The Tormented Survivor

Chapter One

It surrounded us as we ran through the quiet yet crowded street, only our damp feet and the pitter-patter of rain making any noise. The populated area, full of individuals, was silent, no one turned to stare at us in indignation at our interruption of their lives as we made our hasty retreat. It was because they weren't people anymore, only the life-less shell, the body that remained when the soul was gone. Only one human instinct remained. The need to feed. No humanity remained in the walking corpses, no recognition or love, nothing remotely human, nothing remotely alive.

It had started in October, the changings of human to... zombie. Not even a year had past but to us eons had flown by as we fought for our lives, the emotional and physically drain always present. At the start there had been eight, eight beautiful and unique individuals that had stumbled together for survival, now only I remained. The people I had known were gone, lost from the world in one form or another. I wasn't the smartest or strongest, just the one with the most adaptive survival instinct. The one who knew exactly how to live in such a inhospitable world.

The one who would do anything to survive...

I was always the luckiest one when we had banded together, the one who hardly ever got a scrap, but in retro spec I was the unluckiest. The ones who had died were the luckiest, they got an exit to this hell. They finally had some peace, some stability in this life even if it was death. I, however, lived on... alone.

We were teenagers at the time, unaware and wide-eyed to the world, naïve to the dangers that surrounded us. But when the first outbreak occurred, we grew up real fast, had to. The survivors were those who adapted and I always adapted. I had survived alone in a dark Makro warehouse, the stink of decaying matter surrounded me but my nostrils diluted over weeks until the smell was unnoticeable to me. After a few days in the dark my eyes adapted and I could see predominant shadows clearer than the blurs I saw when I first entered.

I had moved a large mattress on to a top shelf, over 8 metres up in the air where nothing could get me and surrounded myself with packaged food that wouldn't go off for years, water bottles, the kind you find in offices were within my reach. I had everything I need to survive for months. The doors could only be manually opened from the inside now, I had sorted that out straight away, so I was safe from intruders, dead or otherwise.

But then they came in. They spent a whole day cutting through the protective shielding that surrounded the entrance and then smashed the last layer of protection with hammer, the glass was shattered and my sanctuary destroyed.

So I took action, I grabbed some kitchen knives and a rake and positioned myself by the entrance door waiting for hours for them to break through. They were shocked when I appeared behind the darkened glass when it smashed, I must have looked like a ghost, pale as the moon as I had not been in sunlight in over a month, and holding a large butcher's knife in my left hand and a positioned rake in my other, ready to strike.

They all gasped and stood stock still as they stared at my small form.

"How long have you been here?" A young man asked, he was about eighteen and very muscular, build like a brick house, his wrist almost the size of my neck. His blue eyes gazed down at me, surreal and wide as he expected an answer.

"Get out!" Did my voice really sound that scratchy and unused? I hadn't spoken to another human being in months, only running and hiding from the creatures that wanted tear me apart and eat my intestines. 

"Sorry lil' lady, we need shelter, there's a mass of 'um coming into the city and we need protection." A tall and lithe bronzed haired boy, or well man, said as he moved closer to me, inspecting my raised wrist that clutched at the knife.