Stay Inside

00. David

My mother named me after her best friend. He died before the change happened. She said he was kind and loyal and always helped her when she had trouble making a big decision. I couldn't imagine that. Mom didn't ever seem to have trouble making a hard decision. She was tough and strong. She had a big scar on her leg from taking a bullet. She was my hero.

It took until I got older for her to tell me about the outbreak that changed life on Earth forever, not that I had anything to compare it to.

After she and Lothryn escaped the facility, they found their way to my abuela's apartment. They couldn't get out of the city. It was locked down and traffic was a nightmare. Though traffic was always a nightmare, Mom joked. So they boarded up the windows and camped out inside for a while. They drank EXtros to stave off the virus. Lothryn provided for them at first while Mom healed from her wound.

In time, they were both scavenging food and supplies, fighting off zombies, and keeping Abuela safe. Lothryn and Mom watched each other's backs. They had a special way of communicating, a special language that only they understood. She said they were an unstoppable team.

And yet one day, Lothryn was unlucky. He was caught off guard and got bitten by a zombie. He told Mom to kill him, but she tied him up outside. She flipped through the pages of their secret book. Folded into the back pages, on the back of a receipt, was a shopping list. Garlic, lemon juice, cinnamon, and ginger. At first, she didn't believe it, but she said she learned long ago that things she thought were ridiculous could sometimes surprise her and be the truth. She got the ingredients and mixed them together and it turned out to be a cure for the very virus that had decimated the world.

But it was too late to restore the world to what it once was. Mom had made peace with that. She said in some ways, it was a good thing. Plants and animals, for instance, were thriving. The virus didn't affect them.

She said Lothryn had a dream about building a community in the woods, something new and full of life. So Mom, Lothryn, and Abuela set off into the forest and began to build my home. They found other survivors like them, kind, hard-working people. Mom shared her cure, and the survivors shared their skills.

It took them a few years to get on their feet. They suffered through adverse weather, zombie attacks, and even a few altercations will fellow survivors. But what they built endured.

I was born into a nurturing community along with a few other kids my own age. We pick fresh berries in summer and swim in the lake nearby. We have a school. Sometimes Mom drives off with other adults and they look for other survivors. They usually return with new friends. They say the zombies are mostly gone, just corpses rotting in the sun. I've never even seen one. Mom says she hopes I never will.

She's never told me what happened to Lothryn. She said as close as they became, she couldn't shake the trauma she'd been through in his company. Apparently, they didn't start off on the best footing. Though she did say if not for Lothryn, she would have never met my dad. She said she discovered that Lothryn disappeared one day. And just ask quickly as he left, she met and fell in love with Isaac.