I got up at six am on the dot and cracked my back, It was the best sleep I'd had in awhile, Aphmau was still asleep next to me, and I decided to let her sleep, I look over to the cot only to see Pluto, and Mutton, are missing.

I do however hear muffled sobs coming from the living room.

I stand in the doorway and see his figure hugging Mutton and his crying grows louder, Mutton see's me and whines, making Pluto look over at me, the light from the Television lighting his face dimly.

"Oh... Hey." He turned away, I knew he was embarrassed about being caught in a vulnerable state, but I had to try to help him.

"Hey buddy, why are you up?" I sat on the couch next to him and Mutton curled up at my feet.

"Couldn't Sleep, And you said get up early in the morning." I chuckled a little and leaned back on the couch.

"Yeah, But I figured you would want to sleep in. I was always sleeping at your age." Pluto looked up at me, confused.

"How? Weren't you scared?"

"At first, when the war first started. But you get used to your situation. You stop being scared." I saw him stare at the ground for awhile. And try to relax against the couch.

"What's the nightmare about?" He jumped, and stared with a stunned look, I gave him an inquisitive look and he sighed.

"Mom... I know she's probably dead. And I keep having the same nightmare of her dying over and over again. I just want it to stop..." He choked out the last sentence, and I grabbed him and held him.

"Pluto, breathe, I know it's hard to except when someone you love isn't around anymore, but she's still alive, you are a part of her, as long as you live she does too." He looked up and in a split second hugged me tightly, tears falling on my shirt.

"Shhhh.... It's okay Hijo... Calm down." I surprised myself that I had repeated what my father had said to me so many times before when I was just a chico.

"I just want one night where I don't see her dying... please..." I hold him close to me, I pat his hair down and just try to calm him down, until eventually I hear his breathing slow.

He fell asleep on me, and I moved him back to his cot and wrapped him in a warm quilt, He sighed in his sleep and it seemed he was finally at peace.

I got dressed, clasped on my leather armor and took a stale biscuit from our rations, Mutton stood and stretched and I slipped on my gas mask.

The sky was ominous grey, and on the horizon was the black clouds of rain, I needed to do a quick sweep before I got caught in the storm.

I enter the school building with caution, all the lockers were still open and backpacks strewn across the floor, textbooks and pencils all here. The lights still buzzed dimly, but the red brick was dirty and unkept.

I swung open a classroom door, there was a chalkboard with numbers written on it, the desks were occupied by some extent by skeletons, these were the lucky ones, the ones that died instantly, it was the ones that died later, in the festering cesspool of radiation, that made my stomach churn.

I explore more classrooms, the building and it's rooms seem mostly intact, even the ventilation system was whole, if I could seal up the holes in the walls, and get the vents to work, we could stop using masks in here.

I eventually come to the lunchroom, where piles of food still looking the same way it did before the war... which is disgusting in its own right.

My eyes scanned the room, There was a pair of skeletons holding hands under the table, cheeky, but now these people were dead...

I moved past that room and back into the main hallway. Mutton sniffed the air around us, and I went up to the second floor, it was nearly identical to the first floor, except this floor had a computer lab, a chemistry room, and a massive gym full of dodgeballs.

Finally, there was a room at the end that was blocked by a skeleton with a janitor hat, I gently moved him, and opened the door slowly.

I was greeted with the putrid smell of rotting flesh as a smaller Crawler turns its maggot eaten face towards me, it lunges quickly and it ends up grabbing me and biting by arm before I manage to bring it down with my pistol.

I huff, and look down at the bite, it didn't break skin, but I knew it was going to hurt like hell later. I was still feeling the repercussions of my starvation.

The room the crawler was in was a very small radio booth, it must have been one of those school news things that played every morning. There was a ladder up to the roof, and a scribbled note on the desk.

"The war is over, and we lost, I can feel my flesh burning. I'm going to die, I don't want to die. Jesse, If you read this, I love you."

The rest became less and less coherent until  it was just scribbles, I sighed, It never got better seeing death notes like this, the last moments of consciousness before someone died, or turned.

I scratched Mutton's head and started my descent down into the bunker, after the storm, I would get to sealing the holes in the wall.