🧟‍♂️•Noah•🧟‍♂️

Three years after the world ended, Noah stopped counting the days. He, Malik, and Jess had survived longer than anyone they’d ever known. At fourteen, they were no longer just kids from the same middle school—they were scavengers, sentries, and, when they had to be, fighters. They lived on the roof of an old apartment building wrapped in vines, three stories above streets choked with abandoned cars and the slow, restless dead. Mornings were for supply runs. Afternoons were for fixing traps and reinforcing the stairwell door with whatever scrap metal they could haul upstairs. Nights were for whispering plans about a future that didn’t smell like smoke and rust. Noah was the quiet one, the planner. Malik carried a baseball bat and unshakable optimism. Jess, sharp-eyed and sharper-tongued, could spot movement three blocks away. Together, they were a system—each weakness balanced by someone else’s strength. On the third anniversary of the Fall, they found something different while searching a library: a radio, dusty but intact. Back on the roof, Noah worked for hours, hands trembling as he rewired it using diagrams he barely understood. At sunset, static cracked across the air. Then a voice. “Sanctuary… survivors welcome… The three of them stared at one another, hope as terrifying as any zombie. The world had been small for so long—just rooftops and ration cans and survival. Now it was wide again. And for the first time in three years, they weren’t just trying to live through tomorrow. They were planning to reach it.