The Apocalypse Blog
by Melanie Edmonds

Sax sang for Simon tonight.  He gathered us all around and said goodbye to him for us, goodbye to a man none of us really knew.  We knew that his name was Simon Richards.  We knew that he struggled with his pain and tried not to let it out.  We knew that he pushed on when we asked him to, up to and often past his limits; he collapsed more than once.  We knew that he knew we wanted to help him.  But we didn’t know who he was.  We didn’t know his face before it was burnt.

Sax sang Amazing Grace for him.  It was beautiful, and sad, and heartbreaking.  It’s my favourite of all the hymns, but I couldn’t join in for the thickness in my throat.  I don’t know how Sax managed to finish it.  I wasn’t the only one crying by the end, and it wouldn’t stop even after we covered Simon’s face up.

I thought about all those who had fallen, about strong Carter and Trevor, and sensible Liz and the kid, and the poor lawyerlady.  I thought about Harry.  They never got words spoken for them, or a song to carry them away.  I’ve said words for them in my heart – does that count?  It doesn’t feel like enough, and I’m not religious enough to take comfort in spirit alone.  But I hope that they know, and I hope that Simon heard us.

Sleep well, my friends.

• Theme song: Amazing Grace

We managed to get the truck running today.  It took all of us – except little Nugget, of course – to do it.  Ben taught me how to bump-start the car from the inside – I’d never done it before, and because I can’t push, I got to drive.

I didn’t realise how quiet it was around here until that engine chugged to life.  We all laughed and there was much back-slapping.  It felt so strange to smile like that; my face had forgotten how.  It seems like forever since we had a reason.  Since we made some real progress against the disintegration of everything around us.  And this feels like a win.  It feels wonderful.

I feel like I could danc

The laptop battery finally gave out in my last post.  I almost burst into tears right there and then.  It feels horribly foolish, being so attached to this thing I’m doing here, this chunk of moulded metal and plastic, this journal of my strangely spiralling life.  We seem to cling to the strangest things when things fall apart.  Little trinkets, big trinkets.  This is mine, I guess.

It was Sax who fixed it for me.  The big, quiet fella who likes to carry a dented saxaphone around, as if it carries the memory of all the songs it has played.  I remember the soft wail of it in the mall, and the picture he made in his faded suit.  He seems more solid these days, but it’s hard to know if that’s just because he’s not a part of the scenery to me any more.

Turns out, he’s a dab hand with electronics.  He got Dillon to fetch him some parts, and he rigged up a power-converter-type thing to hook up to a car battery.  There are lots around, all of them useless since the ignitions fried.  It feels naughty, sneaking in under a bonnet and sucking out the juice, but it’s not like anyone else is here to use it.  I’m still not used to all the stealing.

It was Thorpe who asked how this beautiful piece of machinery is still working when everything else has fried.  I had wondered before, but honestly, I was afraid to ask.  As if that might magically make it not so.  Like a wound that doesn’t hurt until you look at it and know that it has to be painful.

Trust Thorpe to be a douse of ice down our backs.  He’s a miserable piece of work, but at least he puts his shoulder in with the rest of the group.  He’s probably the strongest of all of us; he’s certainly the tallest and broadest, though Sax beats him on sheer bulk.  If only he wasn’t such a dick.

There was an accusation in the way he looked at me, as if I had somehow conspired to keep this machine safe.  As if somehow I was responsible for all of this, as if I had known about it all in advance.  I was so shocked that my throat closed up; I just stared at him.  It was so ridiculous I had no idea how to respond.

Sax came to my rescue.  He’d just got done making Nugget drink something and turned his ponderous attention onto Thorpe.

“The case saved it,” he said, as if that explained everything.  We all looked at him like he was talking in tongues. 

“What’s that got to do with anything?”  Trust Thorpe to recover first and inject something disparaging.  The thing was, I had no idea what the case had to do with anything either. 

“It’s made of metal,” Sax pointed out.  Then he said something about creating a cage and that meant that the pulse couldn’t get through it.  I didn’t understand that part, but basically the case stopped it from being fried.  It’s also dented from some of the recent punishment.

I only bought the case because it was silver and shiny and I liked it.  Who knew, huh?

And now it’s back and working, and here I am typing away again.  The thin thread of my comfort and sanity has been restored.  I’m so relieved that I could dance around.

I’m so behind on everything.  It took us half a day to get out of the café, between getting the truck working, collecting supplies and packing them into it, and then squeezing everyone inside. 

It was slow going.  I hadn’t really noticed before, but there are vehicles all over the road.  Some crashed when they were fried, some just stopped, some were obviously picked up and tossed.  I suspect some of them used to be in different streets entirely; they were carried to their resting places by the blast, like toys, like Dorothy’s house.  In amongst all of it is a hefty serving of debris from shattered buildings.

We had to inch around the obstacles, and a couple of times, the guys had to pile out to shove a car out of the way and open a path.  I lost count of the times we had to backtrack to find a clearer way.

At one point Ben just gave up and scraped past a car, exchanging paint and teeth-edging screeches.  We winced and he shrugged – why protect a paintjob anyway?  It’s not like aesthetics matter, and now it seems strange that we had been so careful before.  It’s silly when I stop and think about it, and yet it was second nature to us. 

I don’t know if this is really faster than walking.  It still feels better to be driving, though.  To not be kicking at the ground any more, to feel like we’re actually making progress.  To give our feet a rest and be going somewhere at the same time.  To not be holed up somewhere like rats who have no idea what to do about the sinking of the ship.

We stopped about mid-afternoon and looked for somewhere to take shelter.  The sky was thickening – it’s still orange, still huddling low above us.  It seems to be some kind of cloud cover, but one that the wind isn’t able to tear apart.  I have yet to see a glimpse of blue, and as a passenger in the truck, I did a lot of looking.

The sight of that sky still makes me nauseous.  It taints the sunlight and it robs us of the moon and stars at night.  No blue, and no clean, spangled black either.  It glows red in the mornings and seeps everything ruddy.  It makes me want to scrub my eyes, but they’ll never come clear.

There’s less smoke-scarring up there now; I think the rain has put out the fires.  So it’s good for that much, at least.  We had only just settled down in our shelter when the rainfall started again.  It seems that the cluttering up of the clouds into a thicker, darker mass is a sign to take cover, after all.

The next day – yesterday – was more of the same.  Painfully slow chugging, shoehorning our way through the mass of debris.  We’re making our way westwards along the river – we looked at the bridges to the east, but the one we came over on is broken, and the next one is too close to the CBD – it’s the one we fled over to get out of there.  If it’s still standing, it’ll be near impossible to get to. 

West is the bypass tunnel under the river.  We didn’t know if it was open, or clogged, or collapsed in on itself like a broken windpipe.  It was the best one to try, so that’s what we did. 

We were about a block away from it when we got caught out by the rain.  It was spotting on the windscreen before we realised that the clouds had thickened, and Ben yanked the wheel around.  The truck bounced off the road and right through the front of a clothes store.  A mannequin bounced off the bonnet, its head ricocheting into a rack of pants.

I think that shook him up a bit.  For a heartbeat, it looked like a person, ploughed through like tissuepaper.  A couple of us cried out in horror at the sight of it – I think I was one of them.  We almost laughed when we realised what it was.  Ben didn’t look like laughing, though.

There’s not much chance of us getting the truck running today.  We’re not going to get it out of the store, and the roads here are too thick with dead cars to have room to bump-start it.  It was almost out of gas anyway.  We’re close to the tunnel, so we’re going to take a look before we try to find another vehicle.

The tunnel was terrifying.  I feel like I’m back in a horror movie again, all shadows and creeping noises.  We’re still trapped inside it, listening to the hiss of the rain and watching the floor for runoff. 

We’re not alone down here.

The stupid dog won’t stop barking.  It’s dark down here, suffocatingly so.  But the acid keeps us away from the open mouth, keeps us huddling in the shadows while the sun dies under the pounding of poisoned water.

I wonder what will happen if the drains all fill up.  Now I wish I hadn’t thought about that.

Wait, the dog’s gone quiet.  Somehow that’s worse than the damn thing making all that noise.  Better go see what’s up – I’ll be right back.

We all knew that there were rats down in the bypass tunnel, but none of us had a clue that there were people down there.  We must have walked right past them.

My heart is still beating way too fast, and we got out of there hours ago.  We haven’t stopped since then, not until now, not until the sky started weeping its broken tears.  Now we’re holed up again, hunched and braced and waiting for the next thing to be thrown at us.  It seems that there’s always something.

Ben’s hurt.  There was no hiding it from anyone this time, not like that limp he had.  I can still hear him screaming.  He’s quiet now – we gave him half a bottle of whiskey so he could sleep – but I can still hear that moment when the acid bit him.  It’s imprinted on my eardrums.

The tunnel seemed like such a good idea at the time.  It was choked up with vehicles, crashed and abandoned, and there was a huge crack across the access road.  As if it had disengaged itself from the regular run of things.  But there was no water in it, and that seemed important at the time.

We had to climb our way into and through it.  A few metres past the gap-toothed maw, the weird orange light didn’t have the strength to do anything useful.  We felt our way, we murmured to each other, we linked hands, we stumbled and clambered.  We lost time in the darkness, and only once did we lose each other.  It took some frantic calling, but we found our scattered pieces again.

There were so many little noises in there, so loud and bouncing off concrete. They made us jump, made my skin crawl like a thousand spiders.  Rats the size of horses, cockroaches bigger than the silly white dog; that’s what it sounded like. We didn’t look for the sources of the noises; we just kept moving, trying to find a way through to the other side.

Oh, god.  The dog.  Dillon is still crying about that.

They came at us from the edges of the tunnel, as if the rain had washed them out of the shadows.  We weren’t even alarmed at first – I mean, they were just people.  We hadn’t seen many others since the rain started, so it was a bit of a relief.  A couple of us even smiled at them.

They weren’t smiling .  They were armed and they didn’t like us there in their tunnel.  They were dirty and lean, and demanded that we get out.  And we would have if it hadn’t been raining.  But what were we supposed to do?

Then one of them grabbed the dog.  It was just a little scrappy thing – no match for an adult who knew how to grab it by the back of the head.  He had a knife – not even a knife, really, just a jagged, twisted scrap of metal.  Sharp enough to gut the poor little thing, sharp enough to make it squeal.  The dog tried to cut its awful fate into glass by sound alone.

The next thing I know, I’m grabbing onto Dillon as he’s lunging past me, headlong towards that man with the knife.  He flung the dog’s body past us and into the rain.  It hit something on the way down – a pipe, maybe, I’m not sure – and then something was falling and splashing rainwater at us.

That’s when Ben got hit with it.  He was closest and took the brunt of the spray, right across his chest. 

It was chaos, then.  We were all shouting, Ben was screaming and trying to tear his shirt off, Thorpe was punching someone in the face repeatedly, Sax waded in with a pole, Sally curled up in a corner.  I lost Dillon in it somewhere and wound up yanking a teenaged girl off Sally on my way to Ben.

The tunnel-dwellers ran off eventually.  I didn’t even see them go; I was busy trying to get the damned rain off Ben.  I lost my shirt that way; it disintegrated, as did his and the one I was using to protect my hands.  I used up most of our water trying to rinse the acid off without washing it all over him.

That was probably stupid, but I didn’t care right then.  I just had to make it better, had to stop it burning him.

It looks so awful.  Holes pitted through his skin, exposing raw muscle beneath, great long gashes of it.  It didn’t go very deep, but the damage is still terrible.  It was all I could do to make up some kind of dressing to cover it all up.

It was dark by the time the rain stopped, and between the puddled water and the darkness, we couldn’t go anywhere.  We slept in shifts, and those standing guard armed themselves with something heavy and swingable.  I barely slept at all, between the ache in my arm, holding Dillon while he cried, and listening to Ben trying not to moan.  Every little noise made me flinch, made my heartbeat ratchet up a notch.

As soon as it was light enough to see, we picked each other up and headed out of there.  We heard them through the night, the tunnel-dwellers, and we didn’t wait for them to see us off.  We just grabbed everything and everyone and made tracks, and we kept going until the sky thickened again.

And now here we are.  Here comes another night, and I think we might have to keep guard again.  Just in case.

Today has been much less eventful.  Today has been about regrouping and resupplying, and letting the injured rest.  Mostly, that’s Ben and Nugget, though some of the others keep telling me to sit down and take it easy, too.  We had to give Ben some more alcohol so that he could sleep.  Nugget needed no such encouragement.

I keep thinking about the fight yesterday.  I’ve never been in anything like that before; the one we ran away from a few days didn’t get that close.  We weren’t involved; I wasn’t involved.  We just ran and stayed out of it.  Yesterday, it was all so quick.  There was no time to think; just react.  I waded in just like everyone else, and I’m not sure what that says about me.

I keep hearing the wet thuds of Thorpe’s punches, or the hollowness of Sax’s pipe landing.  Or the slick sound of that knife, and the squeal of the dog.  Or the hiss of the acid hitting something soft and soluble.

My arm aches all the time now; I think it got knocked more than once in all of that.  I’m trying to ignore it; I can feel the panic climbing up my throat if I think about it too much.  It’s bound up tightly and that will have to do until we reach the hospital.  But it’s been over a week now — what if it’s knitting already, what if it heals wrong?  What if they can’t put it right?  What if there’s no-one there to help me?

If I think about it too much, I feel like I’m suffocating.

Then I look at Ben and Nugget, and I’m ashamed of myself.  They’re so much worse off.  Ben’s in so much pain, and I don’t know when Nugget last woke up.  I’m afraid to ask.  I shouldn’t be so concerned about my stupid arm, but I can’t help it.

The others brought back some weapons from a sports store they found.  There wasn’t much left, they said – all the really good (wicked) stuff had already been taken.  They scavenged what they could from the wreckage the looters had left.

I stood and looked at them for a long time, and then I took one.  I have it on my belt now, under the hem of my shirt: a little hunting knife.  I can feel its uncompromising weight pressing on me there.  Me.  Carrying a knife.  I can’t believe it.  But it feels better.

I’m afraid of everything right now.  Where we’re going, what we’ll find there.  What we’ll find on the way.  If we’ll ever make it.  Who I’m becoming through all of this.

My friends used to know me as Mac, but no-one here calls me that.  I have no idea who Faith is, this girl who carries a knife.

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.