Zombie?

lined with stands selling fruits and vegetables.

It’s an anxious environment with everybody bargaining and talking fast, its busy and crowded. Strange people of all shapes and sizes.

The stands are all made of cheap wood and have roofs made of the most obnoxious brightly coloured fabric you’ve ever seen. Freddy drags him forward until they stop at a stand with a blue roof selling apples.

There is a young brunette man. In his early 20s maybe, with a long and posh haircut, a greasy face full of acne and the ugliest glasses you’ve ever seen standing in the stand. He gazes down at Isaac and gives a judgy look.

“What can I get for you?” He inquires in a nasally voice.

“Two apples.” Freddy says gruffly

“Mmm, I see… one for you and one to put in your pig's mouth.” The man with an annoying face says.

I am NOT that dirty

Isaac thinks

How DARE this snobby guy with a basalt voice and a nose too small for his face call him a pig.

“Yes.” Mutters Freddy, tightening his grip on Isaacs arm and letting a small smirk crack through his peeling lips.

“Very well.” The man nods and picks up two rotten looking apples from the back of the stand. He puts them in a thin plastic bag and hands them to Freddy.

He runs a hand through his greasy hair to get it out of his face and scribbles five numbers on a pad of bright orange paper with a pen.

“Here’s your receipt.” The man says after peeling the sticky note of the pad with his bony hands. It makes a “Schlick” noisenoise, and the man makes eye contact with Isaac as he hands it to Freddy.

Freddy nods at the man

What is going on?

Orange sunlight is bleeding in through the cracks in the wooden roof and the slits of the rustic doors. The floor is made of dirt and the heat is unbelievable. Isaacs eyes land on a single chair in the middle of the room, it’s got rope loosely wrapped around the very bottom two front legs and the paint is scratched away where someone's ankles would be if they sat on the chair.

Well shit

 Freddy pushes Isaac towards the chair and forces him into it.

“Let me go you

Chapter 4

Constance

Family diner

She screams a horrible bloody scream and collapses on the fittingly cold and hopeless rocks lining the bottom of the cave escaped to. She scrapes her knees on the rough rocks and listens to the echo of her voice. She grunts from the pain in her knees and brings her hands down from her eyes to her knees. She sobs louder, tears pouring out keeping her vision impaired.

Her knees are wet with blood and coated with ugly leaves of stray skin. She cries and cries, but the sadness doesn’t stop.

Constance’s eyes are cloudy and red from rubbing them with her blood soakedblood-soaked hands.

She looks at her reflection in the groggy water. She is so tired.

She is too young to be going through this.

Her eyes are redred, and her eyelashes are all stuck together from the crying, she looks like a sad princess.

There’s splotches of blood on her cheekbones. And a rubbed in coat of blood all round her eyes, like a transparent red smokey eye. The blood under her eyes just looklooks like eye bags, she’s never had those before. She’s never not had a bed or been this scared.

She never stayed up late, she slept in on Saturday’s every once in a while, and didn’t drink coffee. She’s never had any reason for stress or worry. She’s always been the smartest in the class. Most gifted kids feel pressure to be the best, but she always naturally was.

That doesn’t mean anything anymore. Nobody cares that she grew up wealthy. Nobody cares that she has been in the honour’s programs of her private schools since she was seven. The zombies certainly don’t. And it seems none of the survivors finding refuge in this pit of rock care that she’s young and alone.

 No one cares that she used to be society’s future.

No one cares about her.

She stares into the eyes of the strange girl staring back. Her hair is longer, it’s all frizzy and puffy, but in a charismatic way. Her lips are chapped, and her eyebrows are thick and untamed. She frowns at her reflection.

She doesn’t wash the blood off her face. It means something to her. Maybe it’s a warrior's mark.

“Oh, look at me guys. I fell on my knees. I’m so tough.”

She starts to weep in sorrow once again. The gravity of what happened pushed on her insides. But she quickly wipes her tears and straightens her face when she hears footsteps glide toward her.

“Did that man didn’t role play as Joan of arc for nothing?” A man with a deep voice says.

She turns around for a glimpse at who’s talking to her. It’s Andrew.

“Don’t disrespect what he did like that.” She whines through sobs, her voice groggy.

“Like what?”

“By acting like it isn’t real and it’s a joke.”

“Joan of arc was a hero.”

“You said role play… He actually killed himself.”

“I know… I’m sorry. What I meant was… are you going to keep going?”

“Always.” She says with no hesitation.

They make eye contact and come to an understanding.

“Are you going to wash the blood off?” He asks curiously, surprisingly lacking any judgment.

“No.” She sniffs.

“Here.” He shifts the way he’s sittingsitting, and his sword clicks a bit. He pulls up his sleeve to reveal a cut about an inch long, it’s still bleeding. He grabs his hand and cups it just about the slit skin before lightly squeezing. A single drop of Scarlett blood starts to build. He takes his free hand and swipes his finger across the leaking wound. Coating his finger in the organic red paint. With his hand still

She starts drawing a line on the middle of his forehead dragging her finger down gently. She passes his eye broweyebrow and his eye flickers closed. She quickly swipes down and pulls her finger away from his face.

“My dad had a scar like that.” She says quietly. Appreciating the gentle moment.

“Do you miss him?” He says sadly

“Yeah… I try not toto, but I do. It’s like there’s something missing.”

“All you need is you.” He says genuinely.

“You’re nice to have around too though.”

“I amam, aren’t I?”

He scotches closer to the water and and starts to lightly wash his cut. He rips off two long pieces of fabric from his sleeve and taps Constance’s leg. Understanding what he wants, she extends her leg and watches as he dips a piece of cloth into the water, rings it out twice, and then places it gently on her skinned joint. She hisses when the fabric hits her knee. He looks up and makes sure she’s okay before wrapping it around her leg and starting a knot. “Tell me when.” He grunts while slowly tightening the wrap.

“When, that’s tight enough .” Constance says after a few beats.

He repeats the action on her second leg and helps her up.

“Do I look stupid?” He asks, his forehead with blood messaged into the skin and his left eye a bright red line that drags vertically across almost the whole length of his face.

“You look beautiful.” Constance says lightly in a joking manner.

“That’s because you did my makeup.” He responds, with the most serious and deep tone.

Constance giggles a bit before following him to where there’s canned food. Everyone else is sitting around a fire in the cave, eating beans with their hands. They’re telling stories and laughing. Giddy from the joy of escape. She knows that everyone there is still being crushed by the weight of what they’ll possibly do next.

But it’s nice to see people having fun.

Some people might find it disrespectful to be laughing and telling campfire stories after that man torched himself for their sake. But people like her can see that they are living their life to the fullest the way the man would’ve wanted.

He didn’t do that to make us all depressed.

He did it all to get us to safety.

And strangely enough, those people look like they feel safe.

Chapter 5

Lola

The cherry tree

There's a young girl, she’s brunette and has bangs that fall just above her thick eyebrows. She has green eyes and thick eyelashes that make it look like she’s constantly wearing mascara. She’s got a button nose and big lips the color of a pale rose, and a chin that points outward. Her cheekbones are high in contrast to un sculpted jawline. Her face is square and her cheeks rosy. Her nose turns bright pink when it gets cold, and her lips are always cracked. Her hair is up when she gets too hot but down whenever she can have it that way because she gets headaches after tying it up for too long…

Her name is Lola.

And she is safe for the time being.

She is getting food, describes the walk, she sees her family, and a new chapter called “Family” starts

This chapter will explain everything.

She is getting food and right after this they are leaving for the drive.

Chapter 6

Family

Solids, liquids, gases, and angels who sacrifice.

Need to drive underwater for a twenty-minute journey

There’s a crack in the windshield (from an earlier fight)

So they can’t go in because the pressure will shatter the windshield and kill all of them.

If they pump the van with a special gas the window won’t break, and they’ll survive. THERE IS A PATCH WITH A TOXIC CHEMICAL IN IT, IT’S THE STRONGEST THING THEY HAVE AND IT GUARANTEES THEY MAKE IT THROUGH WITHOUT THE WINDOW BREAKING.

But the gas is harmful and will affect their brain cells (kill them or something) But they have four masks and four oxygen tanks that will last 30-35 mins each, so they’ll survive.

But one of the four is faulty and the mom who is the one that grabs the masks notices and doesn’t tell anyone because she knows if she does than the dad will take the faulty one and make her take the working one, but they can’t afford to lose him because he’s been doing all the work and planning to keep the kids safe.

So, she wears the faulty mask to save everyone else.

Chapter 7

Isaac & William

One is a monster, and one is a shark.

Two kids are being held hostage by a man and get to the row of 10 masks first. They notice two are faulty and take one of the faulty ones to give to their captor, four working ones for themselves and another working one to give to the captor and steal for themselves once he drowns. They are doing the same thing that the family plans on doing but they’re swimming so they need two sets of oxygen and maybe a little more to make it.

They start swimming and around 5 minutes in the captor- Freddy,

Freddy starts to choke and panic. He hasn’t even figured out what’s going on but in a blind rage, he goes to choke William (13-year-old dark skinned black boy) and Isaac (14-year-old Chinese boy with ginger hair) takes his oxygen tank off his back and starts hitting Freddy in the head with it. As he’s doing this the chord snaps and he (Isaac) starts to panic about not having any oxygen and starts swimming away to where Freddy’s other tank ended up. (Isaacs's second tank fell farther in the fight)

Freddy tries to grab at him but William rips Freddy’s head back so Isaac can get to the oxygen. Williams's nail scratches into Freddy’s eye and blood goes into the water. Freddy finally passes out from lack of oxygen and William helps Isaac (who got to the oxygen before passing out) gather all the tanks and they keep swimming. They go quickly because the blood is going to attract a shark, that only eats dead things. The shark won’t attack them because they are living but they still might get hurt while the shark goes wild and feeds. (The shark comes whenever it smells blood because it means something might’ve died) FYI the family is way ahead of them right now because they are in a car.

And the mom isn’t going to be eaten by the shark because she’s going to die from gas and that takes a few months, there is nothing that can be done to stop it.

The two boys arrive safely across the pool of water and ditch the masks and canisters. Because of the fight, they used a lot of oxygen, more than they would’ve just swimming. So, they used up the fifth oxygen tank, having to share it to make it across safely. They walk for a bit and take shelter in an old parking garage filled with moss and vines, the moss coats the ground, like a rug. Offering solace after their time in the freezing water that stabbed and cut at their young skin. They lie down and they sleep, they sleep not feeling safe, but feeling at rest, for they have escaped. And if they can do that, then anything else will hopefully pale in comparison. Hopefully, they wake up to a dark sky, one with piercing stars, stars that remind William of hospital lights. And stars that remind Isaac of flashlights, the thought of a survival tool punches some urgency into him, and he gets up quickly, startling William. “What?” says William.

“We aren’t safe here!” argues Isaac.

 “Freddies dead.” he William says softly as though he’s reassuring himself as well as Isaac.

 “There’s still zombies out there!” Isaac says harshly. Trying to punch some urgency into the situation.

William groans and gets up of the grass rug that comfortably covers the pit of earth they were sitting on. His legs are bruised from fighting Freddy, and his whole body is sore from swimming at such a treacherous length of water.

“My whole-body hurts man.” William grunts out at the panicking boy.