Survival is only temporary. Everyone dies. That’s always been the case, but now days it’s much more straightforward. There was a time when a human could expect to live into his or her 80s or 90s...even beyond in some cases. Those days are gone. We don’t get decades anymore. We probably won’t even get tomorrow.
Attachments will get you killed sooner rather than later. That girl you made eyes at on Monday? By Tuesday, she’s lying on the asphalt of some abandoned mall, her body swollen and split open with the spores. If you’d taken her up on the offer she made Monday night, you’d be just as dead. You can’t let yourself get connected in any way to anyone else if you want to live as long as you can.
You cannot trust anyone you meet. Everyone is out for themselves now. They will kill you and take what you have, or worse; they’ll infect you. No one is immune to the spores. If you happen to hook up with someone that’s infected all it takes is a touch. One touch and you are a host. If you see another person, kill him or her and run.
You probably won’t be running into a lot of other people though. Most of the world’s population died within the first year of the outbreak. I think the last new broadcast I heard said the death toll had hit three billion. That was about six months after a terrorist cell operating within the US Army stole and released every sample of “Ophiocordyceps unilaterali” or the zombie fungus.
Now, I don’t mean zombie as in reanimated corpses chomping on the living. That would be an improvement; you can avoid that infection. I’d have preferred to live a life like one of those old horror films.
The zombie fungus used to exist naturally. It propagated by infecting ants, eating their brains, and eventually wiping out the colony. It couldn’t feed on anything else and existed mainly to keep the ant population in check. This worked out well for probably millions or years, until some damned scientists decided to play God.
They fucked with the fungus. They altered its build and twisted it into a weapon. Oh, they were quick to assure the world that they had no intention of ever actually using it; they just needed to know if it could be done. Of course, it was stolen from them.
Of course, someone else decided that using it would be just fucking dandy.
I’ll never forget the day the reports came in. A terrorist cell had broken into the CDC in Atlanta, had killed everyone in the complex with some kind of fast acting gas, and had stolen every sample of the fungus. It was a week later that outbreaks were reported, everywhere from Atlanta to LA, to New York, from London to Berlin to Beijing. Everywhere. Every continent, every country was being overrun with the fungus.
Remember how I said it wasn’t like a zombie movie? When you’re infected by the fungus, you don’t come back from the dead. The spores grow in your blood, until they get so big that they bust through your skin, ripping you open. You die. Your body falls, and the fungus consumes you, spilling more spores into the air. Breathing them in won’t infect you. They latch onto your skin, invisible and deadly, and are absorbed into you. The whole process takes about two days.
After six months, the world had ended. After a year, there weren’t anymore people, as far as I could tell. Since then, I’ve met maybe three. Two of them died from the spores, the third was the one that exposed the other two in the first place.. You can’t trust anyone in this world, remember? I learned my lessons the hard way. That’s why I’m writing this down. I don’t know when I’m gonna die. I could be infected right now for all I know. I just want to make sure that, just in case someone else finds this little chronicle, they’ll learn something that will help them survive another day. You can’t ask for more than that.
Anyway, those first days were full of confusion. The hospitals filled quickly, and then turned into spore breeding grounds. The people who went there, most taken in by family members that were just trying to help, weren’t infect at all. They were just scared. Within days, entire cities were overrun with the spores. Corpses filled the streets. Everyone I knew was dead or dying. I wasn’t there to watch it though. When I heard that the fungus had been stolen, I headed for the mountains. I figured it would be safer there.
I lived on the Appalachian mountain range for six months, keeping in the loop with my iPhone and various other technological goodies that are now lost forever. I holed up in a cabin that was about a three hour hike from a sleepy little mountain town. I don’t think the place even had a name. I maintained a relatively comfortable life, what with my gas powered generator and modern conveniences. I thought I could ride it out safely, secure with the knowledge that the government would find a cure.
That never happened. Six months in, and the little town was dead. I don’t know how I avoided death. I went in at least twice a week. I guess someone rolled in one day after I had stocked up, and the two hundred people living there didn’t realize how bad it was to be so welcoming. When I returned for more supplies, I saw the corpses.
Swollen, yellow, and split from head to toe, two hundred dead. I ran. I didn’t stop running for hours. I ran until my feet bled and I couldn’t take another step. I made it a point to never stay in one place for more than a week at a time then. I was constantly on the move. I met my first person on the road into Washington DC, about a month after I left the mountains. His name was Mitch, and his wife was Gloria.
I was wary of them at first, but after a couple hours I decided that they were just like me; lost survivors that needed some hope. We traveled together for about a month without incident. Mitch and I had become good friends, and Gloria was a wonderful woman. They were older than me by a couple of decades, and I had kind of adopted them as surrogate parents. My own parents had died within the first few days of the outbreak.
I mentioned an incident. I guess I’ll elaborate. Mitch and I had scouted out a house that the three of us could move into and use as our next home base. It was in what had once been an upscale neighborhood, but had now fallen into disrepair. Kinda inevitable when everyone starts exploding into bloody spore clouds.
We secured the house easily enough. We’d just settled in when there was a knock on the door. Gloria shouted, momentarily frightened into forgetting the cardinal rule. The next sound was the door splintering under the heavy boot of some thug. He barged into the room and turned the corner, seeing the three of us huddled in the floor.
“Help me...” He said.
And the he shrieked, his body expanded, and in a red puff, he fell to the floor. Yellow spores rose from the corpse. Mitch and Gloria had been the closest and had been covered in a splattered mix of gore and spore. They knew they were dead. I ran.
I’m not ashamed that I left those two. I gave myself more time. Or so I thought. You see, when I ran, I guess I must have gone through the edge of the spore cloud. I started feeling the fungus taking root last night. I probably don’t have much longer.
Please, if you’re reading this, remember the cardinal rules. Survival is only temporary. We will all die. Trust no one.
Survive.
(The remaining pages are covered in dried blood.)
Matthew Cena of Colorado Springs was a man who committed suicide
after running his pet rat just six short months ago. We here at the blog were
able to contact him via an Ouija Board to hear him communicate about the horror
of not being able to make it to the polls. “It’s just really hard right now, I
figured that both of these candidates would make a strong pitch to God or
whoever to let out those of us that registered to vote that happened to be
trapped in here right now!” When I asked him how all of this mattered
considering the fact that he was legally dead, Mr. Cena was quick to point out, “Look
I get the fact that I am dead, but I never got to vote, and as far as I know I
was never cremated so why not take a chance on a lost soul.”
For those souls that still have a meat suit this side of the River Styx, why
not take a chance and work on the way to help these voters more involved in an
election. Calls from the Obama camp were not returned immediately, but the
Romney campaign had this to say, “This campaign does not endorse satanic
activity to get Mr. Romney elected for president. However that doesn’t mean we didn’t
try. These voters are important, but until a higher power is ready to let these
poor lost souls rejoin their body, legally we don’t have a leg to stand on.”
