Age of Decimation

Chapter III

-February Seventh-

"I'm sorry for your loss and blah blah blah, but this was not an accident." The voice sounded like that of a small child's, around the age of six.

"I'm sure you're all sad, but understand that this was done with all the kindness of my heart," the voice said, "and also to destroy mankind as we know it."

I looked out of the window and saw others with sad and dazed looks pasted on their faces as they huddled around dead family members. I turned back to my phone in anticipation.

"I thought to myself: 'adults are destroying the world for generations that come after them,' so I set out to create a disease that would infect all those of eighteen years and older, and ultimately kill them."

I looked over at Erik to see his face contorted in anger, although his eyes looked lifeless. The voice went on.

"I was about to unleash this disease upon the world, but I thought to myself once more: 'won't the other generations of humans also destroy the world?' At that point, I realized even if killed off the 'now' adults, the 'next' would continue destroying.

"So," the voice chuckled, "I modified the disease to kill those who become eighteen as well!"

As the voice finished his monologue, I counted the days left until I turned eighteen. My birthday is March twenty-first, so I have forty-one days until I die.

Forty-one days to live.

The thought of death always freaked me out, as my dad had died to cancer when I was young. Now my mom was dead, and I was gonna be dead along with her pretty soon.

I was shaken from my thoughts by Erik's hyperventilating. I stared at him until I realized what was wrong with him. Besides the fact that more than half of the human population was dead.

His birthday was in a week.

"I have nothing more to say," the voice declared, "except: 'have a wonderful rest of your life!'"

For a few seconds, the world was in complete silence. Then, all of a sudden, my mom's body started to twitch.

"Oh yeah one more thing," the voice explained, "the people who die to the disease turn into zombies. Good luck!" The voice went silent once more, but this time didn't come back.

"We gotta get out of here," I said, no emotion in my voice, "unless we want to die today." Erik was still in a daze, but he managed to get up with my help.

I couldn't look at my mom's twitching body, so I kept my gaze upwards. The queasiness in my stomach wouldn't leave, but I managed to keep it down at least. Erik, on the other hand, threw up on my carpet.

"C'mon dude.." I groaned, "I just vacuumed that carpet!" He looked at me in a way that made me think he didn't know I was joking. Of course I don't care about the carpet! The world was ending as I knew it!

Erik said he didn't know of any place we could go that would be safe from the zombies, but I knew of one.

We arrived at the vegetable shop in a few minutes, and Erik looked at me like I was insane, but when we walked in, he noticed that it was utterly deserted.

"How did you know nobody would be in here?" Erik asked, sounding surprised.

"No one eats vegetables these days," I stated, "so I figured it would be a good place to hide for now."

Erik squinted at me, as he was a huge avocado I mean advocate of eating vegetables.

"I'm just kidding!" I said jokingly, "it wasn't supposed to open today because all the workers went on a protest to stop objectifying female vegans."

Erik gave me one last look of hostility and started to look around.

We didn't find any signs of people being in here recently, so we set up camp and ate some carrots.

After a few minutes, Erik nearly choked on his carrot. I looked at him and was about to go help, but he swallowed it.

"You okay?" I asked, concerned that he was already dying.

"I just remembered," Erik groaned, "we need to go get my sister."

I sighed. I had forgotten entirely about Erik's sister, nine-year-old Ainsly, who was probably still at her school. Which had a lot of adults.

This wasn't going to be easy.