Born on October 31, 1976, Carrie-Lyn was the only surviving child
of Aaron and Lynette Tyler, a prominent ranching family in western Oklahoma.
The Tylers raised their beloved and indulged daughter alongside the
highly-sought show horses they bred at the Ranch. From her first breath,
Carrie-Lyn was treated like a little princess.
At 3, her parents put her on her first pony. It was love at first sight. At
7, Carrie-Lyn won her first horse show and racked up trophy after trophy in
the years that followed. She was the image of a very privileged and very
loved young girl until one fateful summer night in 1988.
That spring, Carrie-Lyn's father had hired a young man to help him around
the ranch. At 50, he was starting to feel his age and simply couldn't keep
up with the demands that a lucrative breeding operation required. The young
ranch hand had provided a list of references as long as Aaron's arm, but he
never looked at them. Aaron took a man at his worth and this young fellow
seemed just the sort to help him run the ranch.
The ranch ran smoothly at first, but, in mid-summer, Lynette, the ranch's
bookkeeper and manager of the business end of the Tylers' operation, noticed
a discrepancy in the books. The ranch hand was taking money. Aaron
confronted the young man and he left in the night. The Tylers thought that
was the end of the matter and tried to put their lives back together.
But a month later, late at night, while Aaron and Carrie-Lyn were running
through the routine for the horse show the next weekend, the ranch hand
returned. He set fire to the barn and barricaded the door, trapping Aaron
and 11-year-old Carrie-Lyn within. Aaron struggled against the barricade and
managed to open the door enough to shove his daughter outside before the
barn collapsed, killing him.
Carrie-Lyn was devastated and left with inner scars that more than matched
the scars from the 2nd degree burns left behind on her body. For a year,
Carrie-Lyn refused to step near a horse, though she still retained her love
for the animals. Her mother, amidst working to put her husband's business
back together, was desperate to pull Carrie-Lyn out of her grief.
For her thirteenth birthday, Carrie-Lyn as given a camera and her mother's
support. That gift started a love affair of a different sort, though she
would always adore the horses that she had grown up around. Carrie-Lyn hid
behind her camera, but took photos that bared the pain from her father's
death.
Carrie-Lyn's skill with a camera took her beyond the ranch and she ended up
in New York City, taking photos of celebrities for fashion magazines. She
proved herself easy to work with and a true talent in a business that seemed
to be more about ego and networking than art. Her talent earned her many
fans and many celebrities wished to work with her, though her passion lay
with more candid shots than the posed shots she was expected to take. After
over a decade of emptiness, she had finally reached a placed where she was
content.
Then the Flu came. Carrie-Lyn stuck it out in New York as long as she could,
but when the first deaths came, she ran back to Oklahoma only to find the
ranch nearly abandoned and her mother getting ill. Lynette Tyler hung on for
a long time before finally succumbing to the illness. After burying her in
the backyard, Carrie-Lyn tried to face a future where she wondered why she
wasn't dead as well.
Then the dreams came, urging her west. Before she could make a decision, the local sheriff, Joshua Garrett, showed up at her property, looking for survivors. Unfortunately, so did Leland, the farm hand who had burned down her barn and killed her father. The fight that followed left Leland beheaded and Joshua dead. Or so she thought, when the Sheriff seemed to come back to life, Carrie-Lyn learned that immortals exist and Joshua was one of them. Terrified of losing him again, Carrie-Lyn drugged him and quite literally dragged him to Boulder, Colorado where they now live.
