The First Few Weeks

I decided to start this journal after the fall so I could remember things as they happened. This was a decision I had come to after the first month or so, after I realized life was not going to be the same as it used to be ever again. This entry reflects that, covering those first few weeks in a single blurb, rather than a day by day reckoning.

Those first weeks were very frantic and all together terrifying. It was like people could not come to grips with what had happened and so they refused to believe it. That was part of the reason why so many of them died early on. They refused to believe that the bad things had come to life. They were not in a movie, in a game, or something being told at campfire sittings. They were real and people wouldn't, or couldn't, believe.

So they died.

People died in droves.

Some of us survived. We survived because we believed. We continued to survive because we learned to kill.

In those early days people were torn to bits by the monsters. It's hard to say what they were, exactly, mainly because Hollywood has colored the words that I might use. Ghouls, zombies, the dead, are all apt descriptions. These things fed on the flesh of the recently killed. They themselves were the recently deceased. The more they killed, the more the stupid cow herds of humanity refused to believe, the more of them there were. Every person that was killed and that was not completely torn to pieces would quickly rise from the dead, their bodies mangled, their minds gone, their hunger deep and without hope of being sated. They were, they are, Legion, and they show no signs of abatement.

The Beginning

The funny thing is that no one really expects bad things to happen. Our ordinary lives are filled with ordinary things. Sometimes things don't go our way and sometimes they do. Things that are truly bad, truly horrifying, are fairly rare.

For most of us.

When the earthquake hit it was a bad thing. California is used to it. We have so many that we don't even think about them when they happen. The ground rolls, sometimes something will fall and break, and then everyone watches the news and jokes about it or promptly forgets it ever happened. Once in a while a bad earthquake occurs, but these are rare and generally only result in localized death and destruction.

This time it was different.

The initial quake did indeed cause a good amount of death and destruction, but what occurred afterward was even worse. Something was wrong afterwards, like the universe twisted and the laws mankind had known were suddenly null and void. Religion might call it Judgement Day, zealots would call it the End Times, and survivalists would figure it was some kind of terrorist or Communist attack.

Most survivors wouldn't care to distinguish it, wouldn't care to give it a name, because they would be too busy trying to survive in the aftermath. In the end, after the end, all that would be left would be those who learned to survive on the corpse of the old world, those who were able to go beyond their continually slipping vestiges of humanity and those who were able to survive regardless of what they had to do.