By the seventh day without food, I could no longer tell whether the buzzing in my head was flies or my stomach howling.
Huddled behind the shelves of an abandoned supermarket, I stared at the bag of expired potato chips in front of me for ten minutes. They had passed their expiration date three months ago, and the oil had seeped through the packaging, making the chips stick together in a greasy mess. Still, I swallowed hard.
The apocalypse came way too damn suddenly.
Saturday, June 13. I was delivering my last takeout order. The customer was a shut-in on the twenty-eighth floor who had ordered malatang with extra cilantro. Just as I parked my bike, I heard screams in the distance. Then the whole city seemed to have been muted. And then came the blood.
I survived purely because I was lucky. That day, I was riding an electric scooter, which meant I could squeeze through the gaps when traffic jammed. I used that advantage to race back to the old residential complex I rented in, hide in the half-abandoned supermarket downstairs, and pull down the roller shutter. I’d been holed up there for seven days.
Seven days. The supermarket’s water had been snatched up, the food ransacked, and even the seasoning packets from the instant noodles had been picked clean in the last two days. The chips in my hands were the one thing that had escaped notice after I searched under three checkout counters.
Should I eat them?
Damn it, whatever. I shut my eyes and shoved the chips into my mouth. The moment the saltiness burst across my tongue, I almost started crying. Not because they tasted bad, but because they felt so real, so real that they reminded me I was still alive.
My phone suddenly lit up.
My first thought was to turn it off and save the battery, but when I caught a glimpse of the screen, every hair on my body stood on end.
