When a deadly plague spreads like wildfire, 17-year-old Bren Watts is trapped at Ground Zero of a global pandemic.
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Bren and his classmates are stranded in New York City, now filled with thousands of murderous infected and desperate survivors. F...
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Five Weeks Later
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Day 65: June 12th, Saturday Two Months since Ground Zero
Even in the early dawn, the heat was killing me.
June in the Atlantic Northeast was much different than June in the Pacific Northwest. The latter rarely went up to the eighties; half of the month had torrential rains or light showers, times for river rafting, fishing, and comfortable, humid camping. In the Northeastern seaboard, June was a brutal assault of sweltering dry heat choking down your throat that you can't even fucking breathe. Or perhaps I was just over-dramatic.
I stretched my aching muscles as I clamored out of bed. I shuffled over to the window to see if I had opened it last night, and sure enough, I did. The breeze was still warm and uncomfortable all night, and I reckoned the temperature would be in the high eighties again today. I was not looking forward to it.
"This sucks," I muttered under my breath. Technically, it wouldn't start in the twentieth, where it would be the longest day of the year (and one of the hottest days), the summer solstice.
In some ancient cultures, they would build massive bonfires and wear garlands of herbs and flowers in celebration of the coming solstice, thought to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck for their crops and harvests, and in some cases, lead the young women to their future husbands. Well, we certainly had large bonfires from the countless burning cities across the country, yet I doubted it'd ward off evil. After all, they're the ones doing the burning. I also doubted people were getting married left and right, but hey, it's the end of the world, so that they might have been going at it like rabbits already.
So yeah. Fuck summer.
The house was quiet, and I assumed the others might still be asleep. We had picked a lovely suburban home for shelter just east of Stamford, nestled in a quiet spot next to the neighborhood park and the woods, a good vantage point, and an escape route if we got surrounded. Previously we hopped from one town to another before we found it, scavenging for food and supplies, never staying long in one town for more than a couple of days. Occasionally, we would get stuck in one town due to a massive horde passing by, unable to move until they were a safe distance away.
We learned quickly that a massive horde combined developed a particular acuity on hearing. They couldn't see things for shit, but their hearing...man. It's the stuff of nightmares. We had to keep quiet and hunker down. We couldn't even cook our meals, eating them cold from the can.
But when we got to Stamford, it turned into three long weeks. Peter said we had to wait until my leg healed properly. It was entirely my fault. I fell off a ladder during a supply run I insisted on going, too confident that my leg had healed (only falling off from the last four rungs, not even that high, but Peter's been a drama queen lately), giving the others a scare. They watched me vigilantly as if my wound would get infected or become septic, though the only downside I saw was that I was bed-ridden again. Without a proper medic in the group, we had to be a lot more careful. They would go off and loot the town for supplies and medicine without me, but they never ventured further than necessary.
