Goodbye Eli

Chapter 1: Blood in the Water

Souless, hollow eye sockets stare back at me. His bones are clean—practically sterile—as if carved from ivory and bleached white for good measure. It looks fake. Or maybe it's my heart that thinks it looks fake. It's nothing like those skeletons you pick out from the halloween store when October rolls around, the plastic, shiny ones made from molds. Those ones are smooth with soft edges—lacking detail and texture. Lacking the intricate lines of matte, real bone.

I blink, and the image vanishes from my mind.

I clench my teeth and hold up the revolver, aiming at a knot on a tree about twenty feet away. But my finger never pulls the trigger. I can't really shoot. Not out here.

A gunshot in a world like this is like blood in shark-infested waters: you never know quite what you'll attract, but none of it is good. Of course, that's if the rusty thing even works. I only keep it on the off-chance it might save my life one day. Also, it looks scary, and in a world like this, intimidation matters.

I slide back from the center of the swimming hole, wading through chest-deep water back toward the rocky edge where my bag sits. I lean over, setting the gun just inside the flap. When my fingertips graze the soft leather cover of my uncle's journal, I pause. His skeleton flashes through my mind again and I swallow a lump in my throat.

Even after all these months, pain still swirls in my chest. Like a wound scabbed over only to tear open again; eventually, you become numb to the pain. Only, I'm still waiting for that numbness to come—still waiting for that freedom.

It's a familiar feeling—grief. The first time it hit me full force was when my parents died. The nights after the car accident were dark. I was fourteen and my little brother, Ivan, was only four. But I wasn't alone back then. Uncle stepped in and saved us. He saved me. When my world turned upside down and the dark waters of life threatened to swallow me whole, Uncle reached in and pulled me out of it. He set my feet on dry land again.

I rub the worn leather journal cover between my thumb and forefinger for the millionth time. Two hundred and fifty-one pages flit through my mind. I could recite every word if I wanted to. They are signed forever on my soul. I suppose that's what happens when you read the same thing over and over for eight months straight. Uncle may be gone, but at least I have his words—his thoughts. So long as I have that, he isn't gone. Not really. Not for me.

I take a seat and ease my head against the swimming hole's rocky armrest, letting my body sink a little lower in the water. My toes poke out of the crystal water, revealing grimy nails ringed with black that match my fingers. I should clean them—my nails. The thought floats lazily through my mind like the fluffy white clouds overhead.

A darkening horizon warns of rain, but I close my eyes, focusing on the warm afternoon sun instead. The cool spring water coaxes weariness from my bones.

Uncle would never approve of my skinny-dipping in the middle of the woods.

Too dangerous, he would say.

But if there's one benefit to living in this barbaric world, it's privacy. I've spent weeks trekking through woodland mountains without hide or hair of another living soul. I might be lonely if I wasn't so relieved. Uncle warned in his journal about the dangers in this new world, this world without civilization. Without law.

Without women.

They don't wake up, Natasha. Maybe it's better this way. The men who survive here are no men at all, but monsters. Count yourself lucky that you don't have to live among them.

Ah, yes. Lucky. That's me. Like a broken mirror.

Every living human transformed into stone in the blink of an eye. But the apocalypse didn't start then. It started when people began to wake. Only the men woke and even then, not all. In his journal, Uncle guessed less than one percent of the population had woken from the stone sleep. And from what he could tell, over one hundred years passed, leaving little of the civilized world intact.