[Dreamtwister]

Yeah, if he stays alone *and* in the city, sooner or later he's going to get injured and die, or get caught by a gang and die, or get cornered by wild animals and die, or drink the wrong water and die....you get the picture.

[legit]

I signed in for my update of an interesting future, where is it? Got to keep the imagination flowing.

Seriously, part of me would like a hard crash just because it would be interesting, possibly fun, and an end to out current dreary times.

[spear]

He can fall off the shelf and the chase would be on.That would be about the time he will be thinking of the Ferrari.

[MacG]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', 'D')og isn't bad. What I've had was a bit fatty and it was just a hint "doggy", but I've definitely had venison that had a stronger flavor.

I haven't had occasion to eat a rat yet. Probably what they tasted like would depend a lot on what they've been eating. I suspect that after a few weeks of being under nourished, a barbeque rat would smell like filet mignon.

FWIW it's very important to cook any carnivorous or omnivorous creature thoroughly because they can cary trichinosis.

[J-Rod]

Where's another entry of doomer porn?

[rsch20]

/applause

very good, and i disagree with the others, I find the loner angle an interesting one. yes it's harder as a loner, but not all loners will die, at least not for a while, hooking up with a community could even be a wished for dream for the protagonist, perhaps he encounters one and is rebuffed.

in fact I find this scenario more realistic for a lot of people than the lucky 'instant communities' that seem to develop in all the other survival fiction I have read, where everyone is good and mostly do fine banding together against the mutant hordes etc.

I like the 'unprepared survivor' angle as well, again most of the fiction I have read the protagonist(s) usually already has wilderness skills and/or some resources to draw on, which like the above paragraph usually leaves me thinking 'lucky you'.

[128shot]

Its good, and I'll only read it during the day when I can effectively beat out the image of eating a child of 5 years old out of my head.


though I think you need a few different angles.


What about the people who still have access to oil and are wealthy/have modern day luxuries? It's different for everyone you know...


How about somebody who is in a large armed mob group?

and just for kicks, how about some rogue militia trained men that take over a oil producing city and control it?


just some thoughts you might also want to explore at some later date maybe. you should probably blog this for everyones enjoyment

[Vexed]

(journal entry 4)

this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room.
this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room.
this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room.
this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room.
this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room. this room.
this room. this room. This fucking room.

I am a bit agitated.

I can absorb all the pain this world can throw at me, but this aloneness is unbearable. I have discovered you can only talk to yourself for so long before two people actually do begin to exist: The sane voice and the insane voice. The sane voice thinks about things like keeping my flat secure, organizing my resources, and staying clean. The insane voice is all raw emotion, and is completely unpredictable. The last time I became the insane voice it ended with me accidentally knocking myself unconscious on one of my flat’s walls.

What a strange sensation to hurt yourself when there are so many folks willing to do it for you.

The sane voice points out all the reasons to stay hidden in my hole. It talks about safety, rationalizes the horrors I have experienced, and looks at my survival before anything else. The insane voice does not talk, it screams. Sometimes it propels me into broad daylight against all my willpower to the contrary. Sometimes the insane voice makes me search out other people, even though I know the risks, and I know what I might expose myself to. The insane voice doesn’t care. It needs comfort and contact, whereas the sane voice is wary of both. The sane voice wants me to stay alive, the insane voice thinks life is irrelevant if I am alone.

Perhaps there are finally real communities springing up Outside? Get real, the sane voice hisses.

I mean how much time can you waste with hope and prayer? I spend entire days trying to convince myself otherwise. I hope and pray that humanity has regained a foothold, that rescue forces are being organized, that treaties are being signed, that hands are being shaken vigorously, that a helicopter will land on top of my building and a uniformed soldier (hopefully Not in a biochem suit) will descend to tell me that the crisis is over and say: son, good job, here is a new life and hand me a fresh Twinkie and send me on my way. But its not going to happen like that. It never happens like that.

In my darkest moments I realize: This could be for the long haul. This room, this stale smell, this silent hole, could be the rest of my life. I might be staring at that same fucking spot of missed paint until I die.

What else am I supposed to think?

The sane voice insists that contact is still dangerous, very dangerous, deadly. The rest of my senses concur. There will not be communities or childbearing families for a long time to come. Humanity has sterilized itself for the time being.

Mankind truly tore itself a new one this time; a gaping asshole we can all flounder in.

If anyone ever reads this, I apologize for the visual, but my point should be granted: We made a sincere mess out of a bountiful beautiful Eden of a world.

Even when the plagues eventually pass, there will still be the Fear; the fear that the person you’re talking to is a Host; the fear that the home you have staked out is filled with invisible death; the fear that the cold sweat on your brow is not from fear but the first stage of illness. How can we be sure when the War of Winds have really ended anyway? What magical TV voice is going to tell us?

New toxins might be entering the air as I write this. I could be breathing them right now. For all know my insides have only just been poisoned, and its now just a matter of time till I am bent-double and retching. I have lived with that Fear for a long time.

I remember when the first wave of disease hit the states and people locked themselves up in their homes and refused to go out for anything. It didn’t matter at all. Most of them died in their homes surrounded by survival supplies, duct-taped into their domicile; entombed by their own hand in search of a defense. I know this is the case because I have spent hours pulling off duct tape and scavenging goods from such people. I am part survivor, part gravedigger.

For most folks out there, there was just no running from the bug (there was no running from many things), but I refuse to believe that I am part of some chosen race because I wasn’t infected. In the past I have seen hand-painted cloth posters for a group that seemed to think they were indeed special because they had remained unaffected. These posters have since mildewed and peeled and draped, and in some places fallen, never re-tacked, never replaced: remnants of the final days.

Nature can turn its back on you in a second, and it will, and it won’t laugh and it won’t cry and it won’t explain at all, as it spills your brains all over the ground.

The fact I remain uncontaminated is a pure random statistical chance of nature. I am not the savior’s Earthly Warrior. I am not a Rider of the Apocalypse. I am not the Next Born.

[align=center]*[/align]

During the transition…That’s a period I should write about. When I think about it, I did some pretty heroic things in those waning days...none of which ultimately meant anything, but still…I placed myself at risk for others many times, and fought many battles and only succeeded in walking away…alone…always alone…many times. Those were some strange and sad days. Really sad days.

Then again, maybe I don’t have anything to say about that period.

Anyway.

During the transition when I thought I was still in control, I wore a cheap dust mask I found at a construction site. These days I don’t bother. Perhaps I have finally become jaded with the end of the world? Perhaps the insane voice has won a battle? Perhaps I have taken one step towards giving up? No, if that was the case, and I was that disillusioned, I would be out cavorting around town with one of those merry bands of limping coughing open-sored monsters everywhere. No, I want to stay alive. Even if it is just to stare at these goddamned walls for one more day.

The mask became redundant. If I wasn’t going to take my chances with other people I didn’t need it. If you stay away from other humans, the risk of transmission is supposed to drop dramatically. I don’t know if that is true, but the fact that so few folks, other than the utterly desperate, ever band together makes me wonder. Desperation is the reason I imagine a person finally gives in to the ranks of the Outsiders (that is an extremely pleasant euphemism).

I am not desperate. I am lonely and bored, but I am not desperate. I have plenty of supplies. I have rations, and light, and books, and warmth, and a safe place to sleep. Luck, or something like it, has been on my side. My sane voice is better than most.

I would be the envy of the city if anyone knew I existed.

Should I be discovered, the law of the land would strip me of my sustenance, and therefore existence, in mere seconds. I do not miss humanity enough to trade in my life. How much comfort is to be found in the “families” and “communities” that exist today anyway? I won’t be greeted with a hug I’ll tell you that.

Don’t you know? The dead and dying are the established order on the Outside these days. And some of them are pretty pissed off about it. The healthy are hunted. Their supplies are raided. They are unceremoniously hacked to pieces out of mere spite and envy by the reigning marshals of the New World. This is chaos. The abyss. The fuck-all end-all.

I never thought zombies would exist, but here they are, everywhere. And they are not what Mr. Romero would have ever expected. They are truly horrific.

From a distance I have watched them. I am the Jane Goodal of Armageddon.

Groups of what would otherwise be ordinary crowds, have become hungry diseased decaying mobs of slow death. Old acquaintances and past flames, family and friends, parents and siblings, all struggling for one last meal, stumble pale and hunchbacked through the streets like slow motion nightmares. They tremble like fugitives trapped in some strange land they can’t understand, each suffering a fate of sickness, radiation, starvation, exposure, derangement, most certainly, despair.

So goes the fight for the last scraps of civilization.

So goes life with the zombies: Blood on their clothing, vomit in their hair, venom in their shrieks, despair and insanity and bewilderment that never seems to disappear. The shock of what has happened still hasn’t receded after all these long years. A faraway look has taken hold in their yellow eyes. They are animals, but worse.

[align=center]*[/align]

My first experience with cannibalism was watching the child eaten in the department store over an open flame. My inability to handle the Fear of cannibalism has shifted. It has been forced to. Apparently the part of the planet I was left on has been picked clean of food in the aftermath. Between the eternal concrete in all directions, the brown sky, and the absence of greenery, people have fewer choices, and they act accordingly.

The zombies, as their environment demands, waste nothing. As each go to their maker, their bodies are spent on nourishing the hungry.

But it is not like in a Romero movie where intestines are ripped out like spaghetti and the person is alive and kicking. No, our zombies are much more meticulous. They know that there are germs that must be removed, limbs that must be disjointed, if they are going to get all the meat, and different portions of the anatomy that need to be eaten quickly before they spoil. Their madness has a method.

I take slight pride in knowing I have not yet been forced to descend to such a level. I sometimes wonder how many people are left who haven’t tasted human flesh?

I am not a zombie. I am a survivor. I am not a zombie. I am a survivor. I am not a zombie. I am a survivor. I repeat that to myself sometimes. It helps….. Sometimes.

I guess I figure if I am going to get sick, I am going to get sick. A rose is a rose is a rose, and shit. But that doesn’t mean that I am going to lose all sense of which voice is crazy, and which one wants me to wake up safely the next day.

I am not a zombie.

I used to be a major asshole. I probably still am.

Sure, sure, I remember the purr of my Lexus. But we were all once cavemen in Lamborghini’s, Neanderthals in super jets, monkeys in glass skyscrapers. We sought to go faster and farther into the unknown until we could not stop, until finally the unknown owned us, and then, the spiral downward was quick and uncompromising.

I remember…
My backyard swimming pool with heated waterfall…sex till 3am…catching martini olives in my mouth…ordering room service…showing off my toys…and small talk. Endless fucking small talk. Hours of droning static meaningless content-less banter about nothing.

I could talk about the weather in thirteen different ways. And I did everyday. Near every moment.

God, I want that back.

but

now

I have carried the dead, felt their stiff skin against mine, held the fevered and lost tears over the shrieking cries of mothers. I have comforted despair and rallied against certain defeat and carried crying children through cities on fire. I am forgiven. I am sure of that. I just don’t care. I do not want to be forgiven. You should understand that. You really should.

It is not about forgiveness. Forgiveness is like blame. It does nothing at the end of the day.

Here, in this ugly world, I have been left with a fistful of my own guts. I have held down the dying, choking on my disgust of this world, hating myself, as they have died. I have seen souls ascend to heaven many times over. I have been in hell too many times to count.

I now avoid such an existence.

I am alone.

That is the right way; the way of the future.

I have a fucking headache.

[Doly]

Great, Vexed.

By the way, have you considered giving your fantasies a reality test? I suggest picking some country in Africa that is in a bad enough state (Zimbabwe springs to mind), and going there to see direct what it's like.

Consider it survivalist training.

And if things aren't the way you thought, that will be useful to know, won't it?

[strider3700]

mmm more doomer porn. The back story is nice to have. I'm also a fan of anything with zombies. I do think he should be working on weapons of some sort though. If disease took out most of the population you would think weapons would be easy to find.