The Beginning of the End

Chapter 1- Introduction

A year ago I would have told you that I was weak, selfish, and a coward, but a year is a long time for a person to change. My name is Shelby, I am 16, I was a junior in high school, and this is the story that changed the world, as we know it forever.

"Mom, I'm home." I listened for a reply as I walked through the door, but I didn't hear one. "So is Ali feeling better now or is she still throwing up?" I said as I walked into the kitchen. This morning right before Ali and I were about to leave for school Ali threw up, and my mom decided that Ali should stay home. Personally I thought she was faking it because I had never seen someone go from perfectly fine to completely sick to there stomach and super pale. I mean Ali was like really white all the sudden, like all the blood just left her body all at the same time. I heard no sarcastic remarks like I usually get when I talk about, or to my sister. I thought that I had seen our mom's car out front, but I went to the window to make sure. Just like I had thought my mom's Jeep was in its usual parking spot in the front yard. So I continued to walk to the back of the house until I got to my room, where I set down my backpack and jacket. Then I went to my mom's room where the door was slightly open and I could see her laying in her bed.

It was normal for Ali and I to come home and find my mother asleep, she worked long hours almost all the time. I decided to leave her alone and went across the hallway where my sister's room was. I walked up to the door and opened it up slightly so I wouldn't wake her if she was asleep, and surely enough she was asleep. I left her in her room, shut the door, turned around to shut my mom's door, but instead of the door being behind me, my mom was and she was covered in some gross, green, red stuff. It looked almost like puke mixed with blood and it was literally almost covering her from head to toe. I thought that maybe Ali had thrown up on her and my mom was just trying to get past me to go to the bathroom to get cleaned up, but the second I moved to let her pass, she lunged at me. She jumped on top of me and I screamed like if I didn't I would be killed by a masked murderer or something. I should have seen it in her eyes. The hunger, the hallowed body of my mother didn't contain any of the memories, pain, sacrifices, or dreams that she had acquired over years of taking care of Ali and I. I remember thinking that I was going to be killed by my own mother and then she was going to kill Ali and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Then all of the sudden her body just goes limp and I am really confused until I look up and see my dad above her with a shovel that he had sharpened. I jumped up and hugged him. Then I went into my sister's room to see if she was all right.

I got into her room and immediately realized that she was just like my mom. Her body was present but the memories were gone, there was no life in her eyes, she had no soul. She started to stumble towards me and I screamed causing my dad to come into the room and try to figure out what was wrong. I could just see his heart break when he realized that my sister was gone, replaced by this soulless body, this corpse. "Get out Shelby." My dad said. "But, what are you going to do with her dad?" I ask as I leave the room. He follows me out the door and pulls the door shut and holds on to it so that she can't get out. "Go get the chain and padlock out of my backpack. It is in the living room." He said. "Okay." When I get back he tells me to wrap one end of the chain through the door handle and the other end through my mom's door handle. I put the padlock on the end so that you would have to either have a key or break the padlock in order to open the doors.

My dad told me to go get in to the car so we could leave. I walked out to the car. As I walked out the door my dad came out behind me. When we got to the car he started it, I got in and then he started to explain what as going on. Well, the little bit that he actually understood about the situation. I looked in the back of the car and there were bags upon bags of groceries and there were a lot of weapons. It looked like he had just ransacked a gun shop and took everything. Most of the food was canned and dried goods. There was a lot of water too. My dad said, "Before the television stations shut down I heard that there was an outbreak of some disease that made people eat each other. I didn't think it was that bad until I saw it with my own eyes." He tried to smile, tried not to worry me, but I could see it in his eyes. He was scared and that meant that I should be scared too. In my lifetime I had only seen him scared, almost in tears, once, and that was the day my mother threw him out of the house. We started to drive, but neither of us knew where we were going. We just wanted to escape the memories from that house.