I’m thinking I probably sounded kind of emo in my last entry. Not like you care, you’re a journal. But it’s sort of like in my mind, you DO care.
They don’t even have emo any more. I’d say I was glad to see it go but emo could only happen when things were normal. It’s hard to wallow in your existential angst a d crawl in your skin when you’re busy being pissed off that the one time there are no cops around you can’t race down the highway because it’s clogged with cars and dead bodies.
This guy I was walking with was like “How long you think it’ll take to clear this road up if we each found a tow truck?” Estimates shot from the group around me “Three weeks!” “Three weeks? Hell I’ll do it in 2 if someone takes one of the cars to go find some beer.” “Bullshit! You’ll drink all the beers and 3 weeks later you’ll be 12 pounds fatter and makin’ excuses!” And everyone laughed.
Those two knew each other from before. They were inseparable friends and used to camp together and stuff. They talk about chili a lot. A third guy came along later. His wife used to be with them I guess but she died. They said he used to carry around photos of her and then one day he just left them wherever they were at. I was strongly advised not to bring her up. They were older, maybe in their 50′s. A few other people were with us, maybe 15 in all. Out in these wide stretches of land there wasn’t a lot of chance of being taken by surprise by the shambles so we didn’t have to hurry along or anything.
We had a pattern that I learned from these old guys. When you find a town you find the nearest convenience store. Then you get a map. A street map if you can. If you can’t find one, draw one if you’re going to be there for a while. Find the grocery stores (probably all looted out), the hospitals, and the library. Yeah the library. This one guy, I call him Chili because he makes it sometimes if we can find the stuff, but he says that before, when you had real ingredients, it was awesome. Chili chastised me for complaining that sometimes a cellphone would work but it would never carry data. I just knew the internet was sitting there all plugged in waiting for someone to get on it. He was like “When we get to town we’re going to the library. We use these things called books and common sense when we don’t have the internet.”
Chili was right. When I was a kid before we had the internet I used to love going to the library. I remember when I went as an adult everything was on the computer and I couldn’t find a card catalogue anywhere. The library we found in that town was a small one though. It was fall and the leaves were turning and we walked down the street by a school. This was that kind of town that before, used to be depicted as perfect. It’s weird to look at a place and see it utterly deserted and abandoned. We camped out in an elementary school. We lucked out, they had beanbags! So many cute toys. Lessons pinned to corkboards. It even smelled like a school. Fuck, it made me think of when I was a little kid. I can almost hear the schoolbell in my head. Never sounded like the clapper bells on the tv.
Anyway that shit’s empty now. School’s out forever, kids. Kind of like a horror movie. “Attack of the brain-eating schoolchildren!” I remember in the nurse’s office where we rummaged for supplies, I was clenching my fists and teeth. I was just standing there breathing hard I guess because Chili had to kinda nudge me toward a nearby classroom. Looking around at the abandoned desks, the chalkboard, I swallowed back a wave of sadness. It was empty. No kids were here and maybe never would be again. My chest felt a little tight. I heard a high-pitched noise and everything felt like it was spinning around me. I didn’t feel sick or anything, just…kind of weird. The next thing you know I was sitting on the teacher’s chair looking at my knees. Chili’s cohort Gus was rubbing my shoulders.
“You’re okay.” I tried to stand up and he gently directed me back down. “Just sit for a few and relax. You’re alright, you just need to take a load off.” I was crying really hard. My head hurt and I suddenly realized I had snot on my face. Frantically I searched the desk for tissues and found them in a likely place next to an African violet. Kleenex. “Kleenex says bless you”, I laughed bitterly and for some reason this made me cry even harder. I was laughing and crying and looking around at the stickers and the colors and the toys and the dead pet rabbit or something, long past putrefacted. It was like being outside of myself. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I found some scissors in the top drawer and then in slow motion I saw myself reaching for them. After that it’s pretty much like a disco, where the strobe light makes everything all Harryhausen.
Lifting the scissors out of the cup.
Jerking them open with one hand and extending my other arm.
Aiming and firing.
The cup, knocked over.
Hands on my arms and twisting away the scissors.
Vomit. Coming from me. Kicking and screaming. More crying. More screaming. More kicking.
I guess at least I didn’t crap my pants. Finally I calmed down and just sat in the corner on a beanbag, looking at the small animal cage bars browned from the succession of larvae that had fed on it and pupated and made their babies on that same corpse. I wonder if anyone thought in all of the panic about that little rabbit. Poor thing all alone, I thought. I wondered how long it took to go from its initial confusion and hunger pangs to the terrible end. Gus squatted down beside me.
“Hey.” Searched my face.
“Hey.” Barely mumbled back, crying again. I had no energy and I still felt fucked up from my previous exertions. My legs felt sore and banged-up and my arm stung. I had a bandage on it and the surrounding skin was pink marked with flecks and smears of dried blood.
Gus pulled the teacher’s chair over, angling it so he could see the door. It was so quiet. “Where is everybody?”
“They went to check for shambles and supplies. They’ll be back. How are you feeling?” He didn’t seem angry or anything. “You probably have a headache and a sore throat, here.” Two random pills and a bottle of water. I didn’t know what kind of pills they were or if they were expired or would kill me but I did have a headache and I hoped they would fix that.
That night we camped out in a pretty nice hotel. Not a big chain but a local equivalent. Pretty sterile. They had kitchens, like an economy lodge for travelers and stuff. In one room there was a guy who had killed himself. Chili and Gus and a couple of other guys searched his room and brought over a bunch of his stuff to search through. It was like fear and loathing up in there, he had a bunch of drugs. Some acid and stuff, a bunch of weed, pills, coke. No meth, which I was surprised by because based on his clothes he was tweaker-skinny. Couple more guns, some ammo. A REVOLVER. No quickloader though.
We sat in this room drinking dead man’s soda. I want to make a Dead Man’s Soda(tm) brand t-shirt one day. Someone rolled a couple of joints and a few people had small pipes. It was amazing. Let the zombie apocalypse happen and it seems like suddenly it’s not so bad to toke up. There were other, non-stoner people too. They were just in other rooms. There probably were no shambles in the surrounding areas. We hadn’t seen any for miles and the people who went out scouting didn’t even smell any. This one young guy who everyone called Bear was passing Chili the pipe and talking about how great it would be to find a big house and settle down for a while. The weird thing is that nobody thought that was a crazy idea or said “I wouldn’t want to live with you guys.” It would have been a crazy idea before, when everyone had their own place and the neighbors weren’t trying to eat you. Nowadays everyone wants to stay together because we hardly ever see any other people. And nobody wants to be alone out there.
There are lots of people that are alive. They’re in what I think of as internment camps. They’re mostly military installations or ad-hoc villages with good security, stuff like rich houses. The only problem is they have so many rules. Curfew, sharing, stuff like that. The people in those are mostly like scared sheep. They don’t want to go out and fight the shambles and find a home or GO home, they want the government to protect them. I guess I can’t really blame them, but I don’t want to be there. Every time someone leaves they have to be quarantined when they return, even the troops, because of the potential of infection. Some people like to travel from base to base, looking for the perfect one. I heard some of them are really nice, like in Florida and California, but they are always at risk of an attack. We are too, me and Chili and everyone else here but at least we’re living on our own terms. I guess in a way I think that makes us better than most of the people living on bases, because we don’t have any soldiers to shoot for us. We have to do it ourselves.