I have taken to talking into this digital recorder at all hours. There’s no one around here to talk to, and I feel less crazy if I speak into this mic than if I just mutter to myself. That being said, I don’t know if anyone will be around to transcribe this.
This sucks.
Okay. Time to get organized.
This is Brien dictating on February 27, time unknown, maybe late morning. And it’s the fifth day of the plague.
Things I am out of. Freeze dried lasagna. Batteries. Water bottles. Plastic bags to defecate in. I just watched the last syringe of my medicine (“Keep refrigerated. Do not freeze”) turn an alarming greyish color, so I think I have taken my last injection of that stuff. Also out of cat food. Not for me, for the cat. Yin has been a real trooper through this whole thing. Low on drinking water, MREs and pistol ammunition.
I am not sure how I made it this far. This apartment isn’t very secure, certainly. Maybe because I have always been the quiet neighbor. And evading the plague victims, it is easier in some ways than evading a rational human opponent. The plague victims don’t seem curious about the pile of plastic bags forming beneath my window, three stories down. Or the liquefying body of one of their own down the hall. It would be the world’s simplest ballistics exercise to track the path of the bullet that killed (?) him back to my door. But no, they seem to be very incurious.
Most of my neighbors fled. Or died. Or both. I decided to take a strategy from Ragnar Benson’s book “Urban Survival” and hold in place for a while. A few days ago I decided to explore plan B, which was to drive to my folks' place in the country. The streets were clear for a moment. I got to my car and turned the ignition and it would not even turn over. That got me worried. On top of the plague, has there been a nuclear war? Did an Electro-Magnetic Pulse take out my starter? I was bashing my forehead on the steering wheel when I noticed. I had just left the lights on.
This being downtown, there are a heck of a lot of plague victims walking around. Not many in the street right now. Mornings there are fewer of them about. They appear in ones or twos, and then dozens.
Well it is time for plan C. I remember back in the good old days when there was light and heat and water out of a faucet, and no danger of being set upon and devoured by a neighbor or someone who used to, say, cut your hair or make your coffee… I remember a game night over at Adam’s. And one of the games, I kid you not, oh unknown future transcriptionist of these words, was “Last Night on Earth.” It was a fun little bleakly humorous game about surviving a zombie uprising. Pick the building where you want to get weapons and make a stand against the pawns of the Zombie player. Discussion on the side turned to where, in real life, if such an event came to pass, HA HA, you would want to hole up.
And they said something about the zoo.