The world around me is covered in grey except for the large expanse of black sky above me that almost blocks out the ball of fire and hydrogen in the sky. Trees reach out towards the black sky, their bark and branches are coated in dried sharp ash that tears into my face and hands when I reach out to steady myself. TheY seem to reach out towards me with dead branches as if I can help them, as if I can release them from their petrified imprisonment. It's too late for that, fourteen years too late to save them or me.
My hurried footsteps make loud crunches as my feet sink into the ash that has remained undisturbed for fourteen years. I trudge on, lifting my pack up so the weight equally distributes onto my shoulders. I hear crunches of heavy footsteps behind me and choke down the sob that threatens to take over my lungs. They've found me, there is no more running, there is no more hiding. That doesn't mean that I won't stop now, I won't stop until those monsters kill me.
I quicken my pace until I'm sprinting through ankle deep dried ash that cuts through my boots and into my ankles. A trail of red ash forms around my bloody cut ankles. How did it come to this? How did the world come down to this low business of hunting and killing each other?
The day the world fell apart, white ash fell like snow around me. It bathed the earth around me in a blanket of fresh, white newness. Of course, it wasn't snow, it was ash. Dead white ash that was hot and stuck to my skin until it burned and caught the world on fire. That was fourteen years ago.
The world was perfect fourteen years ago. There was no more sickness, no more pain; the hands of the doomsday clock moved back to exactly one o'clock. Perfect. Then the world in search of some truth, discovered something that turned the utopia into something straight out of a nightmare. They disturbed something, something that had been dormant inside of the earth. They awoke the monster that would destroy them.
Pushed back into the shadows of unexplored depths by early civilizations, they awoke an infectious agent. At first the monster was harmless, nothing more than the average cold. A simple batch of antibiotics was the cure; notices passed around the peace loving countries that encouraged hand washing. They thought that was the end of it. They were wrong. The disease knew that to kill the human race, all it had to do was take away our humanity.
The paranoia started two weeks after the world was being infected. Countries turned their backs against countries, family against family. The paranoia led to murder in the third week. It was on the fourth week that the bombs fell. I can't remember what country pressed the button first. Iran maybe? North Korea? China? I can't remember, but it was all it took to send paranoid leaders into a scramble to press the button.
All of the uninfected rushed to secret bunkers, including me. I watched infected kill my family. I ran with people I didn't know into a bunker where we spent fourteen years, until the radiation levels were livable. We discovered one thing whenever we stepped out of that bunker, the infected didn't just live through the nuclear attacks, they thrived and mutated.
Which leads to this present moment, my last moments I know. I will die soon and I have almost accepted it, but almost is a strong word. So I trudge through the ash that cuts and stings me. I grab a ledge of the ash below my feet and yank until a shard that is as sharp as glass jerks free. I groan and hurl it behind me. I hear a small moan that tells me the monsters are right behind me. My hands are bloody from a cut that runs from the back to the front and the red drips between my fingers. It all seems so unreal. The ache in my lungs, the ash around me, the pain in my cut ankles, and now the blood that snakes down around my wrist can't be real.
A hand grabs my pack jerking me backwards. I scream out for anyone, but they can't hear me because they're already dead. I break through the layer of ash that reminds me of ice and lay flat on my back. Now I have cuts all over, but it won't matter in a while. In a while, nothing will matter.
There are three of the monsters; they used to be people like me back when the world was perfect. Now they are not human. The radiation has destroyed all of the melanin in their skin and hair, making them completely white. Their fingernails are more like talons now, like something out of a horror movie. The scariest part is their faces that are contorted and disproportionate. One has an extra eye on his forehead, another has abnormally large ears, and the last one has large teeth that protrude from his mouth like a crocodile or maybe a piranha. He raises a gun towards me while he shouts in a pattern of grunts to the others. I know it's the end, but there is only one thing I can do. I scream.

The gunshot echoes around him and the girl's screams fade off into the ash forest. The monster is dead. The infected boy stares at the blackened sky and lets the voices whisper to him like they usually do. The monster is dead. He has defeated the monster. He knows the voice is right. The girl was a monster and the monsters only wanted to kill him. You can only trust yourself, the voices whisper again. He hears a creak and his head snaps back to where the sound came from. Was it another monster? He wouldn't rest until all the monsters were dead.