In the beginning...

[past & present]

Entry 001:


As I stand here now, at the Gates of Hell, I find all my preconceptions dashed to the wayside. From the late-season blizzard to the choked moans and groans of the ghouls at my doorstep, I feel not heat, but the gripping chill of a gloomy fate. Add to that my dwindling supply of clean water, unspoiled food, insufficient linens and ragged clothes, all I feel is complete and utter cold. But all my life I was told that Hell would be hot. Or maybe it is, but the Gates are all cold…or at least this one is…

The path that brought me to this frozen Gate was long and winding with many backtracks, redoubles, and setbacks. And, with my presumed time running nigh, I feel the tug of this long-dormant urge to write my findings and recollections of life in the afterworld. For that is precisely what living in a world ravaged by this disease feels like: the afterworld; the afterlife. Or maybe it’s purgatory. Maybe there is a God, and He (or She or It – or Whathaveyou) is punishing me for my heathenous ways. After all, such a theory is not beyond the realm of possibilities anymore.

No, I haven’t recanted my agnosticism in the face of death. I’m just playing devil’s advocate to my own beliefs. I’m fairly certain that the scourge ravaging this nation is manmade and not an act of God. Though I have no proof, thus the possibility of purgatory…

So cold, this Hell I’m in. And though I toss around such euphemisms and theories as purgatory and the Gates of Hell, I know that this life is real, as is the New Earth Order (as some have taken to calling it). NEO, they say, is the world since the disease overthrew the life we all knew. In America, that life had been mostly sedentary. Many had likened our pre-NEO lives to zombies. But now, after having seen – and encountered – real zombies, I hope they’ve taken to eating their own feet. (Pun intended). For such an analogy is quite the exaggeration.

Though, in their defense, I should probably say: hindsight…

Let me diverge from my current situation to explain the circumstances – the backtracks, redoubles, and setbacks – that led me to this cabin in the woods; this frozen Gate

On a day when most people were enrapt by sitcoms or overblown dramas, I was studying and sparring with a fellowship of students at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. At first, we assumed the shambling horde to be an impromptu Zombie Walk. Some of my fellow scholars (I use that term loosely for a few of them) tried playfully to push them away.

I remember the startled scream with chilling clarity – even after all these years, the sound of it rings out in my sleep. It was the first of many such screams I would hear, but it resonated with such ferocity and depth that it will probably never truly fade. Though, from the inclement weather and other deathly threats outdoors, that resonation might just vanish once my body either withers or is eaten. (I wonder if such thoughts will torment me if I become one of them…food for thought…)

Maybe, if I hadn’t hesitated, then just maybe I could have saved a couple of them. But I did hesitate. And because of that, Donnie and Charles were also attacked. It wasn’t until the three of them were becoming a mid-afternoon snack for this pack of ghouls that I managed to act. And then Jacob, my sparring partner, jumped in at my heels. Together, we brained a half-dozen ghouls (this was when I noticed their discolored eyes and the network of blue veins that spiderwebbed their ashen skin). Once this initial onslaught was quelled, we (Jacob and I, plus the remainder of our fellowship) raced our three fallen friends to the infirmary.

Bad move on our part.

But, hindsight and all; if only we had known…

Having not known this would be a bad move, we found ourselves in a throng of shambling, bloody – and sometimes broken – ghouls. Later, after the shock and awe of this new disease wore off, people would begin calling them what they really were; zombies. But I still prefer ghoul; it seems less real and cheesy. And cheese is important these days. Important and rare. Especially when you’re all alone most of the time…

Charles collapsed in a fit of dry heaves and phlegmy coughs. And then he etched another memory into my mind’s eye: his vegetarian’s breakfast came up in one bloody, curdled mess to paint the walkway. From what I know now (and what any would-be readers of my gratuitously vein scrawlings should now know), half of the mess I saw that day was his stomach lining and chunks of his lungs. I’m pretty sure he asphyxiated before the throng closed in to finish him off.

At that point, we were surrounded; seven of us against an incalculable mob. Only three of us made it out alive; Vivian, the only female in our fellowship (call us old-fashioned, but "fellow" usually implies someone with the sexual organs of a human male); Jacob (he was, after all, far more efficient with the staff than I had been at the time); and, if you hadn’t figured it out yet, Yours Truly survived the mob as well. More would have survived had we been hardened (or maybe warped would be a more apt descriptor), as I am now. But our pre-NEO programming had been never to leave a person behind in battle. Three lives may have survived had we been cold, decisive fighters with a working knowledge of our enemy. But again: hindsight…

We raced across the campus, cutting around buildings and avoiding all possible aggressors, until we reached the parking lot. We didn’t even discuss our plan; Jacob was in the lead, so we blindly chased him to his rickety, rust-brown van. I doubt the others had a chance to recognize the influence of primal fear in the aftermath. But, having outlived them by what now feels like eons, I sure do. Instinct and adrenaline, fueled by such all-encompassing fear, brings you to another level entirely. It was as though we were connected on a nearly empathic plane. And through the fear, my senses were heightened.

Or maybe I was just crazy and paranoid. We may have just blindly followed the leader. But the primal fear most certainly ignited an even more primal instinct. In time, I learned to hone this fear and sharpen my instincts.

There I go again, rambling the day away in my lunatic way…I’ll come back to this in the morning. After all, it’s late and the day has been long…