Genesis

Day 25

Matthew Praugh watched the Virals below him. He'd been holed up in this drug store for a little over three weeks now. Since the day the world went to utter hell. On the very first day, he'd stumbled, in a drunken stupor, upon this little abandoned shop. Chaos was everywhere but here - this little, tiny, uneffected store was practically begging for him to move in.

So he did.

He hadn't thought about the future. All he'd been aiming to do was find a temporary home; some place to call safe. But he'd run out of food by day three, having eaten most of what was in the store on day one, hungry from his drunken expedition, and finishing the rest by day three.

On day six, he ate a rat.

On day twelve, he ate a pigeon and three rats.

And now, for thirteen days, he'd survived off of nothing.

He didn't know how he was alive. He'd gone dehydrated multiple times, only living thanks to the rainy weather of Seattle and its suburbs. His body was wasting away; he had little energy left.

Matthew was going to die, and he was okay with it. He spent his time watching the others who'd died before him, watching them stumble and walk through the streets; moaning and crying out for food. He'd be like them soon, he knew. He'd probably fall off the roof when he turned, breaking a few bones. He wouldn't feel any pain, he decided. Virals didn't feel pain, right? They were oblivious to everything but the need to eat.

Matthew had wanted to be a scientist once. He'd wanted to study things like these - disease anomalies and the likes. But then his fiancee had died and he'd given up; drinking his days away and no longer attending work. He survived off of the funds she'd left him, and then off his mother when he'd wasted those.

And then this had happened.

He should've changed when this happened. He should've used this as a medium to get better. He should've forced himself to get better, moving past the cravings and the sickness from alcohol depravation, continuing past the pains of hunger and dehydration.

But he didn't. Instead, he embraced his now-inevitable death.

He watched the Virals below him, and he waited to die.

Bell watched as Angie calmly raised the gun she carried and sank a bullet into the head of one of the approaching Virals. She could practically feel annoyance radiating off of her. If Angie had eyes in the back of her head, they'd be glaring at Bell right this moment.

She had been late to guard duty, again. For the third time in a row. Angie was a lot like a mother - always fussing over Bell, always making sure the others were doing what they were supposed to. Much more of a mother than Tina ever was to her.

Not that that fact mattered now. This is now. That was then. And, right now, she's approximately shoulder-deep in trouble. If her dad found out, Bell would be banned from guard duty for, well, probably the rest of her kinda-shitty life. She was lucky he ever let her out of the base, let alone twice a week. A liberty she was about to royally screw up if she didn't focus.

It was hard to get to guard duty on time, granted. None of the clocks really worked anymore, so everyone had to either rely on each other or the sun to tell them when it was time to head out, and Bell didn't like to do either of those things. Other than that, the guard post was a little less than three blocks away, which was quite a trek for someone who wasn't exactly dressed for such an occasion.

And boys are quite distracting. That was probably the worst of all. All of Bell's shifts happened when Kipper and Red - the two very attractive men of her group - were off duty. And she just couldn't help herself from striking a conversation with one of them; often leading to Red being furious with her and Angie being extremely annoyed and Oliver completely oblivious of the whole ordeal. Guard duty aside, she also supposed she shouldn't mess around with two boys at once, but she did it before the apocalypse and, well, old habits die hard.