Chapter 2

I love the fonts available on 1001fonts.com. I like to try to write in one that reminds me of how the speaker might have written, especially when the voice is in first person.

2

 

The food dad had saved up in the storm cellar ran out a year later. I had no choice; I had to leave. But that really didn’t break my heart. There wasn’t much left of it to be broken anyway.

I packed up everything I could into one of dad’s camouflage-print backpacks and started walking.

I never had a plan or a destination, but I couldn’t stand to keep on living in that cold, dark hole in my dead family’s backyard. I couldn’t stand looking at that house or the grave where my dad was buried. It was too much and so I left, going nowhere as fast as my legs would get me there.

Before the virus hit and my small, very limited world went dark, I didn’t really have any idea what had happened to the rest of the country. Outside the rural protection of my lonely house, things became very clear very quickly.

I learned 3 things pretty immediately:

 

1.        Probably less than several hundred thousand people in the nation had survived. No one really knew about other countries since communication was down pretty much permanently. But even fewer people had an immunity to the virus like I did.

2.         It had had nothing to with project Archangel. In fact, just about all of the Archangel models had gotten infected and died too. They were human too, after all, if not genetically altered and super-enhanced ones. The rest were thought to have been killed off trying to prevent riots and save people from the chaos of the world unfolding upon itself.

3.         No one else was looking out for me except for me. So nobody could be trusted, no matter how sad their sob story was.

 

It was a numbing, eerie feeling to see so many dead people that all looked exactly the same; they Archangels were all clones of David Rickard so their faces were the same, even if their hair and eyes were different. An army of Rickard’s.

I’d seen disaster movies before, but nothing ever prepares you for something like that. I kept things as simple as I could and never went 10 feet without my dad’s 1897 Winchester pump-action shotgun in my hand and his pistol tucked through my belt in the back of my pants.

Finding food was not really a problem; there weren’t enough people left to compete for what you could find in freezers, vending machines, and grocery stores that were still standing. The world, or at least what I could see of it, had got really empty really fast.

People I did run into came in 3 categories: other survivors like me, desperate or crazy infected people, or those who worked for a man called the Collector. The latter was the most dangerous and unfortunately, the most common.

The collector was just that, nothing more. He’d taken up some kind of kingly role to a group of other survivors, using brute force and violence to impose his will on anyone and everyone he could. To those who would work for him, he promised food, protection, and sex with as many women as they could get their hands on as long as they did what he wanted them to do. It was a pretty good campaign for the caliber of people left in the world; a bunch of desperate fools with nothing to live for will do about anything as long as they feel like they’re a part of something.

The Collector sent out hunting parties far and wide to capture any other survivors they found and bring them back. Some became slaves, usually children and women, some got offered a chance to work for the Collector. Death was preferable to what fate would await me if I ever got caught and I’d sworn that I’d shoot myself before I ever ended up like that.

If fate or God or whatever had brought the world to this state was going to force me to keep on living in it, I wasn’t going to lie down and be a victim. This s****y existence was going to be on my terms.

 

Author's Note

Content not edited.