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her.
    She had shut everyone out, including our dad. The only thing she cared about anymore was keeping that doll by her side. That first year, she had lost a significant amount of weight and had started looking like the beasts that hunted us down. She got so sick that I ended up having to force feed her anything she would keep down. We feared that she wouldn’t make it, but she did. Now, at ten years old, she has become independent. A tiny, little adult with her own needs and wants to satisfy. Something about all this turns even the softest people to hardened fighters.
    Once we had moved locations to a hotel a few blocks down from the library in New York, Samantha spent her afternoons playing with dolls while I spent mine out on the balcony of our room. I would observe everything that happened below us on the streets. When the outbreak first occurred, the zombies would hibernate during the day. I guess because there were plenty of normal people left that they didn’t need to stay on the move to eat. Now with our kind’s numbers dwindling rapidly, zombies are out all day and all night scavenging. They would comb every building that they could get into. Cars weren’t safe and God forbid you were located by even one of them. Within seconds, a swarm would surround you. They would stop at nothing to get to their next meal. The most shocking part was that some had turned to eating one another just to be able to eat something.
    Many times I’ve laid there on that balcony and watched as one zombie ate another. It’s horrific, but it gives me hope that we could survive this. I’ve learned that they can eat each other, but it also kills them from the inside out. It was almost as if eating their own kind was a poison for them. I’ve watched the same zombie eat others over and over just to see how sick it made her. She would be fine for three hours or up to three days before spewing black ooze through her mouth from her stomach. It didn’t matter how much she ate, it would always end the same. The first time I saw it, my stomach turned in circles and I threw up along with her.
    She did this for a month, every time the sickness got worse and worse, before she fell over and never got back up. The next morning, while the sun hung high in the sky, I went out to check on her to see why she wasn’t moving any longer. Her corpse was beyond disgusting. She had already started decaying beyond the point of recognition despite the fact that it had only been about twelve hours that passed between her going down and me checking on her. Her exterior layer of skin had completely dissolved away, leaving behind gray muscles and tendons in its absence. This probably wasn’t something that the Russians and Germans had in mind when they designed this, but it was the answer to mankind’s salvation. They were going to destroy themselves eventually. We just had to wait it out.
    It was easy to tell that it might not be much longer until they all started feeding on each other. More and more of them were doing it now. It wasn’t uncommon to see a group devouring a single corpse. No matter the security that their predicament gave me, it created a horrible consequence. The city was starting to fill with a worse stench than rotting corpses: the stench of the corpses after being digested in the stomachs of their own kind. At times like this, I couldn’t help but to wonder how we were going to get that smell out of the city once the zombies were gone and we reclaimed it again. It would probably take a ton of bleach and water hoses to get the job done.
    It started to get darker out, but I waited around to see our other salvation: the blue light. Not long after the outbreak, a blue beam of light began to light the night sky. It was coming from somewhere on the other side of the city out in the country. I wasn’t sure of its origins, but what I do know is that it’s saved us more than once. It was so bright that it illuminated the entire sky over New York,