A Day In September - BTS Zombie au

2: Phoebe

After I'd lost my parents, there was a stage of ruthless realization.

A wave of lament and self-negligence would follow the isolation I was subjected to. I was still dependent on my parents, and at only seventeen years old, I managed to lose all viable contact with them. There was nothing exciting about solitude in a world gone bad, and certainly nothing good about having to constantly look over your shoulder every second of every day.

On one cloudy morning, I'd dragged myself and my belongings out into the infested streets. There was a numbness to my body that, thinking back, makes shivers spread down my entire body. I turned a blind eye to the ache of my muscles, to the part of me that screamed for me to think before I did the irreversible. The amount of determination had culminated in me, granting me more than enough power to override any sense of rational thinking.

Surely, I'd been convinced.

That particular day, the streets had been ridden with brutes mindlessly dragging their decaying feet across the long stretch of asphalt. I blended right in, as lifeless as I looked.

What's the point, I remember thinking.

But despite my mind being dead set on stepping within confines I would not come back from, there was an ugly feeling at the pit of my stomach. I knew I was going to do something that I could regret, but at that point, I'd given up on finding my parents — or anyone for that matter. I'd looked everywhere for them, I swear I did. I went back after a week, hoping the horde that had massacred half of the population on the camp had, by some miracle, missed my family. All I had found was the chaotic aftermath of flesh-hungry monsters, and homes, dead bodies, and military vehicles engulfed in flames. To the best of my ability, I tried to search for anything, for the remainders of them. I dreaded the thought of my eyes falling upon the burned or, worse yet, roaming bodies of the only people I had left in the world.

My mother always wore that baby blue cardigan.

My father always wore the watch gifted to him by my mother.

Searching the piles of rotting corpses and burned bodies was never ideal for a teens mind.

I searched everywhere. Hungry and desperate for shelter, I'd wandered the city streets, far from the overrun checkpoint. These commodities were no longer guaranteed, and neither was life. The nights grew colder as the months passed, and I had barely made it. There were a couple of days where I teetered towards death, when I'd accidentally starve and fall from exhaustion. My mother was not there to help me back up and to encourage me to continue fighting for my own survival. My father was no longer there to be a protector. I had to grow up, I had to stop being seventeen and start acting like the wise ages of my parents, who knew way more than I did.

Easier said than done.

Those darker times, in which my struggle felt pointless, I had given up. I was in a fruitless voyage of despair and on my way to an unknown destination.

I would look out into the barren streets of cities once full of life, and believed that joining the horde of brutes was my only option.

But on that day, life had decided.

Not yet, it said. Not yet.

In my line of sight, on an intersection of crowded streets and wreckage, there lied my epiphany. Her white sundress, spotted with blurs of blue clung to her tightly. The clouds had separated, her skin was shed with rays of beaming sun; her skin was pale, illuminated golden by the golden sun. Brutes drew near her, her frantic form desperate to find a way out of the shrinking eye of the storm.