I’m going to post what I write at the end of every day as a way to motivate (and shame) myself into actually completing NaNoWriMo this year. I need a win this year guys, and I don’t just mean for NaNoWriMo. I want to accomplish something, anything. So yeah, started this at midnight last night (it’s now the end of Day 1) and I present to you the beginnings of what I hope will come together to form something tangible and complete by the end of this month. 50,000 words, let’s go!

Currently Untitled: Day 1

Word Count: 1453

The world is a vile place, Eli thought, nudging a lifeless limb aside with her sneaker-clad foot. Just a huge ball of- “Well, you’ve never actually experienced the world, have you?” The conversational tone of her friend, at odds with their abysmal surroundings, cut through the internal monologue she hadn’t realized she’d been uttering aloud. Rude. “So, really, you don’t know that all of it’s vile aye.” Dex continued walking ahead before stopping to use the machete in his hand to scrape something that looked suspiciously like a dried up piece of intestine from the bottom of his shoe.

Her brown eyes slit slightly, “well our world is a vile place.” She responded, emphasizing the ‘is’ with a point of her shovel in his general direction. He half turned back towards her and started prattling on about crap that was or wasn’t ‘vile.’ She studied his profile as he spoke, deciding that with his clean cut features and proud, if slightly crooked, nose weren’t too much of an eyesore. Although the crooked nose wasn’t hereditary, it was the result of a few failed re-settings after a few too many blows to the face. He may not have been an eyesore, but his constant need to offer a smartarse remark to anyone and everyone was definitely a headache.

‘All of that is great, but I just tripped over a dead body so…’

“Dead body, or human looking log?” He asked, walking backwards to maintain eye contact. Eli stared, trying not to laugh.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve heard.” She said as lightly coloured brown orbs, telling of some European ancestry she never bothered to ask about, glinted at her from within thickly lashed cages. Eli envied his eyes. She really did, they were wider and lighter, almost hazel. For the most part one could have easily mistaken them for siblings; their skin was the same burnt sienna, the brown colour of Polynesian decent. Both of them had dark unruly hair, but where hers was braided into a long plait in an attempt at taming it, Dex, who refused to go by his full name of Tanielu or Daniel in English, had been her close friend since before the world went to shit. It happened all too quickly, one moment Eli was walking home from school with Dex, talking about how neither of them wanted to participate in White Sunday items and the next they were wading through bodies of people just praying they didn’t come across family members or friends. Running and hiding from monsters that devoured and monsters that killed for play. And, perhaps more frighteningly, from the government that was supposed to protect them. New Zealand wasn’t a particularly big place, so it became harder and harder to find places to hide and it became increasingly apparent as time wore on that their main concern was the Nationals. The party in power when everything went wrong, soon Eli wasn’t just running and fighting inhuman monstrosities, but people. Some of them she’d known all her life. It was difficult to make any sense of, and the more Eli tried, the more everything seemed set against being understood. All she was aware of was the fact that the transition from life as they knew it to this hell they were living was abrupt and harrowing.

“Els, why do you always have to see the negative? Focus on the positive.” With his machete, a glorified knife, he pointed at the sun. She had to admit it was a nice change from the normal grey clouds and rain of Auckland. “The sun’s shining, we’re alive and we live in a…” he faltered slightly, running his free hand through his dark hair.

“I’m waiting.” She stopped, and if she hadn’t been holding a large shovel, she would have folded her arms. “Tell me, D, about the magical paradise we live in.” When he didn’t respond, Eli gave a short snort of derision, “sole,” Samoan slang for ‘dude’ pronounced sol-eh “look around.” She gestured at the carnage before them that used to resemble a decent neighbourhood. Cars with broken windows and dried blood littered the street, right alongside actual litter. If Eli didn’t know better, you would think she and Dex were the last people alive in the country. This wasn’t true, however, there were people alive. Just not brazen enough to come out during the day in search of food and supplies.

Eli studied her fingernails for a second, cracked and blackened, quite fitting for the dirt and blood that she seemed to accumulate daily. “This isn’t exactly the clean green New Zealand it used to be, is it?” Stabbing her shovel into the ground so she could pull her plait up into a bun, Eli looked at her reflection in the glass window of a nearby shop. She was a little underfed, but that was to be expected when they were lucky to find any food remaining in looted stores. Hunting wasn’t great in such a small country, where most animals were small native birds and pests, however Eli wasn’t ashamed to admit they’d had to roast a few possums over the last few months. Food was food, in fact she’d heard of a group of people that had gone in search of a possible source of food from the Auckland Zoo, but it came to no avail as the Nationals had anticipated this desperate move and set up troops to trap those unfortunate enough to try. Nice place for picking up sacrifices.

Tightening her bun and offering her reflection a scowl, Eli grabbed hold of her shovel as she heard footsteps. “Els, you hear that?” Something clanged loudly and the footsteps sped up, in broad daylight Eli doubted it was anything inhuman, or at least anything inhumanly fast.

Dex’s voice, lowered significantly, made her turn to look at him. She nodded, before scanning the area for the nearest place to take cover. Spotting a car on its side she indicated towards it, the noises were louder now, definitely coming from behind the building closest to them. Jerking her head in the direction of the car they both took off, as quickly and quietly as they could, Dex’s lean form just as silent as Eli’s slighter one. They reached the car, which was propped up against the wall, leaving a gap just big enough for them to slip in between. There was barely enough room to be able to crouch, so they had to lie on their sides, Dex with his back against the wall and Eli with her back against Dex’s chest. This wasn’t unusual for them, there were many times when they’ve had to hide in small spaces, elbows in each other’s faces, or knees painfully pressing into one or the other’s back, at least this time they were semi-comfortable. They heard no voices, just footsteps and the occasional clatter of what could have been weapons dropped or noises to draw out, people or things, from hiding. Eli’s heart beat in her throat whilst Dex’s heart seeming to beat against her back, as they waited for what seemed an eternity, but was probably only a minute before Eli gave up. Patience wasn’t one of her strong suits.

When it seemed that the footsteps had started to trail off she pushed up slightly, placing her shovel as quietly as possible beside, almost beneath, her. She wanted to see what it was that made them run and hide like a couple of scared children. Which, considering she was only sixteen and Dex was only seventeen, children is what they legally were. Not that the law was something anyone lived by nowadays. Dex’s hand clamped down on her side, “What are you doing!” He whispered through clenched teeth into her ear, “If you’re seen, depending on who it is, we’re both dead! Or worse, next on the sacrificial plate.”

Eli grabbed hold of Dex’s hand and pushed it away, “Don’t be such a little bitch!” She turned her head up, not craning back enough to see him, but so that she was sure he could hear her without her having to speak above a whisper. “Whoever it is, has got to have passed by already, there’s nothing left on this street. We can’t stay here forever you sook.” Inching upwards, she could hear Dex mumbling under his breath but Eli took no notice of it as she inched her head further out from behind the car in an attempt to see what or who had come through. However she was presented with an empty street before they heard a male’s voice from the bottom where they had initially crawled in.

“Now, what have we got here?”