@ElderGod-yellowqueen
Ariella remembered the day the world disappeared. She remembered it like it happened yesterday. She had stayed up late studying for an exam. She was studying to be a veterinarian. She loved animals and wounds intrigued her. It seemed like the best option for her. It was hard work and led to many late nights studying after work. Just like that one. She had gone to bed a little after one a.m. Her alarm had gone off at eight a.m. for class. When she woke up, her roommate was gone. It was strange. Her roommate was never up before she was. She had always lazed away and slept well into the middle of the day before going to her evening classes. Ariella found it annoying and she absolutely hated her roommate. So her not being there in the morning when she certainly had been last night was strange indeed. She just assumed an emergency had come up. Only it hadn't woken Ariella and she was a light sleeper. Strange.
She had gotten dressed and grabbed her bookbag, slinging it on her shoulder. She exited her room and into the hall, empty, but that was usual at that time. However, it got stranger as she left the building and there was no one. There was no one manning the coffee shop. No students straggling around campus. No professors walking with their rolling bags. No one. She hadn't known what to think. Maybe there was an evacuation notice and she was the only one who didn't get it. She grabbed her phone, checked her notifications, then tried calling her friend. No answer. She called the next friend and the next until she had called every contact in her phone and received no answer. She had run around campus, checking every hall, every room, searching for anyone else and found nothing. She had panicked. She had screamed and cried and trashed a classroom. Her friends, her family, they were gone. They were all gone. Not dead. Just vanished in thin air.
It took her a long time to pick up the pieces. For a while there, she had laid in her dorm room wasting away. she didn't drink, she didn't eat. She lost an ungodly amount of weight, losing all the progress she had worked on for years. She just couldn't do anything. Then one day, she snapped out of it. She shut off her brain and her emotions. She went into survival mode. There was a chance that maybe her family was still alive. They lived in California. All the way across the states. She could get there somehow, search for them, see if any of them still lived. She could do it. She had spent a few weeks preparing and regaining her strength. She siphoned gas. It was not as easy as the movies made it, and then she began her journey across the States. What should have taken her a week at max, had stretched into months. It turned out, she wasn't very good at using a paper map. It was hard going through popular cities. Cars were abandoned on the road as if the drivers had vanished mid-drive. It was hard to get around and she found herself on foot more often than in a car. City after city, she found no one. Either she was the only survivor or the survivors had moved on somewhere else. But as the days ticked into weeks and weeks ticked into months, she was growing more and more despair. There was no one. No one but her.
She had driven passed the sign, Abilene. She was in Texas, she knew that much. How she got to Texas, she wasn't quite sure. Her sense of direction was not very good. Thinking back to her trips going camping and hiking, she realized there was a reason she was never in charge or in front. She likely would have led them around in circles. The familiar stutter of the car singled it was out of gas and the car came to a stop. Great. There was no car nearby and there was no way she was pushing this thing until she found one. It would be too much work and effort for such a crappy car anyways. She opened the door and grabbed her bag, slinging it over her shoulder. She checked her rations the day before. She was running low, almost out. Out of food, out of water. She needed to find a store or something soon.
It didn't take long until she found a store of sorts. It looked more like a warehouse but she could see shelves with food inside and that was good enough for her. She had walked in, shutting the doors behind her out of habit. She was walking up and down the aisles, restocking what she needed. Some feminine products, water. She was looking at some ramen when she heard the door open. Her heart skipped a beat. Maybe it was an animal or something. Just as dangerous. She pulled her gun out of her waistband, ready. As much as it hurt her soul to harm an animal, she would do what she had to survive. But then she heard a voice. A human, male voice. No, it wasn't possible. She crouched down, waiting, listening.
