PART III

Levon's gone when I wake up. Everything's gone when I wake up. Struggling to move my head, I look around. It's pitch-black dark, and the moon's shinning over the overgrown grass around me extending one way to the horizon and the other way towards the abandoned highway. Behind me, the wrecked plane is quiet and still like a wrecked plane. Zombie fact number who gives a shit – I'm done with analogies. I get up. Nothing all around. The silence is so intense it's like it's loud. Ringing in my ear. Am I the only one who hears a high-pitched ringing in my ear when it's all quiet? For a long time I thought everyone heard it, but then whenever I mention it people have no idea what I'm talking about. To me, the sound of silence is this high-pitched ringing. Weird. I'm walking now. I have a vague memory of how much of a bitch I was to Levon, yesterday. Yesterday? Or was it today? Is it past midnight? Well, I have a vague memory of how much of a bitch I was to Levon some amount of time in the past. A vague memory of yelling and grunting and his teary-eyes. I fumble under my shirt for the... Oh, yeah... The locket's gone. Levon's gone. My mind's gone. I reach the highway and stop by the car pool lane. I look left. Darkness. I look right. Darkness. I look ahead. Darkness. I look inside my heart. Darkness. (Oh my God, start a Nightwish cover band already, Eve). Sorry, I use humor as a defense mechanism when things go to shit. And this is the very definition of things going to shit. I pick a side at random and start penguining. I hope I'm not too far away from a city or a town or a... whatever. I'm rambling, sorry. I can't get my mind to focus on one thing, it's all a blur and a mess like I'm blackout drunk but in a bad way. Shut your mind, Eve. Stop trying to think, you're not very good at it right now. Just walk. A Honda Civic with a dead family inside. Cute. A carbonized body of a baby. Sweet. I keep penguining past the cars and the bodies down the highway, walking at random. Walking with no destination. I hear a sound to my right and I stop. Then again. A ruffling of leaves coming from past the last lane on the right where the road gives way to woods and darkness. Oh, God, please be a coyote. Please, end this now. The ruffling again, and a low grunt. Yes, yes! Kill me! Fuck yeah, it's over! No more missing Damian and my Mom and Meredith. No more missing my old life. No more missing Levon and feeling like shit for what I did. Come on, coyote, do your thing! Go for the neck! Silence. Then the ruffling, louder. Then teeny, tiny steps, plec, plec, plec. With a bang, the creature jumps on top of a car hood and raises big, black ferocious animal eyes at me. A squirrel holding a banana. I shit you the fuck not. I look at him and he looks at me and I look at him. The squirrel looks around at the world in ruins, and I kind of envy it. He doesn't know that the world went to shit. If anything, things are better for him now. No cars to run him over or anything. I take a step towards it. Maybe I'll go the same way as the squirrel. Maybe before I starve to death my mind will shut down completely and I'll be in a state of bliss, unaware of all the crap storm around me. I lean my head down and whisper, "Hey, furry one, can I have a taste of that banana?"

Startled by my grunts, the squirrel climbs down from the hood and disappears back into darkness. "Well, fuck you then, you're just a rat with a cute tail." Like a banana would make a difference, anyway. All right, back to walking. I have to stop and look around and make an incredible effort to put myself back in reality. To go back to here and now and make sense of where I am. Ok, how did I get here? I woke up by a wrecked plane and I started walking. Where am I going? I have no idea. Hopefully to quick and painless death. Who am I? Nothing. Nothing. I press my eyes closed and try to push away the fog inside my mind. I am... Eve. I was a girl and now I'm a zombie girl and life sucks so much it's well on its way to becoming a porn star. I open my eyes and start walking again, heading down the highway towards my last few breaths. Hopefully. Either that or I'll end up in a city or town or whatever, then maybe I can find some food. Maybe even people. Just this once. The world's gone anyway, who cares? Who's a Vegan, this day and age?

I push the thought away and keep walking. I push away the image of Levon's sad fat face. Keep walking, stumbling feet after stumbling feet. Where the hell am I, anyway? In front of me, like on cue, a green sign comes to sight under the moonlight. 'Philadelphia City Limit'. Oh, great. Ground Zero. This should be fun.