Forget This To Survive

After the world broke, a memory-haunted orphan is forced on deadly supply runs into a ruined city—but escaping the camp that exploits him means scavenging the one place he refuses to look: yesterday.

The Last of Us meets Chaos Walking in this dark, pulse-pounding post-apocalyptic thriller about the psychological cost of survival—and the lies we need to keep going.

It may be easier to fear the monsters than face what made them.

Years after the world broke, an orphan lives by one rule above all: “forget this to survive.” Forget his past. Forget his pain. And forget the moment he failed his parents.

This morning, he’s a new arrival at a survivor camp that sends a truckload of orphans into a ruined city to scavenge—and face the once-human Wild who wait inside. Their mission is simple: come back with a full pack or don’t come back at all.

Today, he’ll survive. Tomorrow, he might not want to. And yesterday? Well, yesterday was dead. The past would feed on the present if you let it.

But one by one, the orphans he tries not to care about begin counting on him. One by one, the memories he buried start crawling back. And if he’s going to save himself and the few people the world has left him, he’ll have to do the one thing that terrifies him most of all:

Remember.

Rick Foerster is a recovering corporate drone who left a successful career to write at the age of 40 about meaning, identity, and the terrifying risk of feeling anything at all. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two kids.