The Apocalypse Blog
by Melanie Edmonds

It would be so easy to just stay here.  There are a couple of stores here that haven’t been completely stripped of food and water, and there hasn’t been any sign of other people yet.  We could try to make ourselves comfortable, at least until the food ran out.

Good god, we’re locusts.  A very small, ravenous swarm of locusts.

We can’t stay here; we have to keep moving.  Thorpe asked me a few days ago why we’re carrying on to the hospital and pointed at Nugget.  Now there’s Ben too.  It’s not just clinging to the last guidance of a man named Carter; there are real reasons why we’re picking ourselves up and pushing on.

It feels so much better to have it written down.  I’ve been telling myself this stuff all day.  Trying to convince myself that there is more reason to it than ‘any direction is better than none’.  Trying not to feel guilty and selfish because I’m scared that my arm is healing wrong.  Scared that I’m broken and will never be whole again. 

Yes, I want to get to the hospital for my sake, but it’s not just that.  It’s not.

It took us most of the morning to find another vehicle and get it going.  Without Ben to help me, I had to use Thorpe’s hands, and he’s a snappish kind of assistant.  It took all of my patience and lip-biting not to snap back.  I’m starting to get the hang of releasing steering locks, even with one hand. 

We managed to find an old van and emptied out the plumbing tools so that the injured could be laid out in the back.  There was barely enough room in the street to get up the momentum to start it, and the engine sounds like it’s held together with chewing gum and bits of string, but it did start.

It was slow going – the streets here are as bad as the ones on the north side of the river, all abandoned cars and debris.  It’s hard to tell how much progress we made; the distances on the map are very small.  At this rate I think it’ll be another day or two before we reach our target.

We still haven’t seen much in the way of people around here.  It feels strange, like the whole area is holding its breath and waiting for us to pass.  It’s a relief; the last time we saw people on the south side, they were beating each other with sticks.  And our last encounter with people was hardly cordial.

I keep looking at the cracked windows for faces.  The hairs on the back of my neck are convinced that they’re there, that they resolve when we’re not looking.  I don’t believe in ghosts or spirits, I don’t believe in hauntings.  But this empty shell of a place feels like it’s awake and watching us.  It doesn’t feel empty at all.

If it hadn’t been for the rain, I would have slept in the van rather than in one of those unoccupied not-empty buildings.  But none of us wanted to risk the rain, so we crept into an old café missing its entire frontage.  It was deep enough to shelter from the acid water and the rear doors could be blocked up, and that was all we needed.

I don’t know how I’m ever going to sleep.  I’m sure that the building across from us has eyes in it.

We got trapped in the van today.  We’re still in it now, huddling, while the rain patters down on it.

It used to be such a comforting sound.  That wonderful noise put me to sleep as a child: the delicious rhythm of water on a roof; the rich drip of it off gutters and eaves and the boughs of the tree outside my window. 

I would close my eyes sometimes and listen to the hammering of it, beating at a world that cheerfully wouldn’t submit.  A world that would drink it up and turn it into something green and lush.  And sometimes, just sometimes, when it was hot and heavy out, I would go outside and stand in it.  Let it fall on me, prickling and thick.  And I would dance in it.

Now, it hisses on contact, turning to snakes even on impenetrable metal.  The ribbons of it are faintly green-tinged; I can only tell by watching it slither down the windscreen a few inches from my face.  It makes me tense just listening to it.  It brings to mind the faces I watched melt, how they barely had time to scream before sound was robbed from them.  How they looked at us before the acid took their eyes.

Today, it started without warning.  The first thing we knew, Sax was shouting in pain because he had had an arm propped on the sill of the passenger window and spots on his elbow and forearm were dissolving.  Thorpe was driving and nearly panicked, but we’re in a residential street – no store windows to plough through this time.  He didn’t risk a crash, and I’m glad of that. 

I dread to think what might have happened if he had tried to put us inside a building by sheer force alone.  Broken windows, buckled metal and sprung seams, thrown bodies sprawled everywhere, and the rain seeping in over all of it.  I have a mental image of a crash test dummy bent, bleeding, melting, and bearing all of our faces.

Thorpe took a breath and stopped the van instead.  We rolled all the windows up and double-checked the doors, shut ourselves tightly inside.  It was all we could do, even though it made the van suffocatingly hot.  We would all rather put up with the heat than the acid.

Of course, the van leaks.  The doors at the back are not well sealed (despite this being a plumber’s van), and there’s a crack along one side of the roof that has rusted through.  We have moved everyone away from that side of the van – the rain doesn’t seem to be pooling much, thank goodness.

Ben started to shake when the rain came inside – he was trying so hard not to freak out, but he was almost hyperventilating.  The cab seems waterproof, so we helped him scramble into the front.  He’s calmer now, though he’s still watching the rain with taut horror.  He had a deathgrip on my hand for a while.  His burns are still bright and painful; I wonder if seeing the rain that caused it is making them itch with familiarity.

Sax’s arm isn’t too bad, though it still looks like something slathering chewed on it and tore small, dripping chunks off.  It’s bound up now as best we could make it.  Everyone’s waiting for it the roof to come down on us and wash us away into nothing.  I know that all eyes behind me will be fixed on that place where the rain is coming in and making sickly tracks down the van’s side.

It’s so quiet in here.  I just realised that my typing is the loudest thing in here.  Now I’m all self-conscious about it.  Time to do something else.

I don’t like the silence.  I don’t like thinking about the far-off noises I can hear, or what is out there in the shadows.  I don’t like thinking about everything that brought me here to this place, cramped up in a rusty van with six stranger-friends, hoping that the rain won’t come back ever again but knowing that it will.  I don’t like thinking about the things I’ve seen, the faces I know I’ll never see again, even the ones I didn’t know that well.

I apologised to Ben when I stopped typing last night.  I should have been trying to distract him, to make him feel better.  It feels so selfish and self-serving, to huddle myself down and focus on something that’s just for me.  To type away my thoughts and my feelings, set it down so that I can make sense of it.

But he said that it was all right.  He was glad that someone was making a record of this.  He said that no-one minded the time I spent doing this, because they understood that it’s my way of coping.  Because I don’t let it get in the way of anything else.  And because they know that it’s not just me in here.  They know that I’m telling their names and their actions too, and one day someone will know that we were here, that we lived, that we were scared and we were brave, that we carried on regardless, that some of us died awfully and some of us died in our sleep.

And he’s right.  I suppose it’s not just for me. 

I might not want to think about all those people we’ve left behind, but a part of me wishes that I could have taken pictures of them.  I wish I could have recorded them all, like I’m writing this down, so that there is a mark of them left in the world.  So that someone might know what happened to us, so that our story might not be forgotten.  So that all of this might mean something.

I feel like, without this, we might slip away into the dirt and water and darkness.  And that’ll be it.  The world will digest us and move on, and it’ll be like we were never here.  It’ll be like it was all for nothing.  And that thought – right now, it’s making my hands tremble.  This has to mean something.  There has to be a point to it all, even if it’s only so that someday someone will make an effort to never let it happen again.

I felt like crying after he told me that.  I couldn’t speak for the weight on my chest.  That time, he held my hand because I needed it.

We abandoned the van today.  Not because of the nightmare of spending the night in it – though, trust me, it did not smell good in there by the morning.  Nothing like a crisis to make you familiar with the scents of strangers. 

No, not because of any of that.  We ran out of gas.  Of course, none of the pumps will work without power even if we could get to one, so there’s not much chance to refuel unless we start breaking open other vehicles and siphoning stuff out.  We’re going to save that for when we’re really desperate, I think.  Or at least until we steal a much better van.

I still think of it as stealing.  Is it stealing when the owners don’t care?  When they’re dead?  Probably not.  I can’t help it, though – I have to break into them, so it feels like theft.  I still catch myself looking over my shoulder in case I get caught.

I really should stop doing that.  I keep catching snatches of reflections, or movement behind bright glass.  There’s never anyone there.  I’m starting to think my mind is playing tricks on me and sending spiders down my spine because it thinks it’s funny.  It’s really not.  Stop it now.

We still haven’t seen anyone else.  We decided to walk on until we found a better vehicle, rather than delay and search where we were. 

The going was slow today; the injured are slowing us down.  It’s not their fault and the rest of us know that.  Even Thorpe hasn’t complained at the pace, though the fact that he had to carry Nugget for most of the day might have something to do with that; he wasn’t exactly speedy with that burden.  Hopefully we will reach the hospital tomorrow, for their sakes.

It’s so quiet here – it’s easy not to notice when there’s an engine chugging away. 

There’s no distant engines, no voices behind closed doors, no distant chattering of TVs and radios.  No leaves ruffling in the wind, no bright birdsong, no insects with their annoying buzzing.  There’s not a whisper outside of the sphere of our little group.  There’s not even any wind.  Just the scuff of our shoes, the rasp of fabric as we move, the odd grunt, sometimes a few exchanged words.

Sometimes I talk just to break the silence.  Just to prove that we’re not a part of it, to prove that we’re still alive and beating.  Of course, then I feel horribly conspicuous, like I just sucked all eyes onto me and they’re crawling over my skin.  I feel loud and clumsy.

The world is a held breath, waiting to swallow us.

We’re finding out why there’s no-one left here.  It has been sucked dry and left to pucker under this strange orange sky.

We tried three vehicles, but none of them would start.  They coughed sadly, but they wouldn’t start.  It took us a while to discover that their fuel has already been siphoned away.

Our supplies are running low.  There’s no water left at all now, and not much food.  We went into a couple of stores, but there was only dregs left.  We even went into a few homes here, only to be repulsed by the smell from the fridges.  Most of them had already been pilfered, the front doors broken in, kitchen cupboards listing emptily.  We managed to find one cupboard that had been missed, and that gave us something for dinner.

It’s clear now that whoever was left here has moved on in favour of finding food and water elsewhere.  I can’t imagine what place would be any different to this, though.

I never, ever want to eat a can of cold food again.  I will, I just don’t want to.  I’m so sick of swallowing something clammy and slimy.  It’s hard to know if my stomach is turning in revulsion or hunger these days; it all feels the same.  I wish my tastebuds would realise that any food is good right now.

We talked over our small, slick dinner, mostly so that we didn’t have to look at the food and wonder what the hell.  We’re going to push on again tomorrow, try to get out of this area.  We spent so much time searching that we made almost no progress at all today.

We’re so close now.  If we walk and don’t stop, we should make it to the hospital before the rain comes again. 

I’m almost afraid of getting there.  Afraid of what we’ll find.  Afraid of what we won’t find.  The hospital feels like a myth, feels like a mecca we’ll never reach.  It’s our carrot.  It’s all the guidance and purpose we have.  It’s our hope.

We’re so close that I can’t sleep.  I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a crevasse to open up between us and that illusory place we’re all striving for.  We have to get there.  It was the last purpose of a man who melted in the rain; it’s the last hope for a child who won’t wake up any more.

Just one more day.  For all our sakes.

There was no crevasse.  There was no obstacle that robbed us of our goal for yet another day.  It took us most of the day, but we got there.  We stretched ourselves to make it before the rain came again, until we were taut and thrumming with the strain of it.

We stopped when it came into sight. The sight turned my stomach over like a limp pancake.  It rose against the burnt sky with hunched shoulders and shattered teeth.  Smoke curled out of one corner.

Our myth and hope, our target and purpose, is a dirty reality with broken eyes.  Our mecca is made of cracked concrete and sliding doors torn off their runners.  The closer we got, the more we wished that it had stayed a mirage pulling us through this desert.

As we neared it, a part of me realised that there were no lights.  Somehow, I had pictured the hospital being all lit up, all this time.  There would be a breeze that lifted the hair away from the back of my heck, and someone brusque and efficient to chivvy me out of the way.  There’d be white and greens everywhere, and rapidfire voices, and nurses with frazzled buns trying to keep up with everything.

I had pictured the hospital as part of the world I knew.  But it’s not.  It’s a part of this post-world, it is ravaged and torn, just like everything else.  Just like us.  It is hope and hopeless, just like us.

The clouds were ganging up overhead, so we went inside anyway.  The rain started only a few minutes later, trapping us inside.

It doesn’t smell the way a hospital should; that antiseptic tang has skittered away from the air in here.  Worn away by everything else that has passed between its fingers.  We moved through it like ghosts, not wanting to breathe it in.  Even our steps were hushed, in case we were treading on the last vestiges of an illusion.

There was a triage here. There are coloured scraps of material that were used to mark the severity of the injured, lying limply on the floor.  There are gurneys lined up haphazardly, there are carts of equipment and supplies abandoned everywhere. There are stains on the blankets and the floor.  There are long black bags lined up in a corridor that leak an awful scent.

It must have been chaos.  All those people rushing here for help.  All those people we sent over the bridge to them.  They must have made it.  Some of them must have lain here, felt the touch of professional hands.  Received care.  Got what we are looking for.

We were deep inside the building before we found a room clear – and clean – enough for us to unshoulder our burdens and rest.  I think it was a staff room, once upon a time.  No-one has said anything; we don’t know what to say.  We’re just sitting, and breathing, and trying not to cry and shout at the walls.

I don’t know where all those people are now.  The injured, the carers, the doctors and nurses.  Who was looking after them?  How did they cope without power, or water?  Did they all go home and never come back?  Did they realise that it was pointless, that we are all doomed, and give up?  Did they decide to hole up in their homes until it was all over?

I get it, I really do.  But how could they?  How could they do that?  How could they leave us alone here?  How could they take this away from us?  How can they let people die when they could stop it, when they could save them?  How could they not be here waiting for us?

Where did everyone go?  Where will we go now?

I wish Carter was here.  I wish Dad was here.  And Matt.

I can’t think about them. Carter’s gone and I don’t know what’s happened to Dad, or Matt, and I can’t wonder about all the awful things that might have fallen on their shoulders.  I don’t have the strength for it.  I already see their faces melt in my dreams, dissolving as they call my name.

There must be something here.  There has to be.  I won’t let this place be empty, let it spit us out onto the street in pieces.  We’re already in pieces.

I’m not going to sit here and listen to the rain wash everything away. 

After that last post, I went scouting and found a lot of things I didn’t want to.  I also found a few things that might be of use.

There are a lot of bodies in the building.  Whatever happened here, a lot of their patients didn’t make it, and there was no-one to… dispose of them.  I hate that term – people should not be disposed of – but that seems to be what these bodies were waiting for.  Lined up, piled up in some cases, in others just left on their beds covered in soiled sheets. 

And now they’re decomposing, rotting away.  Some of them are not as big as they should be, I think: they look like they’ve been disturbed.  I didn’t want to look too closely and I really don’t want to know what’s been chewing on them. 

If they were outside, the rain would take them, but I wouldn’t wish that on the dead.  At least this way they leave a stain.

The hospital’s supply rooms have been ransacked, just like the houses and stores between here and the tunnel.  The cafeterias have been emptied, and the drug caches thoroughly pillaged.  I’m not surprised by either, though I had hoped that the latter wouldn’t be true.  I have to go back later and look through what’s left, see if there’s anything we might be able to use.

The more mundane supplies have been largely overlooked.  Like some of less pharmaceutical medical supplies around, too.  Bandages, dressings, that sort of thing.

Best of all, there’s a vending machine in a back stairwell that seems to have been overlooked.  We’re going to go back and see if we can crack it open, like a Kinder egg.

I think there are people here. I didn’t see them, but I heard them.  Shuffles in the distance, voices murmuring back and forth.  They’re on the top floor, towards the corner where the smoke was coming from; perhaps the fire was a sign of life rather than the opposite, for once.

I don’t dare hope.  I don’t want to hope.  But once we’ve had a chance to regroup, a few of us are going up to see who they are.  If they’ll help us.

We found out where all the drugs went.  I wish I could say that it was a shock, or even a surprise.  The world has gone to hell in a handbasket; who doesn’t want to get high and forget any of this ever happened? 

We climbed up to the top floor – just four of us, after we convinced Sax to stay with the injured.  Where he should be, for his sake and theirs.  Thorpe tried to suggest that I should stay behind as well, but he stopped when he saw the look on my face.

I wasn’t going to stay behind.  I wasn’t going to linger there and wait for someone else to sort this out.  All I would have done is sit and think and wonder.  Or type nonsense into this record in an effort not to do those things. 

It’s not that I don’t trust the others to do the right thing.  It’s because I have to do something.  I don’t want to be helpless, or weak, or just waiting.  I have to go and see for myself, to replace fantastical mental images with banal reality.  I have to be in motion; my body doesn’t know what to do with itself when it’s still.  My arm aches more when I’m not doing something else. 

And, as Dad would say, my legs aren’t broken, so I might as well go do it myself.

There was this weight against my back the whole way up to the top floor.  A small, hard pressure just above my belt, warm from my skin.  It had been there for days, but I was hyper-aware of it as we climbed the stairs.  We were walking towards a group that might attack us, like the tunnel-dwellers, and the knife seemed to know that.

All the windows are open up there.  I suppose that’s to let the smell out; it certainly isn’t good, even with the ventilation.  Not so much rotting bodies as rancid human waste, the by-product of plumbing that no longer works.  The stench of unwashed bodies and unclean habits.  The gut-turning aromas of the living rather than the dead.

My nose has dulled over the past couple of weeks, after the smoke and dust and then none of us being able to wash properly.  I can barely smell myself or the others in the group any more, but I smelt these people from a corridor away.  There wasn’t much in my stomach, but it still wanted me to throw up.

There were about a dozen of them, down in the geriatric ward.  The patients were all long since gone; this group had taken over the ward and made it their own.  Blankets had been piled near one set of windows and set alight; it was smouldering when we got there, small and sad.  That must have been the smoke we saw outside.

The group might have been a threat if they had been at all capable of it.  They were sprawled in various stages of consciousness, on gurneys and beds, or just stretched out on the floor.  One fella spent the whole time giggling at a painted stripe on the wall.

It was both a relief and disappointment.  They were no threat, but that’s because they’re useless.  They had taken a hospital full of medicine and used it to get completely out of their trees.  The acid is stripping all the trees down to nubs, but they are far too spaced to care. 

I tried to talk to a couple of them, but all I could get out of them was requests for more, and what did I have with me for them?  There was no food or water that we could find.  Lots of spent needles and empty bottles and packets, but no sustenance.  They were suspended on drugs alone up here.

I had to pull Dillon away from a curtained-off bed.  I caught a glimpse of pale white buttocks moving in time with huffed breaths, of a body poised above a girl with empty eyes fixed on the ceiling.  I’m aware that it’s strange to put him in danger by taking him towards potential violence and then to refuse to let him watch a stranger screwing.  He’s just a youngster, though.

There was something not quite right about what was going on in there, too.  She must have been very high to be so still.  I hope she was high.  I hope that he wasn’t doing all the moving in there, because that’s what it looked like.  It looked like she was so far beyond caring that she was never coming back.

We were just looking at each other with clueless confusion when the pair of white buttocks came out from behind the curtain.  He was doing up his pants – thank goodness – and he had a blissful glow about him.  He smiled at us, blankly cheerful in his fuzzy world.

I was going to give up and leave when I noticed that he was wearing a white coat.  It was stained and torn, but it still had a nametag attached to it.  Doctor Masterson.  I didn’t realise that I had read it out loud until he blinked at me vaguely and said, “Yes?”

Everything changed then.  We all started talking at once, which made him look from one to the other and then giggle with delight.  It’s strange, hearing a grown man giggle like a child.  He thought we were the funniest thing he’d ever seen, and his mirth creased him where he stood.

All of a sudden, I was so furious with him.  Thorpe was swearing, and that was exactly what was going through my head.  I mean, how dare he? We have people who need help, people we have kept alive through luck and cobbled-together care, and this is what we find? A doctor, someone who’s supposed to help people, incapacitated because he just had to get high.  Useless – worse than useless: a fucking waste.  A stupid, giggling mess that used to be someone who, once upon a time, chose to save lives.

It was so selfish, turning his back on everything and everyone else like this.  To wrap himself up in a hazy cocoon and damn the rest of us.  Doesn’t he know what we’ve done to get here?  Doesn’t he know what all of this means?

I didn’t realise that I was shouting at him until Thorpe put his hand on my arm to hold me back.  He thought I was going to smack the doctor, and he might have been right.  I didn’t, though. 

I subsided, stepping back and letting Thorpe deal with him.  I was shaking all over.

The tall fireman looked at the doctor – who was clueless, though he had thankfully stopped that stupid giggling – then asked if he’d come with us.  Masterson nodded easily enough; I don’t think he understood the question. 

But he did come with us.  He’s with us right now, asleep in the corner, soaked through with sweat.  We’ll have to wait until he sobers up to figure out if he’s going to be of any real help.

I’m not proud of what I did yesterday.  I’m angry with myself for going off and, if I’m honest, a bit scared.  I had lost it again, let my temper slip out of my mouth and spill venom on someone.  I hadn’t meant to, I hadn’t really been in control, and that scares me more than anything else.

There’s a knife tucked under the hem of my shirt, within easy reach.  Maybe I should take it off.  Maybe I should put it in my pack, or give it to Thorpe or Dillon.  I don’t know if I trust myself with it any more.  What if I get so angry that I pull it out and use it?  What if I lose it so much that I do that to someone?  How will I live with myself then?

I never used to be like this.  At work, I sucked up unfairness and abuse every day, drew it in and breathed it out calmly.  I never snapped, I never let my thoughts outside of my skull.  When I found out about Cody and Bree, when they ripped my heart out, I didn’t vent my pain all over them.  Even when she spread lies about me, ruined almost every friendship I’d built in the last three years through a campaign of hate, I didn’t tell her what I thought of her.  I didn’t even complain, not to her, not to any of those who turned against me.  I didn’t take any of that out on anyone.

Now I’ve done it twice.  Now my group are looking at me sideways again and I don’t know what to tell them.

I don’t think I’m handling this as well as I’d like.  I don’t think I’m handling this well at all.  I can’t sit still, I can’t stop for more than a little while at a time.  I’m so tired, right down to the bone, but I can barely sleep.  I’m a body full of restless limbs, twitching with their own agenda.

I think I’m trying not to fall apart.  I’ve seen it happen, in the CBD after the city came down.  I’ve seen the broken eyes and empty movements.  I’ve seen people whose purpose has died.  I don’t want to become that.  I have to find a way to keep myself going, and that means keeping everyone else going.  It means that I have to keep moving.  Always pushing forward, even into the teeth of the storm.

I can’t keep going like this.  Something has to give, and I think it might be me.

• Theme song: Numb - Linkin Park

I’m calmer now.  Part of that might be because the doctor is curled up in the corner, whimpering and shivering.  He’s going through withdrawal.  I feel sorry for him, but I don’t know how much of that is guilt over shouting at him yesterday.  I want to be sympathetic to his pain, but it’s hard.  I keep remembering the girl with the empty eyes, I keep wondering about what was really wrong with her.  I keep wondering about what he was doing with her, and then getting revolted.

He’s getting closer to being able to help us, though.  The others need him.  I guess I need him, too, for my arm.

I went prowling after my last post, because of that need to do something.  Just wandered around the building to see what I could find.  Dillon followed me – he usually does, but I think he was worried about me.  He kept asking me if I was okay, but I didn’t know how to talk to him.  Poor kid, he was only trying to help.

We cracked that vending machine open.  We now have lots of candies and chocolate, and, best of all, some muesli bars and chips.  It’s crap, but it’s food and better than nothing.  There was a vending machine with drinks in it in the same stairwell, so now we have liquid to keep us going for a little while.  It took us three trips to get everything back to our group’s room.

I also pilfered every useful piece of equipment I could find.  Fresh blankets and pillows, dressings and bandages, that sort of thing.  Even some clean gurneys, for the injured.

Masterson and his crew only took the drugs they could use to get high, leaving the less fun ones behind.  So I grabbed one of every other kind of drug, and I’ll ask what they’re all for when he’s sober.  I recognised one or two antibiotics, and Ben and Sax should take those.  Just in case.

I feel useful again.  That makes a bigger difference to me than I had realised.  Hearing the thanks of the group that I am so viciously attached to.  Seeing the surprised smiles they gave when they saw the food, the relief in their shoulders when they cracked open a can of soda.  The way they relaxed back on those pillows.  Even the way Ben tried to catch me and ask me if I was all right, though it was too early for me.  I don’t think I could answer that question without cracking, so I moved on without answering.

I’m not all right.  I know that now.  But I’m better than I was.

I suppose it is all about purpose; it’s the futility of things that has been getting to me.  The hollow hopes and ashen promises.  The knockbacks at every step.  The things that I can’t do anything about.  The things piling up against us.

I know there will be more knockbacks, more mountains that will rise in front of us.  I know it’ll seem impossible and I’ll feel tiny again.  And it’s hard to think that I’m going to feel like this again and again. 

I just have to keep reminding myself that we have to keep going, and that will have to be enough.