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It was that death that had him exhausted, because he couldn’t sleep at night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the other man’s eyes widen as Marius plunged the blade in his gut. He didn’t have any other options though, not when a knife had been pulled on him too.
This was a new world, one in which it was kill or be killed, stay alive or be a corpse.
He set up camp in the middle of the woods, far from the road he’d been traveling on. It was safer that way, better to stay hidden from the infected and anyone who wanted to steal his shit and cut his throat.
The fire he started was small, the smoke slight as it rose up to the treetops. He sat on an overturned log and reached for his backpack. He was running dangerously low on supplies and hadn’t found anything to scavenge. The few houses he passed had been ransacked and all supplies taken. And the stench of death had filled them.
Things had gone downhill in the last two weeks, the infection spreading far quicker than any of the scientists anticipated. In the beginning, people hadn’t understood what was happening, hadn’t realized their loved ones who had the virus were not the same. They’d tried to help them, tried to bring them back.
There was no going back.
So, in the beginning, the infection spread like wildfire, especially in the parts of the city thick with population.
He grabbed a can of beans from his pack and pushed around the remaining supplies he had. He needed to find a place that was more secure, a place where he could live, grow his own food, survive.
Marius wanted to help people, to come to the surface and see if he could rectify, in some small way, the damage he’d been a part of, but there was no help he could give. The ones who weren’t sick were crazed, untrustworthy, and the infected were to the point their bodies were rotting at a frighteningly quick rate.
He took out his hunting knife, the one he sharpened every night, making sure it could cut through flesh like it was a scorching knife going through a stick of butter. Puncturing the top of the can, he cut enough of it that he could pry the lid open. With no utensils, because that was the least of his worries, Marius started eating the beans with his fingers, scooping them out and staring at the fire.
The wood crackled as the flames licked at them, and his thoughts moved to a world that had been clean, free of infection, where everything had been taken for granted. He’d taken so many things for granted. He was sure everyone had. The little things that he once had, the things he hadn’t really paid attention to that made life easier, seemed like a treasure now.
He wanted to do so much with his life, wanted to get married, have a family, and provide for them.
Family.
It had been the one thing he didn’t really have while growing up. It was one of the reasons he’d gone to school, saturated himself with everything scholastic. That way, he didn’t have to think about anything or anyone, didn’t have to realize he was really alone.
After eating, Marius made sure his shit was packed up in case he had to make a quick getaway, and then he laid out a blanket in front of the fire. Staring at the flames as he lay on the material, his head resting in his hand, all Marius thought was how maybe he should have stayed in the bunker with Brandon.
But no, he knew he couldn’t have stayed there. He would have been ready to tear out of his skin, and he and Brandon would have probably gone after each other because of cabin fever.
Closing his eyes, letting sleep claim him, Marius let the world vanish around him as the only peace he ever felt—the one he found when dreaming—swept over him.
5
It had taken Maya fourteen days and nights to finally reach where she’d been headed. Her car had run out of gas halfway through the trip, and it had taken triple the time frame it normally would have, because she had to walk the rest of the way.
But she kept to the back roads, not about to cut through the city even if it would have shaved some time off her trip.
The city was just too dangerous, and she heard, when the radio had still been working, that the cities were overrun with looters and infected. In those thickly populated areas, the disease spread quickly, taking the lives of those who used to be “normal.”
The road hadn’t been hard, and she had only seen one infected, but that was one too many, especially with the image of her father and lifeless mother to haunt her dreams. What she’d been more afraid of were the healthy humans who now had the run of a lawless land.
