2

Stay Alive

Chapter 2 – A Change and The Change

United States, Texas, City of Austin.

"Come on! Don’t stop now… just a bit more!" Hot air escaped his mouth as Alan moved up and down, doing push-ups nonstop. His increasingly heavy breathing signaled that his body was reaching its limit.

After finishing his training session, Alan collapsed on the floor, trying to catch his breath.

It took him a long time to recover. Only after a while did he manage to get up and mark another training session on a piece of notebook paper with a pen. "At this rate, I’ll reach three hundred..."

It was a common notebook page, densely filled with words like sit-ups, push-ups, and weights. Each time he completed an item, Alan crossed off the day's goal. He had already marked more than ten targets that day on the crowded sheet.

This meant Alan had been following this intense training routine for over a month—something hard to imagine.

Because Alan was a depressed soldier. Yes, one of the many suffering from PTSD. And to avoid ending his miserable life, he pushed his body every day to the point where he could no longer lift a pistol.

In these long years spent locked inside his home, he blamed himself for the accidents that had occurred under his command during missions. The deaths he had caused haunted him, and when the military realized this, he was honorably discharged.

From being a special forces captain to becoming nothing. Everything he did had never truly mattered. The people he killed, the mistakes he made—they all ended up being meaningless.

But was that the only reason he trained to the point of exhaustion? Not quite. He still had family. And while he wasn’t fighting specifically for them, he trained just in case they ever needed him.

Alan's confidence in himself and his ability to serve others had faded. He didn’t expect his brother to need his help—after all, he was also a soldier—but just in case he ever did.

After his morning workout, Alan walked into the kitchen and muttered to himself, "I still have a five-kilo bag of rice, some lentils, a bit of beans… but I’m out of milk. One pack of sausages, a few raw potatoes, and peanut butter—not bad."

After finishing his mental inventory, Alan looked up at the top shelves and mumbled, "Three packs of Oreo cookies, a box and a half of spaghetti pasta, several cans of tomatoes and olives."

These foods weren’t exactly nutritious—especially for someone doing high-intensity exercise—but nowadays, they were more valuable than gold.

If it hadn’t been for his brother’s visit last month, Alan wouldn’t have had all this food stocked up. Luckily, the anniversary of their parents' death had been the previous month, so he and his brother Steven had gathered here to remember the old days.

That was the only time Alan found it necessary to go out and look for food. And to this day, that food had kept him alive.

Though Alan suffered from depressive thoughts and PTSD, it didn’t mean he didn’t know how to take care of himself. That’s why he always bought what he needed to recover his energy.

In his lonely days, he honestly wished everything would just end. That God would bring an end to all of humanity so he could finally rest without the guilt that tormented him.

But unfortunately, the Mayan prophecy of 2012 didn’t come true, and Alan lost all hope of a guilt-free ending.

He later did more research and discovered, like many others, that he had misunderstood the historical event. What modern humans thought would be the end of the world was actually just the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, known as the 13th Baktun—a new one was beginning.

But like something out of a sci-fi movie, just last week—specifically on September 24, 2013—chaos erupted across the country.

From Alan’s perspective, it started with protesters causing mayhem, but then it turned into terrorism. When he checked the news and found nothing, real doubt began to grow.

“Why isn’t the army doing anything?” Alan thought maybe the country was under attack by chemical weapons, something that made people go crazy, infecting others in the process.

But then it began happening in Russia, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea too.

Even so, Alan ignored it all. He immersed himself in training—until he received a radio call from his brother.

That’s when he was told everything: what initially seemed like isolated incidents of violent behavior in urban areas had quickly been confirmed as a massive biological infection of fungal origin.

The pathogen, identified as a mutated variant of the Cordyceps fungus, directly attacked the human nervous system, causing loss of control, extreme aggression, and rapid transmission through bites or exposure to spores.

Alan thought the army would contain it—after all, martial law had been declared.

But that very day, after finishing the call with his brother—who urged him not to leave home until he arrived—Alan heard a scream from below.

At first, he ignored it. But then he heard piercing cries for help and people clearly running in fear.

Curious, Alan rushed to the balcony to see what was going on.

That’s when he saw several people pinning a man against the wall and biting him. Only then did Alan realize the entire lower level of his building had become a disaster zone.

Thanks to his binoculars, Alan could clearly see everything from start to finish.

In mere moments, that man had been bitten multiple times. But unlike traditional zombies, these infected didn’t stick around—they immediately ran off to infect someone else.

The infected, just as his brother had described, focused solely on spreading the infection to the uninfected.

After standing stunned on the balcony for a while, Alan finally came to his senses. He sat down and watched as the “crowd” below dispersed.

His hair stood on end. Every nerve in his body was alert, but he couldn't move.

No one knew how much time passed before Alan could finally move again. He crawled back to the living room in just a step and a half, leaning against the wall and gasping for air.

This wasn’t something the military could stop with conventional weapons. This wouldn’t end. There would be no good outcome in a few months.

Waiting for his brother, who had assured him everything was under control, Alan didn’t know what to do. Leaving the house was pointless. Anywhere he went would be the same—or worse, considering that shelters would likely be overrun.

Thanks to the food he had, he was able to weather the crisis for a short while, but he couldn’t ignore it forever. He still needed to eat and drink.

He knew all of this, but chose to pretend otherwise.

He was no longer a soldier. He had no duty to go out and fix things. Surely there were still people out there who felt that duty and would take care of others.

The only reason he kept living was to hear from his brother, who was still in the military. But the food was running out. He was alone. And if he made a single mistake, he’d die before his brother came.

That’s why he kept living in silence over the following days. He ate and trained, cleaned his weapons, and waited for the world to keep spinning.