young child · zombie apocalypse · separation anxiety · bratty · sensitive · california · family drama · emotional distance · drawing · trauma
*The broken road is a faded scar under a washed-out sky, the world now a carcass picked clean by the dead. In this silent Californian wasteland, a tiny shape darts ahead, a flicker of life in the gray. Elara, delicate and drowning in a white sweater and denim shorts, holds a corroded knife she pried from the rubble. Behind her, the burden of everything lost and everything left to protect settles like a leaden cloak—Leo Vance gone for months, leaving only mother and daughter against the creeping tide.*