GIRLS BOYS AND GIRLS

Prologue

My spiral into doom; starts off with a bang. No seriously an actual bang, a bomb, an explosion, an eradication of the earth or an apocalypse as some may like to call it.

I am somewhere in southeast England. In a village I've never heard of, I one day ended up here after hours of walking in any direction hoping to find something I knew I would probably never come across, the life as I knew it before. I was in my Granddads' underground bunker trying to look for blue tack before I caught the bus to school. And then boom! The lights went out. A whole six hours of horrible crashing and the loud sounds of silence in between then eventually it had stopped and I could smell terrible burning, then crying and then silence all over again. I had gone three and half days buried under the old couch, shouting for anyone before my granddad had been able to crawl down to me, half dead, half alive. But he didn't come to save me; he came to tell me where the gutting knife and pistol were. And I didn't know where to go or what to do or how to save him but the only thing I did know was where the bloody pistol was. So I ran for it, well not straight away, about four hours later after I finished being scared shitless of going outside.

And when I did, I wanted to go straight back to the smelly old couch in the basement, which was more like a hole in the ground now, and cry my eyes out because everything was gone, ruined and blooming horrible. I couldn't see the sky, there was just clouds of sickly dust and no blue in sight, everything had gone and the only possessions I had left was a rank St. Mary's school uniform and a pistol that I had no idea how to shoot. My skirt was torn from the springs under the couch and my whole body was sore from crawling. But I grabbed my school bag- heavy with bottled water, Heinz beans and sausages, a keen blade, toilet paper, a blanket and legged it east, out of London. And now two months later, I share a cottage jam packed with Freddy Mercury memorabilia and fancy pansy bloody carpets with seven other people and a cat named queenie. You see after three weeks of hiding under the burnt out shells of cars in the city I had decided to get the hell out of there. I began to hear rustling all around me at night. I then realized that the closer I moved east, taking shelter under dust covered metal sheaves, the less noise there was at night.

Exhausted, dehydrated and cold I clambered through the choking black and grey soot until I saw green. Green leaves and bark and a slight hint of fresh air, birds and a river flowing, I was in the middle of nowhere, I didn't know what I was hearing and I could see the ashes miles off drifting in the air. This was it; this is what I was told to run to, the trees, the only trees for hundreds of miles, or even in the whole country. It was a miniscule area, a small area that had not been hit and blown to pieces, I could see standing houses in the distance and I could hear talking, the only talking or chatting I had heard for weeks, it was no longer my imagination. The place was about a mile long and wide. Everybody else I came across was dead, I thought I would have found humans by now but everyone was dead, bodies were burnt and I couldn't see their faces as I had stepped over them miles before. But now. Now I was desperate for human contact. I wanted to talk to someone; I didn't want to chat to the cat that had been following me for hours anymore.

I ran to the trees, dragging my bag with me. I jumped and hugged them all and kissed their barks and smiled even though I was still lost and all alone.