FIGHTING TO LIVE [H.S]

CHAPTER TWELVE

song: game of survival by ruelle

SAM'S POV

*Present day, back at Tori's old camp*

Tori has been missing for just over a week now.

My best friend. Missing.

Maybe possibly worse, dead or the even worse option that she's become one of those things that-

No. I can't think like that.

Even though I've only known Tori for the two short years she's been at our camp, she's become my family. Like her, I was also an orphan looking for someone and something to call home.

Right at the beginning of the zombie virus outbreaks, people retreated to their own homes in terror and reinforced whatever they could. But between the people in the country who believed the whole thing was a hoax right from the start and the people who simply believed they didn't need to try and protect their homes as best they could, the death toll as a nation hit millions overnight and was only growing until even the news stations stopped broadcasting and operating all together only a few weeks later.

Another issue many faced right at the start was lack of food. No one knew that the entire world was going to practically go up in flames overnight so of course, not a single household near me had enough food to sustain every life forever. And as nervous as I was for the time when my parents and I ran out of food to come, it luckily never came to that.

About a month into the initial outbreaks, both of my parents had contracted terrible versions of the common flu and due to the lack of doctors available anywhere and their older age, they died peacefully in their sleep together.

As horrible as it is to say, when I look back on their deaths now, I'm actually glad that if they had to have died, they went the way they did and not the alternative.

But when it happened, my body physically felt like I was being crushed by the weight of all the grief and pain and it took everything in me not to give up alongside them. While the first day after they died was heartbreak like I had never experienced, the second day proved even worse when I had to bury them in the backyard of my childhood home. The whole event left me unable to get out of bed for weeks and I became so horribly depressed and isolated in my boarded up house that I lost track of how much time really passed. While I tried to occasionally get up and drink the bare minimum of water to survive and use the bathroom, the pure weight of everything that had happened in the past month left me a shell of a human. Weeks went by of me helpless and afraid in my bed as I would lie awake at night and hear other people's screams bouncing through my neighborhood and then complete and utter silence that showed how alone I really was. I truly thought that this was the end for me.

Until one morning, I woke up to the sound of a lone bird outside my window. And for some unknown reason, that single bird, chirping in blissful ignorance, made the grief feel the slightest bit lighter. Of course, it had not disappeared and never really would, but it was like after weeks of sobbing and never leaving my bed for more than five minutes, my body simply decided it needed to put all that pain and grief into some kind of action.