It had only taken two days for Mattie's entire family to die. Interestingly enough, none of them had become infected with the virus that turned human beings into reanimated, flesh-hungry corpses. No, while they were all busy worrying about that, they had forgotten that there were other diseases that lurked in the carcass of a collapsed civilization. Even worse, her brother had fallen victim to something much less visible: despair. He'd been the first death. After spending several hours making hardtack and making weapons out of broken glass shards, she'd come up to check on him. He'd hanged himself with a sheet from the balcony of the house they were barricaded in. There wasn't even a note. 

As if that hadn't rattled her enough, death decided to tear through the rest of her siblings and her adoptive mother. [i]All[/i] of them. The background was this: She'd had several jugs of water sitting on the kitchen counter. Half had just been collected, and Mattie had put the iodine tablets in them not five minutes before. The other half were safe to drink. And she, in her utter stupidity, had neglected to label which were which. Her youngest sister, Isabella, who was nine, had woken up from a long nap and went straight for the water. No one saw her drink from the contaminated jug, but in less than an hour she had a steadily-rising fever, vomiting and diarrhea. 

With no running water to dispose of all that biological waste, Mattie and her mother were unable to contain what they both were fairly sure was cholera, no matter how much bleach they depleted from what they had. They were the second ones to fall ill, and from there it spread like wildfire. Within twelve hours, everyone in that damn house was ill, and within six, Isabella had died from dehydration, followed by the rest of her siblings. Mattie didn't quite know how she survived, as she spent at least a day unable to move with a dangerously-high fever, passing in and out of vibrant fever-dreams and wild hallucinations that she was too disoriented to distinguish from reality, and of course, vomiting out more than she thought she had in her. 

And then, suddenly, she felt fine, despite the entire house smelling like feces and rotting bodies. Mattie wasted no time grieving––she could do that later–– and rooted around until she found cans of gasoline. She'd doused everything, walked out and thrown a lit match over her shoulder, unsure what to do and laden with heavy jugs of clean water and a hastily-gathered pack. 

Now, to the present. She had planned on strictly rationing her hardtack but it turned out she didn't really need to. She hadn't felt like eating for the three days since she'd walked out of that burning hellhole of a house. Now, disoriented with hunger and rattled with the ever-present paranoia of a living corpse coming out of nowhere and gnawing her flesh, Mattie stumbled clumsily in the direction of a Wal-Mart. She hoped there were enough supplies left in there to restock, but she certainly wasn't going to count on it.