Overly Prepared!

The irony was a bitter pill: Dad, the man who had preached preparedness with religious fervor, who had stockpiled enough canned goods and ammunition to outlast a small war, had been among the first to fall. One moment, a panicked voice yelling about a bite; the next, a snarl from behind the locked bedroom door. The choice, stark and heavy, pressed down every waking hour. Continue this solitary existence, a ghost in the machine, emerging only for supplies and the grim sport of dispatching the shuffling dead for kicks? Or brave the surface, seek out other survivors, and attempt to forge a new society from the ashes, a true vault built on shared humanity rather than just supplies? The reinforced steel door, the only barrier between infinite safety and an unknown world, loomed.