ALIVE: The Aftermath Chronicles (Book 1)

PROLOGUE

Ashes to ashes, they all stay down.

They're nothing but blood on the dirt, until that too, goes away. I'd only been gone for two hours.

Then they got in.

Just two of them was all it took. They ate my friends. Six women. Two men. Three children. They're gone, like they never existed at all. Ripped apart like they were nothing but the meat and bones that, I guess, we all are. That's kind of a sick thought to whoever is reading this. Not sure how else I'm supposed to look at it. It's all I see of anything these days. Dead or alive, the meat inside tends to be the skin we wear on the outside in the end.

No sign of the district anywhere...no point in any of this searching by myself, but the kid keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder why I keep trying, but the thought of being eaten alive will keep anyone running, I guess. I like my body parts where they are and not in the mouths of hell's rejects. I like not eating other people's body parts, too. I was a vegetarian before all this.

Okay, maybe I snuck in some bacon now and again, but I'm DEFINITELY going to be a vegetarian again when all this is over. IF all this is ever over. I want to sleep through the night and not see what the hell I saw that night every time I close my eyes. Not sure I could keep going if anything like that ever happened to Tamara. The kid never talks, but when she does, it's her shouting my name if we get separated for even a moment. What those things did to her parents shouldn't leave a little girl much in the mood for talking. Or, sleeping through the night much either, I bet. She's afraid to sleep, she's scared of these unpredictable days, but like me, she's also paranoid about the districts. We've heard about them from other survivors we've met along the way.

They say the Districts are home to monsters among men, and I'm not talking about the infected.
Super-human soldiers roam around, able to kill the living or the dead with a single swing of their fist. They say they're immune to the virus. They say they're collectors of women, of children. They say they disappear once they're brought to District 4 by one of the soldiers. They call them the Masters, the new leaders of the human race. We've heard this in the radio loops recorded by some raspy-voiced General named Connor. They say they're the fighters against the undead and campaign for survivors to find their way to the district capital.

I'll take them over the creepers any day. But the image of what I came back to, what the dead did, I can't. I can't even write about it now without feeling sick, weeks later. I can't blame Tamara for being silent forever, for being an insomniac forever. It's been enough to distract me from being so damn hungry. For her, I think it's distracted her from even being alive.

Soon, we'll have to make our way to General Connor's district.

District 2, New York fucking city, the mecca of the "free world", promised us safety by the invisible General Connor back when there were thirty of us. That place is demolished, bombed by airstrikes to stop the spread of a fallen district to the zombies. The District 1, somewhere off the coast of New England, taken after, rumored to have the same problem when we started to move that way.

Nothing's left but District 4, or so Connor says on that loop. We are alone somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think. No family, no other survivors, not even animals, from what I can tell, except for the crows. They circle above; they dive, ready to peck eyes out that aren't infected. They've learned, too, to avoid the dead.

I'll be in search of District 4 at daylight. I am heading into the unknown, the remaining capital of the country down south around Atlanta. I guess I'll find out then about these "Masters," about the rumors that their scientists are working on a cure against the Carrion virus.

The world failed to protect us. No one is in power here, not even this "Connor," no matter what he says. No one but the infected makes the rules now. They alone define our future.
I thought I understood that before, but the parts left of my friends will make sure I never forget it again.

Nowhere will ever be safe as long as they have the Earth.

- Unknown author

Journal found near Scranton, Pennsylvania.