Silver ||Joel Miller||

when cordyceps began it's terror attack on society

LAURA

2003

There were things that couldn't be undone—that couldn't be fixed. A shattered plate never glued back the same after the damage was dealt. When you dealt harsh words to someone, you could always apologise, but you couldn't reverse the hurt you inflicted.

And like those things, you couldn't undo taking someone's life when their blood covered your hands and their eyes looked at you, glassed over and their body still.

Laura Richards realised the full extent of that last example when cordyceps began its terror attack on society. When she'd come home from her day at work to an eerily quiet home, and found her fiancé in the kitchen, hyperventilating and shaking, as he looked out the window.

"Nolan?" He didn't respond. "Nolan, are you okay?" Were the next words that fell from her mouth, and she regretted them for only one reason; the fact he'd heard her. When he turned to look at her, he wasn't the man she knew. He was something else. And with them in the kitchen, she knew she had every chance of winning against him.

She lunged for the knife on the counter as he lunged for her, but she had moved just fast enough to beat him. Her fingers nimbly wrapped around the handle of the knife. As he got close, she stabbed the blade through his throat so far it severed his spinal cord.

Nolan's body crumpled to the ground. Blood seeped from his neck and it was all over her hands. The blood had sprayed over her face, threatening to sting her hazel eyes and stain her bleached blonde hair.

Unsure of what to do next, she'd turned on the television and found static. She turned on the radio next, hearing an emergency broadcast warning of something happening but not giving any exact details. All she could piece together was that there was somewhere she should go—that being out alone was dangerous.

Laura and Nolan lived in a remote home, surrounded by acres of estate lands and wilderness. She was safe... for now, but she her area would be a target for those searching for a haven.

There was no way that she could protect it.

Over the weekend, she burned Nolan's body and prepared everything she might need to survive in what was her new world. She checked the television and the radio. Both had turned to static and hadn't come back. So she planned to get to one of the quarantine zones she'd heard about before the radio went dead. Hopefully, there was somewhere for her to go.

She fit the clothes she had deemed necessary into a backpack, and packed some food in another. She'd emptied the tanks of the cars they had owned and put that fuel into jerry cans, had filled the tank of the Chevrolet Silverado and decided she would leave the next morning.

When she did, those two backpacks went in the footwell of the front passenger seat. Her weapons were far more important than those bags. There was the Glock handgun the two of them had owned and all the ammo they had for it. Then there was the weapon she was familiar with—her bow and a quiver of arrows.

Her only stops were going to be for parts she would need for the car, to fill the tank with petrol, or find important parts she might need for the bow in the future. It was too risky to stop anywhere else.

And so she left, never once looking back as she made her way to Boston.