Survivor

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Erick had not slept in 48 hours, he was driving his old car, a Buick of the 50s he inherited from his grandfather 15 years ago. He had never imagined that this car would save his life.

Today he especially remembered the words of his grandfather, when he said: - "the American cars of my time were built to last a lifetime", - "Not like those modern cars of plastics and computers now". Erick felt a great nostalgia when he remembered that strong and rude man who taught him hard work and how to be a responsible man.

It had only been a week since hell broke out on earth, the cities looted and burned, people fleeing to the mountains or to the uninhabited sites, there was only death and desolation everywhere. Everything happened very fast, no one knows for sure what happened, they all have different theories, but the truth was that what started with a harmless flu quickly became fatal.

People became sick and in just hours, their symptoms were similar to Ebola, the population was terrified, it was thought that it was a terrorist attack, the news only reported how the number of deaths increased over the course of hours.

The looting of citizens to supermarkets and pharmacies began to stock up, people closed the streets where they lived and placed barricades to try to protect themselves, and roads collapsed when thousands of people tried to flee the cities.

The government took control and decreed a curfew, the national guard and the army deployed in the cities, to create quarantine zones. The ones who opposed were arrested or worse, shot. The terror and paranoia increased in the population. In the end only a few survive, which for some reason were immune to the disease.

As Erick managed to escape from one of the quarantine areas, he was lucky. The soldiers were distracted when he slipped under the fence. He walked for a couple of days, always at night and during the day he hid in abandoned buildings or in the sewers.

Finally he arrived at his grandparents' old farm, it was empty. It was like being in a horror movie, there was no electricity, and on the dining room table were the food dishes, already putrefied. Erick looked for his grandparents everywhere, but they had taken him or they were dead. He went to the shed because he remembered that there was an old electric generator, which his grandfather used when the storms knocked down the trees, and left the area without electricity. He lit it and went to the house to sleep.

He was on the farm for two days, which seemed like an eternity. Erick tried turning on the radio and television for news, but it was all static. Look for my grandfather's old shortwave radio, and finally listen as some people reported that the cities had been bombed and burned to the ground. That they avoided the main roads, and traveled through the rural roads. That if you listened to the transmission was one of the few remaining survivors and that they were heading down the coast to Santa Barbara, California.

Already his trip is about to conclude, and when he looks ahead he sees a sign in the distance that when he approaches the car, there he reads that it says "welcome to reality" ....

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