The Only

CH 1

Sometimes I think we're the only people alive.

Sometimes our voices are the only thing that breaks the silence. The silence is awful now that the hum is gone. Before, silence meant when everyone stopped talking. You could still hear the refrigerator humming, or the dishwasher, or the television.

Now, silence means nothing. It's like a black hole opens and sucks in all sound. Silence is the absence of sound.

So naturally we talk a lot. We talk about how things were before. Our families, our grades, relationships. Jesse was torn up after I told him that everyone in my American Lit. class had been killed. His girlfriend was in that class.

Of course when we talk, we have to whisper, in case their are any foot-soldiers, or as I like to call them - pawns, around.

The pawns look like humans, except their hair. They all have ashen white hair. They dress in a kind of green jumpsuit, loaded down with arms and ammo.

For the pawns to find us in our camp would be fatal.

Our camp is merely a sheet of aluminum laying across a set of five-foot high Cyprus knees. We keep blankets and sleeping bags inside, with our water pan. We have a fire-ring in front with another pan, the one we use to cook. Our stash of canned food is inside the tree, a few feet from the ring.

Timmy stays inside the tent since his mental break-down. Sometimes he'll wake up crying in the middle of the night. He keeps a high fever that we're never able to break.

Jesse goes out everyday gathering firewood. Since we obviously don't have the luxury of an axe to cut down the trees, he picks up branches and twigs that have fallen.

I loot the nearby houses everyday. Sometimes I have to break a window or go through a pet-door. There is never anyone inside the houses. However there are signs of their death everywhere. Sometimes there's blood splattered on a wall or the floor, sometimes a bullet laying on the ground.

I'm mostly looting looking for medicine. Timmy's fever gets worse everyday, and there's nothing we can do without medicine. We give him water and keep him under a blanket even though it's a hundred degrees outside, but nothing can break his fever.

I make it back to camp with some Tylonol and a few boxes of stale Pop-Tarts. We feast on the Pop-tarts and sit on a fallen tree, watching the sunset.

"Do you think there are any other survivors?" Jesse asks me one day.

"Maybe. Somewhere. I really don't know." I answer truthfully.

Somewhere in the distance I can hear a baby alligator cry.

"Why did they kill all of us, but leave the animals?" I ask.

"I don't know. Maybe they wanted to exterminate us so they could, I don't know, have Earth to themselves?" Jesse answers.

"Eew. I don't want to even think about that possibility." I say.

"I got you something today," he says.

"What?" I exclaim. "But you were on firewood duty."

"Yeah, I was." He states. "I was collecting wood and I ran into a little shack out in the woods. I broke in and found this," he says, placing a hardback book in my hand.

I hold the book up into the dying light. "Dracula!" I cry. "Why....how..?"

"I remembered texting you one night. You told me to leave you alone because you were reading Dracula."

"Yeah," I say, "I never finished it. Thank you so much."

"Don't mention it." He jumps off the log and helps me down. "Get back to the camp. I have one more surprise."

I step under the aluminum, and am surprised to find Timothy sitting up for the first time in weeks. I set my book on top of my sleeping bag and move over to sit beside Timmy.

"You feeling better?" I ask.

He nods. "A little. I couldn't lay on these roots any longer."

Jesse steps inside, reaches under the cover of his sleeping bag and hands us something.

"Surprise!" He says. "Hershey's bars for everyone!"

I place the chocolate in my mouth, letting it melt on my tounge. Things may be looking up for us after all.