Rick gets critically shot twice and slips into a coma. Awakening in a hospital two and a half months later, he finds the world in an apocalypse and his wife and son missing. Rick meets survivors Morgan Jones and his son, Duane Jones. After receiving kind medical help from Morgan, Rick sets off to Atlanta to find his wife Lori and son Carl in hopes to salvage refuge. The city is not what it seemed to be, instead he finds it overrun by 'walkers'. Trapped under a tank surrounded by a horde of walkers, Rick gets rescued by the help of a survivor named Glenn. Rick joins him and a group of survivors: Andrea, T-Dog and not-so- friendly Merle Dixon. He then discovers his wife and son waiting at a camp in the woods. The joyous reunion was short-lived as Rick's group was forced to leave behind drug addicted Merle Dixon and little did he know, Lori and Shane became lovers after the events and assuming Rick was dead. A liaison Lori had trouble keeping under wraps.
Daryl Dixon, brother of Merle Dixon, comes back from a day's hunting and was not happy to find out that his family was handcuffed on a roof in Atlanta then left behind. To recompense for the guilt of leaving Merle, Rick leads a search party with Daryl, T-Dog and Glenn to rescue him. The search for Merle fails as they discover he had escaped by sawing off his own hand. The group returns to camp with a hefty supply of guns and ammo, where they come into an encounter of zombies inflicting heavy casualties on the survivors. Most notably, Andrea's sister, Amy, who she had to put down as Amy turned into a zombie. The survivors finds Jim bitten by a walker. Desperate to cure him, Rick tries to convinces the camp to journey to Atlanta's Center for Disease Control where it was rumored they were working on a cure. Shane thought otherwise and feels the only solution to protect the group was to gun down Rick in cold-blood, to prevent them from traveling to the CDC.
