The Survival of Lillith Dane

A survivor doesn’t have a heart. It is not a perk in the job description, it is a hazard. Love will bring you down. Caring will bring you down. I realized that a long time ago, but I only recently began to wonder; without love, what else is there to live for? If I had nothing, would I become a maniacal lunatic that would just watch the world burn until something finally got the better of me?

Would that be so bad?

This survivor was nothing more than a twenty-two year old stay-at-home-mom of five and half feet tall and a hundred and twenty five pounds (none of which was muscle) before the outbreak. I kept my auburn brown hair long and fashionably wavy, and I color coordinated my clothes to compliment my stormy grey eyes. With the right shirt, I could get them to change to blue. At the time, that was my biggest personal concern – the way I looked. All of my other worries back then were equally pitiful.

Two years ago, an idiot with a voice in the House of Representatives decided it was a brilliant idea to create the perfect bio-weapon = an army of soldiers that couldn’t think for themselves and were as disposable as toilet paper. They knew exactly what they were getting themselves into. They couldn’t use the excuse that they had never heard of zombies before – that’s the frightening part, really. The whole world knew exactly what was going to happen, and we still weren’t prepared for it… somehow.

They said on the news that precautions were being taken so that the infection created would be completely under control. Many knew better. Camps and refuges were established all over the place. Many people just gravitated to the local schools and the criminals on death row were rushed to execution (just in case of a major outbreak). It only took about a year for the infection to spread across the world. Lots of people thought they were safe for various reasons, but they were wrong. Nobody was safe.

My family and I moved into the nearest refuge – the local high school. I had a husband then and two children; two boys aged three and one. They swore to us that we would be safe, and we were skeptical, but we took the chance anyway. We thought; “What’s the worst that could happen?”

I figured, at the very least; worst case scenario; we would all die together, and go to heaven together.

They started killing off the old and sick first. They did it discretely, using overdoses of pain medicines so that we wouldn’t get angry or rise up against them. They started recruiting the healthy, strong young men as new armies that were really mostly just slaughtered by the zombies. My husband wasn’t a soldier, he was sick. He had a debilitating disease and when all the old were gone he jumped to the bottom of their priority list.

I tried to teach my boys that when daddy was gone, it was because he was working to keep us safe. In a way, I believed that he was. Of course my oldest cried and was scared, and I tried to comfort him, but how could I? I was scared too, and I cried. I tried not to, but I did. I could only take solace in thinking that their pain wouldn’t last, and over time, they would be happy again.

With our numbers significantly reduced, and all of our strongest and smartest defenders sent out to the slaughter, it was just the weak women and children left behind. It was only a matter of time. Still, we thought we would be okay. Still, we held onto the hope that God wouldn’t let our children die.

We were wrong.