If this is the end

Chapter 3

I wake up the next morning with a headache. It's not blinding or incapacitating, but it's there to remind me that I am still among the living, in the most unwelcome way. I tap on the bedroom door and call for April to wake up and let me see her on the Cast. I know I'm being annoying, but I am a mixture of concern and blindly hopeful. She doesn't answer. I knock as hard as I'm willing to without knowing if there's any infected in the building. Most of the neighbors left that first night after we watched a man get torn into and turned to – whatever the hell they are – right in front of our eyes. I know Dorothy across the hall didn't leave, but I haven't heard a peep from her apartment since we watched in mutual shock and terror that first afternoon. Unlike me, she was smart enough not to go back out. I hope she makes it out alive.

More out of habit than anything else, I tap 'cast to all' and wait. Rayne and Kat materialize almost instantly, but nobody else does. I'd think it was weird if Isaac and Becca weren't in the most dangerous position of us all and Brody hadn't spent last night looking as if someone stole his puppy. They need a break from the crazy. Nobody can fault them for that. As it is, I greet the two before getting down to business. Kat lives near the 394 and says all entrance and exit ramps are completely cut off by armed military. Her parents wanted to check and see if there was a way out of town and they came back after their first drive through all of the city exits and updated her (no way out), but they haven't come back from their second outing. She tries to say they should be home soon, but they left in the middle of the night, and haven't been back yet. All communication outside of the city has been cut off. I tried to phone my mom before Casting with Rayne and Kat, but I got an automated recording informing me that my call cannot be completed. The paranoid part of my brain is reminding me that nothing good happens in a city that's been cut off. The part of me that's still in denial is saying that the government wouldn't just throw away half a million people. But how many of that half million are even "people" anymore? The local news station is still running, which I would have known if I had checked before now, but it's running the same message:

Stay indoors. Do not leave your home for any reason. Help is coming soon.

I stare for several minutes, but the message stays the same. I check again if the trains and busses are still running. They are. Kat's parents don't trust the Clean Zone and think it's a trap, but I think they're just being paranoid. At first I wonder how they are keeping communications going within the city, but cutting it off from the outside, but then I remember that Minneapolis is a smart city. I bet the infrastructure in place is keeping our cellphone and wifi service going within the city limits. It's not my area of expertise so my knowledge of how it all works is pretty limited, but I do know that places like New York and Chicago have had it implemented for over a decade. It's relatively new here, but regardless of the how, when, and why I am grateful that we aren't completely cut off from each other.

Kat brings me back to the conversation at hand. How are we going to survive? Rayne, true to herself, just nods along and is willing to go with whatever Kat and I tried to come up with. Kat wants to stay put, I want to leave on a train as soon as humanly possible. For the first time, Rayne's easy-going devil-may-care personality is grating on me. We need a plan, we don't need head nods, or "whatever you guys want." I almost give her a piece of my mind, but I know I'm only irritated because I'm stressed and scared, and she probably is too. Being an asshole to her isn't going to spontaneously make her a different person. Indecisive may as well be her middle name.

Finally, we settle on meeting up at Kat's house. Hopefully if we are all together in person, I can convince them to join me on the trains. With the number of infected growing so rapidly, there's no way everyone who signed up would make it, which would hopefully leave openings for the dumbasses who didn't sign up in the first place. Her parent's place is still in the locked down zone so no risk of being shot on sight, but we wouldn't be braving the jailbreak alone when – or from kat's perspective, if – we have to get the hell out of dodge. The only real problem is that we do have to get there alone, if I can't bring April with me and Rayne can't get ahold of Isaac and Becca. The most important thing right now is getting myself and April to safety, whether that means heading to the clean zone, or meeting my parents in La Pointe, as there is a me inside of my body, and an April inside of hers, I will do whatever I need to do to keep us safe. The thought reminds me that I still haven't heard a peep from the bedroom she is stuck in, so I tap once again and whisper her name. This time, there's a weak "I'm here."