This is the way the world ends. . .

July 11th, 2011. . .

Unlike some of the survivors that I had met , I was only a child of maybe ten or younger I can't recall.

My parents and I were some that were taken to the Campion Camps as I've heard them called, no one can really remember the name of the camps because it's been so long but we all know what they were meant for.

They were death camps for the infected but some how , my vital signs, my blood and my pee had all tested positive for the virus when the military doctors were going door to door stripping everyone down from old men and women to little boys and girls and poking and prodding them, my sister, my mother and me all tested positive for the campion strain but something was wrong and I was tested wrong.

They were ripping screaming , crying children from their mothers arms and killing the severely infected right in their own front yards when they tore me out of bed , I'll admit , I was scared and crying too but I didn't scream or anything, my mom was being pulled right behind my sister and I and my father was being thrown in a white van with a lot of others with Quarantine in big blue letters written on the side.

I was pushed into a big black van with a bunch of people who were coughing up blood, bleeding from their eyes and fainting then as I peeked out of the back window and the van began to idle, I saw a young man with shaking hands put a gun to my twelve year old sister's head, she didn't even flinch just kept her eyes locked on him like some kind of wild animal waiting for the right time to attack, two others held her arms , her eyes began to seep blood and just as the van took off there was a loud pop , a flash and my sister was lying in a puddle of blood with a hole in her forehead, mom was screaming and fell to her knees.

A few hours later, I saw the camp before we even stopped, we passed by a line of dog cages and people going through it , a boy who was at the end of the line looked at me with a look of desperation as though like the adults there , he knew what he fate was going to be, I heard the dogs yelping , howling, growling and snarling as the boy walked through the gauntlet of dogs and heard six loud pops as the van slowly passed by, I saw ahead of us were rows and rows of cages with lots of families in them , women and girls were in separate cages from the men and boys, they examined our eyes, noses and throats before pushing us in the cage, the young girl behind me was a pretty brunette maybe four years old, her mother was carrying her six month old baby sister behind us , all were crying, she opened her mouth and her toungue was black as coal with green bumps all over it, she was pale and her skin was veigny, her mother insisted it was only the flu and there was no risk of infection.

A military doctor, Dr. Hartford came and looked at the girl then he signaled for two men to come and carry the kicking screaming child away, he looked at me with his wild , fiery eyes staring straight through me, he smiled an evil smile at me and walked away.

Late that afternoon , after all the pops and the cages had less people in them, I tried to close my eyes wanting so bad to go to sleep and want to wake up back in my own bed.

I woke up to screaming and gunfire as well as the cage being tipped over, I fell and tumbled to the top of the cage, I knew my arm was broken and it was bleeding pretty badly but in my haze, I saw that the cage door was broken off, I scrambled to the door and crawled out of the cage, there were lots of those who were once caged attacking the doctors and each other, my mother was sitting in the back of another cage , I went to her crying and wanting so badly for my mommy just to hold me.

" Alexa, is that you?" My mom asked weakly.

" Mommy, what's going on?" I asked crying.

" Nevermind that now, baby." She said leaning forward into the light revealing a gaping wound in her left shoulder, " What I need you to do is run as far and as fast as you can, don't talk to anyone and don't stop for nothing." 

I didn't want to leave her but she gave me no choice, I did as I was told , I ran and ran and ran as far and fast as I could.

I stopped on a long dirt path , I didn't know where I was going or how I was gona get there , I couldn't breathe or feel my legs, I collasped on the ground and fell unconscious.

When I woke up, I heard them shambling toward me moaning in their horrible moan and that annoying shuffle of their feet.

I got up and ran as far as I could, there was a small , ruined town, all the zombies had followed survivors onto the interstate , I took refuge in a small house at the end of the town.

It took almost two months of starving and shivering to death for someone to find me , it was a group of survivors heading for Angel City, a survivors compound which was supposed be safe from infection totally baricaded and  there was plenty of food and water.

Martina was like a mother to me , I was almost feral and living off of canned pet food, I bit Harley but after I was examined and the others had calmed her down, they took me with them, we walked all the way from where I was to Angel City which was almost a hundred miles away , it took a few days.

Yoshi was hurt with what we found, he even dropped on his knees and began sobbing.

The makeshift city had been totally destroyed and everyone who was once there had either been killed in the raid , kidnapped or fled to safer land, Angel city was drenched in blood , the metal shacks had been torn apart, bodies still littered the floors and beds of their makeshift homes slaughtered not by zombies but survivors like us, people who had survived but been driven insane and chose to kill anyone no matter human or zombie to get what they needed to survive, scavangers is what Hollis called them as he carried the bodies of some slaughter kids to the burial pit that he and the others had made.

I had seen so much death and destruction that I couldn't help but just stand around and do nothing.

I wandered into a shack that was still standing, a young boy was hiding in a corner crying, he looked up at me and he almost looked scared of me.

I took his hand and led him to the others, the doctor, Dr. Vincent checked him out for signs of infection and gave the all clear with a sweet smile.

The boy and I were taken out of Angel City by Hollis, Martina and Grey, the three of them spoke of a military base abandoned a few weeks before which had plenty of food and water and other survivors like us , a place without a name , refugees had taken it over now and the military personel had fled when the first horde of zombies tried to break down the barriers just to save their own asses, they never told the refugees they were leaving but somehow the refugees took over the fort and kept raiders and zombies out, they had been communicating for days til they had to leave their encampment because of zombies wandering onto it too much.

It took eleven hours to get to the small fort they had taken over, it was hard to get in , peoples pet dogs sniffed and licked us knowing we weren't infected.

We worked hard even the smaller kids worked hard, planting, watering and gathering food.

We cleaned and cooked and worked as though we were on a farm, the world as we had once known it was gone, the age of technoligy was over, we couldn't use that stuff anymore or it meant our deaths.

We learned to shoot at a very young age , we built a community pretty quickly, sleeping in shifts and working in shifts, when we laid down and slept , it was because we were exhausted.

Life in the refugee camp wasn't easy by any means but it was safe even from the raiders.

I grew up with plenty of other children who were born after the infection though it was fun once they got of age, you know that old saying " it takes a villiage to raise a child." , well if you were old enough to take care of yourself then you helped take care of the babies.

When the first batch of suvivor babies were born, hordes and hordes of zombies were surrounding our fort and anyone who could shoot worked overtime, there was also the fear that the new babies would be born infected and unfortunately in the first three years , there were a few mothers and babies that died during the birth and were reanimated yet there was no way for us to figure out if they already somehow became infected with virus or if some how the campion strain had become blood borne.

I was raised by everyone, had over twenty mother and father figures yet had no mother or father but that was fine.

I learned fast to do everything and became part of the scouters when I got to a certain age.

Somehow I never forgot  my first visit back into the world outside our little safe haven, it was a few years later and the world had gotten worse, all the animals and greenery had died  , the sun was hotter than it used to be yet the sky was gray not blue like it was in the first years but the smell of scorched earth still hadn't died out because of all the plants that use to be around that started exploding once there weren't anymore people to take care of them, the fires were still burning, the zombies even looked worse just flesh and bones now , emaciated from the lack of food.

The world couldn't all be like this but if it was we were doomed anyway, it smelled , I don't know how we had kept that awful breathtaking gruesome smell out of our little safe haven but we managed to, when we returned from searching for food, clothes, clean water and suvivors like us, I was too busy vomiting to notice everyone had begun the usual routine, my friend , Rolland , the boy whom I had mentioned earlier was holding my hair back and assuring me that everything would be alright and just to relax for a while.

I asked myself if this was the way the world ended because as long as there were still people in the world, there would still be zombies and I knew then that we were damned if we did and damned if we didn't. . .

How can we possibly rebuild a world that has been so damaged?