Chapter One: The Bar
My hands shook from anxiety. I wanted to end it. I wanted to do it so bad. But I couldn’t. I could only cut herself for attention, not results, placing a vertical scrape across my left wrist, welcoming the thin stream of blood that came after. Because I chickened out, I knew the memories wouldn’t stop.
My hands would keep shaking, and the PTSD would never allow me to find happiness again.
My younger sister, London, called out to me from the next room. I had to straighten up before she came after me. I refuse for London to find out how her big sister has been dealing with the weight of the world.
Rolling down my sleeve from the red Christmas sweater I was wearing, I placed the razor blade back in my pocket and stood up from the bathroom floor. Upon leaving the stall, I flushed the toilet, hoping to fool my younger sister into believing I was using the bathroom.
As expected, London opened the bathroom door, sticking only her head in the bathroom as she stood in the doorway.
“What are you doing in here?” London asked, looking at her fully dressed sister.
“What do you think?” I replied, now washing my hands in the sink.
“Well come out so we can get moving. Get your alcohol and lets go,” London said with a smile on her face.
It seemed like London could never take her big sister serious. She could never keep a straight face. Always happy, even in the desperate times we lived in. Even in an apocolypitc world, where the human population was near to being over, with very little survivors of the plague that wiped our parents out. Me and London were all we had.
London and I were only a year apart in age, with me being eighteen and London being seventeen. Being the last of our family, we were closer than ever now. It was becoming hard to believe that we barely paid attention to each other when civilization was at peace, using the term peace loosely. I say that because the wars and murders and other crazy shit that humans did before, was nothing compared to what a virus did in days. An unknown threat…changed people.
I left the bathroom, now entering the bar. Walking around the counter, I grabbed the four bottles of liquor, placing all four bottles in my backpack, leaving only cans of food in London’s scavenger backpack.
“Do we have to hit up every bar we come across, Violet?” London asked me.
“This should be enough alcohol until we reach the next town,” I replied.
“Yeah right,” London ended the conversation, hearing voices in the far distance.
The voices seemed to come from the outside of the bar, getting louder and louder as male voices got closer and closer. London went over to the bar’s front window to see who was coming. Taking a quick glance, London’s disturbing face showed she indeed saw someone.
“How many are there?” I asked, zipping my backpack up.
“Three. I see three of them,” London informed her sister. “They all like they were in their thirties.”
I ran around the counter, grabbing my sister’s hand and pulling her towards the back of the bar. The two us headed for the back door. To our surprise, it was already open.
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