Fearful Thinking

I know what you're thinking.

Oh, it's so dumb to be afraid of the sunsets, aren't those supposed to be pretty or something?

No. No they're not.

Not here anyway.

Farstan was watching the sunset with trepidation. I couldn't blame him, we'd been running from them for so long now that I can hardly remember what we're running from. Phantoms. Zombies. Skeletons. In short, the undead. The undead of our population from hundreds of years ago.

The human race has barely survived for this long. Parents never take care of children longer than they need to because they slow them down. They never get emotional attachments to them anymore, as an emergency evolutionary response to this stupid apocalypse. A lot of people don't even stick together for fear of being slowed down. We name ourselves.

There is no such thing as civilization. I named myself Barest, pronounced ba-rest. You never need a reason for your name, though sometimes people do name themselves for a reason, like Wolf. Wolf killed a wolf and now sports a wolfskin cloak. Stuff like that goes big for our group.

Our group of four kids, this is going to be a long night, I know it. A lot of hiding, maybe fighting, certainly no eating or scavenging. We learned that outside the city barrier is almost worse than inside it, purely because of the fact that there is no shelter there, even if all the shelter here is buildings with little to no upkeep because none of us know how to do it.

Wolf tapped me on the shoulder. I knew it was Wolf because of the cloak that he always wore. He hardly ever talked, unless it was an emergency. He was always bent on selective mutism, because he had problems with his voice that he never wanted to address personally, so he hid it from all that he didn't trust with his life. He trusted me, Farstan, and Abrah like that. Abrah was the dork of the group, he was slow, he wasn't super smart or super strong, but he kept the group together like he was superglue.

Wolf signaled to us all that we needed to climb high in our tower so that we were safe from the ground, at least for now. Abrah groaned and got ready for some serious gymnastics, even though he was crap at them and almost always had to take the stairs instead. Farstan was swift and adept at it and was already at the ceiling after less than ten minutes. I was normally pretty good at gymnastics too, but right now I was also sporting a splinted arm, so I didn't even dare try it. The stairs were unclimbable without using at least a little bit of gymnastics, and I was the only girl in the group, so a lot of the time the rest of the group was really awkward around me. Except for Wolf. He never even asked for consent before doing something, he just did it. I liked that about him.

Wolf grabbed me around the waist and started climbing the stairs, Abrah not too far behind. When the first few poles came up, Wolf gripped me tighter around the waist and performed the swings flawlessly, even one handed. Landing back on the stairs, he kept running up them at astonishing speeds for carrying a sixteen-year-old girl. Then again, he was seventeen, and he was also really strong despite the fact that it looked like you could probably break him like a twig if you handled him wrong.

Once we were at the top of the ceiling, I winced, but was still alive, and that's what really mattered, we all knew that. Pain was temporal, death certainly was not. The skeletons were often a bother because there were just so many of them that it often felt incredibly overwhelming. Sometimes they had rags or clothing on, but for the most part, they were bare. The only way to "kill" them, or at the very least disarm them, was to cut all of their tendons and linking points, and unless you were extremely good at that you just had to run and hide because of the sheer amount of them.

Nothing slowed them down. They were fast, and they knew it. Without flesh covering them like the 'ever-so-benevolent' zombies, they were almost literal speed demons.

That brings me to our next major problem. Zombies were disgusting, terrifying, slow, rotting sacks of mindless flesh. Their anatomy quite resembled a human's, but that was only because of whatever made the dead start coming to life anyways. They were not as plentiful as the skeletons, but they really hate the idea of a living creature. I hated them, they had picked off one of our team long ago. Their name was Marcus. They were good, but stupid and self-sacrificial. They had it coming.

Our next issue was phantoms. Phantoms were bird-like undead creatures that loved to eat people, but nobody ever saw them coming, so nobody ever worried too much about them. If they wanted to eat you, they would. Simple as that, no need to worry. They didn't normally eat humans anyway.

All of our team claimed this spot and had had it for years on end. Most of us came around and joined around eight, and we would keep taking little kids in if they ever wandered this way. I thought that maybe we should go out and look for kids that needed help sometime, but it was quickly shot down by Wolf to go looking, and nobody ever crossed Wolf when he had made up his mind. I still thought that it would be a good idea, and the more that I mentioned it, the more I thought that I had been convincing Wolf that it was actually a good idea.

Honestly, I would more than love to have more kids around, more people to teach how to live around here. The human race wasn't completely doomed if we kept fighting for our survival like we have been.

"Look out there!I think that I see something flickering against the darkness!" Abrah said excitedly. He was pointing to the west, which we had seen a lot at night. He was right, there was something there. It was a white... thing. like a peice of the sun, and it was trying to light up the faintly red sign that we had seen a lot of during the day.

I noticed that it was a signal, calling for help.

SOS.

Looking down at all of the zombies and skeletons that suddenly burst through our little hideout, I knew one thing only.

We needed that.

SOS.

SOS.

SO-