Here Alone 2016

The forest didn’t make a sound. Not a single birdcall. Not the rustle of a squirrel in the underbrush. Just wind moving through dead trees, like breath through old bone. Ann didn’t need sound anymore — she knew the rhythm of survival. Wake. Watch. Move. Hide. Breathe. Repeat. A year had passed since the cities fell to the virus, and longer still since she'd buried her daughter in a shallow grave by a river that no longer flowed. The infection didn’t just take lives — it stripped the world of its noise, its rhythm, its memory. But Ann had learned to live without all of it.

Each morning was the same: sterilize her gear, check the traps, keep moving. She never stayed in one place more than two nights. The infected still wandered — fast, blind, violent. Sometimes they cried like infants at night, and Ann would bury her head under a dirty blanket, pretending she was somewhere else. A kitchen. A campsite. A life. She wore layers of stink and soil like armor, rubbed mud into her pores so nothing would smell her humanity. Alone was safer. Alone was smarter. Alone, she believed, was the only way she’d survive long enough to forget who she was.

That belief cracked when she found the boy. Sixteen, maybe. Half-starved and dragging a bleeding woman behind him through the trees like a broken memory. Ann nearly shot him, but didn’t. Pity? Instinct? Or just the ache of too many words unspoken? She took them in for one night. Then two. Then longer. The woman — Olivia — healed slowly, though her eyes held too many questions. The boy, Chris, talked constantly. About what school used to be like. About music. About his father. Ann hated how their voices sounded in her ears — fragile, alive, tempting. Dangerous.

But survival isn’t a democracy. It’s a burden. And when the infected came again — three of them, fast, hungry, unshackled from whatever humanity they once had — Ann had to choose. Not between life and death, but between isolation and something worse: trust. She gave Chris the gun. She gave Olivia the backpack. She stayed behind. As they fled, the forest swallowed her again, as it always did. Alone, but not broken. Not yet. Because in the world that followed the end, survival wasn’t measured in days or miles. It was measured in the weight of the choices that kept you breathing… and the ghosts you carried after.