After at least an hour, I got to the front of the line where the girl waited for me. When I did get my sandwich, she handed one with a bite already taken out. She laughed at me.
“Enjoy!” she cackled.
I took out the few bites from the opposite end, purely out of hunger, but it had a bad taste, so I left the rest in a pair of sneakers of one of the quarantine guards that were just sitting out. I expected to get called out for it. I didn’t expect to get extremely nauseous from it, but I did.
As the pain worsened, my vision started to get blurry. I looked for a place to sit and recollect myself when my balance gave way. I tried to steady myself on what I thought was a pole, but it reared back and swore obscenities at me.
“Sorry!” I slurred
I fell to the floor when it seemed my head wasn’t in charge of my body anymore. It was light and full of woozy air. I felt the hard floor. It probably hurt. I heard applause before I completely blacked out. That was weird. I let myself slip into unconsciousness, hoping it would lead to a better place than this.
* * *
When I woke up, I was stirred by a hot wind and about eight faces above me, one of which being Destiny.
“What’s going on?” I asked, groggy and fighting for consciousness.
“You were tried and convicted,” the girl said. “And now you’re about to be punished. There’s no way you’re getting away with what you’ve done.”
“For the last time,” I said, drowsy. “I didn’t kill Jake. He was stupid. And what kind of fair trial is it if I’m drugged and can’t give a testimony?”
My S’s slurred together, and I realized I was eliminating a lot of saliva.
“You know that Jake and I dated first, making you thloppy theconds,” I said in sloppy speech.
She sneered at me while one girl grabbed the top of my hair and pulled it. I yelped in pain.
“You think you know so much,” she said. “You don’t know anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out the way you wanted. But that’s no reason to have it out here in—”
I sat up and looked around blinded by bright white light, but the girl jerked me back to the ground by my hair.
“Ow!” I cried. “Where am I anyway?”
I was outside and could see nothing but desolated city with that smoggy green haze for as far as my eye could see. My arms were tied down, and the girls around me tightened the ropes.
“Since you left Jake out here to die,” Destiny said while one girl kept her firm grasp firmer on my hair. “We’re returning the favor, just to see what it was like for him.”
They all straightened and took a few steps back as if to admire their handiwork. Destiny rubbed her hands together and beamed.
“I just wish my sorority could see me now!” she said.
“Real mature, guys!” I said. “At least set me down on the ground so I can figure out where to go from here.”
“Admit it,” she hissed. “You wish you were us. You know why?”
“I literally can’t think of one thing,” I said. “There’s no way I’d want to be part of your crappy club for jerks.”
“Because we’re the future,” she said. “And we’re going to survive and live long, and when we’re done, we’re going to have children who carry on our legacy.”
“Moving on so quickly then?” I asked. “Jake would be happy.”
She drew her hand back and slapped me really hard. I jerked back in pain and winced. It burned, then tingled. Whatever—I knew that joke was funny.
“You remember that,” she said. “’Cause it’s the last human interaction you’re going to get.”
She straightened and was greeted to high fives all around. The rest of the girls took turns spitting on me before they all left.
“Ew!” I said. “Stop that!”
They turned and left me, then ran for the door. Just like that I was abandoned on top of the roof of the quarantine underneath the hot sun, tied to it like meat left out to dry.
One girl poked her head out from the door they’d just disappeared through “Also, you’re fat.” The girls laughed and walked away.
I rolled my eyes, which isn’t easy when you feel them welling up with tears.
“I am not,” I muttered.
It was hot, really hot, under the sun with no shade whatsoever. I closed my eyes and prayed for the third time in my life. I muttered words over and over like a magic spell and then would open my eyes quickly as if an angel would appear in thin air. I think I did this about five times, and every time I felt a little less hope in me.
When that didn’t work, I wriggled around, trying to bend my knees. The ropes were tight and scratchy. Overheard, I saw birds fly over and then circle around. I realized my bag of belongings still were inside, forever gone.
Nope. I made a resolve. If I was going to die, it was not going to be at the hands of those petty, stupid girls. If I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be a day where the last thing I heard was “Also, you’re fat.”
This couldn’t be true. I’d been eating nothing but scraps and I knew I’d lost weight. I felt it and my pants were looser. The pre-Apocalypse me would be so proud that finally I had found a diet that worked. So many years of just eating Doritos for dinner and Coke for breakfast that just never worked. My mind traveled back since the Incident now that I was only eating what I could find, eating for survival, not taste. I made a mental note to self, I thought, while furiously wriggling out of my bonds. I would put together a diet plan and market it as the “Survival Diet” for when the world went back to normal. This would probably be the best idea I would ever come up with.
I’m going to get out, I told myself. I’m going to get out. I repeated this over and over. I’m going to get out. I’m going to get out.
Wriggling out of those ropes was torture. They burned as they rubbed against my skin and my back ached from my fingers straining to find a weak spot in the knots. Still, in the back of my mind, I imagined my cookbook—me in an apron, surrounded by rocks and shrubs, like something out of the Bible.
Yes! The Jesus diet!
I told myself to stop it—this was the time to get out of here otherwise those birds would be vindicated in their dietary choices.
I fumbled around enough where the knot loosened and freed myself. I could tell I had limited time before another roving gang would be out and about, looking for either sandwiches or a lost, clueless girl. There was no way I was going back inside. If I was going to have my choice of which barbaric gang was going to kill me, it certainly wasn’t going to be the one where Jake’s lover was dreaming specifically of how to dismember me.
I ran to the side of the structure by way of the rafters. To the left I could see what was left of the freeway and to the right just one abandoned building after the other. I took my chances by following the now crumbling freeway. Time wasn’t on my side, so I limped away. If I headed north, maybe I could find my parents and their apartment. Now that I didn’t have people fighting and deciding which direction to go was right, I could do what I wanted. So I decided to go home.
Walking down a freeway is terrifying. It doesn’t matter if it’s pre-Apocalypse, post-Apocalypse. One thing that hadn’t changed was there were still bumper to bumper cars, just not moving anywhere as far as the eye could see.
It was dark, and I had followed the freeway since my escape from the quarantine. It was cold and I had lost everything, including my scratchy blanket, my dead phone, a bag of kale chips that I was hoping to barter something more valuable for. It occurred to me that I could just check and see what people had left behind in the cars. Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to think that—so many had had windows bashed in and been picked clean of whatever was available, but it didn’t mean they were all like that.