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.