They’re dead, all dead. Ashley, Jimmy, Tom… I’ve spent years trying to build myself a life. This is my life now. Just a lonesome engineer undergrad from Berkeley, and nothing but the memories of my friends, my family, and who I was, like pieces of shattered mirror trailing behind me. Whatever it was, it happened fast. We lost Brandon on the first night, during our escape from San Jose, and whatever those… things are — they’re not the people we knew. They’re not the neighbours or loved ones we had held so dearly.

I was apart of a group, a band of my friends and people from our University. We struggled for a long time after the fall of San Jose, and our hopeful refuge, the military, they killed people like animals. One by one their camps fell, and we listened to their broadcasts on the radio everyday. This is paradise, they said. This is a safe place, they would tell. Then they’d stop broadcasting, and slowly the marks on our map of all these safe-places began to disappear.; marked out hastily by a sharpie, and we would hear the rumours of how they had fell to the horde. To those things.

Eventually, these safe-places we had plotted across the map, had all dwindled down to a handful. The scratched out marks filled the page so that much of it was unreadable. And during all of this, we too, dwindled. Arianna and Gentry, a couple, they died in each other’s arms. Taliah was caught on a fence as we tried to escape. To this day I remember her screams, and how we left her there. I remember watching her bloody fingers slowly lose their grip on the fence, and how her screaming turned to gurgling as they descended on her.

Then there was Yuri. We had picked him up on our war past San Francisco with his family. He went insane. He shot his wife, his child, and Hamilton — who had tried to stop him. It ended when he turned the gun on himself. He just couldn’t handle it, and honestly, I don’t know how we could.

From there, things slowly got worse. It seemed like people were dying everyday, and we eventually stopped burying them. I still think about it every night; their faces, what they must look like now, have they been torn apart by carrion birds and scavengers, or are they among the things that haunt us everyday. And then I think, I worry, what will come of me?

Ashley and Tom were the last to go.

It was just the three of us now, and we had only one place left on our map. Arklay. We had heard rumours of this place, and it felt too good to be true. Ashley and Tom didn’t die because of the horde. They tried to kill me. After I beat Tom’s face in with a shovel, I left Ashley — my best friend through all of this — I left her there next to Tom’s body. I shot her with Tom’s gun, and couldn’t bring myself to finish her off. I still don’t know why they tried to kill me. I’ll probably never figure it out now, but then it was just me.

I set out for Arklay with an empty gun, what was left of my rations, a scribbled on map, and a lingering fear that this paradise I had heard about, would be like the others. I would scribble the last refuge off of my map, and then I will have nothing. Instead, I managed to find a boat, and here I am — on this island. Everyone is afraid of the horde, we’ve all lost someone, we all have no life to go back to — but what they don’t talk about is who we should really be afraid of.

Ourselves.