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Serendipity slowly crawled across the ground, moving like a snake over mud. A creeping chilled wind blew across the desolated land she had been forced and blundered into inhabiting. All because of a crippled yet corrupted government who ‘accidently released’ a flesh rotting, blood spilling, stomach churning strand of mutated Ebola Zaire. One of the deadliest viruses on the face of the planet and the fracking government wanted to play with it, typical. Now any survivors of the out-break were placed in a stereo-typical ‘end-o-the-mother-fracking-earth’ scenario. Now as she crouched upon a heap of wrecked cars, the red sun setting in a Amarillo sky line, she felt the urge to burst into laughter. She could picture herself from a distance, it would look just like the ending scenes on one of the old cheese-y movies from before, those movies that somehow accurately but unrealistically described life and survival after something like the out-break. Standing up and turning around from atop the heap she whistled out long and low, calling in the dogs. The only life she had found alive in this waste land was a pack of dogs, some with strange mutations, and some with injuries or post-out-break sickness. It generally was a good thing to find dogs in situations like these; they were loyal and good hunters. So long as you weren’t the targeted prey. She looked out over the land, trails of black and multi-colored smoke floated up from fires that had been burning for weeks now. The cities had fell and fast, havoc and panic had killed everyone who hadn’t already died or been infected by the virus. Speaking of, she realized, there wasn’t a name for the new strand. From what little news that was leaked about it before everything fell apart, it was a cross between a long dormant strand of the black plague and the mysterious strand of Ebola Zaire. Making the virus twice as deadly as anything else that had ever been on the Earth before.
As she looked around at her pack of ‘friends’ , her long blue hair dappled with grey streaks of faded blue, her brown roots starting to show. It was kinda hard tryin to keep your hair dyed when there wasn’t any dies about to keep your hair a certain color. Not that bothered or really even mattered to her anymore. She swiveled her head about, her lonely grey eyes turning dull and distant from the sight. All around her blood pooled on the ground, it was saturated with the liquid. Bodies of children in their late and early teens, those were the kids that were more resilient to the virus’s effects, their strong immune systems kept them from dying right away. Their bodies rotted in heaps by the roads where they had tried to walk away from it all, only to go back to where it had all started, hoping it was over with. Some of them wouldn’t have even died from the virus; they’d simply laid down and died of depression or lack of food and water. Their blood pooled rustic red, pure and untouched by the black virus bricks that clogged and thickened the other blood. Their eyes pointed upward more often than not, it was as if they were thinking in their last moments that looking up would bring them to heaven. She had found a couple in their early twenties; they had died laying under a tree embraced with loving arms, their eyes forever frozen on the others. Above them carved deeply in the bark so as to last for eternity was their names, their birth days, and the day they died . . . She had closed their eyes out of respect. Where as many had died in beds, on streets, fighting, and killing others. They had died a romantic yet horrific death. Among the dead bodies that littered the street were rats and crows, swarming over the bodies and eating what was left. The rats were so thick that they could swarm over a body and keep the crows off of it due to sheer numbers. At night Serendipity could hear the rats eating, gnawing on the bones and flesh of others.
This tragic landscape was all that remained of humanity, as far as Serendipity knew. She had at once believed that the out-break was harmless, that it would fade out after it peaked. At the time she wasn’t aware of the full effect the virus could, would, and did have on the world. The virus had the ability to spread through the air and the water, not to mention fluid contact. She had ignored the ramblings of other more religious people, she had been an Atheist. Though in the beginning the tales of how Satan would rise from the Earth and destroy the sinful and Jehovah/Jesus/God/Lord, or whatever people called their supreme being would take them to heaven. And from what happened, maybe that was true. Nearly everyone had died, so the sinners were gone as well as the ‘saints’. Maybe they all went to heaven, if there really was such a place. It added up in a strange ironic sort of way. The Virus strands had to have been found in the Earth and dug up, and it did kill millions. She sighed heavily; there was no point in comptenplating things already passed.
When things had first started getting bad she had holed up in her parents panic room, more of a two story, underground, air filtering house. She had been the only one who had wanted to stay in there while the others stayed above. Eventually on the verge of committing suicide she unlocked the doors and fled the cavern of quarantine unto the world as it had become. She rose from it expecting to find the smiling faces of her family, friends, and lover still intact and alive. She found the corpses of all laying in her former living room. Her nose was violated by the rank stink of rotting flesh; her eyes were burned with the image of her family dead on the carpet she used to play on, and her heart broken, shattered, bruised, and incinerated by the sight of her dead lover.
At first she had been vehemently conscious of the smell of it all, now only a vague notation in her mind. Her existence had been reduced to barely nothing, it might have been said that the ‘who’ of Serendipity had died long ago while the basic instincts or ‘what’ of her lived on. She had been so far drawn back into her own mind that at one point in time she had gathered the decaying corpses of her family and held a conversation with them. Only hours later did she come to full conciseness and out of her shocked state and give them a proper burial. She cleaned her home after, since she had locked herself underground the house hadn’t had maintenance, or so it appeared to her. A minuscule part of her mind has haunted her ever since.
Now, two months down the road of life, what a narrow rough road it is, she looked out at a landscape lit by the setting sun. She might have been the last human on Earth in her mind but perseverance and faith would show her otherwise. This-this is the preceding’s of Serendipities story to find others . . . I don’t recommend it for the faint hearted.