Notes from the End of the World

Gretel's story

First, I've been through hell; later, I brought hell to others.

They left me to die, and I suppose that if I were in their shoes I'd do the same. I was weak and scared. I was fragile and silly. I knew nothing about the world, but when the world died out and turned sour, I had no other option than to become like it too.

Survival, that's our basic instinct, and that ended up becoming our sole purpose from now on.

In the first days, we gathered a group of twenty-five people. But one by one they started to die. Some were killed. Some got infected. Some took their own lives. Some disappeared. Some were left behind just like they would do to me afterwards.

I think I was lucky to have lasted for so long. The elders succumbed quite quickly. They could barely hold on for a week. Then the baby got sick and died. His mother throwing his little body in the river from a bridge was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. We had no time to bury his tiny body. They were after us. What else could she do? Carry that dead baby on her arms, running on the highway, so she could find a resting ground for him somewhere if we managed to escape?

Today, a river is as good as anywhere else to dump our dear ones. Who cares in the end? What difference does it make when every human is wiped away?

We are all doomed, and that's the harshest reality that none of us was prepared to face. Things would have been much easier if we had accepted that earlier on. So many dilemmas would have been solved by a snap of a finger. Life or death, it doesn't matter. We are all dead already.