It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, after having been plunged into near complete darkness and now finding myself in a stark white room, with the light glowing a harsh white light. My momentary lapse didn’t last long as I was shoved into the room to make way for those following. Troy was looking through a trap door in the door, “I think that will hold them,” he said.

“The other one didn’t” my mother said. She was trying to keep Lauren upright, she hadn’t said anything while we made into the basement. She stood silent, teetering slowly from side to side, eyes wide open, and she was pale, so pale.

“These doors are metal,” he said, “I hadn’t switched my front door yet.”

My hands were shaking, I dropped the crowbar somewhere in Troy’s house, and I couldn’t sit still.

“Feeling jittery?” Troy asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s the adrenaline. It’ll pass,” he said. He brought us into a room with metal bunks attached to the walls. “Why don’t you stay here? They can’t get us. I promise”

I left my mother consoling Lauren in the room, and I found Troy sitting on a fold up chair facing the door. He had the gun on his lap, and he was reloading the other two guns from a box of shells. His motions were fluid, and he barely looked at the guns while he loaded them. He finished loading the guns and stood to replace them in their respective holsters and he noticed me standing there.

“How are you feeling?’ he asked.

“I’m okay,” I said, “I’m not sure how Lauren’s handling it.”

“She’ll be okay. She just has to adjust.”

“How are you so calm. There are freaking infected people walking around your house right now. Why aren’t you cracking up like the rest of us?”

He looked away for a moment, “Man, you see what I’ve seen. I’m not surprised by anything anymore.”

There was a crash above us.

“They made it into the house,” he said.

“Are you sure that door will hold?” I asked.

“That door up there is solid steel, in a steel frame, with a six-inch deadbolt. This door’s got the same thing but with the three reinforced bars. So unless they learn to pick locks. They ain’t getting in here,” he said.

And they didn’t. Periodically, there might be a noise upstairs, and for the most part we kept quiet, not wanting to attract any more attention to the basement. In order to stay somewhat informed, Troy listened to a shortwave radio he had in the corner of the basement, with the majority of his gear.

The news came in short bursts, a lot of filled with static, and it was hard to hear. Troy was convinced that, after the infection was wiped out, someone would look for survivors but the longer we stayed in the basement the less likely this seemed. Troy would occasionally relay the highlights to us. None were positive.

“Washington fell today,” he said one day when we were eating our daily ration of MRE’s.

“The president’s dead?” Lauren asked. She had become more talkative since the day we entered the basement.

“Not necessarily,” he said, “he went in a bunker when this all started. He’s under mountain somewhere, safe and sound.”

One of the most disturbing newsflashes came the next day. “They bombed Chicago today. The city was overrun and they just bombed the hell out of it.”

That was our life in Troy’s basement. Our existence consisted of white walls, metal bunks, thin mattresses, and cardboard food, and it was hard to think that we had it better than most of the people on the planet.

From the radio transmissions, most of the countries fell, or at least the functional parts of the government, Heads of State were in hiding, most of the larger cities were overrun or destroyed entirely, and compared to what most people had, I was a king. Eventually, Troy turned off the radio.

It became difficult to keep track of time while in the basement. Lauren had a tube of lipstick in her pocket and started keeping track of the days. Every morning I would wake up and there would be a new red mark on the wall next to her bunk.

It was the only ornament on the walls, which were completely bare expect the few maps Troy kept taped to the wall in the main room. He kept a map of the United States, but it was hardly recognizable after the marks Troy made, red dots in certain areas, or entire cities crossed out.

We tried to break up the monotony, but it was useless. Except for meals, virtually every waking moment was the same, staring at white walls, counties the cities that had been bombed, taking inventory of the supplies, it grew to be the same.

Every morning, Troy sat in the same spot, the fold up chair in front of the stairs, polishing the gun he kept there.

“You certainly like that gun,” I said.

“Believe it or not, it’s the zombie special. A .22 long rifle, 30 round magazine, it’s beautiful,” he said, the gun was black and polished to the point that it shone in the fluorescent lights.

“Isn’t that a small caliber?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter what size it is if you hit what you’re aiming at. Because of the small caliber, there’s limited recoil and there’s a laser sight,” he flicked a switch and a red dot appeared on the wall. He winked at me, “Don’t worry though, I got the big stuff too.”

That was the last conversation we had that day. He continued to keep the gun at the ready, and everywhere he went, even in the relative safety of the basement, his guns were on him.

Days went by.

And days.

And days.

If Lauren’s count was correct, it had been twenty-eight days since we entered the basement. The short wave was mostly silent, and no one ever came to get us. Before the world ended, Troy kept three month’s worth of supplies in the basement, but it was only meant for one person. One person, three months, four people meant less than a moth if we were careful, and we were close to running out. We cut meals to the bare minimum, but even with the meager portions, there was less than a week’s worth of food. Water was running low too, maybe a week if we stretched it.

No one wanted to talk about it. Every time we sat at the metal table in the center of the room, eating the small bits of food, sometimes a cup of rice, other times beans with beef jerky, or the odds and ends of left over MRE’s, there was a look of resignation in everyone’s face.

We knew what was happening. Soon the food would run out, and we would have to go outside, face the situation, the one we were avoiding. We had to decide the manner in which we died. One, we could slowly starve to death in the basement, or face almost certain death above ground.

How does one decide the manner of his death? Honestly, I almost flipped a coin, but it didn’t come to that.

We had a few days of supplies left when someone finally said something.

“I’m going to look for food,” Troy said.

“No Troy, you can’t go out there, there’s still things here,” my mother said.

“I can’t wait till we’re starving, I need to go now,” he said.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“Absolutely not,” my mother said.

“He can’t go alone,” I said.

“You’re not going,” she paused, “I’ll go.”

“Mom, you can’t. No, there’s just no way you can go out there,” she said.

She wouldn’t listen, and she went.

Troy packed a bag with supplies, “Can you shoot?” he asked my mother.

“Allen taught me,” she said.

“I figured as much,” and he handed her one of the pistols from a cabinet.

“How are you getting out of here?” I asked.

Troy pointed to a door at the back of the basement, “There’s a tunnel behind that door, it goes to my shed in the backyard. We’ll slip out through there,” he said. “Now, when we get back. I’m going to knock on this door three times, real slow, see, and then you’ll know it’s us. If something knocks on that door, just once, or even twice, you take that shotgun there,” he said pointing to one on a rack above his arsenal, “You hear anything other than three knocks, you open that trap door there at the top and you empty that gun, you hear?”

I nodded.

“We should be back by nightfall, but if we’re not you pack up your sister and try and get out of the city okay?”

I nodded again.

“I love you both” my mother said and she kissed us both on the forehead. They departed through the dark tunnel and we closed the door behind them.

We never saw either of them again.

The first day was the hardest. Lauren cried uncontrollably, and I soon followed. We held each other for hours and never parted. By the third day, it was certain that they were never coming back, and the little hope we had died.

“Jesus Christ,” Lauren said, “I can’t do this anymore, she’s dead Tim, isn’t she. She’s dead, just like Amanda, like everyone else up there they’re all dead.”

The anguish was so real, I felt as though I hadn’t any skin. I was raw and I couldn’t believe it. Even when the pain would stop for a moment, I dragged it around like a weight. A weight neither one of us could bear. I tried to be strong for Lauren, but it was useless.

One the fourth day, I started packing.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“We need to leave,” I said.

“Are you kidding me,” she said, “I’m not going up there.”

“We have to, we’ll die down here for sure, at least up there we have a shot.”

“No” she said and sat on her bunk.

I didn’t want to have to do it but I played my final trump card, “Mom would want you to go. She wouldn’t want us to die in some stupid basement,” I said.

It was the shove she needed. We each packed a bag; taking what little food we had left. I saw small first aid kit, and some lighters, and really didn’t know what else to take. Except for the guns. We took so many guns. Troy had an arsenal to start a small war. Each of us took three pistols, and I took two of the special silenced ones Troy showed me. Inside the top drawer of the gun cabinet, was another .22 rifle, set up exactly as the one Troy had. We took as much ammunition as we could carry. And, we had all the knives we would need, small ones, large ones and bigger things like machetes. I took one of the axes and Lauren took a machete.

We left through the same exit as Troy and our mother, but we couldn’t bar it from the outside, so it remained unlocked. There was a complete absence of light in the tunnel, but I clicked on a flashlight from the basement. It was narrow and hard to navigate with the pack, but the path was relatively short and it only took a few minutes to find the end. A small ladder marked the end of the tunnel and we climbed up through a trap door, and into Troy’s shed. The shed had a small window in the door and I looked out to see if they were any of the infected ones in the yard. It was clear.

“Let’s go,” I said. And, we moved out of the shed, trying to stay low and jogged to the gate at the back of Troy’s property. Our houses backed up to a main road, so we decided to follow it.

It smelled horrible, as if the air was burnt and several other combinations of odor about which I did not want to think.

We saw one in the parking lot of a dentist office, but it didn’t seem to notice us.

“Where are we going?” Lauren asked but I didn’t quite have an answer so I remained silent. I knew we needed food though, and decided to try the most obvious place.

“We need to find a store,” I said, and hoped that any store would have food left, which was unlikely. The nearest grocery store was about a mile from our house, and it would have been quicker to cut through the neighborhood but I was weary of residential areas. Its where most people lived and now we were trying to avoid their bodies, so we took the main roads. An idea that I thought afforded us safety.

We walked to the grocery store and it took me a while to realize we didn’t need to stay on the sidewalk. It was clear that no cars were coming. A majority of the roadways, especially the intersections, were completely clogged, with cars and emergency vehicles, and even some of the National Guard trucks were there. Evidence of the conflict was everywhere, buildings were burned, cars flipped over, a true war zone.

The silence was the strangest part. Because of the lack of ambient noise, I was thrown off. Normally, especially with our house so close to a main road, car sounds were second nature. Everything was louder, our breathing, our footsteps, the sounds of our packs. I made a mental note about the noise.

In order to get to the store, we needed to negotiate several cars and man made blockades. When we finally reached the front of the store, I was dismayed that the bars were closed over the entrance.

“I guess we’re not getting in,” Lauren said.

“Let’s try one of the side entrances,” I said. It was a mistake.

Besides the main entrance, there was an employee’s entrance on the side of the store. I remembered when one of my friends worked there during the previous summer and sometimes he would let me sneak in that way. The entrance was in an alleyway that divided the grocery store from a gym next door. We entered the alleyway but the door was locked. I tried to force the door open when I heard the sound, footsteps, but not normal footsteps, these were slow, shuffling footsteps like the ones I heard in Troy’s house. I looked to my left, towards the parking lot behind the store, and there were at least six of them, some wearing store shirts.

“Lauren we need to move,” I said but when I turned to the right there were at least a dozen more.

“Oh crap,” Lauren said.

I raised the rifle I took from Troy’s house, flipping on the laser sight, and aimed at the closest one, placing the red dot right on its forehead, but the gun wouldn’t fire.

It.

Would.

Not.

Fire.

I pulled the trigger over and over but the trigger was stuck. I pulled out the pistol and it wouldn’t fire. I watched as the quivering red dot danced around the pale forehead while the gun harmlessly clicked

“What’s wrong?” Lauren said. She was yelling now. After seeing my guns fail, she pulled one off her belt, and the same thing happened. Nothing.

They were moving closer, and despite their lack of speed, were closing in fast.

We were surrounded.