Filthy and Hopeless

Dirt. Sand. Mud. It's streaked across my face and smeared all over my body, seeping through my ripped clothes. The damp air around me already reeks of sweat, blood and death. Never ending shrieks and screams mix with raging battle cries creating a horridly continuous song that will rattles my bones and drains all thoughts of hope out of me. 

Just an hour ago, or maybe it was two, or three, I watched my baby brother get pulled apart, shredded and tossed aside into a growing pile of limbs and rotting flesh, all in a matter of seconds. I'd snatched him out of his crib the minute I saw my mother get eaten alive and my father stampeded to death in our living room. When I fled down the stairs of my apartment and ran into the streets, not breathing and not comprehending, I found that the city I knew of as beautiful New York City was gone and torn apart, already littered with corpses and stormed by evils I had only seen in my worst nightmares. Through my streaming tears and with trembling hands, I hid my brother in a small recycling bin that did nothing for my eighteen year old body but was just enough to conceal him and covered him with cardboard boxes and newspapers from the day before, predicting a sunny and cloudless day today. What a joke.

With what I can only think of as my primal instincts, I fended off the monsters that seemed to pour towards us like a neverending stream of gore, tearing blindly with my hands. They clawed at me with grotesquely long nails and an emptiness in their eyes that scared me so much I had to shut my own closed. Every time their finger scratched my body I resisted the urge to scream in agony as what I can only describe as a trail of hot, burning acid. I don't know how long I fought them off for, because no matter what I did they kept coming back and there was always one to take the place of a fallen. My arms and legs were weaker and sorer than anything I'd ever experienced but somehow I kept thrashing, forcing my limbs to move, to defend my brother. 

To defend my brother, the only family I had left. But when a little cry I knew all too well sounded a few feet in front of me, I snapped my eyes open, barrelled through the wall of zombies in front of me, only to see my brother murdered. By the time I screamed 'I love you' through my hoarse throat, his head had already been snapped off.

At that point, I collapsed onto the ground and the zombies continued their mindless march forward, tossing me around with their feet. I didn't care. Let them kill me. I had given up, every part of my body completely useless. They tossed and turned me for about a block until I was kicked into alleyway, my body heavily rolling down a set of concrete stairs where someone grabbed me and shoved me in a door. 

I'm filthy, worn out and hopeless. Every vein and muscle that ever wanted my pathetic body to survive had given up. I'm writing this with some untapped reservoir of strength that will only last a few more seconds so that people will know, so that they'll understand why I stopped trying. I'm done, and it will only be a matter of time before my corpse is thrown out to join the streets of decaying bodies. 

And all this in a day.