I felt the burning sensation in my arm start to fade away. Like when you put medicine on a burned patch of skin; the pain was finally seizing. I slowly opened my eyes and looked that the bite mark on my arm was gone. I said my final goodbyes to my mother, and then laid my head back down. I woke up back in my room, with Nick sitting on my bedside.
"Welcome back," he said, resting his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to say something, but I could still barely move. "Your reaction must have come from the virus," he began. "After years of lying dormant it was suddenly wiped from your system." I turned onto my back and sighed in relief. No more Zombrex, I thought to myself. After years of pain, years of extreme close calls and painful side effects, it was gone. I heard my dad on the phone, walking down the hall.
"Look, I know your busy… you need to come here now. I can't discuss it on the phone." He waited, and then sighed in annoyance. "I know we haven't talked in years. Barely at all sense the aftermath of the facility. But Frank—you have to see this. It could change your life, change the lives of thousands." I watched as Chuck then hung up the phone and walked into my room.
"Who was that?" Nick asked him. Dad looked at me, smiled, and then returned to Nick.
"That," he began, "Was none other than Frank West."
Frank West. I had only met him once; at a huge event that dad took me too not long after Fortune City. He received an official apology there, for being blamed for causing the outbreak when in reality it was that big celebrity Tyrone King. Dad always told me there was more to it than that, but he didn't have enough proof. Stacey was there too, and everyone else I knew. Chuck was awarded a 5 year supply of Zombrex for the trouble he had been through. Of course, he gave Frank half of it, as much as he had protested. Then, things got really nice for a while. Chuck and Stacey started dating, and I actually got to go to school, something dad never let me do. I met a lot of friends, and for a good few years, I was doing fine. Then Chuck and Stacey got married, and I thought I finally had a mother again. But then, when I was 13, the Zombrex chips were announced. It seemed like a blessing; free instant Zombrex. But dad didn't trust it. I remember hearing them fight.
"Chuck, you have to do this!" Stacey yelled.
"Oh, please, don't tell me you want to give in to the government too!" He responded.
"I know the chips are GPS tracked. But it's the law, and we have to follow it."
"You know what they're capable of! You saw it in Fortune City! They could easily set the chips off, it could all be a huge set up!"
"HOW ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO GET ZOMBREX, CHUCK? HOW MUCH MORE DO YOU HAVE? AND IF IT BECOMES ILLEGAL, THEN HOW COUL YOU POSSIBLY AFFORD IT WITH THE LOW CLASS JOB YOU HAVE?"
Dad stared in silence. Then he slowly walked away, muttering the words "Fuck You". He almost never said words like that, and never to Stacey. In the years following, he started doing terrible things. Trying to get Zombrex for me, keeping me from getting chipped, he became a crook. Stacey left him soon after his sudden transformation, and I hadn't seen her sense. By 2019 I couldn't take it anymore. The feeling of guilt, that it was my fault he had been through all of this, and so I packed my things and ran. I took all of the Zombrex with me, enough to last me a month, and set out for Los Perdidos, the farthest city from Spring Valley in the West direction. It was there that I quickly met more people like me, illegals who didn't want to deal with the government's bullshit. I noticed I was changing as well, dying black highlights into my hair, dressing in a more gothic look, I guess it came with the territory. Red was their leader, he was only a little older than me, and there was something about him that just attracted me. Maybe it was his sense of leadership, I don't know. I knew he was interested in me though. We tried to make it work, but as I got to know him more, I realized he was the exact opposite of what my dad always told me to be. I didn't like that. Even after I broke things off with him, he continued to persist, right up to his death. But it's okay, because then I met someone who was exactly like how my dad told me to be. I knew he had an interest in me the moment we met too. I was stealing a car for the illegals, and he was the mechanic who fixed it up and brought it to me, thinking I was the owner. He had already asked me out for coffee when the zombies came. In that first three days of hellish nightmares, I stayed with him, because I felt safer. I left to find my friends, but I knew he would find me, and he did. The more I talked to him, the more I felt he was… special. And now here he was, caring for me in my room, after giving me a better gift than anyone could ever imagine: a cure.