Resurrection Diary (A month in the life of a woman going insane, trapped in a flooding city with rats, flies, rivers of floating corpses...and the evil dead.The events in this diary take place directly after those in my novel, RESURRECTION.) |
ENTIRE CONTENT COPYRIGHT 2010 BY TIM CURRAN
tim@corpseking.com
tim@corpseking.com
October 1
I’m starting this diary at the end and not at the beginning because it
is THE END.
While I cowered in my apartment listening to the rain fall and the
dead scratch at my door, the city died.
I stood over its grave in the morning light. It is flooded now.
A waterlogged corpse slowly sinking into darkness.
October 2
To a maggot, a corpse is its whole world.
It is food and shelter and spawning ground.
The city is now a corpse and I am a maggot.
October 3
The doors are locked.
I venture out only in the daytime.
At night the dead come looking for me because they know I am here.
They know I am six months along. I think they want the baby. They
pound at the door and scratch with their black, broken nails.
I live on the third floor. I hope they cannot climb.
They scream in the flooded streets.
Sometimes they scream my name.
October 4
Charlie Bowers is dead.
He lived downstairs in 2-c.
Everyone thought he was crazy walking around in his combat boots
and camouflage, stockpiling survival rations and weapons, always
spouting off about Armageddon and leaving disturbing fliers tucked
under our doors about surviving plagues and nuclear holocausts.
Towards the end he barricaded himself in his apartment and
everyone thought he was even crazier.
But I knew better.
I went into his apartment today. I have all the keys from the
managers office.
I took a 9mm handgun, some mosquito netting, and what food he
had left which wasn’t much.
Charlie has been dead at least a week.
I think rats have been eating him.
October 5
The dead eat the living. They feast on them.
I watched two of them last night—a woman and a little girl—kill a
man who was trying to wade across the street in the moonlight.
The water out there is hip-deep.
The man was half way across and I silently cheered him on. Then the
woman and the girl rose up and took him. I listened to him scream as
they pulled him apart. When he stopped screaming, they dragged
him under.
I think they only eat enough to satisfy them.
They prefer their meat cold: I think they take the corpses somewhere
and let them soften up before they feast.
I wonder what that tastes like.
I wonder what carrion feels like in your mouth.
October 6
My husband’s name was Michael.
We had two lovely children.
Michael was a good father and he never, ever hit the children
because I wouldn’t put up with that. He hit me sometimes but only
because he had to.
October 7
I found one of them today or should I say one of them found me.
I was under the mistaken impression that they only came out at night
like ghouls and vampires on TV.
I was wrong.
They do not like the light, but it won’t kill them.
I went downstairs to get more batteries from Charlie Bowers’
stockpile.
I came down the steps, listening to the thudding of my footfalls and
perhaps the beat of my heart. I smelled something like spoiled meat
and something worse like a rank boiling fermentation that literally
curled the hairs in my nose.
There was a woman on the landing…or something like a woman.
She was wearing a ragged, mildewed shift that looked like a shroud.
Her face was white and puckered, nibbled-looking, like it had been
underwater and fish had been chewing on it. She looked at me with
black shiny eyes that had no pupils or whites, just those black oily
marbles floating in yellow watery sockets.
And she hissed.
Between clenched gray teeth, she hissed like a whistling teakettle.
She had something and she didn’t want me getting it—a blackened
human head burst open with rot. She opened the door to the second
floor and crab-crawled through.
Afterwards, there was nothing but that horrible stink.
I stood there for a moment, motionless, before realizing that that
creature had once been Peggy Lake, my next door neighbor.
If I see her again I will kill her.
October 8
Last night, by wan moonlight, I watched the river of waste sweeping
through the streets below.
There was wreckage of all kinds bobbing out there—everything from
picnic tables to tires—but mostly there were corpses. Dozens of
corpses, bloated and bleached white, carried along by the current.
Some of them are dead. Some only pretending to be.
Last night and tonight again: a knocking at the door.
It sounds like many hands.
October 9
Michael was a cop out of the Crandon Precinct.
He had seven years on the job. He was a good man and an honest
man and he wasn’t dirty and corrupt and foul-mouthed like a TV cop.
No sir.
He was a fourth-generation cop and he took it very seriously.
We had a daughter, Marissa, who was six and a toddler, Sammy, who
at one was already like his father. He would have been a cop, too. I
know it.
If we had gotten out of the city before the water rose.
If we had heeded the warnings on TV.
If, if, if…I am drowning in a world of ifs.
But Michael and I both believed the water would recede. It had other
years. It always had.
The Black River would swell, some neighborhoods would flood, then
it would dry up.
Michael worked the four to midnight shift.
He left for work one afternoon and did not come back. By two in the
morning I was frantic.
Though the police themselves were looking for him, I went out
myself. I was gone an hour. I did not find him.
When I got back, the door was wide open. Marissa was gone. Two
men whose faces were like running white wax were eating Sammy.
He was dead and they were pulling him apart like the carcass of a
well-boiled chicken.
That’s all I remember.
When I woke I was alone.
They took Sammy with them.
Marissa never came back.
Nor did Michael.
But I wait for him. Each day and each night, I wait. He will come
through the door of our home sooner or later and I will be here.
The child I carry is not his.
October 10
The rats are getting bad.
Today, on the second floor, I came upon a dozen of them feeding on
the body of a dead man.
They did not even scurry when they saw me; they kept eating.
They were huge things with greasy-gray pelts and glaring, dead eyes.
They were tearing strips of white flesh from the throat and belly and
arms. Most of the meat was gone from the corpse’s pale mucid face.
I was certain he was dead.
Then he opened his oozing, filmed eyes.
(later)
The water is up to my waist now on the first floor. It’s not easy to get
around with my big belly. But there’s work that has to be done.
Carrying my gun and axe, I pushed through that sea of slimy dark
water. It stank of gassy putrefaction. Dead rats and nameless, rotting
things floated on the surface leaving oily wakes. Meatflies rose like
black bubbles.
I felt something in the water. A motion. An intent.
Something icy gripped my ankle, then retreated.
A hand, a grave-dead hand.
Peggy Lake rose up from the murk, water running from the holes in
her white rubber face. She was still wrapped in that gray, rotting
winding sheet. Fat green worms threaded in and out of the flabby
tissue at her neck. Her eyes were a liquid black.
She motioned at me with a meat cleaver.
“You,” she said in a congested voice like her lungs were filled with
mud and leaves. “I watched for YOU, I waited for YOU…I want what
you carry! Give it to me…GIVE IT TO MEEEEE!”
She lunged forward with the cleaver and I shot her three times with
the 9mm. The holes I drilled into her surprised her more than
anything else. No blood poured fourth, just a watery black discharge
like India ink.
I shot her in the face and it split down the center like it was made of
candy glass. Half of it sloughed off and fell into the water, revealing
the basal anatomy of muscles, tendons, and shiny gray gums. She
was infested by looping, squirming things like slugs or river worms.
Shoving the gun into my pocket, I swung the axe at her and nearly
took off her head.
Screaming with a shrill, insane sound, she went down into the water
then rose up again and this time I did take her head off after several
swings. Her body jumped up from the water, thrashing wildly about
and then submerged. Then it came up again. I chopped at it until it
sank. When it floated to the surface, I finished the job: I cut it in half.
Now Peggy Lake is nothing but a bobbing head, a torso with arms,
and a set of hips with legs.
They sank from view.
The head floated for a time, snapping its teeth at me.
But it, too, eventually sank.
October 11
Though I was sickened and scared by what happened yesterday—and
spent most of the night sweating through fever dreams—I went down
to the first floor again. If there’s anyone alive I need to find them. I
knocked on doors: Carrie and Mike Standish, Frank Fahey, Doris and
Ervin Pulcek who owned Creative Crumbs Bakery down the street,
but got no answer.
I heard a wet, slopping sound behind the Standish’s door.
Using my keys, I pushed it open against the water.
It was very dark in there.
I heard something like a gnawing sound. It reminded me of a dog
chewing on a bone.
I found Carrie and Mike. They were both dead and both half-
devoured, doing the dead man’s float. Whatever had been eating
them had a preference for bellies, throats, and thighs. It was terrible.
But day by day it was taking more to shock me.
From the bedroom, I heard a splashing: subtle, muted, darkly secret.
The sound of a crocodile gliding silently through a moonlit green
river.
I heard giggling: the shrill evil laughter of a child.
Terrified, I flashed the light around and saw something which made
me scream: a blurred white face with huge empty eyes and a black
hungry mouth.
It was ten feet away.
Then it submerged again. I shined the light around, my heart
pounding and the face surfaced not five feet away.
Dear God, but I think I recognized it.
I pulled the door shut which is not easy in the water. When it closed,
something hit it from the other side. I could hear it clawing at the
wood.
I did not leave my apartment for two days.
October 12
Charlie Bowers believed that there was a cover-up at Fort Providence
Military Reservation outside the city.
The base was enclosed by a series of chainlink fences topped with
barbed wire. Armed guards would stop you if you got anywhere near.
Charlie once told me they had the bodies of alien astronauts there,
another time he told me they were conducting weird experiments on
the corpses of soldiers shipped back from Iraq.
“You know there’s something funny about that place, April,” he told
me one day. “They claim they’re doing research into battlefield
medicine. But if that’s true, why the secrecy?”
“You know how the Army is.”
“Yes, exactly. I was in for ten years, April. You don’t wanna know
about some of the shit I saw.”
I did not ask and I did not want to know.
Now, however, I wish I had asked.
What had he seen?
What had he participated in?
And better yet, just exactly what had they been doing out at Fort
Providence?
October 13
I went down to Charlie Bowers’ apartment again today.
I don’t know why. I just felt I should.
Although Michael never knew it, I used to spend two afternoons a
week with Charlie. I liked to hear him talk. He saw conspiracies
everywhere. He was kind of like that guy on The X-files, the good-
looking one, except very militant.
When I got into Charlie’s place, I saw that a spreading green fungus
had grown over his face.
There is a leak in the ceiling. Water is dripping on Charlie’s corpse
and making it soft and spongy.
I poked it with a pencil and black fluid leaked from it. The smell was
disgusting.
What concerns me most is that it looks like something has been
eating Charlie. I couldn’t find anywhere that rats could get in. But
they must have.
For it can’t be the dead.
The door is locked and undamaged.
And I have the only key.
October 14
By the guttering glow of candles, I heard it.
A stealthy, sneaking sound that filled me with a cold blackness that
was limitless.
The doorknob was rattling.
It was night and I knew whoever was out there was not a living
human being, but something that had crawled from a grave.
There was a knocking at the door.
Then a scratching of fingers.
Taking my gun and ax I went over there.
I pressed my ear to the door and I could hear a breathing that was
moist and clotted.
The scratching went on and on and in my mind it was like spiders,
leggy spiders trying to find their way in.
A cold chill spread over my back and arms and I knew I should hide,
shut out the sound of that scratching. Yet I was drawn to it. I undid
the locks and said, “Come in.”
The door swung in and I heard a gurgling voice say, “Ma-ma, ma-
ma…”
Marissa had come home at last.
She was still wearing the remains of her nightgown and it hung on
her like a filthy shroud. Her face was white and puckered, the graying
lips shriveled away from gums and fine sharp teeth. Her mouth was
smeared with gore and I knew she had been hiding in the Standish’s
apartment, feeding on Carrie and Mike in the darkness like a corpse-
worm.
She held her arms out to me.
There were beetles crawling over her face.
Her hair was full of maggots.
I think I screamed as I swung the axe and cleaved her head in two.
She hit the floor, howling and screeching, and I kept chopping and
chopping until she was scattered into pieces. They were like white
worms wriggling and wriggling.
They would not die.
October 15
I took what was left of my daughter this morning and put it in a green
Hefty garbage bag, the draw-string type.
The pieces had stopped moving.
I took the bag and threw it out the window into the rising river in the
streets. It joined the other trash and wreckage floating by.
I have not even heard a distant plane in many days now.
I wonder if anyone’s left.
(later)
Have to write this down for I doubt my own observation.
I was sitting at the window at sundown watching the river of waste
wash on by, watching the corpses and dead animals floating and
bobbing as they were carried by the current to where I do not know.
As I sat there, I heard a splashing like a whale floundering down
there.
I peered closer and saw something I still do not believe: A
gargantuan mass of gray-white tissue erupting from the frothing
water. It looked like a twisted and gnarled tree trunk…but pulsating
and oozing, set with dozens and dozens of screaming mouths and
what might have been yellow globular eyes.
Then it sank from view.
Such a thing could not be.
Yet it was.
October 16
The food is nearly gone.
I made it last as long as I could, but I need to eat for the baby if for no
other reason.
I have two cans of soup and one bag of macaroni.
I have cleaned out all the apartments on the third floor and most of
the second. A lot of people took all the food they could carry with
them when they left. There are only scraps.
But the baby needs nutrition.
I must eat.
(later)
I have gone mad and I do not doubt it.
There is a set of stairs that lead from the third floor to the rooftop. As
I left my apartment I heard footsteps. Taking my gun, I followed the
sound and stopped dead at what I saw.
I could not have seen it.
A set of corpse-white legs joined at the hip walking up the stairs and
disappearing into the darkness. They must be Peggy Lake’s legs.
What drives them, what animates them, I do not know.
But if her legs are alive, then the rest of her must be as well.
October 17
There was a time when the helicopters used to fly over looking for
survivors, but I haven’t seen any in over a week now, maybe two.
There is nothing to do but read.
I like to read science fiction and have ever since I was a child and
discovered The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. More now than
ever I seek the oblivion of my imagination.
In the past month, I have read The Word for World is Forest by
Ursula K. Le Guin six times, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem four times, and
Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement three times.
My new favorite is Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor. It is
about a man named Ryan who travels in a spaceship to another star.
Everyone else is in suspended animation.
He is awake.
He is alone.
He is slowly going insane.
October 18
Last night I dreamed I gave birth.
My child was a fleshy pink fetal rat, perfectly hairless. It was cold and
slimy.
When I held it in my arms, it mewled at me.
Then it broke apart into a threading nest of green worms.
I woke up screaming.
October 19
The rain keeps falling and falling.
I visited Charlie today.
He is badly decomposed.
It was nice to visit him even though his entire body is now
encapsulated in that green mossy fungus. I pressed my hand against
the fungus and it was greasy and warm. It pulses slightly like the
heartbeat of a newborn.
Charlie and I had a long discussion.
It wasn’t like the old days when he would put his hands on me and I
would melt.
Still, we understand each other.
“April, listen to me,” he said. “This building is now your fortress. But
there is danger out in the water and there is danger in these many
hidden rooms. You must go to each one and—”
“I’m afraid.”
“I know you are. But you must exterminate the living dead. You have
to. You have to think of the baby.”
“I can’t do it again. I can’t.”
“You must.”
He was right. Someone must exterminate them. That someone is me.
October 20
The vermin are unbearable.
The building is infested with rats.
The flies are so thick in the air they move like a black, seeking cloud.
On the first floor, their buzzing is so loud you cannot shout above it.
Dead things are washing in from the streets now, bloated and
putrescent things, that are acrawl with flies and shuddering with
larva.
I sleep with mosquito netting over my head.
(later)
One of the dead attacked me. It was a little girl, I think.
She came up out of the flooded stairwell leading to the first floor.
She had long black braids and wore a decaying, mottled gray burial
dress. Her face was a seething mass of maggots. I clubbed her with
the handle of my axe and her face exploded into white ribbons of
pulp.
I beat her away and raced upstairs.
I made it.
This time.
October 21
I got another one today.
This was on the second floor.
(It’s far too dangerous to go down to the first floor as it’s nearly
submerged now. Judging from how high the water is on the stairwell,
I think it would be up to my neck.)
I went into Mrs. Cardozian’s apartment. The shades were drawn and
it was very dark. But I knew something was in there: I could smell
the sickly-sweet pungency of the walking dead which was like rotting
fruit fermenting to juice.
I thumped the wall to draw them into the light.
One took the bait and showed right away. It was not Mrs. Cardozian.
It was a naked, stick-thin wraith whose puckered white flesh barely
concealed the protruding hip bones, the racks of her ribs. It was a
woman…or had been. Her eyes were gone. She moved in my general
direction, her long skeleton fingers like white pencils tapping along
the wall.
“Over here,” I said.
She turned quick, drab greasy hair hanging over her face like dead
worms. She was like a skeleton skinned in the thinnest veneer of
white flesh. There were numerous punctures in her skin that seeped
a black fluid. One scrawny breast swung back and forth by a ribbon
of tissue, the other was eaten away into a yawning black pit by an
ulcer.
Lips pulling back, clenching blackened teeth, she hissed at me.
It was a reptilian sound, like a snake.
I shot her in the head and she fell over against the wall, leaving a
black smear of goo over the cream-colored plaster as she slid down.
She screeched and flailed madly with her hands.
Before she could rise, I shot in the head again.
Then I swung the axe in both hands at her two, three times. Her head
split apart and her brains foamed out. They looked like thick, viscid
porridge oozing into the carpet.
But she was not dead.
Whispering to herself, she reached about as if she was trying to find
the pieces of her head. Like it was a puzzle and she could easily re-
assemble it.
I cleaved off her head and left her.
(later)
I checked on the wraith-woman thirty minutes ago.
Her body was out in the corridor. It had crawled, headless, out there,
finally settling into a corner by the elevators, knees drawn up to its
chest.
A dozen rats were chewing on it.
And even then, its hands trembled, splayed against the walls. The
fingers were moving like white worms.
I have not eaten in three days.
October 22
Today: the Jigsaw Lady.
The dead do not die.
Even the pieces live.
If the dead are not destroyed completely, rendered to fragments like
my daughter, they cannot die. There will still be life in their remains.
If anyone should find and read this, heed my warning: the pieces live.
I was standing at the stairwell leading to the first floor, swatting at
flies, watching how high the oily gray water had risen. A few bubbles
broke the surface. I should have run off, but I stayed.
I watched as a bone-white carcass bobbed to the surface with a
splash, ripples spreading out from it. It just floated there. I could not
even be sure what I was looking at, just a bloodless white mass that
was shiny with water and slime. There was a tracery of dark veins
beneath the skin and minute perforations like nails had been
pounded into it.
Then I knew: a back, a woman’s back.
And at that moment, it flipped around, paddling in an ever-widening
circle. It was Peggy Lake’s torso and it was swimming about, almost
casually. It floated around on its back, long pallid arms cutting
through the water gracefully. One breast was a swollen, livid water
balloon, clustered with something like toadstools, the other was
hung with fat black leeches. I could clearly see the stump of her neck,
the stump at her waist. Both were alabaster white, strings of tissue
trailing from them like the tentacles of jellyfish. The bullet holes in
her chest and belly made sucking sounds as water was drawn into
them and expelled.
I think I screamed.
Then something else bobbed to the surface.
Peggy’s head. It floated there, a rotting and putulant mass of gray-
white flesh, hair fanning out about it. Half of the face was blasted
away from my bullet and pink, segmented worms slid in and out of
the exposed bleached tissue. She watched me with one glaring black
eye that looked like a glossy egg ready to hatch. Her mouth opened
and closed with a gurgling sound.
I think she was saying my name.
I stumbled off. I could take no more.
It was insane.
I pulled myself up the stairs to the third floor and was near the top
when I heard a wet slapping sound.
The torso was following me.
I made it down the corridor when it emerged from the stairwell. It
was like some fleshy albino monkey walking on its hands, torso
swinging back and forth.
It was coming for me.
Just as I fumbled my door open, I saw a set of legs come walking
towards me. I locked the door and listened to them out there.
Knocking. Kicking. Trying to get in.
I crouched in the corner. I was crying and shaking. I had to put my
thumb in my mouth so I would not start giggling.
October 23
Today I paid for my arrogance.
I was pissed off about the Jigsaw Lady. I wanted to find those pieces
and destroy them.
What I found instead was a young woman sitting in a kitchen in 2-c.
Pressed into the corner, a morbid mesh of mildew had grown over
her in a fine plaiting, then spread up the wall in a cobwebby net.
She kept whispering beneath her shroud.
She would have been an easy kill.
But it was a trap.
She was bait.
While she drew me in, the others came for me.
Two naked men: dripping things, their skins a brilliant almost
phosphorescent white. Oily black mud and sediment from the river
bottoms was streaked over them like warpaint. It stood out in great
contrast to their pallor.
One did not have a face, just a gray creeping blanket of fungus where
it should have been.
The other did not have a head.
They took me by surprise.
I fought and screamed as they grasped me.
They were strong; but I was manically determined.
I kicked out and freed myself.
My nails sheared the fungus from the first man’s face and gray juice
alive with worms sprayed into my own. But this hardly cooled his
passion. While the headless man held me, the fungus man pressed
his ragged, pulsing face into my own. His breath was like rotting fish.
I moaned with horror and his tongue—which was cold and bloated
black—licked my face and then swam between my lips like a dead,
wormy fish.
I bit it off.
I tore it off by the roots with my teeth.
He fell away and I spit out the cold snake of his tongue. My mouth
was filled with a slimy, rank discharge.
I knocked the headless man away, remembered I still held the axe,
then swung it double-handed at the other. I sank it right into his face
which was like a watercolor painting that had run—color and flesh
oozing from the bone in a seething, fungoid mass.
Then the headless man had me.
He threw me down and with such force it knocked the wind out of
me.
The other man stumbled away into the corridor, the axe still planted
in his face, fingers trembling on the handle, tap-tap-tapping.
But the headless man had me.
I was pinned down and he climbed on top of me. He pounded my
head against the hardwood floor until I stopped moving. I was
vaguely aware of my skirt being peeled away, of being laid bare by
him. I came to and I felt his member slide into me like a sliver of ice.
My stomach contents heaved. I vomited bile from my mouth.
I screamed.
I fought.
I was being raped by a headless corpse.
He pumped on me for some time as my mind went blank and the
mildewed woman giggled. Then I came alive, wild and shrieking. I
tossed him off me and ran from the apartment. The dead man with
the axe still imbedded in his face was hissing and howling in an
insane, diabolic fury over what he’d been denied.
The headless man stumbled after me.
He nearly caught me.
His hand slid around the edge of the door as I slammed it shut,
smashing the hand to pulp. Four fingers were severed and fell to the
floor, still possessed of an unearthly life. They looked like pallid, evil
worms.
I smashed them to paste.
Alone, I crouched in the corner, stinking and dirty and violated.
I screamed.
I screamed for a long time.
October 24
The rain keeps falling.
Everything damp.
Everything rotting.
The flies cover the walls.
I have no food.
I dare not open the door. The dead are in the corridor. Parts of them.
I found a rat in the kitchen cupboard.
I crushed it to jelly in my hands, then I roasted it over a fire I built in
the sink. It was good. It was unbelievably good.
October 25
By nightfall, I was forced out.
I needed something to eat.
I went out into the corridor, then I went downstairs. The water is
much higher now. I can’t go to the first floor, it’s completely
submerged.
The baby is kicking and kicking.
I hoped Michael would be home.
There is no food. The rats have eaten everything.
(later)
The dead are not in the corridor.
I investigated 2-D, but found no food. Not even a rat.
In a back bedroom that was used for storage, there were rows of
coats and dresses hung by wires. I think it was a collection of antique
clothes: bustle dresses, hoop skirts, clawhammer coats. They smelled
dark and musty. I looked around at them with my flashlight. I was
enjoying myself.
Then a thin white hand with black fingernails slid out of a coat sleeve
and grasped my wrist.
It was just an arm. A living severed arm.
I fought with it for some time before I could peel it free. I threw it in
the corner. All the coats and dresses were swinging back and forth by
then. I thought they were alive.
I slammed the door shut.
The hand scratched desperately to get out.
I sat on the second story landing for an hour after that, watching the
black rising water, waiting for the Jigsaw Lady, listening to the
constant drone of corpse flies. The water is up to the fifth step from
the top now. I crept down there, peering into the dirty water hoping
to find a dead rat and saw a white, narrow face with mirrored eyes
staring up at me.
I screamed.
I thought it was one of the dead, rising up.
It was only me. My reflection.
I am a monster now. I am a horror.
I look like one of them.
October 26
Still no food.
Not even a rat.
I have been feeling very ill. I am dizzy and nauseated. I am so hungry
it feels like someone is pounding nails into my stomach. I have a very
bad feeling. I think the baby is coming. I really think it is.
I will have to deliver it alone.
It will be premature.
But it must live.
It has to.
I am so alone.
At night I hear a woman crying.
I think it is me.
October 27
Exhausted.
Wrung-out.
It began early this morning. The labor. By noon the contractions
were eight minutes apart. The baby came out at five. A boy. He is
small, scrawny really, but he is healthy. Very beautiful. I was afraid
he would be a monster.
I named him Michael.
So tired.
Wish that woman would stop crying. I need sleep.
October 28
Michael sleeps a lot.
Good baby.
I can’t take him out when I look for food.
Weak from hunger, I have to crawl on all fours but I found a rat. In 3-
F. It was blown up with gas and maggoty, but I ate it anyway. I ate it
raw. The taste of rotting flesh is very yummy.
Why didn’t I know how good it tasted before?
Even the maggots. Very plump. Very sweet.
Rice.
Pretend it’s rice.
Yummy, Uncle Ben’s.
(later)
Every night now, as I crawl on the floor,
Dead parts knocking, knocking at the door.
I wrote this on the wall in crayon.
October 29
I crawl on my hands and knees all the time.
I hunt.
I am a hunter.
I do not like standing anymore. Down by the floor you can see and
smell things you can’t when you stand. I drool all the time. I dream of
raw meat. Sometimes it has worms in it. Meat is meat is meat. And I
have to fill my belly so my breast milk is good for Michael.
The dead want Michael.
They will never have him! Michael is mine and I will never give him
up to those monsters. Never, ever, never.
Still, they knock.
They pound.
They claw.
They call my name.
I think it is the Jigsaw Lady, the Wraith Woman. Many other parts.
They wait at the door. Hungry, hungry, hungry.
October 30
Flies cover my face; they are my mask.
Caught six nice spiders and several beetles for my supper. It’s easy to
dig into the walls now. Everything is soft from the creeping
dampness. Wallpaper is hanging in strips. Plaster is crumbling.
Inside the walls is where you find the goodies.
Believe me, I know!
I heard a scratching in the walls and I knew something was in there. I
clawed through the plaster and found a nest of rats. The adults
scattered. The mother tried to fight and I stabbed her. She crawled
farther into the wall. I couldn’t get her.
But she left her babies.
Blind, hairless pink little things in a nest of shredded newspaper.
They were warm in my hands. They moved. I could feel the pulsing of
their little hearts. I could not stop drooling.
I ate them raw.
They were good very yummy.
Sweet and soft under my teeth. How delicious. I never knew rat
babies could taste that good.
I licked the blood from my fingertips.
Yummy.
Yummy.
That crying woman keeps the baby up at night.
I will find her.
I wonder if she will taste as good as rat babies
October 31
Halloween.
Lots of trick-or-treaters this year. They pound at the door with their
pulpy fists. They scratch with their nails. They call me by name. I
have no treats for them and I do not want to see the fright masks they
wear.
Thinking about Michael who was an asshole. Wish he was here now. I’
d show him. Thinking about that guy downstairs the survivalist guy, I
used to go down to his apartment twice a week while Michael was
gone whoring or whatever it was he did. can’t remember that guy’s
name. he would talk about UFO’s and strange things and before long
he would have my clothes off. it was not rough like with michael.
sometimes its nice to be eaten ha ha ha
Listen.
Outside the door they are outside the door. bits and pieces. All the
bits and pieces
That voice
I think it is Charlie
Come out and play come out and play
baby michael.
he hasn’t woken up at all today. he’s so tired. crazy insane fucking
crying woman kept us up all night. fucking kill you psycho bitch
better believe i’ll kill make a fucking soup out of your bones pudding
of your liver pass the beans ma
trick-or-treaters.
knock knock scratchy-scritchy-scratch you can’t come in
baby rats I dream of baby rats they were so good yummy tasty I bet
there’s more. fat little sweetmeats soft bones chewy meat the blood
oh the blood babies are good
happy
holloweeeeen
found meat yes I did
it was hiding there in the blankets but I found it and I ate and ate and
ate oh the sweet flesh and hot blood and tender flesh eat it raw tastes
so good raw delectable yes like that word like luscious succulent
filling myself until I can eat no more face wet with blood fat and
grease on my fingers and chin
but the baby
dear god
i wonder
i wonder
i wonder where the baby is
I’m starting this diary at the end and not at the beginning because it
is THE END.
While I cowered in my apartment listening to the rain fall and the
dead scratch at my door, the city died.
I stood over its grave in the morning light. It is flooded now.
A waterlogged corpse slowly sinking into darkness.
October 2
To a maggot, a corpse is its whole world.
It is food and shelter and spawning ground.
The city is now a corpse and I am a maggot.
October 3
The doors are locked.
I venture out only in the daytime.
At night the dead come looking for me because they know I am here.
They know I am six months along. I think they want the baby. They
pound at the door and scratch with their black, broken nails.
I live on the third floor. I hope they cannot climb.
They scream in the flooded streets.
Sometimes they scream my name.
October 4
Charlie Bowers is dead.
He lived downstairs in 2-c.
Everyone thought he was crazy walking around in his combat boots
and camouflage, stockpiling survival rations and weapons, always
spouting off about Armageddon and leaving disturbing fliers tucked
under our doors about surviving plagues and nuclear holocausts.
Towards the end he barricaded himself in his apartment and
everyone thought he was even crazier.
But I knew better.
I went into his apartment today. I have all the keys from the
managers office.
I took a 9mm handgun, some mosquito netting, and what food he
had left which wasn’t much.
Charlie has been dead at least a week.
I think rats have been eating him.
October 5
The dead eat the living. They feast on them.
I watched two of them last night—a woman and a little girl—kill a
man who was trying to wade across the street in the moonlight.
The water out there is hip-deep.
The man was half way across and I silently cheered him on. Then the
woman and the girl rose up and took him. I listened to him scream as
they pulled him apart. When he stopped screaming, they dragged
him under.
I think they only eat enough to satisfy them.
They prefer their meat cold: I think they take the corpses somewhere
and let them soften up before they feast.
I wonder what that tastes like.
I wonder what carrion feels like in your mouth.
October 6
My husband’s name was Michael.
We had two lovely children.
Michael was a good father and he never, ever hit the children
because I wouldn’t put up with that. He hit me sometimes but only
because he had to.
October 7
I found one of them today or should I say one of them found me.
I was under the mistaken impression that they only came out at night
like ghouls and vampires on TV.
I was wrong.
They do not like the light, but it won’t kill them.
I went downstairs to get more batteries from Charlie Bowers’
stockpile.
I came down the steps, listening to the thudding of my footfalls and
perhaps the beat of my heart. I smelled something like spoiled meat
and something worse like a rank boiling fermentation that literally
curled the hairs in my nose.
There was a woman on the landing…or something like a woman.
She was wearing a ragged, mildewed shift that looked like a shroud.
Her face was white and puckered, nibbled-looking, like it had been
underwater and fish had been chewing on it. She looked at me with
black shiny eyes that had no pupils or whites, just those black oily
marbles floating in yellow watery sockets.
And she hissed.
Between clenched gray teeth, she hissed like a whistling teakettle.
She had something and she didn’t want me getting it—a blackened
human head burst open with rot. She opened the door to the second
floor and crab-crawled through.
Afterwards, there was nothing but that horrible stink.
I stood there for a moment, motionless, before realizing that that
creature had once been Peggy Lake, my next door neighbor.
If I see her again I will kill her.
October 8
Last night, by wan moonlight, I watched the river of waste sweeping
through the streets below.
There was wreckage of all kinds bobbing out there—everything from
picnic tables to tires—but mostly there were corpses. Dozens of
corpses, bloated and bleached white, carried along by the current.
Some of them are dead. Some only pretending to be.
Last night and tonight again: a knocking at the door.
It sounds like many hands.
October 9
Michael was a cop out of the Crandon Precinct.
He had seven years on the job. He was a good man and an honest
man and he wasn’t dirty and corrupt and foul-mouthed like a TV cop.
No sir.
He was a fourth-generation cop and he took it very seriously.
We had a daughter, Marissa, who was six and a toddler, Sammy, who
at one was already like his father. He would have been a cop, too. I
know it.
If we had gotten out of the city before the water rose.
If we had heeded the warnings on TV.
If, if, if…I am drowning in a world of ifs.
But Michael and I both believed the water would recede. It had other
years. It always had.
The Black River would swell, some neighborhoods would flood, then
it would dry up.
Michael worked the four to midnight shift.
He left for work one afternoon and did not come back. By two in the
morning I was frantic.
Though the police themselves were looking for him, I went out
myself. I was gone an hour. I did not find him.
When I got back, the door was wide open. Marissa was gone. Two
men whose faces were like running white wax were eating Sammy.
He was dead and they were pulling him apart like the carcass of a
well-boiled chicken.
That’s all I remember.
When I woke I was alone.
They took Sammy with them.
Marissa never came back.
Nor did Michael.
But I wait for him. Each day and each night, I wait. He will come
through the door of our home sooner or later and I will be here.
The child I carry is not his.
October 10
The rats are getting bad.
Today, on the second floor, I came upon a dozen of them feeding on
the body of a dead man.
They did not even scurry when they saw me; they kept eating.
They were huge things with greasy-gray pelts and glaring, dead eyes.
They were tearing strips of white flesh from the throat and belly and
arms. Most of the meat was gone from the corpse’s pale mucid face.
I was certain he was dead.
Then he opened his oozing, filmed eyes.
(later)
The water is up to my waist now on the first floor. It’s not easy to get
around with my big belly. But there’s work that has to be done.
Carrying my gun and axe, I pushed through that sea of slimy dark
water. It stank of gassy putrefaction. Dead rats and nameless, rotting
things floated on the surface leaving oily wakes. Meatflies rose like
black bubbles.
I felt something in the water. A motion. An intent.
Something icy gripped my ankle, then retreated.
A hand, a grave-dead hand.
Peggy Lake rose up from the murk, water running from the holes in
her white rubber face. She was still wrapped in that gray, rotting
winding sheet. Fat green worms threaded in and out of the flabby
tissue at her neck. Her eyes were a liquid black.
She motioned at me with a meat cleaver.
“You,” she said in a congested voice like her lungs were filled with
mud and leaves. “I watched for YOU, I waited for YOU…I want what
you carry! Give it to me…GIVE IT TO MEEEEE!”
She lunged forward with the cleaver and I shot her three times with
the 9mm. The holes I drilled into her surprised her more than
anything else. No blood poured fourth, just a watery black discharge
like India ink.
I shot her in the face and it split down the center like it was made of
candy glass. Half of it sloughed off and fell into the water, revealing
the basal anatomy of muscles, tendons, and shiny gray gums. She
was infested by looping, squirming things like slugs or river worms.
Shoving the gun into my pocket, I swung the axe at her and nearly
took off her head.
Screaming with a shrill, insane sound, she went down into the water
then rose up again and this time I did take her head off after several
swings. Her body jumped up from the water, thrashing wildly about
and then submerged. Then it came up again. I chopped at it until it
sank. When it floated to the surface, I finished the job: I cut it in half.
Now Peggy Lake is nothing but a bobbing head, a torso with arms,
and a set of hips with legs.
They sank from view.
The head floated for a time, snapping its teeth at me.
But it, too, eventually sank.
October 11
Though I was sickened and scared by what happened yesterday—and
spent most of the night sweating through fever dreams—I went down
to the first floor again. If there’s anyone alive I need to find them. I
knocked on doors: Carrie and Mike Standish, Frank Fahey, Doris and
Ervin Pulcek who owned Creative Crumbs Bakery down the street,
but got no answer.
I heard a wet, slopping sound behind the Standish’s door.
Using my keys, I pushed it open against the water.
It was very dark in there.
I heard something like a gnawing sound. It reminded me of a dog
chewing on a bone.
I found Carrie and Mike. They were both dead and both half-
devoured, doing the dead man’s float. Whatever had been eating
them had a preference for bellies, throats, and thighs. It was terrible.
But day by day it was taking more to shock me.
From the bedroom, I heard a splashing: subtle, muted, darkly secret.
The sound of a crocodile gliding silently through a moonlit green
river.
I heard giggling: the shrill evil laughter of a child.
Terrified, I flashed the light around and saw something which made
me scream: a blurred white face with huge empty eyes and a black
hungry mouth.
It was ten feet away.
Then it submerged again. I shined the light around, my heart
pounding and the face surfaced not five feet away.
Dear God, but I think I recognized it.
I pulled the door shut which is not easy in the water. When it closed,
something hit it from the other side. I could hear it clawing at the
wood.
I did not leave my apartment for two days.
October 12
Charlie Bowers believed that there was a cover-up at Fort Providence
Military Reservation outside the city.
The base was enclosed by a series of chainlink fences topped with
barbed wire. Armed guards would stop you if you got anywhere near.
Charlie once told me they had the bodies of alien astronauts there,
another time he told me they were conducting weird experiments on
the corpses of soldiers shipped back from Iraq.
“You know there’s something funny about that place, April,” he told
me one day. “They claim they’re doing research into battlefield
medicine. But if that’s true, why the secrecy?”
“You know how the Army is.”
“Yes, exactly. I was in for ten years, April. You don’t wanna know
about some of the shit I saw.”
I did not ask and I did not want to know.
Now, however, I wish I had asked.
What had he seen?
What had he participated in?
And better yet, just exactly what had they been doing out at Fort
Providence?
October 13
I went down to Charlie Bowers’ apartment again today.
I don’t know why. I just felt I should.
Although Michael never knew it, I used to spend two afternoons a
week with Charlie. I liked to hear him talk. He saw conspiracies
everywhere. He was kind of like that guy on The X-files, the good-
looking one, except very militant.
When I got into Charlie’s place, I saw that a spreading green fungus
had grown over his face.
There is a leak in the ceiling. Water is dripping on Charlie’s corpse
and making it soft and spongy.
I poked it with a pencil and black fluid leaked from it. The smell was
disgusting.
What concerns me most is that it looks like something has been
eating Charlie. I couldn’t find anywhere that rats could get in. But
they must have.
For it can’t be the dead.
The door is locked and undamaged.
And I have the only key.
October 14
By the guttering glow of candles, I heard it.
A stealthy, sneaking sound that filled me with a cold blackness that
was limitless.
The doorknob was rattling.
It was night and I knew whoever was out there was not a living
human being, but something that had crawled from a grave.
There was a knocking at the door.
Then a scratching of fingers.
Taking my gun and ax I went over there.
I pressed my ear to the door and I could hear a breathing that was
moist and clotted.
The scratching went on and on and in my mind it was like spiders,
leggy spiders trying to find their way in.
A cold chill spread over my back and arms and I knew I should hide,
shut out the sound of that scratching. Yet I was drawn to it. I undid
the locks and said, “Come in.”
The door swung in and I heard a gurgling voice say, “Ma-ma, ma-
ma…”
Marissa had come home at last.
She was still wearing the remains of her nightgown and it hung on
her like a filthy shroud. Her face was white and puckered, the graying
lips shriveled away from gums and fine sharp teeth. Her mouth was
smeared with gore and I knew she had been hiding in the Standish’s
apartment, feeding on Carrie and Mike in the darkness like a corpse-
worm.
She held her arms out to me.
There were beetles crawling over her face.
Her hair was full of maggots.
I think I screamed as I swung the axe and cleaved her head in two.
She hit the floor, howling and screeching, and I kept chopping and
chopping until she was scattered into pieces. They were like white
worms wriggling and wriggling.
They would not die.
October 15
I took what was left of my daughter this morning and put it in a green
Hefty garbage bag, the draw-string type.
The pieces had stopped moving.
I took the bag and threw it out the window into the rising river in the
streets. It joined the other trash and wreckage floating by.
I have not even heard a distant plane in many days now.
I wonder if anyone’s left.
(later)
Have to write this down for I doubt my own observation.
I was sitting at the window at sundown watching the river of waste
wash on by, watching the corpses and dead animals floating and
bobbing as they were carried by the current to where I do not know.
As I sat there, I heard a splashing like a whale floundering down
there.
I peered closer and saw something I still do not believe: A
gargantuan mass of gray-white tissue erupting from the frothing
water. It looked like a twisted and gnarled tree trunk…but pulsating
and oozing, set with dozens and dozens of screaming mouths and
what might have been yellow globular eyes.
Then it sank from view.
Such a thing could not be.
Yet it was.
October 16
The food is nearly gone.
I made it last as long as I could, but I need to eat for the baby if for no
other reason.
I have two cans of soup and one bag of macaroni.
I have cleaned out all the apartments on the third floor and most of
the second. A lot of people took all the food they could carry with
them when they left. There are only scraps.
But the baby needs nutrition.
I must eat.
(later)
I have gone mad and I do not doubt it.
There is a set of stairs that lead from the third floor to the rooftop. As
I left my apartment I heard footsteps. Taking my gun, I followed the
sound and stopped dead at what I saw.
I could not have seen it.
A set of corpse-white legs joined at the hip walking up the stairs and
disappearing into the darkness. They must be Peggy Lake’s legs.
What drives them, what animates them, I do not know.
But if her legs are alive, then the rest of her must be as well.
October 17
There was a time when the helicopters used to fly over looking for
survivors, but I haven’t seen any in over a week now, maybe two.
There is nothing to do but read.
I like to read science fiction and have ever since I was a child and
discovered The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. More now than
ever I seek the oblivion of my imagination.
In the past month, I have read The Word for World is Forest by
Ursula K. Le Guin six times, Solaris by Stanislaw Lem four times, and
Cycle of Fire by Hal Clement three times.
My new favorite is Michael Moorcock’s The Black Corridor. It is
about a man named Ryan who travels in a spaceship to another star.
Everyone else is in suspended animation.
He is awake.
He is alone.
He is slowly going insane.
October 18
Last night I dreamed I gave birth.
My child was a fleshy pink fetal rat, perfectly hairless. It was cold and
slimy.
When I held it in my arms, it mewled at me.
Then it broke apart into a threading nest of green worms.
I woke up screaming.
October 19
The rain keeps falling and falling.
I visited Charlie today.
He is badly decomposed.
It was nice to visit him even though his entire body is now
encapsulated in that green mossy fungus. I pressed my hand against
the fungus and it was greasy and warm. It pulses slightly like the
heartbeat of a newborn.
Charlie and I had a long discussion.
It wasn’t like the old days when he would put his hands on me and I
would melt.
Still, we understand each other.
“April, listen to me,” he said. “This building is now your fortress. But
there is danger out in the water and there is danger in these many
hidden rooms. You must go to each one and—”
“I’m afraid.”
“I know you are. But you must exterminate the living dead. You have
to. You have to think of the baby.”
“I can’t do it again. I can’t.”
“You must.”
He was right. Someone must exterminate them. That someone is me.
October 20
The vermin are unbearable.
The building is infested with rats.
The flies are so thick in the air they move like a black, seeking cloud.
On the first floor, their buzzing is so loud you cannot shout above it.
Dead things are washing in from the streets now, bloated and
putrescent things, that are acrawl with flies and shuddering with
larva.
I sleep with mosquito netting over my head.
(later)
One of the dead attacked me. It was a little girl, I think.
She came up out of the flooded stairwell leading to the first floor.
She had long black braids and wore a decaying, mottled gray burial
dress. Her face was a seething mass of maggots. I clubbed her with
the handle of my axe and her face exploded into white ribbons of
pulp.
I beat her away and raced upstairs.
I made it.
This time.
October 21
I got another one today.
This was on the second floor.
(It’s far too dangerous to go down to the first floor as it’s nearly
submerged now. Judging from how high the water is on the stairwell,
I think it would be up to my neck.)
I went into Mrs. Cardozian’s apartment. The shades were drawn and
it was very dark. But I knew something was in there: I could smell
the sickly-sweet pungency of the walking dead which was like rotting
fruit fermenting to juice.
I thumped the wall to draw them into the light.
One took the bait and showed right away. It was not Mrs. Cardozian.
It was a naked, stick-thin wraith whose puckered white flesh barely
concealed the protruding hip bones, the racks of her ribs. It was a
woman…or had been. Her eyes were gone. She moved in my general
direction, her long skeleton fingers like white pencils tapping along
the wall.
“Over here,” I said.
She turned quick, drab greasy hair hanging over her face like dead
worms. She was like a skeleton skinned in the thinnest veneer of
white flesh. There were numerous punctures in her skin that seeped
a black fluid. One scrawny breast swung back and forth by a ribbon
of tissue, the other was eaten away into a yawning black pit by an
ulcer.
Lips pulling back, clenching blackened teeth, she hissed at me.
It was a reptilian sound, like a snake.
I shot her in the head and she fell over against the wall, leaving a
black smear of goo over the cream-colored plaster as she slid down.
She screeched and flailed madly with her hands.
Before she could rise, I shot in the head again.
Then I swung the axe in both hands at her two, three times. Her head
split apart and her brains foamed out. They looked like thick, viscid
porridge oozing into the carpet.
But she was not dead.
Whispering to herself, she reached about as if she was trying to find
the pieces of her head. Like it was a puzzle and she could easily re-
assemble it.
I cleaved off her head and left her.
(later)
I checked on the wraith-woman thirty minutes ago.
Her body was out in the corridor. It had crawled, headless, out there,
finally settling into a corner by the elevators, knees drawn up to its
chest.
A dozen rats were chewing on it.
And even then, its hands trembled, splayed against the walls. The
fingers were moving like white worms.
I have not eaten in three days.
October 22
Today: the Jigsaw Lady.
The dead do not die.
Even the pieces live.
If the dead are not destroyed completely, rendered to fragments like
my daughter, they cannot die. There will still be life in their remains.
If anyone should find and read this, heed my warning: the pieces live.
I was standing at the stairwell leading to the first floor, swatting at
flies, watching how high the oily gray water had risen. A few bubbles
broke the surface. I should have run off, but I stayed.
I watched as a bone-white carcass bobbed to the surface with a
splash, ripples spreading out from it. It just floated there. I could not
even be sure what I was looking at, just a bloodless white mass that
was shiny with water and slime. There was a tracery of dark veins
beneath the skin and minute perforations like nails had been
pounded into it.
Then I knew: a back, a woman’s back.
And at that moment, it flipped around, paddling in an ever-widening
circle. It was Peggy Lake’s torso and it was swimming about, almost
casually. It floated around on its back, long pallid arms cutting
through the water gracefully. One breast was a swollen, livid water
balloon, clustered with something like toadstools, the other was
hung with fat black leeches. I could clearly see the stump of her neck,
the stump at her waist. Both were alabaster white, strings of tissue
trailing from them like the tentacles of jellyfish. The bullet holes in
her chest and belly made sucking sounds as water was drawn into
them and expelled.
I think I screamed.
Then something else bobbed to the surface.
Peggy’s head. It floated there, a rotting and putulant mass of gray-
white flesh, hair fanning out about it. Half of the face was blasted
away from my bullet and pink, segmented worms slid in and out of
the exposed bleached tissue. She watched me with one glaring black
eye that looked like a glossy egg ready to hatch. Her mouth opened
and closed with a gurgling sound.
I think she was saying my name.
I stumbled off. I could take no more.
It was insane.
I pulled myself up the stairs to the third floor and was near the top
when I heard a wet slapping sound.
The torso was following me.
I made it down the corridor when it emerged from the stairwell. It
was like some fleshy albino monkey walking on its hands, torso
swinging back and forth.
It was coming for me.
Just as I fumbled my door open, I saw a set of legs come walking
towards me. I locked the door and listened to them out there.
Knocking. Kicking. Trying to get in.
I crouched in the corner. I was crying and shaking. I had to put my
thumb in my mouth so I would not start giggling.
October 23
Today I paid for my arrogance.
I was pissed off about the Jigsaw Lady. I wanted to find those pieces
and destroy them.
What I found instead was a young woman sitting in a kitchen in 2-c.
Pressed into the corner, a morbid mesh of mildew had grown over
her in a fine plaiting, then spread up the wall in a cobwebby net.
She kept whispering beneath her shroud.
She would have been an easy kill.
But it was a trap.
She was bait.
While she drew me in, the others came for me.
Two naked men: dripping things, their skins a brilliant almost
phosphorescent white. Oily black mud and sediment from the river
bottoms was streaked over them like warpaint. It stood out in great
contrast to their pallor.
One did not have a face, just a gray creeping blanket of fungus where
it should have been.
The other did not have a head.
They took me by surprise.
I fought and screamed as they grasped me.
They were strong; but I was manically determined.
I kicked out and freed myself.
My nails sheared the fungus from the first man’s face and gray juice
alive with worms sprayed into my own. But this hardly cooled his
passion. While the headless man held me, the fungus man pressed
his ragged, pulsing face into my own. His breath was like rotting fish.
I moaned with horror and his tongue—which was cold and bloated
black—licked my face and then swam between my lips like a dead,
wormy fish.
I bit it off.
I tore it off by the roots with my teeth.
He fell away and I spit out the cold snake of his tongue. My mouth
was filled with a slimy, rank discharge.
I knocked the headless man away, remembered I still held the axe,
then swung it double-handed at the other. I sank it right into his face
which was like a watercolor painting that had run—color and flesh
oozing from the bone in a seething, fungoid mass.
Then the headless man had me.
He threw me down and with such force it knocked the wind out of
me.
The other man stumbled away into the corridor, the axe still planted
in his face, fingers trembling on the handle, tap-tap-tapping.
But the headless man had me.
I was pinned down and he climbed on top of me. He pounded my
head against the hardwood floor until I stopped moving. I was
vaguely aware of my skirt being peeled away, of being laid bare by
him. I came to and I felt his member slide into me like a sliver of ice.
My stomach contents heaved. I vomited bile from my mouth.
I screamed.
I fought.
I was being raped by a headless corpse.
He pumped on me for some time as my mind went blank and the
mildewed woman giggled. Then I came alive, wild and shrieking. I
tossed him off me and ran from the apartment. The dead man with
the axe still imbedded in his face was hissing and howling in an
insane, diabolic fury over what he’d been denied.
The headless man stumbled after me.
He nearly caught me.
His hand slid around the edge of the door as I slammed it shut,
smashing the hand to pulp. Four fingers were severed and fell to the
floor, still possessed of an unearthly life. They looked like pallid, evil
worms.
I smashed them to paste.
Alone, I crouched in the corner, stinking and dirty and violated.
I screamed.
I screamed for a long time.
October 24
The rain keeps falling.
Everything damp.
Everything rotting.
The flies cover the walls.
I have no food.
I dare not open the door. The dead are in the corridor. Parts of them.
I found a rat in the kitchen cupboard.
I crushed it to jelly in my hands, then I roasted it over a fire I built in
the sink. It was good. It was unbelievably good.
October 25
By nightfall, I was forced out.
I needed something to eat.
I went out into the corridor, then I went downstairs. The water is
much higher now. I can’t go to the first floor, it’s completely
submerged.
The baby is kicking and kicking.
I hoped Michael would be home.
There is no food. The rats have eaten everything.
(later)
The dead are not in the corridor.
I investigated 2-D, but found no food. Not even a rat.
In a back bedroom that was used for storage, there were rows of
coats and dresses hung by wires. I think it was a collection of antique
clothes: bustle dresses, hoop skirts, clawhammer coats. They smelled
dark and musty. I looked around at them with my flashlight. I was
enjoying myself.
Then a thin white hand with black fingernails slid out of a coat sleeve
and grasped my wrist.
It was just an arm. A living severed arm.
I fought with it for some time before I could peel it free. I threw it in
the corner. All the coats and dresses were swinging back and forth by
then. I thought they were alive.
I slammed the door shut.
The hand scratched desperately to get out.
I sat on the second story landing for an hour after that, watching the
black rising water, waiting for the Jigsaw Lady, listening to the
constant drone of corpse flies. The water is up to the fifth step from
the top now. I crept down there, peering into the dirty water hoping
to find a dead rat and saw a white, narrow face with mirrored eyes
staring up at me.
I screamed.
I thought it was one of the dead, rising up.
It was only me. My reflection.
I am a monster now. I am a horror.
I look like one of them.
October 26
Still no food.
Not even a rat.
I have been feeling very ill. I am dizzy and nauseated. I am so hungry
it feels like someone is pounding nails into my stomach. I have a very
bad feeling. I think the baby is coming. I really think it is.
I will have to deliver it alone.
It will be premature.
But it must live.
It has to.
I am so alone.
At night I hear a woman crying.
I think it is me.
October 27
Exhausted.
Wrung-out.
It began early this morning. The labor. By noon the contractions
were eight minutes apart. The baby came out at five. A boy. He is
small, scrawny really, but he is healthy. Very beautiful. I was afraid
he would be a monster.
I named him Michael.
So tired.
Wish that woman would stop crying. I need sleep.
October 28
Michael sleeps a lot.
Good baby.
I can’t take him out when I look for food.
Weak from hunger, I have to crawl on all fours but I found a rat. In 3-
F. It was blown up with gas and maggoty, but I ate it anyway. I ate it
raw. The taste of rotting flesh is very yummy.
Why didn’t I know how good it tasted before?
Even the maggots. Very plump. Very sweet.
Rice.
Pretend it’s rice.
Yummy, Uncle Ben’s.
(later)
Every night now, as I crawl on the floor,
Dead parts knocking, knocking at the door.
I wrote this on the wall in crayon.
October 29
I crawl on my hands and knees all the time.
I hunt.
I am a hunter.
I do not like standing anymore. Down by the floor you can see and
smell things you can’t when you stand. I drool all the time. I dream of
raw meat. Sometimes it has worms in it. Meat is meat is meat. And I
have to fill my belly so my breast milk is good for Michael.
The dead want Michael.
They will never have him! Michael is mine and I will never give him
up to those monsters. Never, ever, never.
Still, they knock.
They pound.
They claw.
They call my name.
I think it is the Jigsaw Lady, the Wraith Woman. Many other parts.
They wait at the door. Hungry, hungry, hungry.
October 30
Flies cover my face; they are my mask.
Caught six nice spiders and several beetles for my supper. It’s easy to
dig into the walls now. Everything is soft from the creeping
dampness. Wallpaper is hanging in strips. Plaster is crumbling.
Inside the walls is where you find the goodies.
Believe me, I know!
I heard a scratching in the walls and I knew something was in there. I
clawed through the plaster and found a nest of rats. The adults
scattered. The mother tried to fight and I stabbed her. She crawled
farther into the wall. I couldn’t get her.
But she left her babies.
Blind, hairless pink little things in a nest of shredded newspaper.
They were warm in my hands. They moved. I could feel the pulsing of
their little hearts. I could not stop drooling.
I ate them raw.
They were good very yummy.
Sweet and soft under my teeth. How delicious. I never knew rat
babies could taste that good.
I licked the blood from my fingertips.
Yummy.
Yummy.
That crying woman keeps the baby up at night.
I will find her.
I wonder if she will taste as good as rat babies
October 31
Halloween.
Lots of trick-or-treaters this year. They pound at the door with their
pulpy fists. They scratch with their nails. They call me by name. I
have no treats for them and I do not want to see the fright masks they
wear.
Thinking about Michael who was an asshole. Wish he was here now. I’
d show him. Thinking about that guy downstairs the survivalist guy, I
used to go down to his apartment twice a week while Michael was
gone whoring or whatever it was he did. can’t remember that guy’s
name. he would talk about UFO’s and strange things and before long
he would have my clothes off. it was not rough like with michael.
sometimes its nice to be eaten ha ha ha
Listen.
Outside the door they are outside the door. bits and pieces. All the
bits and pieces
That voice
I think it is Charlie
Come out and play come out and play
baby michael.
he hasn’t woken up at all today. he’s so tired. crazy insane fucking
crying woman kept us up all night. fucking kill you psycho bitch
better believe i’ll kill make a fucking soup out of your bones pudding
of your liver pass the beans ma
trick-or-treaters.
knock knock scratchy-scritchy-scratch you can’t come in
baby rats I dream of baby rats they were so good yummy tasty I bet
there’s more. fat little sweetmeats soft bones chewy meat the blood
oh the blood babies are good
happy
holloweeeeen
found meat yes I did
it was hiding there in the blankets but I found it and I ate and ate and
ate oh the sweet flesh and hot blood and tender flesh eat it raw tastes
so good raw delectable yes like that word like luscious succulent
filling myself until I can eat no more face wet with blood fat and
grease on my fingers and chin
but the baby
dear god
i wonder
i wonder
i wonder where the baby is
