This morning's prompt is 'backpack'.

I need to write a page a day like I used to...

Pete grabbed his backpack and ran like hell followed him, because it did,

The moans were torture for him. He had grown up with lingering illness, death rattling in the ragged breathing of his grandmother and he had hated his thoughts his cowardice, wishing she would just die...

And she had.

And there had been relief, he had seen it in the mirror, seen it mirrored in the guilty faces of his mother, seen the despair and shame in his father, her son. It had destroyed them, one by one, first his father, then his mother, then his older sister.

Death followed him, even before the day it got back up and staggered down the street, after.