Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 76

Now

Thirty days.

A lot had happened.

We've lost so many in a month. Everything changed in a month. All the things we hold for granted—technology, everyday society, and our own modern privilege—gone and foundered. Seasons will turn, holidays will be forgotten, and one of us will soon forget the faces of the people we love as time pass.

The latter is what I dread most.

I do not want to forget Luke's face, but picturing him is already hard to do even as I'm writing this.

I don't even have a photo of him.

If I try hard enough, I can scour for an old CRA hardware database, and perhaps find a photo of him in the survivor's list when he was still alive, but like I said, we took technology for granted they break down.

Everywhere I looked, I become more and more convinced that we are never going back to where we were before, even if, by some miracle, a brilliant scientist finds a cure. The past is an entirely different world, like a vague dream or a distant memory, and I'd find myself not even thinking about it as if it no longer exists. I can choose to relive them, but I only feel hollow like I will sink to the ground. If I had known the world will end, I wish I had done things differently.

I wish I never boarded that plane and be so far away from my family.

Sometimes, I wish I never met Luke.

Is this how everything ends? Death and destruction at every corner, shedding a piece of ourselves, and we will continue to lose friends and family like parts of your limbs and organs, and we can't do a fucking thing about it. We will slowly bleed as we watch ourselves decay until we no longer recognize ourselves. We are powerless against an enemy we can't even see, and it is winning.

How do you defeat an enemy that doesn't give you time to breathe?

Thirty days.

Thirty fucking days.

In CRA-controlled cities, many folks say anyone who survives the first thirty days of the outbreak is lucky, fortunate, touched by God if we get religious. I say, fuck that shit. Everyone is dying one way or another, including me, and the world's just doing it slower. We droned on and on and on, daring to hope like sheep, but what do we truly get out of it? I reckon that there's nothing to receive. A false image we define ourselves for years, to strive and fight, learn to kill and to suffer, but does it matter in the end? Does it count as a life well served?

Yet, I cling to it like a petulant child hanging up a tree. Luke's words ring in my ears when I write, when I think, when I fight, when I dream.

Survive.

Easy to say, but harder to do.

But dead is dead. What good do they know about living when they're free? For the living, hell awaits every day.

——

Day 30: May 8th, Saturday
One Month since Ground Zero

Then

One midnight, I volunteered to keep watch. I saw no point in sleeping as I could barely hold my own in the covers, flashes of blood crossing my eyelids, and the muffled pop of a gun over a pillow that it felt better to be awake than unconscious. I knew I was slowly beating my body up. Eventually, I would need sleep, but until that time arrived, I'd keep myself up.