Surviving The Apocalypse *serious editing*

Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Dedicated to @TheDemonicSky for the amazing message and getting me to write this chapter.

It's been a month since I buried my mom and sister. It seems sereal to think that Ive lived without my family for a month. So much has changed since that night and things are getting worse. Food is becoming more scarce and people are freaking out. Henry was right, after a week and no improvement with the electricity and no sign of it every coming back on people started to panic and had a growing mentality of everyman-for-themselves. Henry and Julie tried to reason with people, telling them that acting out would only make our situation worst. For the most part people listened but then Bill (I had met Bill at a town meeting soon enough) would rile everyone up again. 

All the schools had been disbanded but now kids are wishing they could be back in school. Every able bodied person was recruited to keep the town running. We had started growing crops on our town green (its a big grassy area in the center of the town that would be used for animal grazing back in colonial times) but it wasn't nearly enough food to actually feed people especially when winter comes. Besides farming the town also needed runners, who would bike from town to town delivering messages, gather news, and negotiating trade deals. Most of the time no towns had any surplus to trade but it was still a comfort to be able to communicate with the other towns. 

No one knows any news from outside about a twenty mile radius. Once, one of our runners heard through the grapevine that Boston and a few other small cities were starting a militia because the United States government had no control anymore. There had been rumors that the government was still in power and trying to organize and keep the country together. There had also been rumors that North Korea had launched this attack and was now uncharge of the government. Im not sure what I believe. 

I got lucky, my job was an in-town runner. Basically I went around delivering food and supplies to people who couldn't come and get the food themselves. I also delivered any messages that people wanted delivered. It was a pretty tiring job, I was always biking from one end of town to the other just to have to run back to the other side again. 

Even with my busy schedule and tiring job I still had time to see Ryan. Ryan was a farmer and was often just as tired as I was but we always made time for each other at the end of a busy week. It was the only luxury that we got, being in each other's arms and enjoying that we could just lay their and rest. I don't mean to say that we were saints when we were together, only being in each other's wholesome embrace, but it wasn't as big of a deal. Most of the parents relaxed their rules after a couple of weeks of the Outage, they probably realized that there were more important things to worry about than if your child is having sex with the boy they love. Ryan and I were always safe so neither Julie and Henry nor Ryan's parents really cared. 

Sometimes when I was with Ryan I would just cry. It was the only time of day that I felt like I could relax and actually grieve, not just for my family but also for the whole world. Life as we know it is over and theres nothing anyone can do about it to fix it. Ryan would just hold me while I cried and when he thought that I had fallen asleep he would cry too. 

We lived like this, in a fragile, perpetually vulnerable state for a month before it finally broke. Bill had been threatening to take what was his (he thought the whole town was his) for a few weeks but no one thought his threats had any weight to them. That was until he decided to attack a town meeting. 

They were going to vote to reopen the schools part time so kids could still learn to read and do math and stuff like that. Bill had made it known that he thought reopening the schools was a terrible idea, we need to teach these kids to shoot and fight, not know how to read shakespeare. Bill still had a few staunch supporters but for the most part people disregarded him so no one thought he would do anything.