Running shoes

No one suspected that the bees would leave, well that’s a lie really; the really smart people noticed that they were leaving, but they were the people everyone else ignored because it wasn’t cool to listen to them. I mean since when is a high school jock going to listen to a scientist locked in a chemistry lab surrounded by books, nope they would be out drinking, partying and generally ruining their lives with horrendous one-night stands, that’s exactly what I was like… ‘was’ being the operative word.

I was dumb, you have to admit it from time to time or you just get arrogant, and trust me when I say that an arrogant jock isn’t exactly a pleasant experience for anyone. My dad once told me that I had one of two choices, work hard in class and get into an ivy league college, or be exceptional at football and get a free pass… okay it wasn’t the best advice in the world but let’s face it, I’m crap at math. So football became my life, training, pep rallies and all the cool stuff that comes from being scouted. After each great performance on the field was the after party, after the after party, well that’s when I would have my head in a toilet and coach would scream something along the lines of “Your ruining your god damn life!” or “Get yourself together or I swear you’ll never kick another football!” Excellent motivation right there…

Okay, I admit that when the world started to die I didn’t notice; I mean it was all over the T.V. but since when did I have time to sit and watch something that wasn’t football? Apparently it started with the flowers, crops started to fail and generally nature was screwed; ironic really, vegans were always preaching about one thing or another, saying they were going to save the world… and they were the first to starve. Man, I have a screwed up mind sometimes.

Well you can imagine the uproar when supermarkets couldn’t get stock because… well the stock was dead. People were panic buying left right and centre; even the church… that reminds me… no maybe another time… right now I’m being chased… why can I not focus today?

I had to get out of the high street, I should know better than to gather here anyway; too many hunters, too dangerous and the others needed me. There were a few shops left and then I could take a sharp right and scale the alley to higher ground, they couldn’t scale like I could.

Their footsteps were a few paces behind me, stumbling left and right carelessly as they tried to keep up. The sound of bare feet hitting the floor wasn’t the nicest sound, the rough pavement ate at the feet worse than the hunters do.

That reminds me, I need new shoes; if the gang expect me to run for the last scraps of food they need to provide better gear. Oh maybe now is a good time to mention the problem? Your probably wondering what they hell is chasing me bare-foot through this ghost town. Yeah sounds about good right here, I’ll scale this, and you catch up with what happened to this god-forsaken world.

See people change when they are hungry, a friend becomes an enemy and a loved one becomes your next meal. Everyone was talking about it at school, we all knew that cannibals existed but there were like four across the whole of the United States, right? But somewhere in Texas a farmer killed his wife; apparently he went a bit crazy and ate her because the last of his cattle died. The teachers said he was a one off, but then more people started doing it; people were too weak to fight them off and soon they were hunting each other. Wonderful.

Well, then everyone started getting the idea, but the hunters were changing; they were like wild animals. One came into the school on the last day they let us in; he went from room to room tearing people to pieces. Running came in useful that day, I climbed out of the window as he came crashing through our classroom door; I managed to get four more people out of the room. I only looked at him once that day, the colour of his eyes were weird; like they had leaked into the white.

From the roof of Maccies I recognised all of the eyes staring up at me, swirls of green and blue blurring in with the white; their mouths frothing and snapping at me, wild dogs had a more pleasant appearance. None of them could climb, I had ran into these twats before; they’ve been hunters’ for a while now and each time they got a little slower, their eyes lost a little more white… they lost a little bit of human each day… and we get a little bit closer to being able to kill em.