The Extinction Trials(38)

Tonight, they are evil.

Tomorrow, they are survivors.

The next day? They are visionaries.

I don’t know what The Change is, but to me, this is how the world ends. The strong don’t survive. The cunning survive. The people who slit throats and slink away—they survive. That’s the world we live in now. Maybe it was the world we lived in before, but there was enough to go around, so no one realized it.

Not anymore.





Day 4





Upon waking, my first thought was even darker: what am I missing? What’s the next surprise? Because I have only one chance of survival, I want to be the one who surprises the others this time. I don’t want to be the one who is surprised.

In this ruined world, you can only be surprised so many times until you’re dead. I’ve been surprised twice. My time is slipping away.

And I was surprised again today.

Here is what the world after The Change is like: Gray

Desolate

Empty

The streets have no names. The signs are gone. The cars are even crumbling. How much time has passed? Who knows? How would we even speculate?

The world feels, in a word, like slime. It’s a world that is dissolving in the sands of time, washing away.

Every place we encounter is broken down. It feels old. Fragile.

There are no animals that I can see. Have they all died out? If so, what does that mean for us?

Our destination looms ahead. Does salvation wait there? I’m a cynic. My vote is no.

We stopped to rest by the roadside. The quiet is deafening. The world before was never like this. There was always some sound.

My heart is as hard and as hopeless as this world, but even I can admit this: I care for one person in our group. No names. I don’t know who will read this or what will happen. But I do care. So, there’s that. There’s something still left alive inside my heart.

What I’d like most right now is to live in a world where I can love with my whole heart. This is not that kind of world.





Day 5





Two more are dead.

They were the strongest.

What happened?

Should I even write it down?

Why?

I guess it’s the same old weakness: believing in a better world, doing what little I can, when I can. And so, that’s why I’m writing this, in this shelter, trying to understand what happened, hoping that maybe you’ll find this, and it will help you survive out here.

The city is a mess. A crumbling ruin. We marched through it, uncaring. Stupid.

We learned.

The hard way.

At the GPS coordinates, we found nothing but a collapsed building. The walls were a mottled gray that were grown over with fungus and low grass.

We’re too late—that was our first thought.

But at the exact coordinates, we spotted something waiting there for us: a hatch, like you might find on a submarine. It stuck out of the ground like a giant metal mushroom.

One of us went to turn the wheel on top. He was dead the moment he touched it.

An arrow speared through him.

I spun.

The woman beside me fell—an arrow in her heart.

I ran then, not caring, not knowing where I was going.

I heard voices scream after me: “Drop it! Drop everything.”

I did. I dropped every last thing I was carrying.

And I kept running.

I think, looking back on it now, the only thing that kept me running was the person running beside me. If they had fallen… I might have given up.

We ran. Together.

I stopped when I felt as though my heart was going to burst. I doubled over, grabbed my knees, and panted. One of the members of my cohort zoomed past me, then stopped, looked back, and turned to me.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine. Just winded.”

The last living member of our group arrived then, also panting, glancing back, afraid. We all were.

“What happened?” he said, voice so loud it made us wince.

“Quiet,” I hissed.

He gulped air, staring at me.

“It was a trap,” I told him, and upon seeing his surprise, I continued: “They were waiting for us. With bow and arrow. They’re probably still chasing us.”

He ducked down and swiveled his head to look back. “I don’t think so.” He thought a moment. “I think they got what they wanted. We’re dead out here without food.”





Day 6





Hunger is our enemy. It hunts at night. Keeping me from sleep. It is waiting at dawn, ready to gnaw away at my humanity, a feral animal that knows no code of decency. It makes us crazy. Rude. Unreasoning.

It is the maker of dark thoughts.

We don’t have any destination, only this dark road littered with the ruined remains of a world that feels alien to me.

How much time has passed? I don’t know. Too much or not enough? Will this world ever be right again?

Even the animals have gone into hiding, it would seem.





Maya turned the page and noticed the subtle gap at the binding. She ran her finger into the fold and felt the rough edges where pages had been torn out.

She turned the page and the handwriting continued.

“I think someone removed some pages,” she said.