I stare at our old grandfather’s clock, clothed with two-hundred-day-old dust. It’s been eighty days since it stopped, our only marker of time being the sizes of our shadows by day. The air about us is musty, the atmosphere plagued by a deafening silence none of us is brave enough to break. The only sound I hear is the tick-tock of the clock engraved in my memory, haunting me.
I cuss under my breath and toss the knife across the room. The slices of the last tomato gape back at me, fiery red anger in its eyes.
“Jo, get yourself together!” My sister yells and runs her dirty, bony hands through her hair. She hugs our little brother who is now gasping for air, the same way he did the night Mum and Dad promised to return. And didn’t.
Screaming, I bow my head as I concede to the contemplations inside it. “That’s it. We’re going up.”
A collective gasp fills the room. “Outside? Are you insane?! Nobody’s left since one ninety days ago!”
“Two hundred,” I correct my sister. Jaws clenched, I stuff my bag with essentials: nose masks, gloves, alcohol, Jason’s inhaler. Then, I add the gun. What if we run into The Infected?
Heaving the makeshift ceiling aside, we climb up into what used to be our home before The End. Abby cries as we walk past the pictures on the wall.
The road is empty, dust covering everything that was once part of a seemingly unending civilisation. I notice the inscriptions on the board. Global pandemic. Churches say their last prayers. Memento mori. Underground.
Carrying Jason on my back, Abby’s hand in mine, gun in my left, we set out into what’s left after The End.
“We haven’t survived this long just to die hungry today.”