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THERE WERE MANY PREDICTIONS of how the world would end. Self-proclaimed psychics were always making claims that a great war, second coming, or even some galactic disaster would be our downfall. But none of them predicted this.
When this first started the world erupted in chaos like nothing anyone had seen before. It all started so quickly, like dominos after they've been set into motion. People were getting sick, and with flu-like symptoms, there wasn't much worry. But then things got strange. The sickness started traveling at an unusual speed and symptoms started growing worse. Everything seemed to quickly escalate from there, riots were breaking out in major cities and citizens began to realize that things were being hidden from them, and it wasn't long after that the world felt what pure raw fear was.
The sickness that had traveled around began taking the lives of its victims. That's when we learned about the virus's real dangers. After a victim died their body would become reanimated and it seemed they were only capable of one thought and action. Eating.
Amongst the chaos that took place, I was able to find some good people and we banded together to form a group and slowly the world around us grew quiet. The death of millions will do that. We had set up camp in a secluded location, only people who knew about it before everything would be able to find it. We were cut off from the world, protected by the dense forest and rocky roads that circled us.
I had often found myself wondering if there were any people left in the world, other than the ones in our small group. But dwelling on thoughts like those can only cause despair so I often tried to avoid thinking altogether. Doing so was a lot easier said than done, especially for a ten-year-old. At that age, your mind is constantly at work and it gets hard to control. So I found ways to keep myself busy and that, at the time, involved coloring or reading. That's what I was doing when we first made contact with another person.
It was two months after everything had started. I was sitting in the dirt, surrounded by tents, coloring an elephant in my coloring book. There was a sheer layer of sweat across my forehead and every so often I could feel beads of sweat slipping down my back into the waistband of my shorts. Summers in Georgia were always obnoxiously hot and with no air conditioning to escape to, I had no choice but to bask in the heat.
