Paradise

7. It's A Man Eat Man World

"You know what, I'm tired of being scared of these things! I hate being locked up in this house. I'm leaving." Grayson finally exploded one day, putting some things back into his bag that were cluttered around the guest room.

"Gray, you've killed one of them. Don't act like you know what your doing." Ethan said from the doorway. Once he caught on to what Grayson was doing, he guarded the doorway so Grayson couldn't get through to leave. Although, if Grayson was smart enough he would know the window was ground level. Andi had snuck in and out many times since she got her license, whereas Casey hasn't. Casey was just a hooligan in different ways than Andi.

"They taught us about the black plague in school and it turned out fine in the end. Yay! The human population recovered. This is kind of like that except we have flesh-ravenous rotting corpses of humans that eat other fucking humans!" Casey could hear Grayson shouting from the end of the hallway. "If I'm gonna take my chances in this fucking apocalypse it's not gonna be locked up inside this house!"

Ethan looked defeated when he came back into the kitchen. He sat up on the counter and grabbed the pack of prime times beside him. He lit one up and took a few long drags before passing it to Casey. Between the two of them, they blew through Ethan's pack and were already halfway through Casey's. She made a mental note to pick some more up when they went out next.

"If he leaves, he'll try to go back home," Ethan stared at the ground. "Wherever he goes, I go too - but I don't know if I can handle being in that empty house right now."

"We said we'd stay together until we get answers and we have answers." Andi mentioned.

"Do you think he'll really leave?" Casey looked from Andi to Ethan.

Ethan shrugged. "He seems pretty serious." Andi left the kitchen a few seconds later and headed down the hallway. Casey knew Andi was going to hopefully talk some sense into him or at least get answers out of him. "How can act like none of this bothers him?"

Casey didn't respond to Ethan's question but she thought about it until Andi came back into the room. By now, their shared prime time was gone and Ethan was already debating another. The topic was never brought back up and Casey assumed it was resolved.

-

Casey was startled awake on the couch by a loud bang from the backyard. She got up to investigate and wasn't surprised when she saw Andi coming down the hallway to investigate the sound too. "Do you think its one of them?" Andi questioned. She wasn't talking about the twins, she was talking about the living dead.

"It could be. We haven't see many around here because of the camps but they must be spreading out now." Andi said as she slowly pulled a blanket back to look outside. The sun was just starting to peak over the horizon but it was still pretty dark outside. Andi let the blanket fall back into place. "Yeah, it's one of them."

Casey thought back to the fairgrounds. A painful chill ran from the top her head to the bottom of her toes as she thought the rotting, walking corpses that had broken through the weight of the military trucks blocking the gate. There were many of them so if they had all been pushing, they would've gotten through eventually.

That was only the third day into the apocalypse. Casey assumed the main three camps they were going to investigate had been all swiped out with infection and disease. She strongly disliked thinking about that.

Her family could've been brought to one of them.

Andi headed back to her room but Casey stayed in her place. She stared blankly at the ground, not wanting to let her emotions get the best of her. She'd been pushing them deep down for two weeks. She did anything to distract herself so she didn't think about what she saw when she went home that day. Her brain finally gave her feet the signals to move and she headed to the kitchen.