Desolation ✔️

Prologue

Who knew silence could be so painful?

Yes, relief on the ears is absolutely wonderful, but that's all I ever hear anymore. There is no more laughter. No barking dogs. No cars speeding down the freeway. No chirping crickets at night. Heck, I'm lucky if I even hear the wind blow.

It wasn't always like this. There used to be so much noise, I often thought New York was a virus that had spread to every state; even the small, quiet heart of Wyoming. Well, guess what? I was half-right about that.

It's crazy how quickly things can change; how suddenly they can take a turn for the worst. To know that one minute you're life is peachy and perfect - or at least, pretty close to it - and then the next minute you're stopped cold, breath constricted, mind wiped utterly clean. And then your world turns upside down, and everything in it is shaken out.

That's what happened to me, only I didn't have time to recover. I just had to move and leave everything behind in search for safety. Come to discover...safety doesn't exist anymore. Now I'm in search for something else. Problem is, I don't even know where to start.

Just after New Years, reports of an unexplainable illness covered the news. What I mean by unexplainable is that it wasn't just the classic fever; it was worse - times ten. People were trekking into hospitals with strange bites from animals. The bites were treated, and the patients were well enough to walk out of the hospital to head home. But those people never made it home. The numbers of missing people grew - it was five missing people here, ten missing people there, and, oh look, a-hundred more over that way. Every day there'd be another parent, another child, another helpless soul dragged away into the night. And yes, I mean something physically stole away these poor people. Not aliens - though many tried to claim this situation as a result of Mars' wrath. But no. They're worse.

Zombies.

Monsters.

I call them night creatures. They are not vampires, though they choose to hunt at night. The scary thing is - heck, what's not scary about them? - they crave human flesh. It wasn't long before we found the missing people...but completely transformed. Milky white eyes, graying, rotted flesh, razor sharp teeth - our worst nightmare come to life, basically. And then there's the one way to put them down: a blow to the head.

They've devoured almost everyone now. They've destroyed everything. The world has become their place of ruin, where they pick what they want and dispose of the rest. There's nothing left. No people. No animals. Everything is just...gone.

Why do I keep going, you may ask? Why, when everything I loved and dreamed of was ripped away in a matter of seconds?

Well, sometimes going forward is the only thing left a person has to hold on to.