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Bones and All (2022)
At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world around me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, and out of the stress and tragedy of it all.
Mia understood three things by the time she fourteen years old:
1. Her mom was dying of cancer. There was no way around it. 2. A zombie apocalypse took over the world. 3. She was going to die one day. Whether it be today or ten years from now. She was going to die.
How does a twelve year old go from playing with toy horses to witnessing an undead creature tear somebody's flesh apart? How does the world go from a perfect sunny day to a global epidemic hitting out of nowhere? How does a twelve year old girl go from the only worry in her life being to keep her room clean to now having to learn to shoot a gun three times the size of her?
So many questions. So little time to answer them.
Mia was only twelve when she first saw the undead. Her bedroom window. She saw it's melted flesh hanging from its rotting bones. It's broken off jaw that still revealed two rows of razor sharp teeth. She could hear the moans and groans. The kind of thing you only see in the movies. Suddenly, she's ripped away from her home with nothing but a bag full of clothes. Her dad stuffed her and her siblings in the car and took off. She didn't know where they were going. All she knew was they weren't safe anyone.
The undead had taken over.
People were being ripped apart.
The living were struggling to scrounge for survival.
Mia thought as long as she had her family (Her mom was dead at this point. She was long gone in the ground. Fuck you, cancer!) that everything would be okay. Cut her some slack. She was twelve. But then her family died. Father and little sister. Car accident. They were eaten by the undead. Her sister was barely even a body anymore. The twins were forced to watch the corpses tear through their flesh from inside the crashed car.
Sometimes, at night, Mia can still hear the sound of their skin being torn apart.
Now, she's thirteen, and it was just her and her brother. Lucas was the new Riley Jones. The man of the pair. He did what he could. They traveled on foot for what seemed like years. Their life was now sleeping in the woods with nothing but their backpacks under their heads and whatever food they could find in their bellies (They sometimes went days without food.). They were two kids battling for survival. The world was no longer theirs.
