Ambrosia Software Web Board: A short story - Ambrosia Software Web Board

(This story is written in first person, although it is not about me)

I often look back on the events of the last twenty years, wondering how and why I made it out alive when so many others didn't. There isn't really anything special about me that enabled my survival. I was just your typical teenager with the typical teenager's life. I think I was just at the right place at the right time and had the right kind of family to fall back on. Had things been just a little different, I could have easily been one of the other 6.8 billion people who didn't make it.

The day it all started seemed like any other day. You see, the Incident didn't take effect gradually. It happened suddenly with full force. I was just in my house playing video games when I started hearing screaming and all kinds of noise outside. I ran out to see what was going on. I had always been the kind of person who wanted to help out when he could.

When I got out the door, I was shocked by what I saw. It was the most horrific thing I had ever witnessed up to that point. People were savagely attacking each other for seemingly no reason. Everyone from children to the elderly could at any moment be mercilessly beaten to death with whatever weapons happened to be available. Although I saw someone losing their life every ten seconds, I somehow managed to stay relatively calm. I started to ask a group of people what was happening, only to have one of them scream at me and try to hit me with a metal pipe. After I quickly ducked and staggered back, they soon became occupied with other paranoid suspicions and left me alone.

In all the mayhem, the familiar sound of my parents calling my name filtered into my ears; except, of course, they were screaming in this case. I turned to the direction of the sound to see them frantically beckoning me to join them in the car. I quickly ran over and got in, and we immediately sped off for some unknown destination.

On the way to wherever we were going, my parents did their best to explain the situation. Apparently, an experiment with gene-altering weapons had gone wrong and there was a outbreak of a disease that turned people into mindless cannibals. Besides observing behavior, there was no obvious way to tell if someone was a normal human or a "Freak". And there were rumors that you could be infected by just touching an infected person, even they hadn't been mutated yet. Now I understood why everyone was going crazy.

After several hours of driving, we came across a secured compound for uninfected people. We all decided that it would be the best to stay, at least for now. When we got in, they took blood samples and put us in a guarded waiting room with some other people for about an hour. I held my breath as someone came in and read off the results of the blood samples. I breathed a sigh of relief when my family and I were all listed as clean. But some of that joy turned to horror when, after the results were done being announced, two guards gunned down the four people whose blood tested positive for the infection. I swallowed to stop the vomit that threatened to come up, understanding that they were doing what had to be done and that it was probably harder for them to do it than it was for me to watch it.

The compound was not as heavenly as we had expected. Not many people had brought adequate resources, and most turned to stealing from others. The guards tried their best to keep things under control, but robberies still occurred and fights continued to break out. My family and I did everything we could to stay out of trouble. When we went out looking for supplies, we collected only what we needed and used it immediately so that we wouldn't become targets for thieves. Despite this, I knew that we would eventually get sucked into the conflicts no matter what we did to prevent it.

One day, about a month after we arrived at the compound, that time finally came for me. There was a wave of thefts occurring across the compound, and I naturally wanted to help out. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared, and said "You're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air.

I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said "FRESH" and had a dice in the mirror. If anything, I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought, "nah, forget it". "Yo home, to Bel Air!"

I pulled up to the house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabbie, "Yo home, smell ya later!" I looked at my kingdom, I was finally there to sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air.

Yo man, it was actually kind of amusing.

Much obliged, brah.

I'll wait for the Spark Notes version.

tl;dr

Zombies attacked, survivors fought over resources, I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said "you're movin' with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air."

Excellent use of universal themes.

What a twist!