A Glimmer of Hope

I wasn’t the kind of person who would make it in an apocalypse. In the before days, I wore glasses, hated working out, and survived off ramen noodles and chicken nuggets.

My slow metabolism, a curse in my old life, kept me alive now as I scavenged for cans of chili, soup, vegetables … anything really.

When the world first went dark, and everyone around me started to die of sickness and starvation, I was ready to accept my fate. I laid in my bed, watched downloaded movies until my phone died, then switched to books. I shut out the world and waited for my turn to go. But weeks passed, then months. My food supply started to dwindle, and yet, I was still here.

When I finally went outside, the grass had turned to dirt and the skies rained ash. The forests looked like a skeleton graveyard, the branches reaching toward a sun that continued to fail them.

I’m not sure what I expected, but that wasn’t it. In my haste to get back inside, I tripped, smashed my face against the floor. As my head pounded, my vision turned blue, then purple. Once I pulled myself together, I realized I’d cracked the lens of my glasses.

After that, things got pretty bleak. I can joke about it now … humor is my way of coping, but I seriously considered taking matters into my own hands after that.

I couldn’t live in this hellscape alone. The sound of my own voice was hollow. When I screamed, nobody heard me. Sometimes, the only sensations I felt were the stinging of bug bites, the continued nagging of starvation, and a never-ending burning in my throat from unanswered pleas.

What was the point of continuing on? But whenever I got too serious about this idea, I saw my mother’s eyes, pleading for me to be okay, to live on without her.

Her last days were spent looking for me, and when she found me, locked up here in my college apartment, she shook her head in disbelief.

“It was almost too easy,” she had said to me, but I knew it hadn’t been. Without gasoline, she had to trek through the rubble and the chaos. She’d been unable to find uncontaminated food, and her teeth had begun to rot in her mouth.

Part of me, the worst part of me, wished she’d never found me. I never wanted to watch her die.

But I couldn’t change the past. She was gone, and I’d made my promises to her. I clutched the locket she’d given me as a child, knew that I owed it to her to make the best of this wasteland, of what little I could call my life.

I couldn’t stay in my apartment after she died, so I began to walk through my neighborhood. I searched each building on my block, only to find another reason to give up.

After finding my elementary school teacher and his entire family surrounded by flies and worms, I couldn’t stay in that place any longer.

That’s how I ended up here, in the middle of Missouri, searching for water, for tents, for people. The fields were barren. All of the plants died from lack of sunlight. I felt their pain.

My energy levels had depleted to nothing. I had to rest often, and when I did, the mosquitos attacked. They buzzed around me in a frenzy, attacking bare skin, their mouths like tiny needles. Had they gotten stronger, or was I just weaker now?

In the isolation, and to drown out the endless buzzing, I had started talking to myself. It helped me feel less alone, but it definitely added to the feeling that I totally and completely lost my mind.

“Keep moving forward! You’re okay. You’re doing so good. Just look for movement. Think about the kinds of people you’re going to find if you just keep going, just keep going,” I said. It was the kind of nonsense that you couldn’t say to another person. I wanted someone to tell me to snap out of it.

I even missed the bad parts of conversation, like the hard talks that people gave you when you were being dumb. Tough love meant you had something to strive toward. It meant that you only needed to try harder, and everything would be okay.

Instead, the bugs kept me company. They questioned my decision to keep moving forward. They landed on my skin and whispered evil nothings into my ears.

The worst part of the world ending, after all the grief and the fear of course, had to be the annoyance of living without modern conveniences. No bug spray, no electricity. Just me, my thoughts, and my itchy skin.

My bug bites had stopped healing, and instead, turned into open weeping sores. It felt as though I was continuously oozing. No amount of lotion could save me now.

As I walked through the trees, I wondered what it would be like when I found other people. I imagined a small village, with cabins and fires. Children would be running around, grandmothers would be watching from the windows.

Deep down, I knew there weren’t any children or elderly alive. You had to be tough to survive in a place like this, devoid of happiness and light.

A nagging voice in the back of my head began to haunt me. What if there were no other people? The sicknesses could have killed everyone. The lack of sun had already killed most everything.

I grasped my locket, tried to shut the voice in my head off.

“Just keep moving. Just keep moving,” I said.

I continued through the woods, looking for any movement. The mosquitos continued to swirl around me. Their dedication to survival was literally sucking the life out of me.

Hours passed, then days. I came through the woods, crossed into suburbia, then entered a field that looked like it used to grow wheat. Maybe it had horses, once upon a time.

I spotted something dark and small in the middle of the field. As I approached, I realized it was a crow. He must have been searching for food here when he finally gave up, laid down and refused to move. When I approached, he just looked at me with blank eyes.

I had heard somewhere that crows were highly intelligent birds; some even knew human language. I had a lump in my throat that I didn’t know what to do with. It had been so long since I’d seen anything other than bugs. He made it pretty far before life became too hard. I laid some corn kernels down next to him, which he ignored. I poured water into a bottle cap, left it for him. He didn’t move.

I think he had accepted his fate like I did a long time ago.

A memory came into my mind; an old fact. Crows liked shiny, glimmering things. They found value in beautiful objects. We had that in common. My hands fumbled with the clasp, but finally I was able to get my locket off. I laid it on the ground next to him.

A mosquito buzzed against my face, landed on my hand. I slapped it and watched the blood pool. Dead, finally.

“Don’t give up,” I said, and then continued my journey forward.