Hope

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We were driving for about an hour before we hit an old dirt road outside of the forest area, miles from the burnt down village. I took over driving about a half hour ago when the sun began to rise, give Aaron a chance to rest in the back alongside Ash. Callum was asleep on Holly, his head resting against her shoulder with his action figure firm in his grasp while her open eyes looked out the window at the passing fields of dead grass. On the horizon there was sunlight, enough that I could finally turn off the headlights and save some battery power. These roads are deader than the creatures that attacked us last night... I don't think anyone else made it out alive, we were the only ones I could see. All the other guards, all my friends, people who I treated like family... all dead. Just like the rest of the world.

I could barely make out the dirt road when we hit it, it's so overgrown with moss and dirt, tire tracks and grass, but not one other car or person to be seen. Just a seemingly endless dirt road for miles on end. Holly sat up in her seat and I became more focused after about an hour of sunlight, when the dirt road we had been travelling on all night began to come to an end amidst a main road, still deep in the countryside. I drove the hummer up the small ramp leading from the dirt path onto the smooth tarmac of the two way road, shot up by cracks that were caused by jackknifed trucks and old grenades that have blown chunks out of the roadway. Here, there were more cars, but no drivers. Trees and moss were grown inside and out of the cars. The bodies inside inhabited little bugs and rats. Any fuel that was in the cars has already been pumped, all the gaskets are wide open. I swayed the hummer slowly along the road, driving around the cars and dead bodies scattered throughout the road. For a quiet country road, it had gathered many cars and bodies throughout the years.  

I saw several rotting cars I had not seen in years, police cars with rotting skeletal corpses alongside them. The blue pain with the writing "police" was withering away to white.  

'This is where a police checkpoint was held' I said to Holly, us being the only two in the car awake.  

Her eyes looked around the road full of cars, for a distant country road, there were high amounts of deteriorating vehicles and corpses amongst the roadway. 

'What happened?' asked Holly, stroking her sons arm gently. 

'People began getting impatient, so they overthrew the law... I remember seeing this on live news, not just this road, all of them. Police checkpoints were overrun by frightened people who ran over innocent men and women to get free of populated areas' 

Holly shook her head as she looked at the devastated road that I tried to get free of as quickly as possible. I didn't want Callum or Ash to have to see it.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the village, which means that yesterday was July 13th, year 2040... a Friday... Friday the 13th. Huh... ironic. The disease started over twenty years ago, may have started in someplace earlier than others, all I know is that I was sitting by my fire with the Christmas tree still up, celebrating the day after New Year's Day, sitting down watching Breaking Bad... just as it was about to reach its climax, that's when my brother called. He told me the white house had just been evacuated and that New York had been shut down... that's when shit started to go down. January 1st 2020 was the last normal day I had on this earth, I'd do anything to go back and relive it just one more time. 

It wasn't long before I saw a familiar road-sign, a welcome sign reading "Welcome to Belleview Estates"... well there's a sight for sore eyes, my mom and dad's estate, the place I grew up.

I haven't seen these roads in some twenty three years or so, yet I remember them so well. The cracked pavement was there before all of this, and the homes with ivy growing on them, they were there too. Sure they are more than overgrown, but I still remember the place for how it was. There are cars scattered around the road, no doors or tires, some don't even have an engine. Show's how desperate people were when the whole thing went down. I drove straight down the street towards my parents place, stopped the hummer outside and looked at the home, untouched by the end of the world. Everything is as it was, apart from the garden, overgrown with weeds that have killed off all my mother's beautiful flora. I drove the car into the driveway, the garage door had been blown right off the hinges, gone. Yet still I parked the hummer inside the garage.