Personal Account, Location: Surrey, England

Personal account of scavenger found operating in South East England area.

Boom! Every so often it just hits you like a brick in the face. The sheer enormity of what

happened. There were a lot of people talking about divine retribution; saying maybe it wasn't too

late to repent. I wonder if they're still saying that? Me, I'm a firm believer that this is it. This is all we get; a one shot deal and I'm still trying to make the most of it.

There's no one I know left now. They all believed they would go to a better place and I

guess they have. They're all giving back to the earth they spent their whole lives helping to destroy.

I don't know why the world was surprised when the big one finally struck. All parasites will

eventually exhaust their host's resources. Even a seemingly indestructible virus can consume too

much; destroying the host by replicating itself to excess. Because that's all people are really, just

some sort of parasite; a virus on the earth.

It's strange. You'd think it would be so much more quiet and still now. Full of silence.

In fact now I think it might be noisier than ever. Or maybe it's just that I notice more without the constant hum of the cities and my own humdrum thoughts burbling in the background. Sometimes I can convince myself that I've forgotten what it used to be like. Sometimes I can even pretend I'm the only one; that somehow I survived because I was never really one of them. It would explain a lot; why I could never settle down, why I was always a loner and in trouble, why I acted on impulse instead of thinking most of the time, why they locked me up.

Now it's like they lock themselves up. All walled inside their safe-zones. I went right up to

one of those walls once. I scrambled through the wire and fences and placed my hand on that cold concrete. I would have tried to find a way inside, tried to grasp at some semblance of the mundane life I used to live. That is if they hadn't shot at me. I'm actually quite glad they did. I spent too long locked away because I wasn't like them. I don't want to be walled in again. Out here I can finally be free. There's no one to make me second-guess myself. No walls, no bars and no judgement. Just me and the sounds of a world being left to come alive again.