Immunity

1

I snap shut my phone and sigh. There's no point checking Facebook anymore. Barely anyone's alive to put up new status updates. But, in a way, thats kind of good. I dont have to see dumb statuses like 'Had frickin' coco-pops for breakfast! YOLO!'

My name is Wren, I am fourteen years old and here's a newsflash for you: London is gone. New York is gone. Tokyo is gone. Nearly the whole world is gone. Dead. Or changed into a flesh eating zombie. And that's exactly what we're hiding from.

Adelaide was once an average city. One of the capitals of Australia, it moved at a fast pace. School was great. Having not a care in the world was great. I missed that now. If you wanted a breath of fresh air you'd have to die for it.

But now Adelaide is a mutilated wasteland. The streets are silent apart from the constant growls of the walking dead.

Thanks to a man from Peru who boarded a plane to Australia carrying the disease of 'F- eleven-nine', its like that now.

The sickness spread like wild-fire. Reports of the disease had already been made in other countries,  but everyone just assumed it was something that would just go away itself.That was before people began to rot.

Australia was one of the last countries in the world to be contaminated, but as I said, the disease spread, to quickly for anyone to try to control it. Sydney was taken first. Melbourne second. Canberra. Then Brisbane and Darwin. And as for Perth, well, we were to busy trying not to die to see how they were doing.

So thats why the remaining population of Adelaide (About 1000 to 1500) are being held here, a big place call Westfield Shopping Centre, the biggest mall in South Australia. It's supposed to be like a sanctuary, away from the infected.

I was here with my Dad, Mum and younger sister, Zaylin. I was lucky I still had my whole family, most, scratch that, nobody still had there whole family, apart from us.

My Dad looks over to me when he hears my sigh. "Wassup, sweetheart? Something got you down?" I watch a smile crack across his trrying-to-be-serious face and we both burst out laughing.

We are interupted by a knocking on the locked, sliding glass door of the shop we were... residing in.

Dad lets whoever it is  in, a female soldier, her black uniform and helmet slightley to big for her. Her hair was cropped short and her eyes were big. It made her look young and I wondered how old she actually was. They wouldnt be recruting kids... would they?

"I'm here to test you for F119!" She chimes in an oddly... happy tone. I was trying to figure out if she was jsut a glass-half-full person or just dumb.

She looks around the shop. "Wow, you got the manchester store!" She beams.

Dad smiles, the annoyed smile and says, "Yeah, we were lucky,"

She begins to check our skin for bites and for the purple blemishes you get before you change. She checks the back of our throats for blood, after all, the disease starts out like a cold.

"Have you experienced head-aches?"

"No."

"Fever?"

"No."

"Sweats?"

"No."

"Runny nose?"

"No."

"No?"

"No."

She proceeds to ask my father the same questions. Thankfully, he says no too. Instead of stopping there, like a usual health test would, she asks another question.

"Are you hiding anyone that is infected? We found a group of people down stairs hiding a kid that had been bitten,"

Dad shakes his head, "The wife and my younger daughter are at the ration center,"

She nodds, "Okay then, they'll get scanned there."

She goes to let herself out of the shop, but Dad grabs her shoulder and begins to speak in a hushed voice. "How are the perimetres?"

I resort to pretending to play on my phone. I didnt know much about the 'perimeters'. From what I had heard from Dad's rare talks about them, they giant walls of junk all around the sanctuary designed to keep out zombies. I didnt really understand how washing machines stacked on top of fridges with barbed wire on top was going to keep out infected. I mean, imagine that you were starving to death, times that feeling by one hundred and imagine you're already half dead. Are you going to let some mountain of crap with some sharp stuff on top stop you from getting food?

The girls face dampens at the question."Not good..." She mumbles "More of them gather around it each day. They... they're close to getting in. We try to bomb them, but they keep coming."

There's a pause. Eventually, Dad nodds and wishes her good luck.

Before she leaves, she looks over her shoulder at me, and gives me a weak smile and a wave.

She steps out into the long and wide hallway and she freezes. Screams begin to echo down the hall.

She barely has time to scream herself before she gets trampled to death by screaming citizens getting chased by the starving infected.