It's been 215 days since the world ended and I miss you.
I work two jobs now. The first is just my regular job, greeting customers and waiting tables and wiping down booths. People still go out to eat, even now. Especially now. Even though we close before the sun sets (which is around five these days), we still get lots of people coming in and waiting for an open table. Waiting to have their order taken, to be served food, to talk and eat like there was nothing wrong with the world.
My second job involves looking for supplies. We still have electricity -- I've heard about other cities that aren't so lucky -- but some supplies are still low. If you are physically fit and twenty to forty years old, then you are automatically supposed to be a part of a supply team.
My supply team is assigned the northwest side of the city. It's a large area, but we go from house to house -- checking to see which ones are abandoned, which ones still have people in them, and which ones belong to the dead (we call in a different team to deal with those). It's tough sometimes, but we only work for a few hours each morning -- nobody works at night.
Today, we found something new. There was a house on Primrose that had already been checked a few months ago, but we decided to check it again to see if anything was left behind. Two of us opened the front door, checking to see if there were any squatters.
There weren't any people, but something was there that hadn't been before. They grew from every crack, every broken floorboard. They grew out of the plaster walls and on the brick fireplace.
Black flowers.
We shut the door and marked it with a piece of red tape. We weren't sure who else to notify -- there was no dead inside (at least none we could see from the front door, none of us were willing to walk inside), but it was something we hadn't seen before. Eventually, we just told our superior and he told his and up the chain it went. I'm not sure what they're going to do.
I can't help but think about The War of the Worlds and the red weed. The choking red weed that the Martians bring that grows on everything. Are the black flowers like that? Will I wake up one day to find them invading the house, growing on everything?
Will I wake up one day to find them growing on me?
It's been 215 days since the world ended and I miss you.
