AM13 Outbreak Shorts

One Year On - Forty Three (Alex)

Alex

Everyone is dead. Everyone around me is gone. Yet somehow, I am still standing. I don't understand it. I don't get why I have been chosen to continue existing in this hell. Don't I deserve to be punished since I started all of this? My rage at Benji unleashed everything.

The sad thing is beating Benji didn't help me, seeing him die didn't make me feel any better, none of it brings Rachael back, I still have the suicide note from her, proof that she's gone. Now, most other people have joined her except for those who ran, and everything is so much worse. It's all over.

This camp might not have been the safe haven that could hold us forever, there were issues here beyond anything that two teenagers could've dealt with, but we had walls around us, people living alongside us, it was almost like normal life.

Almost, but not quite enough.

"What now?" I cry out to myself. "What now?"

I want to scream, to yell, to lash out. I want some of this frustration to leave my body before I explode like a pressure cooker as I reach my limit, but I don't have the emotional energy for any of that. I guess I've given up. I'm waiting for death. Waiting to join everyone else.

"Alex?"

At first, I think I imagine my name being called out. I'm so desperate for company that I'm making up friends, but then the groaning comes a second time, then a third.

"Rhys!"

Oh my God, Rhys. My one-time best friend who I still care lots for. Sure, we drifted apart when our lives went in opposite directions here, when I focused everything on Rachael and he joined the soldiers, but I'm still glad to hear from him.

I rush quickly over the bodies until I reach where he's collapsed.

"Oh, Rhys, oh my God. I'm so glad to hear from you..."

My words trail off as I realize this isn't the happy reunion, I want so bad, this isn't the glimmer of hope I need in this mess, this is just another tragedy for me to face. This isn't so much Rhys anymore, parts of him have been bitten off, shredded from him, eaten by them.

He's slowly becoming one of the infected as well, it's obvious just by looking at him. he's developing a hunger and I'm obvious prey standing right in front of him, waiting to die.

I should run, I know I should, but I don't. My intense need for this to end overshadows everything else and I remain exactly where I am, paused while Rhys succumbs surprisingly rapidly to this virus, while it consumes him up whole.

I resist my survival instinct and I let him come for me, I let him take my arm, and I allow him to eagerly sink his teeth into me. It's agony and the guttural scream tearing from my chest nearly makes me take off, but it doesn't matter now. There's nowhere to run.

It's already too late.

I'm dead, just like the rest of them.