The Apocalypse Blog
by Melanie Edmonds

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.

I’m so tired. I guess I should spend more time sleeping and less time writing this blog.

This is the only way I get to unload. I can’t bring myself to complain out loud – everyone here is in the same position I am, and some of them have it much worse. I do what I can for them; it helps me as much as it does them, I think. I can’t burden them with the viper doubts curling up in my chest, or the stony fears squatting in my stomach. It’s not fair to them.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m going to burst and the only way to stop it is to write it down. This blog isn’t just a record of everything that’s happening to us: it’s the only way I sleep at all. It’s the only way I can make peace with even a part of what I see every day.

I don’t know how the others do it. They don’t have this. I offered it to some of them, but they refused. Ben said he didn’t have the words, and Matt said he knew I told it all for him. Thorpe just shrugged, and Sally looked at it like it was an alien artefact. I wouldn’t trust Masterson with the laptop.

So I collect their stories for them. Like mosquitos in amber, I hope they’ll stay here forever for some future scientist to discover and learn from. I hope our stories matter to someone, somewhen. I’ve even started burning backups, just in case, though that might be paranoia nibbling at my edges.

It all seems pointless when we’re scared about what each hour will bring, what new threat will turn up on our doorstep next. But it seems so important not to forget all of this. Maybe that’s arrogant of me. I don’t know any more. I live by the knife in my waistband but I can’t do without a word-vent every day. Hand to mouth, head to keyboard.

So little of this world makes sense any more. Why should I be any different?