Second of May
I walked in on a brawl in the common area. We have a room on the fourth floor set aside for mealtimes. Half the wall is gone and part of the door is still in the jamb. I had woken up in time for a late lunch and I guess I was too groggy to be aware of my surroundings.
Very nearly avoided getting punched in the face.
Anatole wasn't so lucky. Flew right past me. Back skidded noisily on the linoleum. Some guy named Raymond shoved me, knocked my bowl of dry cereal and unopened bottle of water right out of my hands. Then he buried his boots in Anatole's midsection.
I might have maybe stabbed him. After I kicked the back of his knees out. Buried my plastic spork spoon fork piece of shit in his shoulder when he was down.
Raymond got KO'd with a right cross to his jaw by Anatole.
I got yelled at for wasting food. Anatole got his ear chewed out, figuratively, by Dr. Becca.
After everyone cleared out, Allison came over and told me that the fight was over a "disagreement of words." And then she asked me what the hell was up with my boyfriend.
I told her my boyfriend is dead.
She left me to pick up my cereal by myself.
Twenty First of April
I have these moments. It's like... I don't really know how to describe. It's kind of like I'm going crazy. Sometimes.
Okay. So. There are times when I get so ... focused? intense? that everything falls away and it's like I can't, or won't, hear anything around me. Like tunnel vision, for the brain. My mind kind of blanks under the intensity of single-minded purpose, but it can happen anytime for any reason at all. Hell, it happened not too long ago, when I was staring out the window and an abandoned red bike at the side of the road across the street caught my eye. Couldn't look away. Everything just... fell away. Got all silent.
It doesn't scare me... but I feel like maybe it should. And maybe it should, because the moment everything is perfectly still, I hear things.
Voices. And shit.
Fucking crazy. Feels good to let that out, though. Actually put this out somewhere, instead of tell myself over and over I'm not crazy I'm not crazy.
But maybe I just. I don't know. Need more sleep.
Nineteenth of April
Sometimes there are birds in the sky, first thing in the morning. You'd think there wouldn't be any animals left, but there are. I counted five of them. I think they're pigeons, but I can't...
The doc won't lend me her binoculars to take a closer look, either.
Anatole won't leave me alone. But it's not... weird. He's not weird about it. I just don't fucking. I don't understand it. And I'm not gonna ask 'cause that's a whole can of worms I don't want to open. He's not standing over my shoulder reading this, though. He's in the hall outside my door. Pacing. I don't know if he's gotten any sleep. I've been in and out since we got back at daylight.
And I'm just hungry all the time now. We have food but it's not enough. I don't think it's enough.
And we're fucking low on coffee.
And my knees hurt.
And typing is getting hard with these cloth wraps around my fingers. I scraped them up something awful on some rusted metal beams yesterday, and I'm hoping they don't get infected.
God. I really hate Mondays.
Thirteenth of April
When I fell, it was like this.
We went two buildings down the block. The first floor was obliterated. I followed up the rear, and Mitchell was up front. Was me, Anatole, and Mitchell. Mitchell had the light and so we followed close, careful where we stepped and how much noise we made. We'd got a few weapons to smash in the heads of anything coming by, but it was a quiet night for the most part. We worked our way up the broken building, picked apart the remains of what looked like the average stereotypical cubicle office turned stampeded through shithole.
I don't remember what floor it was. But we heard a noise. Low. Angry. Like a growl, but still sort of human. A gurgle and the shuffling of feet on fucked up carpet down the hall. Mitchell moved forward. Anatole followed suit. Then me.
Sometimes... Sometimes those things. They uh. They're smart enough to circle 'round. Sometimes. They can catch us off guard and surround us fast if we're not paying attention. And once that happens... well, there ain't no getting out of that.
Mitchell sprinted forward. Anatole spun left, into a room and out of sight. I went left, too. There was a smack! and a scream in front of me. My boots crunched on something slick and hard. I thought about how it would've been nice to have a flashlight. Then the floor wobbled and a crack! echoed in the black. And then I fell.
My knee still aches. I'll get used to it though.
The Seventh of April
I privatized some journal entries because I wasn't sure if I should reveal them to the world. But the laptop's running low on batteries and we haven't got a new generator to replace the older one, so the energy's just for the basic stuff. I figure if anyone's alive out there and they see this, I gotta keep the blog updated so they know if the Settlement is still a safe haven, or if we've killed ourselves off.
I can't lie though. New York ain't the safest place to be, even before the shit hit the fan.
Anyway. My leg's okay now. They let me tag along nights again, but instead of sticking to just three people like usual they insist on keeping it to four. They mean well, but I can't think of it as anything except a big "You fucked up" sign plastered across my forehead. I can't take it back though.
Got no one to blame but myself.
The Second of April
Mitchell said that this apocalypse was God's prank on the world. I told him April Fool's was over and no one's laughing.
"Don't need to be funny to be a practical joke," he said. I thought practical was a poor choice of words, but he didn't seem to share that opinion. He just shook his head, tossed a bag of chips and a bottle of sprite in my lap, and left me alone.
God. I hate soda.
Twenty Third of March
I snuck out to see Cory. I don't like kids, but I wanted to see how he was doing . Figured I'm stuck in here anyway, maybe I could help.
I can't.
They said he was getting better. I think they were lying.
The Twenty First of March
It gets lonely up here. Kind of.
I stopped taking the pills, mostly because I hated how they left me feeling loopy and disoriented. There's still some pain in my knees, but I stretch and limp in a circle to keep moving. I hate sitting in one place, staring. I hate it.
I'm going to lose my fucking mind if I have to just sit here any longer.
Sometimes Dr. Becca keeps me company up here, but she usually just hangs by the windows with a pair of scratched binoculars and a notepad so full of scribbled paper that it's falling apart. I think she likes to study the... infected from a safe distance, but I can't really tell. I hear her mumble names and laugh to herself, but aside from that she hasn't shared anything with me.
The battery life on this laptop is starting to worry me. I don't have an outlet or a generator to leech life from. If I lose this laptop ... I don't know. I'll need to find a journal and let everyone fucking read off that instead. Lord knows these people gossip 95% of the day. Cooped up cramp with a whole lot of people, there's not much to do aside from talk and watch the exits.
Anatole comes around sometimes, when the doc isn't here. He cracks jokes and sometimes waves chocolate candybars in my face. It's annoying, since I fucking hate chocolate, but I appreciate the company. I think he thinks it's his fault I fell. It isn't, and everyone else agrees it isn't, but I'm not gonna keep reminding him otherwise. Let him work that out on his own.
I never did finish that story about what happened. I would now but the doc's on her way back. I can hear her elephant-stomps on the stairs outside. How a woman that small can walk so heavy, I will never understand.
The Sixteenth of March
I fell, yesterday. Well. More like last night. Early this morning? Sometime after midnight.
See, this is what happened.
Me and Anatole and Mitchell do a lot of walking around with really big sticks and one gun and hope that we don't run into a mob of undead fuckers in the middle of the night. See, the night watch, that's a volunteer job. No one actually wants to do it, but if it's up for grabs the same people keep volunteering.
I try not to look too closely at why I keep asking to go.
Anyway.
I don't really... Memory's a little fuzzy. They gave me some white pills and put me on the top floor by a window. I don't like this room, but my knee's all sprained and shit. I got pissed off at the pictures on the walls, and it took me a fucking hour to pull down all five of them and then hobble back to the god damn windows to hurl them as far as I could.
Fuck. I need new sneakers.
What was I? Oh, right. So. I fell.
We was walkin' around. Outside. Mitchell wanted to see if we could land some generators for space-heaters and stuff. I mean. Obviously the Jimmies aren't going to need them, and the kid, Cory, is gettin' worse so he needs his own room. There's a couple apartment buildings on this block, and there's a fuckin' hotel or motel thing a couple blocks down, and I don't know whose bright idea it was to go at night, but that's what we did. Well. They did. I just followed.
It's something. I can see a nice chunk of Queens from this window. I hate it. There's fire burning somewhere, and it's been getting bigger, but not really spreading out. Just thick black smoke from one place pretty far off. Makes me uncomfortable to watch. Fuckin' knee needs to get better soon.
So we went two buildings down. The one next door was for the people in the morning. So. Two blocks down is a wreck. The lobby wall closest to the boulevard is gone. There's just cars and shit all through the goddamn first floor. I don't know why the fuck that didn't happen to our building.
Am I cursing a lot? I guess I am. Knee hurts. Gonna take another pill.
Oh. Oh man. I think I'm just gonna. What the hell is this? Vicodin?
Fuck it. I'm gonna finish this later.