I woke up after a loud thud shambled from somewhere. No one was sleeping beside me. Ashley was not in bed.

“Ash?” I called. 

No answer.

Something is wrong.

I jumped to my feet after sensing that something felt really off.

I opened the bedroom door to find the most bewildering thing I would ever see.

Ashley was there, on the floor, kneeling. I stared directly to her back, but I could see that she cried. Tears dropped down from her cheek, and blood reddened her shirt.

“Ashley?”

The item next to Ash was a bloody knife. In front of her; a form… a figure. It was on the floor laying lifelessly.

“Ash, are you okay?”

I approached her and saw a dead boy in front of her. She was kneeling by that body. It looked like she just stabbed the kid on the chest and let him bled out and die. I also saw the front door opened like it shouldn’t be.

“Ash, you okay?”

“I’m so sorry.” I could barely hear her as her voice was muffled by her cry.

“It’s okay, Ash.”

I tried to hug her, but she immediately dodged me and picked the knife up, and threatened me with it. “Don’t come near me!”

“Okay, okay.” I slowly moved backwards to avoid the sharp knife she was pointing. “Ash, calm down, okay? I understand what you were trying to do. Just put the knife down. It’s okay.”

“You don’t understand. I killed a kid.”

“It looks like you saved that kid. You opened the door for that kid and he was trying to bite you, so you stopped him. It’s not a wrong thing to do, Ashley.”

She shook her head. “He did bite me.”

Four words. 

Those four words shattered the world around me. They destroyed me and who I was. Suddenly, I didn’t have an urge to live anymore. Suddenly, every hope I stored inside my heart just vanished. Half of my soul died when she spitted those words. 

“What?”

“I opened the door after hearing a cry. He turned just five minutes after I let him in and he bit my arm, Ti.” And she showed me a bite mark on her left palm.

“No. No.” I ran to the kitchen despite her words and her knife. “No, I can fix this. You don’t worry, okay, Ash?” 

I ransacked every drawer, every cabinet and every shelf. I searched for antibiotics and ran back to her after finding a few. 

“Take this, Ash. You’ll be alright. You’re not going to turn.”

“You don’t remember, Ti? Nothing in this world can heal me after I was bitten.”

My head knew that, but my heart still looked for a way. I didn’t accept the fact that she was going to leave me.

The infection already took half her body. She suddenly fell to the floor and her hands started twitching. Blood ran out from her mouth like a waterfall.

I ran to her. I picked her up from the floor and I hugged her. I didn’t want to depart. I didn’t want to lose the only person that I loved in this world. My head was fuming and my heart throbbed faster than bullet.

“Ti…” She was crying in my arms. I couldn’t stand it. “Please promise me that you have to live. You have to live, as hard as it might seem.”

“No, Ash. You go, I go. That’s how it works.”

Ashley shook her head again. “No, don’t. You have to live, Ti. You are in this world for a purpose. Remember that!”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to leave you. If you go, I will come with you.”

Now, her legs trembled without intention. 

“No!” She yelled. “You have to live.”

She hissed after saying those words.

I cried. I knew nothing else to say. My whole body felt numb. My head felt really dizzy. I didn’t want to accept the truth. Not now, not ever.

“Sorry, Ti.”

Ashley, with her twitching hand and her paling skin, grabbed the bloody knife beside her. 

“No!” I tried to snatch the knife first, but it was too late. My sister cut her own neck and didn’t let me save her. She choked until every last drop of blood exited her system. My face turned red. Every cell of my body died. Her blood sprayed out, staining my face and my clothes.

Finally, she was still. Both her eyes stared open towards the ceiling, but nothing was left. Not her soul, not her life. She was dead. She left me alone.

I stayed there as long as I could remember. I kneeled as both my hands clutched her. I didn’t dare to move or to talk or to breathe. I couldn’t think.

So decidedly, I carefully brought her to our bedroom and covered her still body with the white bedcover. I didn’t think it was real. I didn’t think it actually happened.

Everything happened too fast and too unreal so I couldn’t cope with reality. Laying her cold body on the bed just felt like bringing a sleeping sister to the bed past bedtime. 

She’s gone. Get over it.

I decided to check if it was real. I went out and closed the bedroom door as silent as I possibly could, and afterwards, I just walked slowly to the place where she died and found the dead boy beside a bloody knife. That knife consumed him, my sister, and it should consume me too.

For the boy’s body, I took it to Roundley’s old room and rested him there on the bed. I returned to my room just after that, and then I sat down at the exact center of my apartment, staring coldly at the knife. It was just a normal, handy kitchen knife which was owned by my mom before she departed forever to another continent in the south. 

Maybe I should just throw it away. Maybe I should bury it or leave it somewhere where I could never see it again.

But I wanted so bad to test if everything was real or not. You might have thought that I was nuts or dumb, but I think I was both.

I pressed the sharp end of the knife deeply into my left palm until a cut slid open. It penetrated my skin, and then my flesh, and then blood started to drip out one drop at a time. I watched my hand getting sliced open. I felt the sting and pain coming from there, but I still thought that it wasn’t real.

But it was.

And I realized this. 

So I dropped the knife and my body sprung backwards to the floor. My head bumped those white tiles hard so everything went black.

When I woke up, I felt terrible. My head was really numb and every part of my body was limp. 

I could see no color. Everything was black and white. Fireflies flew all over my eyes.

I tried so bad to get on my ass, to sit and absorb the situation a bit. I did do that after trying for a while, but the first thing I saw when I finally managed to sit was my left hand. The bleak red blood dried on my skin, and the bleeding also stopped, but I couldn’t feel a thing. I tried to swing it up, but nothing happened.

I touched it with my other arm and pain suddenly registered to my mind. I realized that I was starving, so I tried to crawl on the floor, but I used my left backhand instead of my palm, and slowly reached one of the uncooked sardines on the kitchen’s island. 

My hands couldn’t open them, so I dragged my butt to the fridge, and hauled a pack of dog food. Believe it or not I consumed the one kilo package for less than ten minutes. I felt really disgusting and filthy, but at least my belly was full.

And after a while, I finally caught up to what happened before I passed. I remembered everything in an instant. It came to my mind like hundreds of speeding cars trying to ram me.

The first logical thing to do was to wash my hands as clean and as long as I could, because that knife which stabbed my palm also stabbed that infected boy’s chest.

My feet stood just at the door. My eyes were locked to the blanketed figure on top of the bed, covered by the white sheet. She was my sister. She was also a human, just like everyone else. She had ordinary lives and ordinary friends. But now, she didn't even have a life.

Her last message was for me to stay alive, to not surrender, but I wasn’t that strong. Something like this hit me and I immediately fell. I searched quietly for a strong rope that could not break while my body hangs on it, and lucky me I didn’t find one. I could just stab myself or jump out from the window like Roundley did, but something stopped me.

I didn’t know what.

So I lived normally after that day, though I lost sense of the meaning of the world. I ate like I always did, changed my bandages for my palm since that day, practiced and worked out for hours every day. The latter really helped me cope through those hard times. Working out distracted me from the bitter reality that I had to live in.

I never entered my room once. I refused to even look at the white door. The smell of rotting corpse started surrounding the whole apartment, and it came from my bedroom where my sister’s old remnant lied. I didn’t know what to do, so I smashed one of the windows which led outside inside the room to let the fresh air inside.

Until it came to the year of 2022 (yes, two years after the breakout) that something major happened in my life. The month was February (I think) and the snow started melting and the temperature got a bit bearable but just for a slight. I did smash some windows to let the stinky odor out, though it didn’t really help much. The rotten smell from inside my bedroom didn’t bother me at all anymore.

I think at this point I almost ransacked every room on every floor (except the bottom ones) and killed almost eight predators in total.

What did I do for a year? I mostly spent it by talking to myself or working out. I almost decided to just fuck it and end it all several times, but no method really suited my liking. 

I wrote countless songs and imagined how they would boom if the world hadn’t ended.

But smashing predators’ heads kinda became my favorite hobby.

I can tell you that I’m getting really good at killing predators, though I hadn’t even killed that many, but I was a good swinger with my lovely metal bat.

But that day in a cold February, something happened.

Something that would change the course of my life in this god forsaken place.

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Art : _EDV7770sm from Flickr