Friday, October 31, 2008

Twenty-two days since Grace left me.

22-

Everything came apart so fast. The first few days were chaos. Even the people that fancied themselves prepared had trouble holding on to their lives. Some of us were lucky; we were not in a big city. We had been camping, what began as the worst weekend of my life, turned into the end of the world.
My name is Sam Russell. I haven’t seen another living soul in twenty-two days.
I don’t know what today is. It is twenty-two days since Grace died. I didn’t know her. I had been cornered inside a deli; it was stupid of me to go in there. I was hungry. We are always starving these days, but I was just hungry.
I didn’t need to eat. But I went in there anyway. My senses left me and I went into a building I didn’t know, in the dark, without knowing, without thinking. There were so many, as if they were in the walls. She told me it’s the smell, the rotting cuts of meat. They are drawn to the smell. She said that when she saw me go in, she figured I was just tired of living. When she heard me scream, she knew she had been wrong.
She was so fast. Literally three-to-one. I was, I am able to handle myself, but she was a natural savior. She was graceful in it. Eight of them were finished before she pulled me out of that coffin.

She didn’t die that day. It was later that I lost her. It was later after I knew her. And it wasn’t them, it was us. A living man killed her.

It is so much quieter than it use to be. It is like when you wake up just before dawn and you feel like you are the only person in the world. It is like that all of the time now. I don’t know how, but we did it to ourselves. It’s been twenty-two days since I have heard more than the sound of my feet.

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