What They Called A Vaccine Was Population Control

Avery had been underground for fourteen months when she heard the first sound that wasn't her own breathing. A scrape. Slow and deliberate, right above the hatch. She had refused the vaccine the day they announced it on every channel at the same time, which was the first sign something was wrong. The government didn't agree on anything, let alone broadcast the same message word for word across every network simultaneously. She had stocked her bunker for exactly this kind of moment, not a pandemic, not a war, but the moment the people in charge decided the rest of the world was a problem they needed to solve. She was right. She knew she was right the moment the reports stopped coming in and the silence outside went from eerie to absolute. Fourteen months of canned food, filtered water, and the creeping fear that she might be the last person on Earth who remembered her own name. Then the scrape happened again and she realized with a sharp cold certainty that she was not alone. She cracked the hatch just enough to see and what she found wasn't the wasteland she had prepared herself for. The world outside was quiet but intact, overgrown in places, still in others, like it had simply exhaled and settled. And walking along the tree line forty yards away was a man. Not stumbling, not threatening, just walking with no particular destination, no expression, no awareness that she was watching him. She climbed out slowly and called to him and he turned and looked at her with eyes that were present but completely empty, like someone had left the lights on in a house where nobody lived anymore. She had heard the vaccine did this to some people, the ones it didn't kill outright, and she had assumed that was the worst of it. She was wrong. Because behind the man through the trees she could see the outline of a structure she didn't recognize and figures moving around it with purpose and not all of those figures had empty eyes. Some of them were watching. And one of them was watching her.