School Assignments

Annie Reed

My name is Annie Reed, I'm sixteen years young, and I don't want to die. I mean, I know I used to say it a lot, that I wanted to die, but that was just so my parents would stop telling me to clean my room or not talk to Ren, who happens-or happened- to be four years older than me. But now that it's a possibility, I don't want it to happen. There were so many things I wanted to do, I wanted to experience. My favorite punk band was having a concert in a month!

I've been awake for four days now, that's four days since I found my parents and little brother dead in their beds. There were no physical signs of any wounds or illness, they were just lying there asleep and never woke up. I called 911 but the lines were all busy, no one could answer my calls. There were no cars on the streets, or people walking their dogs. The air was still the only sounds were sirens in the distance, helping all of the other people. I tried to call Ren but he didn't answer. I called my best friend, Trin, who told me her parents were dead too. It was just her and her brother Sam left. I started to have a panic attack, I felt so alone and I hated it. They came over to my house about thirty minutes later, both of them looked terrified.

We sat quietly for a while until Sam finally broke our silence. He asked me if the bodies were upstairs still. I said of course, I didn't want to move them! None of us knew what happened since the night before everyone was in good spirits, my mom had been nagging me about getting my homework done, which I had finished an hour earlier but she didn't believe me. My little brother kept breaking into my room and I had to keep chasing him out. My father watched the football game until he fell asleep. Everything was how it always was. Except when I walked out of my room that fateful morning no one was awake. My mother would have been making us breakfast but there was no bacon scent wafting through our home like every other previous morning. It was unusually still as I patrolled my hallways. When I walked into their rooms I thought they were just sleeping in, but they didn't respond when I shook them. I couldn't see their chests rising and falling so steady as it had always been, and my father wasn't snoring. Frightened I had run into my brother's room but the same thing was wrong with him, he wasn't breathing.

Now we sat, and after recalling that morning we turned on the television. The only station working was channel 14, our local news. The woman behind the anchor desk looked nervous and terrified and like she had never been in front of the camera at any moment in her life.

"A-as more and more people p-pass away in their sleep it's becoming more apparent that this is some sort of epidemic. Scientists still have no reason as to wh-why this is all happening but they speculate that there might be some correlation between sleep and this sudden wave of death."

It all made sense now, why we weren't affected by this. I had been up all night working on a school project until the sun came up, since most of the night I had been on the internet watching Youtube videos of game reviews and makeup tutorials. The same went for Trin, since she has the same teachers as me, but Sam had gotten some sleep. It just didn't make any sense.

The next day I did some research on how long a person can stay awake and apparently in 1965 some nutjob just a year older than me stayed awake for eleven days for some world record. A few sites say it's possible to stay awake for a month, of course hallucinations and other side effects happen with this. None of these websites state how long before you die though, because no one is stupid enough to die for science willingly. So my choices are fall asleep and die or stay awake, suffer, and die eventually.

Now as I write this you can see I've chosen the latter option.

---

It's been a week and I'm exhausted, how does any one do this? So many more people are dead now. The news reporters changed, it's a man now-Camera operator maybe? I think the woman fell asleep and didn't wake back up like all of the others. He says that scientists found that there's a bug, a sort of virus, that's been making its way through air and into peoples brains. It buries in and basically feeds on you while your brain is at rest, when you're asleep. They've dubbed it the Zombie Virus, since it feeds on your brain. I bet that scientist thinks he's clever.

The three of us raided a 7/11 today. There aren't many survivors so a lot of the convenience stores are untouched. We took a bunch of coffee and 5-hour energy and all of the snacks that have sugar in it. We also took a bunch of scary moves from a video store so we wouldn't want to fall asleep.

I haven't gone in the rooms where the dead were rotting. I had checked on them later the first day and their eyes looked slightly sunken in. I have stayed away from their rooms because even though I probably have the virus already, I just don't want to see them wither away.

Thirteen days now, Sam and I had sex. I just didn't want to die a virgin. I said I've done it so many times to be cool, but I'm a liar. I just don't want to go to heaven and be dubbed a liar when I see everyone again.

It's been four weeks now and I'm so tired. No, there's a better word than that, but I can't think of it right now. Trin fell asleep two days ago, we tried to keep her awake but it didn't work and now she wouldn't wake up. It's just Me and Sam-Sam and I now. I miss Trin so much, she was my closest friend and now she's gone. I cried for three hours, Sam cried longer.

I hate this, I hate all of this. I miss everyone, I miss my mom and my dad and my brother and Trin and sleep...I miss sleeping! I can't even lay down on my bed or I might fall asleep. I've been seeing them, you know. Their ghosts. They try to lead me to my bed. Sam caught me yesterday, he saved me.

I don't think those scientists are ever going to come up with a cure.

I'm so tired.

I don't remember how many days it's been. I lost track. I don't hear anyone outside anymore, no one has been on the news, there are no stations playing on the television or radio. It's just silence, and the silence is scary. I'm at peace with death now, because I want nothing more than to sleep right now.

Sam and I are going to go to my bed and just lay on it. I'm the happiest I've been in weeks. I wrote this initially in case someone would survive and find this so I could live on somehow but now I realize I'm writing this to keep my sanity...But now I think I'm going to sleep.