy. This only served as a source of renewed encouragement to further increase her strength. She pushed herself with her life on the line. The metal weights clanged, cutting through the gurgling of the dead and occasional screams and gunshots outside that served as her grim workout music. Now and then, raiders tried their luck at taking her gym. Their malnourishment and lack of stamina always led to their downfall against Catherine.
One day, a tall, slender woman came banging on the door, crying for help. Catherine didn't welcome Sarah's visit at first, but she had a change of heart when the wailing Sarah revealed her only equipment was a jerry-rigged shield that no doubt had had a past life as an office desk drawer. Catherine felt sympathy for the woman and let her in, even if only to find out how she had survived up to this point with nothing but a rickety desk drawer. As she turned around to chain the door shut, she felt a stabbing pain in her back. The woman had lodged a bloody pick squarely into Catherine's back.
Sarah easily evaded Catherine's charge.
Just then, the doors to the gym burst open, spilling the dead inside. Sarah scowled and turned to run. Sarah’s initial plan had been to take the gym as her stronghold, but she had been unable to see around Catherine’s hulking figure that the door hadn’t been chained up again and had attacked too soon. Catherine stood her ground against the walkers, clutching her wound as she repelled the invaders. She eventually prevailed while Sarah escaped amidst the chaos.
The pick had missed anything vital, and Catherine was up and about in less than two weeks.
Seeing the destroyed head of her favorite lobby sculpture, Catherine paused.
“What did I do to deserve this?”
She began to reflect on her past, her life, and the decisions she had made along the way. She had been faithful to her husband and had been repaid with betrayal. She wouldn’t have ended up like this if she had locked the gym doors and refused people entry from the start. On top of it all, Catherine had been, quite literally, stabbed in the back by someone she had attempted to save.
Despite the rage that filled her, she couldn’t help but smirk at the thought of her new goal.
For this amount of pain, she felt she surely deserved some gain.

## Skills

 41 | Withstand | Decreases damage taken by 40% when Catherine’s HP is less than 40%.