Stop taking my hand!

like they wanted to invade us and their first thought about how to do so was “let’s genetically engineer giant fucking monsters that will crawl out of the depths of the ocean and trample cities”

leaves and flowers and trees growing out of abandoned houses and cars, smashing glass windows, invading and reclaiming the spaces humanity took from them

warning scrawled hastily on the sides of buildings in spraypaint or in blood; don’t come here, it’s not safe. turn away, go back. we died here. you will too.

notes and messages scattered across the world, addressed to people who never saw them or never lived to reply to them. rachel, we’re alive. david, don’t look for us. amy, dad got bit, please come home, we need you. kim, i love you. 

people broken into tiny groups. society shattered. they are past the anger, past denial, past trying to fix any of it. now there is only begrudging acceptance, and the knowledge that nothing is ever going to get better. the only thing they can do is survive.

a skeleton lying at the foot of a tree, flowers blooming in its ribcage. a bloodstained note in its front pocket. ‘sorry, mom’. travelers see it and barely spare a thought; such things are commonplace.

roaming packs of dogs and cats still wearing their collars, centuries of domestication breaking down under the need to live and to keep living

families born of blood and sacrifice. trading stories over campfires about who they used to be, who they might have been, what they could have become if none of this ever happened. looks of understanding when someone loses a sister, a brother, a father. it happened to me, too.

abandoned bedrooms combed over for supplies, but the faded posters still hanging on the walls and the useless knickknacks on the shelves tell the stories of the people who lived there years ago