For me, I held on by planning the next move and the one after that. And the truth was, I already saw where it ended. In my mind I could picture every path, every eventuality, and they all led to one place: the storm of zombies waiting.
We had no hope. The conclusion was written. The last line had been carved in stone and our judgment handed down. There was no appeal, no do-over. The moment we’d stepped into the Overlook we’d chosen our path, and we’d chosen wrong.
It would take us a long time to get there—longer than I’d even realized at first. The building had an elaborate roof garden with a saltwater pool. Early on we rigged a ladder to get up there, and thanks to a retiree with an odd penchant for collecting seed packets, we were able to plant a vegetable patch that was pretty successful.
But on that first morning at the Overlook there was this moment when I was standing on the balcony with Nicky and the rising sun hit the pink-tinted windows of an apartment building a few blocks south. And suddenly, everything around us turned rosy; the world became soft and beautiful.
Nicky pulled me down into the chair next to her and she tilted her head back and I did the same. “When you only look at the sky,” she whispered, “it’s like nothing’s changed.”
And she was right. The wall of the balcony blocked the chaos below—I could no longer see the wrecks or the carnage. In that rose-tinged heartbeat, there existed a flutter of hope. I could see it in Nicky’s eyes—that what she’d said earlier wasn’t really true. Being the hopeful survivor wasn’t just a role. She didn’t believe in giving up, which is something I wouldn’t come to fully understand until much, much later, when her raw-ribbed chest rattled and wheezed.
I’d come onto the balcony that morning to give her the chance to circumvent it all: change her decision and choose a new path. She could fly over the railing or take the elevator down to the main level or find any other number of ways to determine her own ending.
All I could see were the ways our world had fallen apart, but somehow Nicky had found a way to show me that in some respects it was still the same, and it could be beautiful.
At the very end she would take it all back, of course. When death was no longer a promise but a pressing reality, I asked her if she regretted this dawn-inspired commitment to survival. Her answer had been a simple yes. That if she’d had it to do over again, knowing that rescue would never come, she’d have killed herself on that first morning.
And then she was gone and it was just me. The only one who’d never really hoped. The one who’d never seen the Overlook as some sort of waiting room before life resumed as it had once been. The one who understood that our world hadn’t been put on pause but shifted into a new reality and that days would continue to come and go, piling on one another as they always had.
I’d known from the beginning what Nicky had understood only at the very end. But just because I’d seen the truth from day one didn’t mean I needed to force her and the others to see it too. Because there’s something I learned in that sliver of pink sunrise: we all come into the world knowing we’re going to die. And maybe I’d figured out that our death would come sooner and it would come harder, but that didn’t make it any more or less inevitable.
And it didn’t mean there wasn’t something worthwhile about those days in between—the good and the bad of them. The kisses and the fights and the fears and the laughter. I was done with fearing death and I was done with fearing regret. I’d made my choices. Maybe they’d been the wrong ones, but I intended to live them to the end.
Carrie Ryan is the New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Forest of Hands and Teeth series, which has been translated into over eighteen languages and is in development as a major motion picture. She is also the editor of the anthology Foretold: 14 Tales of Prophecy and Prediction, as well as author of Infinity Ring: Divide and Conquer. Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Carrie is a graduate of Williams College and Duke University School of Law. A former litigator, Carrie now writes full-time and lives with her husband, two fat cats, and one large dog in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can find her online at carrieryan.com or follow @CarrieRyan on Twitter.
Carrie Ryan, What Once We Feared
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