5/6/2014

5/6/2014

Not much today. We're still on the elementary school roof. There are maybe a half dozen dead on the ground below us, and I heard at least one in the building a few hours ago. Today, we just spent the day sitting around up here.

At some point during our time at the grocery store, Karen had grabbed some food and stuffed it in my book bag. All of us were grateful, with the possible exception of Amber, who said that she'd always thought Karen was a thief. I had to cool down an argument that almost turned into your typical school hallway catfight.

Other than that, they day went by pretty fast, and none of us got hurt at all. Mr. Hammond and I spent a little bit planning our next step. I don't know why he thought I'd be a good person to plan with, I'm a sixteen year old kid who couldn't think past Friday night before all this happened. Now, I just want to make it to Friday night.

5/5/2014

5/5/2014 

We had to leave the resturaunt, unfortunately. Yesterday, Sunday, I woke up to the smell of gas. I wasn't the only one, either. I ran downstairs to see what was going on, and there were probably twenty dead inside, having piled against the door and broken it down. One of them must have bumped into one of the ovens, or something, because a gas line had been ruptured. I could smell it upstairs, and I could really smell it down there. I quickly shut the door to the kitchen and ran back upstairs. I woke Karen and her dad up, told them what was going on, and we each preceeded to pack a bag of stuff. Of course, I couldn't forget this notebook. It really is turning into a necessity, now. I kept my acquired rifle and axe, as well, though I figured I'd use the axe more. I've never fired a gun in my life, I'm probably shit with them.

There's a fire escape at the back of the building, which we used to avoid the dead at the front of the building. Sasha's body was still there, thankfully unmoving. We each climbed down, me first (I had the axe), then Mr. Hammond (didn't want his daughter to get hurt while he was up on the fire escape), and then finally Karen (didn't really want to leave, but knew she had to). Once we got on the ground, Mr. Hammond took the lead and nearly got himself bitten by the homeless dead guy. At one point on Saturday, when I was taking care of it, I dropped the can with the dice in it. The homeless guy grabbed it and tried to bite into it. He probably thought it had been making noise because it was alive. Guess the dead are pretty stupid, but, then again, they are dead.

I swung the axe and took the homeless guy's head clean off at the neck. His body fell, and his head rolled off of his neck and landed behind his body. The head still kept snapping at us as passed by, but it didn't get any of us. Karen suggested opening the back door and tossing a match inside to cause a gas explosion, but Mr. Hammond vetoed that idea right away, feeling that it would only cause more problems than it would solve. I agreed with Karen, but I kept my mouth shut.

We hiked for about seven miles until we reached the elementary school at the edge of town. We would have driven, had it not been for the fact that Mr. Hammond's car was parked out front, where the dead were getting into the resturaunt. None of the three of us knew how to hotwire a car, so that option was out. I guess if I'm gonna try and survive as long as I can, I should probably get a lesson on hotwiring from somebody.

The elementary school had been listed as one of the rescue stations on the radio the first day. I'm going to assume that somebody infected got inside, because when we got there, most of the exterior doors were either open or busted off the hinges, several windows were opened or broken, and there was one lone corpse wandering around in the yard. It saw us, and I quickly slammed the axe down on its head. We didn't go inside the school, yet, but we didn't forget about it, either.

We continued on further into town. The closest rescue station after the school was the grocery store on Vinewood and 3rd Street. I was the first one to reach the front doors, so I pulled them open and saw thirty surprised people looking at me like I was a crazed monster. A cop had his gun out and pointed at me. I told him I was just a kid, not a threat, and he lowered his gun. Mr. Hammond and Karen showed up about two seconds later and then we were ushered inside.

There were plenty of people I recognized at the grocery store. Being a small town of maybe only a couple of thousand people, that's not a big surprise, the surprise was seeing them all beaten up and bloodied. Obviously, they had had as hard a time dealing with the dead as I had.

The cop didn't confiscate my stuff, instead praising me for finding such useful equipment. I told him how I got the gun and the axe and he told me that the guy had probably deserved what he got. I didn't exactly see it that way, but my actions a few days ago can never be erased, so, no use crying over it. I told him about the rest of the good ol' boys that had left their friend and he told me that they were probably “holed up in some shack out in the woods, drinkin' Bud and pissin' all over themselves.” I can only hope.

The rest of Sunday went by quickly until I decided to hit the sack. I found a corner and laid my stuff down, then I used my pink book bag as a pillow. Karen slept next to me, very pleasant.

This morning, I woke up to sounds coming from the back room. My sleeping spot had put me right by the doors that led behind the coolers. I left Karen where she was, picked up my axe, and crept into the back room of the grocery store. I was instantly reminded of the movie The Mist, where a guy and his kid and a few dozen others spend a few days in a grocery store while monsters prey on them. When the monsters first show up, a bag boy, who was about my age, gets grabbed by this big tentacle monster and pulled away to his death. I didn't think there were tentacle monsters back there, but I assumed there might have been dead people, which was probably just as bad.

As it turned out, not only was I wrong, the cop was wrong about the good ol' boys pissing on themselves in a shack. Two of them were back there, with a girl I knew from school tied up with duct tape on her mouth. I, very loudly, asked them what they were doing, and one of them instantly recognized me as the “dumb fucker who killed Lem.” He took a baseball bat and first hit Amber (the girl from school) in the stomach with it, then took a swing at me. I ducked out of the way just in time, but lost my grip on the axe in the process. His buddy grabbed Amber by the chin and placed one of those old straight-blade razors to her neck. I told him to let her go, but he just laughed and told the other guy to finish up with me.

Speaking of the other guy, he had rapidly closed the distance between himself and I, and replaced his bat with my axe. He took a swing at me with the axe and I could almost feel the air being sliced in two as the axe passed over my head. I rushed toward him and knocked him down, no small feat considering I weighed maybe 170 while this guy had to weigh well over 250 pounds of muscle, and an extra 40 in beer gut. He tried to get me with the axe again, but this time, I grabbed it by the handle, elbowed him in his beer gut, and wrestled the axe away from him.

By this time, we must have attracted some attention, because two cops – the one who told me I was in the right when I accidentally killed that hick from the other day included – rushed in, both with their guns out and flashlights pointed at us. I told them that I had heard a noise and come back here, and they believed me. Then, Beer Gut told the cops that I had killed their friend a few days back, but I was, thankfully, off the hook, because these guys were already known felons, and they had just been caught attempting to rape one minor and murder another.

We were all brought out from the back room and Amber gave me a hug and a kiss – sadly, in front of Karen – and thanked me for trying to save her. I immediately had to smooth things over with Karen, but saving a life sure made it feel worth it.

Mr. Hammond had found some of his friends and found out that they were planning on gathering up a couple buses from the station across the street from the resturaunt and using the to ferry all the survivors to one of the military outposts in the next county. Nice to know that there can't be any military outposts in this county. Closest county line was at least twenty miles east of here.

Anyway, Mr. Hammond told them it was a bad idea, thanks to all the dead crowding the resturaunt right now. They didn't exactly like that, and at least one of them stormed out of the grocery store and into the dead-infested streets to get to his car. This was a bad thing. When he walked out, he must have attracted some dead, because not five minutes later, they were all around the store. They were banging on the windows, banging on the doors, at least a couple of them even picked up rocks and started using those to pound on the glass.

The cops tried to corral us close to the back of the store, in hopes that the dead would lose sight of us and lose interest in the building, but one man panicked and tried to wrestle a gun away from one of the cops. The gunshot was loud in the confined space of the store, and the bullet tore through the panicked man's foot very nastily. His pain-filled scream riled up the dead outside to the point that I thought they were just going to knock the walls down and converge on us in seconds. It didn't go down that way, but Mr. Hammond still pulled Karen and I into the back room where we could escape through the back door. Amber followed us, much to Karen's annoyance.

We got out the back door and back onto the streets. Most, if not all, of the dead were around front, trying to get in. I heard glass breaking a few minutes later and then more screams and a lot of gunshots. It sounded a lot like they got in, after all.

Amber told us that she and her parents had been shuttled around to a few of the rescue stations in town, including the elementary school. She suggested we go there, because it had been evacuated within hours of the first attacks on Wednesday. She said there'd be fewer of them in there, because there hadn't been many living in there to begin with. We took her on her word, and made our way to the elementary school. On our way out of the grocery store, Mr. Hammond managed to find a steel bar in the back room, and I grabbed Karen a butcher knife from the resturaunt before we ever left yesterday. I had told Mr. Hammond I could get one for him, but he had said that I was our best bet for survival, thanks to how good I was getting with the axe.

Amber had been right, there weren't many dead on the school grounds. We made it from the first floor to the roof without seeing one of them, and then we barricaded ourselves on the roof. We're in a pretty good location, so long as it doesn't rain. I heard more gunshots about an hour ago, but I couldn't tell what direction they were coming from.

The full moon is the only thing providing me enough light to write right now. I wish we'd grabbed some of Karen's candles before we left the resturaunt yesterday, but we sort of left in a hurry. Maybe tomorrow, we'll find a way out of here and a place to go. Twenty miles to the county line, though with no vehicle and a lot of dead out there, it may as well be a thousand miles. Maybe I'll be optimistic tomorrow.

Maybe.

5/3/2014

5/3/2014

Happy Saturday. Woke up this morning to the smell of bacon. Mr. Hammond had gone downstairs in the middle of the night, grabbed some bacon and eggs from out of the freezer, and brought them up here for us this morning. He took my axe, just in case any of them had broken in after we tossed Sasha outside. Luckily, a few of them had wandered away, thanks to what he said sounded like gunshots. I guess some people are fighting back against the dead, as opposed to looting gas stations and robbing teenage boys at gunpoint.

Karen was already awake, helping her dad in the kitchen. Despite the fact that their home sat on top of a resturaunt, Karen and her dad still had a kitchen in the upstairs portion of the house. They felt it was easier than having to stay downstairs and cook for themselves after spending the whole day downstairs cooking for their customers, and I can't blame them. I must have had an emptier stomach than I thought I did, because I wolfed the bacon and eggs down pretty damn fast. So fast, in fact, that I offered to cook extra for everybody. Mr. Hammond laughed at it all. “The world goes to hell, and you're still cookin' for the breakfast crowd,” he said, and that got Karen and I laughing too. The situation was a clean spot in the middle of a whole lot of shit.

Today was pretty easy. Karen and I just spent the day watching all the dead outside, studying them. She told me something that just plain disturbed me. On Wednesday, when my parents and I heard that first broadcast, they didn't say anything about why the dead were attacking the living. At some point on Thursday, after cell phone service was taken away from us, there had been another broadcast, this one just a regular Joe who had hijacked a radio station. He was still broadcasting, actually. This guy explained that the dead were actually eating the living. I thought back to my mom attacking my dad, and it made sense. After ripping off that piece of his arm, she just sat there on my bed and munched on it for however long it took my dad to get back up, and after that, I was the only living thing in the house. Mrs. Ferguson must not have been killed by one of the dead, because she was relatively wound-free, kind of like that guy I killed.

That leads me to the one dark spot in the day. A woman drove up to the resturaunt, didn't see us, and tried to get in through the front door after most of the dead had been led away. Like I said, she didn't know we were there, but she must have wanted someone to be there, because she started yelling toward Karen's open bedroom window. She and I stayed out of sight while the woman screamed, but we both looked out when the homeless man grabbed her from behind and took a very large bite out of her neck. Karen grabbed hold of me and just started crying, so I shut the window and closed the mini-blinds, then spent the better part of an hour consoling her. The woman, sadly, took a very long time to die. Hearing her scream turn into a gurgle and then finally die off is something I really hope I forget soon.

One thing I forgot to mention is that the internet is still working. Interestingly, a lot of websites that required you to pay, like Netflix, Hulu Plus and that sort of thing, are now a hundred percent free. I guess when the country goes to hell, you drop the prices. I spent some of the day catching up on episodes of Arrow and The Following. Karen surfed the web looking for news, finding out that there was a bit of a fight at the Canadian border, and some of the dead made it up north of the US. Mexico still seemed to be doing okay, though, but that could have to do with most of Mexico being up here in the US. Some of the bigger cities are worse off than our small little town, and that scares the hell out of me. I doubt there's that many living people here, so there must be less in the bigger cities.

Well, it's nighttime now. Again, I'm writing by candlelight. Thankfully, Karen's a freak for candles, she buys them every single payday. I'm sleeping on the couch, while Karen sleeps in her bedroom. Mr. Hammond went to bed about an hour ago. Y'know, I'm sure it'd be any guy's dream, to need to live in his girlfriend's house and sleep with her while he does. I just can't. I'm weird, I guess. Maybe it's the fear that her dad will take my axe and chop my head off if he finds us, but I'm sure he actually wouldn't mind if we slept in the same bed. I still just can't. I was raised very traditionally, you don't sleep with a girl until you're married or at least mature enough to take care of a kid.

I'm going to bed now, journal. Write in ya tomorrow.

5/2/2014

5/2/2014

I made it to the resturaunt, thankfully. That was the hard part. I woke up this morning at about seven thirty, according to my phone. After that it died, so the thing really doesn't matter anymore. Karen's always been on my ass to charge it more often. I guess if I'd foreseen the impending apocalypse, I'd have listened to her, but I'm the standard American teenager in a small town, I really don't have the ability to foresee Friday night. Which, ironically, it is right now. If it were a normal night, Mr. Hammond and I would be dealing with the Friday night crowd, usually the busiest night of the week.

After waking up, I sat up and looked around the car to see if there was any movement, alive or dead. Remember that gas station I stopped at yesterday? It was in plain view of the car and there was a pickup truck parked at the number three pump. Two guys with hunting rifles (or, well, what I assumed were hunting rifles, I don't really know guns all that well) were standing at the front and back of the truck. I could see at least one guy inside, though something told me there were two. I opened up the door that faced them so that they could see that I wasn't dead, then the closest one shot out the window. I instantly closed the door, even though I knew that wouldn't matter. I slipped out the door on the opposite side of the car just as I heard one of them reach me. He told me to get out of the car and give him my stuff, but I just kept to the side he couldn't see. He reached the car and yelled to his buddies that there was no one in the car, but one of the others said that he saw me. When he came around to my side of the car, I slid around to the front of the car, still out of sight of the others at the gas station.

This was when I got lucky. For no explainable reason, there appeared to be a fire axe under the car. I carefully slid it out from under the car and readied myself. I considered jumping out and scaring the man, but I had mental images of him just shooting me dead right then and there. Instead, I waited until I caught a glimpse of him and swung the axe, digging it into his leg. He fell to the ground, and must have pulled the trigger in a reflex action, because a gunshot rang out and nearly deafened me. I'd never heard a gunshot that close in my life. Today was actually full of things I'd never experienced in my life, not the least of which was cutting a man's leg off with in axe. I came around the car and pulled the axe out of his leg, which nearly made me gag. I could watch this stuff in movies or on TV, but seeing a large axe wound in an actual human being was a bit much.

I saw the look on his face, one that I was certain I would have seen on my own two days ago when I saw my mom get bitten by Mrs. Ferguson, or my dad bitten by my mom. He looked scared to death. He'd lost hold of his rifle, which I kicked away into the grass beside the car. It didn't take long for him to pass out. One of his buddies had run over to the car to find out what was going on. I grabbed the first guy's rifle and yelled at him to get away. I obviously looked like I'd never held a gun before, because I hadn't, outside of guns I made out of Legos when I was a kid, and those aren't as heavy as real guns. The guy, of course, didn't take me too seriously, because he shot a round off at my feet, which made me jump back a little. His buddies (I could now tell there were two of them) pulled the truck around and told him to hurry up with me. He grabbed my bag from where I'd dropped it and took everything but my notebook and a bottle of soda. None of them even tried to help their friend, they just left him to die on the side of the road thanks to blood loss from an axe wound caused by a sixteen year-old kid.

So, there I was, on the side of the road with man I'd killed. They didn't take the axe or the hunting rifle, either. Must have thought I could take care of myself, but didn't need the food. At least they didn't take you, my notebook. Two days in, this is already starting to feel like something I need to do to relax.

The rifle had a shoulder strap, so I awkwardly slung it over my shoulder, attempting to do what I'd seen in the movies, but it was a lot more difficult. I grabbed the notebook and the axe next, thinking it'd be a pretyt good weapon against the dead. It was a thought I'd actually have to put to the test mere seconds later, when the guy I killed sat up and tried to get me. I tossed the notebook on the hood of the car and slammed the axe down on the dead man's head. He didn't move after that. Splitting his skull open made me think about my mom. Coming down the stairs, I'd tripped on her head. Maybe damage to the head is what kills these things. It'd be something to try later on.

I gathered what little stuff I had and headed back to the gas station. Those guys had done a number on the place, knocked over shelves and everything. I grabbed what I could, again. This time, however, there were no plastic bags left. I found a book bag that probably belonged to one of the two dead employees I found in the back room. Dead-dead, not un-dead. Either they'd been undead and those guys shot them, or they'd been dead-dead when I stopped by yesterday. Either way, I was glad I found that book bag. I knew the girl who owned it, too. Sharon Baker, sat next to me in third period Chemistry. Karen always thought I stared at her too often. I emptied the book bag on the counter, finding her school books, her non-gas-station-employee clothes and a box of condoms. I guess Karen was right after all, she was screwing Brock Overman, the lead quarterback. I handed her the twenty bucks I owed her when I got to the resturaunt.

Dumping all my new stuff in the extremely pink book bag, I tried to more accurately sling the rifle over my shoulder and kept the axe at the ready. I probably looked like a damn gay hunter, or something. I got on my way and started hoofin' it for the resturaunt. Too bad I lost that portable radio, but I wasn't going to head back home to replace it with the one my parents had. I was done with my house, forever. My dad's probably still just crawling around there.

The trip started out pretty uneventful, but ended up very eventful. I don't know if the dead can tell where living people are, but there were probably twenty of them swarming the resturaunt. I kept to the other side of the road and made my way to the back of the building. On my way there, I spotted that homeless guy, still trying to get the dice in the soda can. I could see that Karen was the one rattling it, sitting at the window. I waved to her, but she wasn't paying attention to me, so I just ran to the back door and... found it wide open.

That wasn't good. I walked inside slowly, making sure I didn't miss any corners. No one presented themselves right away, so I shut the door and locked it. I walked a little further into the kitchen, still looking for any movement, but still not seeing any. It was around that time that a hand grabbed me and pulled me down and I almost put my axe in Mr. Hammond's head. He shushed me, then pointed over the counter. I peeked over the top of the counter and saw Sasha wandering around in the dining room, bumping into tables. Two other dead were trying to get in from outside, but the front doors must have still been locked. The other twenty or so were just hanging around outside, not trying to get in at all.

Mr. Hammond told me that around four o'clock that morning, Sasha came in, thinking that no one was there. He and Karen had kept the lights off, so they wouldn't attract any dead. Sasha had shown up, coughing up a storm. All the coughing was what attracted the local dead population, which was made up of the bus across the street at the bus depot. It was at six o'clock this morning when she died. Karen and her dad didn't know anything about it until she started banging on the door to the stairs, looking for someone to kill.

We left Sasha and went upstairs, where I immediately embraced Karen, who wouldn't let go of me. She asked me about all the stuff I had on me, and I told her the whole story. Thank God I wrote it down, I might have forgotten some of it. Two days ago feels like two weeks ago with all the stuff I've done since.

And I wasn't done just yet. Mr. Hammond and I went back downstairs, where he distracted Sasha, led her toward us, and I hid behind the counter and waited for her to get closer. When she got close enough, I stood up and swung my axe into her head. After that, Mr. Hammond and I had a silent memorial. Sasha was like an aunt to me, and a pretty good friend. We carried her out back and tossed her away from the door, then shut it again and made sure it was locked. Our actions had drawn more dead to the front door, but still not enough to cause any trouble.

For a few hours afterward, Karen and I just sat on the couch, watching TV. None of the local channels were playing anything but a steady stream of rescue stations and messages to stay inside. The cable networks were still running their usual programming. I guess they must have those planned by the week, or something. Maybe after a couple of days, they won't be playing anything, either.

Karen said something a little while ago that got me thinking. She told me how lucky she felt, since her dad was still alive and I was still alive. That got me thinking about my parents. I didn't even spend a second grieving over them on Wednesday when they died. Maybe it was shock, maybe I'm just a horrible son who wanted his parents dead, I don't know, but it bothers me now that it didn't bother me earlier. I hadn't even shed a tear over them. Karen did, when I told her, but I didn't. It really bothers me now.

Right now, Karen and I are still on the couch. She's asleep against my shoulder, while I'm sitting here writing this by candlelight. Mr. Hammond left us a blanket, which Karen is covered up with. I spent last night sleeping in a car, and the night before that in a closet. I guess I don't need blankets anymore. Good night, journal.

5/1/2014

5/1/2014

I'm inside a car now. I fell asleep sometime after finishing last night's entry and woke up at sunrise this morning to see that my parents' shadows were no longer wandering around my room. My bedroom's on the east side of the house, so it'd be tough not to see their shadows during the morning hours. I unlocked the door, slowly opened it, and saw that my room was very empty. I quietly left the room and looked down the hallway, but neither of them was anywhere I could see.

I slowly started to descend the stairs, but stopped before I even made it halfway. Dad was using his one good arm to crawl away from the stairs, both of his legs broken, bones sticking straight out. He was trailing blood behind him, in two thick trails that started at the stairs. I took another couple of stairs and looked for Mom, but I couldn't see her. Dad took a left turn, and suddenly I had a clear shot to the front door. I decided to take my shot and bolted, drawing Dad's attention, but he was in no position, literally, to do anything about me. I slammed the door shut and used my key to lock it from the outside.

Mrs. Ferguson was standing out in the street, almost like she had nothing better to do. I made damn sure she didn't see or hear me by taking my steps slowly and carefully, then breaking into a run before far enough away from her. I ran for a pretty long time before I finally came to a stop at a gas station about a mile away from the house. I stopped in there for a few minutes and stuffed a bunch of things into a plastic bag: Candy bars, bottled water, a Mountain Dew, the battery radio behind the counter and batteries for my flashlight.

While I was grabbing all this stuff, it came to my attention that I was still holding onto this journal for reasons that I really can't explain right now. I should have dropped it then, but I kept holding onto it, and now I'm still writing in it. Thankfully, I'm not wasting my flashlight batteries because there's a street light just outside the car that's still on. Seems like it was just my block that lost power, bet it was a car accident or something.

Before leaving the gas station, I called Karen again. She answered the phone very scared, thinking that I'd been attacked, and that's why I hung up on her yesterday. I told her the whole story, about what happened to my parents. Her dad took the phone from her and told me to hoof it over there. I told him I was on my way, then we were forced to hang up. Cell phones satellites were being reserved for military and law enforcement use, or at least that's what the message that played said.

I stuffed this notebook into the bag and my cell phone into my pocket and I started on my way to the resturaunt. I was maybe twenty minutes into my trek when I realized that I'd left my keys at the house. I had considered myself lucky when I got out of the place unscathed, now I had to go back.

I made it back to my neighborhood without incident, then I stopped behind a Uhaul and watched Mrs. Ferguson. She was still just standing there, like a freakin' robot or something. Judging by what I'd seen of the dead so far, all she was waiting for was something to attack, and I wasn't going to give her the luxury of it being me. I slowly made my way back to my house, out of her sight. At one point she turned her head in the direction of where I'd been, and I just stopped. As I sit here in this car, I wonder what exactly attracts them, and I think movement must be at least one thing.

Now, you're probably wondering why I have two sets of keys, since I already told you that I locked my front door with my keys. Before I got my job at Mr. Hammond's resturaunt, I had a nasty habit of losing my keys. Mr. Hammond made me promise that I'd keep the keys separate so that if I ever lost my house keys, I'd never lose the keys to his resturaunt, which was also his house. A little demeaning, but understandable. As such, I never took the keys to the resturaunt with me to school, and I was all ready to go to school before the dead showed up at my house and decided they wanted company.

I decided that the front door was probably a bad idea, since Dad was probably still crawling around by there. I slipped around by the back door and tried to see something through the semi-transparent curtains that Mom decided had to be a good idea. I didn't see any movement, but that didn't mean Mom wasn't there, waiting for something living to step through the door. I slowly unlocked the door, then slowly opened it. Nothing in the immediate area, thank God.

I crept through the kitchen until I reached the stairs, then decided to grab a little something from the kitchen before going further into the house. I grabbed a knife from the block on the counter. Thank God I work in a resturaunt where we serve steak, I'm pretty damn good with a knife. I made it back to the stairs and then saw exactly what I didn't want to see: Mom, standing at the top of the stairs, looking around for, well, me. Her jaw was hanging down, kind of oddly, like she'd broken it at some point between last night and then. I couldn't see Dad, but I knew he had to be around here somewhere.

It was at this point that I started thinking about Dad. His legs had been broken, and nobody had done it to him, the only thing it could have been was him falling down the stairs. I didn't exactly want to hurt my mom, even if she was dead, but I knew that her getting her legs broken from a tumble down the stairs would be the best way for me to get to my room and get my keys. I grabbed the salt shaker and tossed it at the stairs. Salt wasn't alive, but the movement alone got Mom interested.

It's an odd feeling, knowing that you just broke your mother's legs. Certainly you've heard of the whole “Step on a crack, break your mother's back” bull? Well, I actually did break my mother's back, her spine was sticking out and everything. It was gross. Still, she struggled to turn in my direction in her attempt to get me. I stepped over her and then up the stairs, where I knew everything was safe. I opened my closet and grabbed the resturaunt keys out of my hoodie from the day before yesterday.

Now came the hard part, getting back outside without Mom grabbing me. She still had the use of her arms, damaged though they were, and could easily grab me. I decided that the best thing to do was to run, so I bolted down the stairs. This turned out to be the worst idea that I could have, because I tripped on Mom's head. She didn't try to grab me, but I did catch Dad's attention. I blacked out for a few seconds, because he went from six feet away from me to three feet away in the blink of an eye. I got up, with some extreme pain in my knees, and made for the front door. That was when I forgot that the front door was locked, and I really didn't have the time to unlock it to go outside, then lock it again when I got out there.

Instead, I made for the back door, which was still wide open. Mrs. Ferguson was standing there, and saw me. I readied the knife I'd taken from the kitchen and ran for her, jamming the knife into her chest and pushing her against the backyard fence. The knife went straight through, and stuck her to the fence. She tried pulling herself off the fence, but I had jammed that knife in better than I thought, because she just could not move. I was about to shut the back door and lock it, but my dad had gained a sudden burst of speed, or something, because he was about halfway through the door behind me. I just broke into a run and got as far away from my house as possible.

I was about halfway to the resturaunt when it got dark. I decided that if the last couple close calls with the dead happened in the daylight, nighttime would probably be a lot worse, so I found a car with its doors unlocked and now, here I am, waiting out the night. I wish I could call Karen and tell her I'm safe and on my way, but the satellites are still for government use only. Luckily, it should only take me a couple more hours before I get to the resturaunt, and the roads have been clear enough so far. If only I knew how to hotwire a car, I'd just drive there. Don't have my license, but I doubt those laws still apply right now. I should turn in for the night.

4/30/2014

4/30/2014

Holy... shit... I'm writing this in a closet with very little light because right now, I'm hiding from my parents. I have one hand cupped over the flashlight to minimize how much light they can see under the door. It was a reflex action that made me grab the journal in the first place, now I'm just writing to calm my nerves, and lemme tell ya, it ain't workin'.

First off, I woke up this morning to a storm siren. The power was out in the house, so my alarm clock never went off, and I was late for school. I quickly got dressed, pretty much ignoring the storm siren, how stupid I was. As soon as I hit the bottom step, my dad grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the kitchen. He and my mom were both standing around the kitchen table, listening to a battery-powered radio. Even though I'll probably never forget what I heard, I'm still gonna write it down here:

“As of six a.m. eastern standard time, the continental United States is now under martial law. Our nation's borders to Canada and Mexico are now being patrolled by the respective militaries of those nations, and neither are accepting American refugees. All law enforcement is now to be considered an extension of the federal government. For reasons yet to be explained, the bodies of the recently dead are rising and attacking all living creatures. As of this time, we have no idea how widespread this phenomenon is, and are taking measures to contain it here. Do not leave your current location unless an evacuation convoy arrives to shuttle you to the nearest shelter. Do not answer your door to strangers or anyone who is incapable of coherent speech.”

After that, the station just rebroadcasted that message for about an hour, which is why I remember it so clearly. Even so, I don't think I would have forgotten after just the one time hearing it.

I ran up stairs to my bedroom to grab my cell phone. It's a decision I regret now, because if I hadn't run upstairs, I could have been downstairs to help my parents when our dead neighbor walked in through our unlocked back door.

Unlike 99.999% of all teenagers on the planet, I don't take my phone to school with me. Anyone I'd call with it is already in the building, why would I need it? Until I come home from school, that phone sits on the very desk that this notebook sleeps on. I barely had a good grip on it before I started dialing Karen. She answered with a very panicked voice. They had heard the broadcasts earlier, and already had a close call with one of the dead.

Remember that homeless guy living in the cardboard box behind the resturaunt? He had walked around to the front of the building and knocked on the door. Karen told me that blood was trickling down his chin from his mouth, and there was still some of it on the door glass from where he pressed his face into it. Mr. Hammond took a soda can, dropped some dice into it, tied it to a string, and then hung it out a second story window on the side of the building, then started shaking it to lure the dead homeless man away from the front doors. Karen and her dad are both keeping to the second floor, and all the doors on the first floor are locked. The front door can only be unlocked from inside, and only four people have keys to the back door: Karen, her dad, me and Sasha.

When I heard my mom screaming, I abruptly hung up the phone and ran downstairs as fast as I could, tripping on the last step and falling face-first to the floor. I quickly got back up and just in time to help my dad pull our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Ferguson, off of my mom. Just as we got the old lady off of her, Mrs. Ferguson took a bite out of Mom's shoulder. Dad pushed her out the door and kicked her back, then shut and locked the door. After that, he looked at me and almost scowled. I was the last one in through the back door, I should have locked it, Mom getting bitten was my fault.

Dad and I grabbed Mom and carried her upstairs. We laid her on my bed, because mine was the closest room to the stairs, and I held one of my shirts to her shoulder to hold down the bleeding while Dad ran into the bathroom to get the cloth bandages. When he got back in my room, he set to work bandaging her wound, but he was a little too late. Mom died just after Dad finished with the bandages.

Sixteen years of life, I never heard my dad cry. Then, when I finally did, he was dead five minutes later. His crying was obviously an omen, that it was time he left this world. Whatever was the cause, five minutes after my mom died, she sat up and bit Dad on the arm, just as Mrs. Ferguson had bitten her on the shoulder. Dad pushed her away, then fell to the floor, clutching at his arm.

After that, it was pure reflex. I just grabbed this notebook and the pen that went with it and locked myself in my closet. Not shortly after that, Mom must have gotten up from the bed, because she was pounding on the closet door, like she'd seen me get in here, and then Dad joined her about ten minutes after that. I've been in this closet ever since. I've considered calling Karen, but I'm afraid they might here me. The door is locked, but who says they can't break the door down if they pound against it hard enough? About two hours ago, they stopped pounding on the door, so they must think I'm not in here. I've been watching their shadows moving under the door, hopefully they leave my room soon.

4/29/2014

4/29/2014

How's it goin', journal? Well, for me, it's pretty boring. That homeless guy I wrote about yesterday? He's still in that cardboard box back behind the resturaunt, and today, I found him chowing down on a rabbit.Granted, the rabbit wasn't exactly anybody's pet, but it's still a defenseless animal being eaten by a homeless guy that was supposed to be in a shelter by now. I guess Mr. Hammond was either too busy today, or the cops couldn't take him or something. Either way, the guy freaks the crap out of me.

School was plenty boring, too. I spent most of the day wondering why half the damn school didn't show up, and the rest of the day wondering why I cared about half the school not showing up. Either way, all anybody did was the usual work: English, Geometry, Chemistry, Gym, yadda, yadda, yadda and yadda. Each class almost seemed more boring than the last, and that was accomplishing something.

Some some weird stuff in the news before I hopped on my bike and pedalled to school. I guess some cops got attacked by some methed-up dirtbags in a raid last night. Makes me glad I never jumped in on the habit when somebody brought some to school, otherwise I might have been like one of those meth heads the cops took down. Still, one cop had to go to the hospital because he was bitten. Crazy guys, I'll tell you.

When Karen and I got to work, after school, Mr. Hammond immediately gave us the day off. After the lunchtime rush, the place emptied pretty quick, and he decided to close early to give himself a rest. He and I are the only two cooks, and Karen and Sasha Wilkes are the only two waitresses. Sasha went into a coughing fit as soon as Karen and I showed up. I guess she was doing that most of the day, wearing a surgical mask.

So, with a day to ourselves, Karen and I took a little hike into town to catch a movie. It was both pretty romantic and more than a little creepy that she and I were the only two people in the theater. Romantic, because we spent the entire two and a half hours of the second Hobbit movie making out; creepy, because the projectionist was probably watching us the whole time instead of the movie. If it was my friend Eric, I knew he was watching us, the guy's a major perv.

After the movie, we went back to the resturaunt, where I cooked us up a little meal, Karen's dad, too. It's rare when we get the whole joint to ourselves because we're usually dealing with the dinnertime crowd, whose names we all know by heart. Small town, plenty of regulars. About the only time new faces come in is the lunchtime rush, when truckers and commuters of all shapes and sizes are passing by.

After dinner, we spent the rest of the night cuddling on the couch, where we kept going back and forth between The Voice and The Originals, because there was nothing else on. I popped a DVD in just as a news report that neither one of us wanted to watch came on. After leaving Karen with a goodnight kiss and heading home, I sat down here at my desk and started writing in you, journal. I gotta say, maybe Karen's onto something with this journal-writing thing. Helps me clear my head just before I go to bed. Nighty-night, journal. See ya tomorrow. Or, Thursday. Wednesdays can be pretty exhausting at the resturaunt.