Ten Simple Tips for Surviving the Apocalypse by Cari Z

Author:Cari Z [Z, Cari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
Publisher: Goodreads M/M Romance Group
Published: 2015-02-08T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Run Boy Run

I was never very athletic before the apocalypse. I was naturally skinny, but that was mostly because I was a twitchy, hyperactive guy who tended to binge on Redbull and not sleep for days at a time in college, a habit I never really grew out of as I got into the working world. I always ate like a teenager, nasty delicious snack food that would make my mother turn red with shame. I’m sure all those pizzas and peanut butter cookies would have caught up with me eventually, but now we’ll never know.

Now I’m not just skinny, I’m lean as a rail and can see muscles in myself I only ever imagined existing before. Like, I can individually parse my quadriceps into four different muscles. I’ve got that weird split between the gastroc and the soleus that only comes from an extreme amount of bicycling. I have visible abs, not just a flat, soft plane of flesh.

It took time to develop this ridiculous physique. Plenty of running, biking, and gastronomic privation went into making me look like I just fell out of a Prince of Persia game, and I regret that. I wish, from a purely selfish perspective, that I’d been fitter sooner. It’s easy to tell yourself you’ll get on the treadmill tomorrow when tomorrow still exists. That nebulous, normal tomorrow will never exist again, and neither will that fucking treadmill.

Survival tip number six: Fitness is not optional, it’s a necessity. This isn’t about body shaming or desiring that everyone look homogenous: this is about living to see another postapocalyptic day. Which, yeah, sometimes not exactly the best motivation, but you know what sucks worse? Getting run down and eaten alive.

I’m not blowing smoke here, this actually happened to me. Well, not all of it, not the eating me alive part, but the running? Yeah. It’s one of my absolute worst memories of Phase One. And I’m still not entirely sure what it was that was running after us.

America is… okay, look, I honestly thought the biggest issue would be personal arsenals after the nukes went off. Big cities were toast, military bases were taking each other out in fits of mistrust, but after all was said and done there were still a huge number of weapons lying around. I figured those would be the real problems on the road, and they definitely sucked, don’t get me wrong. One only had to look at Phin at this point, pale despite the heat and insisting he didn’t want to drink, to get that guns could do real and horribly permanent damage.

But you know what else people have a lot of in America? Pets. Some of which are massively illegal or at least should be, but people buy them anyway. I’m talking lions. Tigers. Yes, even bears. And sure, alligators and crocodiles and snakes and spiders and all sorts of other things, but it’s the mammals I’m talking about here. Because mammals are the ones that can catch the Purple Plague, and it changes them in fierce and unpredictable ways.

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