Scavengers

I wake before the sun. It's the best time to scavenge. The beasts sleep at this time. They come out at night but they hide in the hills before the dawn. I sneak a quick glance out the window. It's dark and still. I throw my hair up and nudge Antoine sleeping beside me. "Leah." With one word, he sits up and rubs his eyes. He told me once that he liked to sleep late in his past life, before the change. Now we wake at the slightest noise, we are always on alert. We have to be.

I sighed wistfully, remembering the days when one could simply go to the grocery store to buy food. Antoine and I had run low on our stock long ago, now we had to find whatever we could in the recesses of abandoned cabinets in the forsaken homes around us, remnants of life before the viruses.

It was a dangerous endeavor. The beasts were unpredictable. One might think that they knew the ways of the beasts if they studied their habits through the window, as I did. However, the beasts had been human once and they were unpredictable. Just like their former selves. It was hard to tell friend from foe when faced with one, much like in the past.

I had met Antoine at a party in my building that my downstairs neighbor had thrown. He had been very drunk and needed a place to crash. My roommate Ana and I had simply taken pity on him and let him crash on our couch that night. It wasn't his dimples or his smile, no, just pure pity. When we woke in the morning the world had begun to change. A virus was ravaging the world that we had once been naive enough to feel safe in. We were told to stay indoors and Antoine told us he didn't have anywhere to go back to. So we let him stay.

Things got worse. And worse. And worse. Leah went out to buy wood to board up our windows and doors. She never came back. I like to think that she found her family. I like to think that she found a better place. So Antoine and I broke apart my dining table to board up the doors and windows. Then we settled down to watching the world fall apart on the television. Until the electricity didn't work anymore. Then the food ran low. Finally, the water stopped coming out from the tap. It was time to scavenge.

Sometimes I can't put the past behind me. The life I lived before. My job at the advertising agency. Before I became a scavenger. The single girl life in the city. It was so much better than this. Of course, I didn't have Antoine then.

That first night we scavenged was the most terrifying night of my life. When we stepped outside of the comfort of my apartment we were faced with darkness. Pure, blinding darkness. Just those few feet downstairs to my neighbor's apartment were horrifying. I was hoping to find her alive. The girl that had thrown the party on the last night of normalcy. We found our way into her apartment because her door had been left open. She was dead of course. Her face had been eaten off.

In her apartment, we found a case of bottled water and some canned food. We were lucky. This was enough to sustain us for a few days. When we arrived safely back in my apartment, Antoine handed me a heart shaped locket.

"Be my girl?" he asked.

"Is this...hers?"

He smiled. I looked at him, possibly the last man on earth. Thank God he had some dimples and a nice smile.

"Your disgusting." I told him. It was a strange start.