When the alarms sounded off, it began.

From that point on, the world was over, and the dead were walking.

Everything happened in a certain order. The alarms, the screams, the pounding on our front door, and finally the silence. When I asked my grandfather why it was so quiet, he shivered. Without sparing me a single reassuring glance, he said, "Mikan, it isn't quiet. That's just what death sounds like." And so I listened. And sure enough, it wasn't silent. There were lots of distant things, sure, but it was anything but silent.

That was three years ago and I've never forgotten that loud silence. Sometimes that silence would even return, and even though it didn't happen often, it was chilling.

I survived the hardest part. Barely, but surely.

"Mikan, remember that little hideout you used to play in as a little girl?" Jii-chan said grabbing his coat. I nodded. "Grab a flashlight, a box of crackers and water bottle, maybe even a book, and hide yourself in that hole. Don't come out even if someone calls for you. Only come out if it's me, you understand? I'll come back for you but for now you're just going to have to-"

"You're leaving me here? Grandpa, what's even going on?" He kissed my forehead.

"Sweetheart, that's what I'm going to figure out. Do what I told you and don't look out the window."

And with that he was gone. It wasn't too hard to figure out either, that the kiss grandpa gave me would be his last.

*/*

"Damn it Mikan, watch out!" I turned around, swinging a baseball bat behind me. I didn't need to look to know that the walker behind me had fallen to the ground, dead for good. Wiping some of the splattered blood off my hand, I stomped on the zombie's face for extra measure.

"Natsume, I can take care of myself." He stood in front of me, obviously annoyed. His long black hair was a bit of a mess. As much as he tried scrubbing the dirt out it never went away. It must've been something about living in the zombie apocalypse that made it so impossible to clean. He always stood tall whenever I saw him, but he might've been different before all this for all I knew. Maybe he was a sloucher and walking dead people kicked some sense into him.

"Like hell you can. Can you take care of yourself after you've turned, huh? Who's gonna smash your head in, because I know it's not gonna be me. They call us Untouched for a reason." I sighed. He was just worried. Gripping my baseball bat in my right hand, I placed the left on Natsume's back. We started walking back home "I know, I'm sorry. I'll be more careful next time."

*/*

I met Natsume one week after hell broke loose. I had been living in the small crawl space Grandpa told me. In the six days I stayed trapped in there, I had eaten through two boxes of crackers, a bag of dried mangoes, and three cans of soup. My flashlight was dead, so I started leaving a crack in the cover up oh the hole so I wouldn't be in complete darkness. When I finished the book, I grabbed a pen and started drawing happy things on the wall to help myself feel better. I still didn't know what was wrong. I had assumed it was a bad storm, or maybe some plague had swept through the village. That still didn't account for the fact I was told to stay in this hole. Right when I thought I might be able to go out, I heard a man burst through the front door. His footsteps were heavy. They echoed through the house and made him known.

"Hello?" he called out with a strong voice. There were men with him, and I could him them searching through the house. I shut the covering to my hole and lowered the sound of my breathing. Grandpa had said not to leave, no matter what. So I didn't.

"If anyone is in here, you need to answer. We're the police, and we'll keep you safe. We'll take care of you so you won't turn into one of them." It was tempting, but there were lots of things that weren't answered. Why was the police walking into our house saying they were going to protect me from "them." They searched every bit of the house, but somehow missed me, inside the wall covered by a piece of painted plaster.

I waited until ten minutes after they left to come out. The light made my eyes squint, and the sudden space around me made my head feel light. My feet moved across the room with some difficulty, but somehow I managed to near a window.

And there it was.

The answer to all my questions. So earth shattering, it made my stomach sick.

Three people were shifting down the road.

They weren't sick, hurt, tired like they seemed at first glance.

They were dead.

Skin of various shades of green, blue, purple, brown, gray, were all pealing off the walkers. You could see the flesh pouring out of them and rotting away. When I caught sight of one's face, I forced myself to turn around take a sip of water. It didn't seem real at the time, but somewhere inside, I knew it was.

The sad truth came to me later when I was pacing around the house trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, cleaning off the dirt I hadn't had the chance to clean off in the shower. I felt like screaming, but I couldn't bring myself to. Somewhere inside of me, there was logic. A beautiful kind of logic that was there to keep me safe. That logic also reminded me, that the reason grandpa hadn't come back yet, was because he was probably dead with the rest of town.

That was when it clicked.

Somehow, Grandpa knew. Grandpa knew that they would try to round up everyone, and he knew that it wouldn't lead to anything good like they intended. Who knows, maybe they had gathered up the people of the village just to kill them before it could happen to them. My Grandfather managed to save my life.

And so I had to plan. I needed to find someone, anyone, that could help me. At sixteen I wasn't going to make it on my own. Even if Grandpa had managed to get me this far, I couldn't hide in the hole forever. If the zombies didn't kill me, it would've been the dark cramped space. I grabbed Grandfather's hunting knife, gripping it in my hand, allowing the leather grip to implant designs into my skin. Twisting the knob of the front door, I stepped a foot outside.

The air smelt a bit sour, but everything else was in place. Birds still flew through the air, singing on their way. Street lights still changed normally, even though there weren't any cars.

I was shaky, moving through the town. The first plan was to make my way to my neighbor Tsubasa's house to see if he had any idea what to do. When my house was far behind me, I gripped the knife harder in my hand.

"Auuuugghhh" The noise came from behind me, and I knew immediately what it was. Letting out a terrified scream, I ran a few feet and turned around.

I stood face to face with one of the worst things I had ever looked at. It was like the rest in terms of appearance, but still held facial features of who the person was before they died. It was haunting how familiar it looked. Tears fell from my eyes and plopped to the ground with a drip. The walker stepped toward me, swinging its arms trying to reach me. It bent over a little to match my height, and something inside me forced me to swing at it, slashing it's head. The walker fell to the ground, and didn't move anymore.

I imagined myself, just as lifeless on the ground. Rotting and vile.

And so I ran.

I ran toward where I remembered Tsubasa's house was and sobbed. The longer I ran, the more tired I became. So tired, that eventually, I tripped. I laid flat on the ground, and when I tried to pick myself up, my ankle twinged. My leg forced itself up, but much movement sent needles through my ankle. Working to raise myself upright, I bit my knife in my mouth.

Then there were feet in front of me. Wavering slowly, they made it closer and closer to me. I already knew what it was, but it was hard to look at. I scrambled to get myself up, and even though I could bite through the pain in my ankle, I still couldn't ease it enough to get myself up.

This is it, I thought. I am dead. After all that determination in the darkness of my crawlspace, after the love and care from grandpa, this was it. I wasn't so cut out for a world full of zombies like I thought.

In one last futile effort, I screamed into the sky, "Somebody help me!"

As if hearing my cries, somebody saved me. The person gashed the walker through the head with an axe, and it fell to the ground. And there he was. Black hair, red eyes, and a determined look on his face. Staring at me, his look never wavered.

"You aren't bit, are you?" he asked. He didn't look reassuring like I hoped.

"By what? The walkers?" He nodded and started scanning my arms and legs with his eyes, looking for possible bite marks like he had said. "No, I haven't been bitten. Why?" Something in my throat was still recovering from my scream, and made my voice crack a little. He looked at me like I had just told him I believed pigs could fly. With walking dead people though, that didn't seem too far off.

"A bite kills you. Turns you into one of them. You've been alive for a little over a week without knowing that?"

"I've been locked up in my house."

"The sweepers would've found you." He was probably referring to the police and it almost sounded like he didn't believe it.

"I hid in a crawlspace for a week." He was taken aback by this.

"You hid in a tiny cramped area, for a week?"

"That's right." By then I was a bit more relaxed. Even though he was talking to me, he was still paying attention to our surroundings, which made me feel a little safer.

"No wonder you're clueless. I'm Natsume."

"Mikan Sakura," I paused for a second then asked the question that had been on my mind ever since I crawled into my hole. "What's going on?" He unenthusiastically kicked the dead zombie at his feet with a disgusted look on his face.

"Haven't you figured out already? The world is over. This is some sort of deranged apocalypse where dead people come back to life. It's worse than some areas and the first few days were hell. Especially around here. The Sweepers took all the panicked people and threw them all in one spot." That's what Grandpa was protecting me from. The Sweepers.

"Is the entire town in there still?"
"Well, yeah. You're the only other person I've seen, dead or alive, outside the building."

"What is the government gonna do with them? About this entire situation?" He looked at me with the most despair I've ever seen a person have.

"Don't you get it? There is no government. The people in that town square building are dead! They killed each other. You aren't supposed to be alive. I'm not supposed to be alive."

So then Grandpa was dead.

Everyone in town.

"I accidentally let a few out when I went to turn the power on," he mentioned. "The rest of the town is nearly spotless." He didn't know what else to say. The information he'd given me seemed like enough. "I guess I'll get going now," he stated quietly.

There was something about Natsume. Something about how tired his eyes were, even though he was so determined. Or about the way there was dirt smeared all over his face, arms, and legs. Even though he was smart and strong, he looked like he was barely hanging in there. As he was walking away, I realized that if he stayed on his own he'd die. Even hanging out with me would be better off than him just wandering around on his own.

"Natsume, wait!" I called out. He turned. "Do you need a place to stay. I just think it might be easier with two of us." Somewhere in his stoic eyes, I saw relief.

"You might be right." He put his hands in his pockets and followed me as I lead the way home. We didn't speak, but the silence wasn't uncomfortable. In fact, it was much different than the silence I heard in my crawl space. This silence was the trusting kind. The kind of silence that tells you you're in safe hands.