Just In Case

A few Moments of Peace

{ 17:56 Akron, Ohio, USA }

Bryce had arrived in Ohio. He was forced to surrender his truck to the military, along with a mandatory bag search and body inspection as precautions. He was living alone in a small townhouse, his bag still packed and basically untouched since he had arrived. He had become heavily paranoid due to being alone with only the dead for over two months. During his time in the guarded community, he had met a few other people around his age, not allowing himself to get too close to any of them.

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{ 09:02 Eaton, Ohio, USA }

The heterochromic girl paced as the boys slept, trying to decide a way for them to survive - no matter what it would cost. She wouldn't take those boys out of the building unless there was absolutely no other way to keep them alive. Vivian had been taking care of the orphaned twin boys for a few weeks, but the government was slowly lessening the amount of supplies they provided. Their electricity was still functioning, along with their water and heat. She knew that things weren't going to last and it kept her up at night - She had made these children her responsibility. Though she was young, she had consciously made the decision to take care of the foreign twins. Vivian lowered herself onto the couch and began to think of a real survival plan.

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{ 02:38 Lexington, Kentucky, USA }

It had been a few days since the outbreak on the bus Holly had been traveling in. Turns out, a young boy, a child, had been scratched by an infected family member, and his mother had told no one. He had died and turned in his sleep, his overprotective mother being the first one bitten. Everything went sideways, the bus crashed, everyone fled, screaming as they ran. They must've forgotten that noises only draw more dead ones, and soon enough all noise had ceased - Holly assumed them to all be dead. Except for the blue haired male that had spoken first spoken to her a few days before. The brave boy and the frightened girl decided they'd do better together than separate, and they stuck together, hatching a plan to leave Tennessee. Holly had found a seemingly abandoned van with enough supplies to last a few days. She and the young man waited a while before taking it, always cautious of the possibility of roaming dead. The young man, Robin, had been taking care of her, showing her how to survive. Holly was young, and he wanted her to live as long as she could, even in the world they were thrown into. Having made it to Lexington, the two young people were sitting in the middle row of the van, mapping out possible ways to get to their destination. They weren't that far, but with the dead stumbling about outside, nothing can be predicted. They mapped out multiple routes before getting some rest. When they awoke, they were off.

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Outside of Ohio and a few other selected states, things weren't going very well. People were dying, only to reanimate as a mindless being that would attack anything that moved. Families had been separated, by death and means of survival. Almost every infant that had been unfortunate enough to had been born around the time of the first infection had been devoured, the infant's clothing and bones being all that remained. Small children who had just learned how to act around strangers and other living people, were suddenly being taught not to make any noise and to never leave their parents' side. Older children were being taught to kill and scavenge to survive. People were praying to any god they could possibly think of, begging them to end this savage world, but alas, there was no answer. Anything that was alive either ran, fought, or became food for the dead. Some tried to find permanent shelter, but that rarely worked out, as those that hid likely had children which lead to the dead being drawn in by the screams from fussy or nightmare plagued children. Some had sacrificed family pets or the elderly to avoid being eaten themselves, as this world truly was kill or be killed.
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A man sat alone in his home, his wife and children gone, through both abandonment and death. As he sat in the nearly ancient, slouchy arm chair in the living room of his old home, he could feel the infection spreading through his veins. He had been bitten the day before. He was sweating profusely, desperate for something to drink. However, he could not move. The infection had caused his bones to feel as fragile as a bubble, as if they would shatter into thousands of pieces at the slightest movement. He was dying, slowly, and there was absolutely nothing that could be done. The only noise that could be heard over his shallow, pained breathing was the continuous thumping of the dead as they attempted to claw their way into the house. The man sat, staring blankly in the general direction of the blood splattered family portraits that hung on the wall, trying to distract himself - But he could not. His long dead son mindlessly, repeatedly slammed himself into and scratched at his bedroom door, reminded him of what he would soon become. The father, who sat in that old, musty chair, stared directly forward, unmoving. Though he was not yet dead, he was well on his way. Outside of his home, dead wandered the streets, occasionally bumping into cars and making their alarms go off, only for them to aimlessly scream into the night before being silenced by the previously useful settings. Everything had gone terribly wrong, in this small town. When it had first started, the town counsel believed it could be contained. In the last century, no one had been more incorrect than they.
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{ 2:14 Akron, Ohio, USA }

Bryce knew that it was due time to move locations to a different city. He gathered his things and set outside into the crisp, autumn air. It was a particularly cold morning, as the young boy decided to sneak out of the community and go on his own. He swiftly avoided the guards around the perimeter, distracting them with thrown rocks or kicked pebbles. He left that little community behind and went towards the city, curious as to if all of Ohio was as safe as they said it was. As he travelled, he made sure to keep the screwdriver he brought from home at the ready; never know when a dead one may appear, even if the government says the area is safe. He had been traveling for almost a day when he wandered across a few of them. They seemed to have more difficulty walking than a toddler taking their first steps, stumbling and bumping into one another. He tried his best to avoid having to kill the beasts, and that wasn't going to change now. He swiftly ran by them, hoping that none would follow. Bryce ducked into a seemingly abandoned alley. As he cautiously crept in between the towering buildings that surrounded him, he saw a re-murdered corpse. It's head was bashed in, it's jaw dangling from the left side. It's eye, which hung like a ripe fruit, has been launched from the skull upon being hit by whatever it was that killed it again. Blood trickled down the right side of it's partially decayed face, leaking from the impact site of the blunt force trauma it endured in its final moments. He continued to stare at the again deceased beast before hearing distant gunshots and running in the opposite direction. He stopped after a few blocks and he scoped out his surroundings as he regained his breath. As he looked around he saw someone being eaten alive. There were dead ones, several on each side of him, clawing into his slowly cooling flesh as blood spilled out of his abdomen. The dead around him tearing, ripping, shredding, and destroying the body that was once useful, causing the soon-to-be dead man to release a series of blood curdling screams. He stood, horrified, as he watched what was once a man be ripped to nothing more than useless chunks of flesh, muscle, and fat.
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Useless mounds of flesh that were once human wandered the streets, attacking and killing anything that they could shove down their gullet into their decaying insides. Every day the undesirable beasts roamed the streets, repeating the same process. Some were missing limbs; arms, hands. Some had ankles so badly broken that they walked sideways on their feet, not feeling the slightest bit of pain. Some had no legs at all, forced to drag themselves along the rugged concrete as it tore and clawed at it's rotting flesh with every pull. This was the world now. If you died, you became one of those things. All of this, ranging from the falling government to the corpses of children, their families and animals lining the streets, to the ever-present smell of rotting flesh, this world, to most, was no longer worth living in. However, there were some that made it their goal to prove that mindset wrong.