“YO! Jamie! Wake up.” Someone screamed in my ear. I flinched and glared over at Darien. This guy. He is working my nerves. I punched him in the neck. “I wasn’t sleeping you idiot. I was thinking.” He sat up, laughing and rubbing his neck. It was red. I hope it bruised too. I jumped up and re-adjusted my shotty strap on my shoulder. Darien skipped ahead of me to our living area. I followed slowly.
It been 2 months since that day. I’ve been running since. I left my town and just kept driving in Ash’s car until it ran out of gas. It took a day or something for that to happen, since it had a full tank of gas. Then I walked. During this time, I realized what was happening to our world.
I walked past bits of dead people and actual dead bodies. Shops were closed and broken in to. Cars abandoned and missing parts. Lawns left unattended. If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought the 2012 apocalypse had happened. There was no people. It was like a ghost town.
I wandered in neighborhoods for days looking for some sign of life. Everything was just so quiet, I got depressed really fast. To think that we would be brought down by something. But I can’t really talk about it since I’m not fully sure what the hells going on. I knew that I needed to protect myself from those “things”. So I found a gun shop and took a few items. Two hand guns, a shotty, 3 combat knives. A nice bag to hold it all was also found and “borrowed”.
I slept in different house and random stores for a few nights before I finally found someone. I was raiding an empty grocery store, picking up food (and feeling only a little bad about it) when I heard a noise from the back of the store. I stopped and got down to the ground. I heard the noise again and decided to check it out. I didn’t know what it was but if it turned out to be dangerous... I pulled out my hand gun.
I walked slowly toward the sound and when I got close, it stopped. My breathe caught. A few seconds went by and nothing moved. My heart was beating in my chest fast and hard. Then out of nowhere, a shape flew in front of my and tackled me. I screamed and fumbled with my gun as best as I can with someone throwing me to the ground. We both hit the ground but with me being on the bottom. He was straddling me on on my stomach and the weight of him hurt a little. I put the gun up and pointed it up at the person.
I almost pulled the trigger until I noticed the person, who happened to be a boy, was pointing a similar gun at me. We both breathed hard and held our guns to each others face. I looked up and saw that the boy’s eyes were not the terrible black and red color, but instead a steady brown. He must have noticed I was regular because he got off of my and held a hand down to help me up.
“Are you infected? Were you bitten? Scratched?” he said with a slight Australian accent and a serious face. I looked at him odd. “No I’m not” I replied. He nodded and put his gun at the waist of his pants.
“Well that's good. Then I would have to kill ya.” he smiled real big and I couldn't help but to return it. "Same here" I said shaking my gun at him before I putting it back in my bag. He looked at my bag then back up to me. Then shoved out his hand and said, "I'm Darien and you are?"
“Name’s Jamie. Nice to meet you Darien.” I shook his hand then let go. After that we sat down and got to talking a bit about what we’ve seen and what we know. Turns out he knew a lot of what was going on. He told me about how something with government testing went wrong and how people went nuts. He told me about what the infection really was.
It was like rabies. You only caught it if you were in contact with someone infected, though a bite, a scratch, or getting it into open wounds. And when you were infected, it would basically kill you from the inside out. Your blood burns. Your bones start to become weaker and weaker. Your brain will turn to mush. But for some reason, you can slow down this process by consuming large amounts of blood to clean your own out. Which reminded me of the cannibals back at my school.
I asked how Darien knew this all but he wouldn’t tell me. After he told me this, I told him what happened to me. He just listened patiently. When I finished, he was quiet. I was going to say something but we heard a loud crash at the front of the store followed by vicious growling. We shot up. I stared at Darien and he motioned me to this back door in the store. We went through it and out some doors in the rear on some loading decks. And ran for some cover by some cars near by. We stopped to catch our breathe and I stared over at him.
“Now what?” I asked. He looked over and smiled. “Now we run. I don’t like being by myself, so wanna go with me?”
I scoffed. “Of course.”
This was our beginning.
