Hunger

[slavyori]

Aria walks inside her apartment complex, stepping over broken bricks and sharp rebar sticking out from under her feet, alongside the corpses and torn limbs from both explosions and infected alike. The military must have bombed the hell out of this place, with the staircase collapsed and a giant pile of rubble from the roof covering the entrance to her apartment. Wordlessly, she walks back outside and moves to where the window of her apartment was- on the second story. Taking a ladder hidden underneath some maintenance equipment, she props it up against the window frame and climbs up, opening the unlocked window and climbing through. Not pausing, she pulls open her dresser, takes a few bedsheets, ties them into a makeshift rope and secures them at the window.


Finally taking a moment to look around the area now that she had a secure method of entering and exiting, everything was intact as the day she left it. Likely, since no survivors or looters could get past the rubble at her door. Sitting down on her bed, she grabs her diary and opens it to a random page.


“I’m sorry, I’m sor-”


The page is torn out, crumpled and thrown out the window, hitting the dirt and rolling on the ground. Another random page is opened.


“I’ve joined the police here. Maybe I can do something good in this world for once. Maybe I can be forgiven for my sins. Maybe I’m just a fucking mon-”


Aria reads a little from that page before once again switching to another yellow slice of paper.


“Hunger. That’s what I feel. Painful hunger behind this ma-”


She stops reading and switches to several pages ahead, finally reaching her last entry, dated a few weeks ago.


“I was going to start. I was so close. What are the chances that all this weird shit would start happening instead? It’s kept me busy at least, kept me entertained. Something tells me it is just going to keep getting better too.”


Removing a pen from her pocket, she clicks it open and rests the tip against a blank page. Taking a deep breath of the chilly air inside the unheated room, Aria watches the cloud of mist flow from her mouth as the sounds of screams and gunfire echo in the night. She smiles.


“I’m not so hungry now.”
​