If ever given the option, you would have definitely chosen to live out the apocalypse back in England and not the Southern states of the US, if only because of the weather.
You're used to torrential rain and and unforgiving winds, with the occasional sunny day mixed in here and there, not what feels like slowly baking alive in the devil's arse. While, fortunately, your melanin rich skin was made to handle harsh temperatures, being a 3rd generation south Asian living in England has admittedly made you soft and struggling to function with temperatures over 25 degrees celsius. And so here you are, 2 years into the apocalypse, 2 years of fighting to survive in America, a foreign land on which you were only supposed to spend a couple of weeks of the summer before starting uni, scouring the streets in hopes of finding some water or anything to fill the aching pit that is your stomach.
You're dangerously malnourished and dehydrated right now, and you know it won't be long before one of the dead will easily be able to take you down. Fuck, they probably won't even have much to chew on if you carry on the way you are.
You've already raided the shops on either side of you, coming up empty handed, much to your annoyance. Your last chance is the corner store in front of you. With fingers crossed and prayers repeated in your head on the hopes of finding something of substance inside, you raise your khanjar and enter the store. It's a fancy little thing you'd picked up at an Islamic shop for your mum back in England, back when you were a tourist and not a twitchy survivor with possibly self-diagnosed PTSD. Thankfully the store is clear of dead ones and as you search the backroom and shelves for any sign of something edible, you unearth some unopened crackers and 3 bottles of water. You never thought you'd cry over a box of Ritz, yet here you are, eyes watering, downing half a bottle of water and shoving biscuits into your gob. You don't eat much, wary of making yourself sick after going without for so long, and so you place your treasure into your backpack and carry on your search. With a slightly less painful belly and a not-so-parched mouth, a more thorough search of the place turns up a pack of mints, a roll of tape and a pack of tobacco with papers and filters. Someone must be on your side up there because today seems to be your lucky day.
The smallest of smiles makes it's way onto your face as you hop up onto the counter and start rolling your first fag in who-the-fuck knows how long. You grab a couple more crackers and a few more sips of water before lighting up and thinking of your next steps. It's still relatively early, but you need to use this time to find yourself some shelter for the night and not push your luck with more supplies.
Surviving a world where the dead roam free is hard on anyone. Surviving in a foreign country is infinitely worse. Hell, you're not even sure that you haven't just been going around in circles for the past 2 years. You're sense of direction is pretty shit. You could be walking for days here and not so much as come across a petrol station, while in England you'd come across a council estate every 10 minutes, or, more commonly, a kebab shop. Fuck, you'd kill for a kebab right about now.
Common sense tells you there's bound to be some houses nearby because of the shops, but are you willing to risk the possibility of running into other survivors? You've avoided residential areas for this very reason. You do not do people. You've got your crippling anxiety to thank for that. While you know having a group will help your chances of survival, people these days are a lot worse than they were at the start of this whole mess; they're less empathetic towards others, more suspicious of anyone new, and more willing to take whatever the hell they want from you. Especially men, who of course there are more of now than women. Typical.
Turns out, it doesn't matter what you decide to do, because just as you hop off the counter and crush the butt of your fag under your boot, you hear the tell tale sounds of motorcycles and cars in the distance. You're just about ready to throw up the few crackers, alongside your heart, while your panicked mind contemplates what to do. You can't risk staying here, because while they might just drive on past, they're more than likely to stop and search the stores for supplies, and you'll end up being a sitting duck waiting to be found. Mind made up, you sprint out the fire exit towards the back to avoid being seen, taking down a dead fuck lingering a few feet ahead of you and make a run for the tree line not too far ahead. Still weak from the lack of nutrition in your body, you're not as fast as you'd like to be but still make it within the cover of the trees before you hear the engines cut out.
With the world as quiet as it is these days, you can faintly hear someone giving orders and the raiding of the stores even from this distance. They clearly don't care about how much noise they make, immediate red flags, and so you don't stick around in the general area for a second longer and continue in a jog through the forest, trying to put as much distance between you and the rowdy bunch of survivors as possible.
A safe distance into the forest, you start following the general direction of the tree line as you can recall it, as you don't fancy getting lost in the woods for weeks on end and not knowing how to make it out again. You're scared, of course you fucking are, and you're not ashamed to admit it because you're young and hungry and weak and you don't know where you're going and that could have been a really good group that could take you in and protect you or they could be a really bad group of what sounded like men that could take you in and do bad things to you and it's not like you can take on a whole group of men and you don't know what to do anymore and you just want be home with your mum and family and this whole shitpile to be just a nightmare and -
You need to stop before your spiraling thoughts lead to a panic attack and make the situation worse than it fucking is. You rest your hands on your knees and take in slow deep breaths, in through your nose, out through your mouth. You slowly straighten up as soon as your heart doesn't feel like it's about to beat through your chest and that's when you hear it. The whistling.