Desolate

Dear Diary,

Silence.

The silence is golden.

For days, the screams had echoed, tore at our eardrums. Blood had caked the ground, patches dotting flowers and tufts of grass. Red sprayed across trunks of trees and car horns blared, abandoned in their owners haste to get away. Traffic had ensued and blocked the cars. The only way out was to either wait or run.

Buildings fell, crumbled to the ground in pieces. What was once proud homes to businesses that soared are just now piles of rubble. The dust floats, flecks that never end.

Months.

I still can’t believe that it’s been seven months since the end of the world happened. Seven months with no contact that’s outside of these people that I have to live with. Seven months with no internet and no electricity. Seven months since it all just… stopped.

It had just happened where one day, the buildings crumbled. The next, the screams echoed and tore at our eardrums. After that, silence has been the best part of it, even if it is tedious at times. But it means the creatures aren’t around.

I used to watch movies growing up and thought I knew all there was to know about zombies. About the flesh eating, brain craving monsters that hobbled and clacked and desired nothing more then to either make you join them or gobble you up like a Thanksgiving feast. They don’t exist in this apocalypse. I’d do anything for zombies instead of what we actually have.

They’d slaughtered anyone in their way. Men, women, kids, and even animals when they got in the way. No one and nothing had been safe unless you went the other way. They’d descended from above. No one knew exactly from where. Or maybe it had been an experiment in a lab gone wrong and they’d somehow fell from the heavenly world above.

I witnessed the carcass of one. I’d been lucky enough to not cross it while alive. Because I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be alive if that were the case.

The carcass lies in the backyard. It’s too big to carry off or even drag by ropes. It probably doesn’t help that when we had tried, even the entire group wasn’t able to move it. It’s larger than this two-story house with an attic that we are confined to. At least the cellar’s stocked from whoever the house used to belong to.

We’d found it when escaping the town. When the ground had rumbled, and people had ran for safety. I wasn’t as lucky as the others with their families having been left behind. Or maybe it’s that I am lucky that I didn’t have family to leave behind. I grew up in up in the foster system. I once thought it was the worst thing in the world, always jealous of those kids who had families, I know better now though that it was in fact my lottery winning. No family means no one to worry about. It’d made the running for safety so much easier.

Claws that could rip you apart on four long legs and a flat face with nothing except a wide mouth and sharp rows of teeth. We’ve counted five rows of them, just like sharks. Nearly three thousand of them, the thing could rip through bone. Its body is covered in prickly little fur, spouts of it like a spider. Pincers sprout from the top of its head and a large black thorn sprouts from the back of its bottom like a bee. Its eyes are hollow as a body turning to dust. Though, in the first few days that it had been in our sight, they were black and shiny, lifeless as they stared into our souls. I don’t like looking in the eyes despite its glassy stare of death. Because in those few days before they melted away, just vanished into nothing, it was as if it were watching us closely and would up and blink back to life. It was the worst part of the creature that we don’t understand a single thing about.

There has been nothing but silence for seven months and counting. The days feel endless. The sun bakes the ground we walk on, as if on eggshells, as quiet as the air that lies thick around us. It didn’t take us long to realize that if we dared to make a sound outside the walls of the house that the ground would shake with the pounding feet of whatever those monstrous creatures are. We have no name and yet, to us they are known as a “Landprey”, a simple name for such a beast. I’m still unsure if we are allowed to name it. Because scientists have already grabbed hold of one and dubbed it whatever it is, that they saw fit.

There is no word from the outside. It has had us reeling in this new world that we’ve had to carve from scratch. The ground is far too molted to spring up vegetables and fruits as it had once done. Cracks line it from the scorch of the sun. The grass no longer grows, and the trees have shed their leaves even during the first spring we experienced in this new world. Flowers can no longer grow, there is no sustenance beneath the ground we walk upon to allow them to flourish. Desolate, that’s the name. Barren, in every direction we can see. The forests are dead, branches withered. The animals that had once scampered about no longer exist.

I’d found their bodies scattered across the ground. Most had been curled in fetal positions, the telltale signs of hunger taking their lives. Some had been spared by being torn about by other animals desperate to eat anything at all. I didn’t need to ask to know that those who ate vegetation were all the first to go. The land had flittered away and so had they.

The beauty part of being human was the fact we could learn to hunt if needed. So, the four-legged creatures who roamed about, tearing apart the bodies of the ones who ate the vegetation hadn’t stood much of a chance unless they knew how to fight as well.

It was how we’d lost Brandan. Thought he’d be smart enough to go after a bear on his own. Died within days of the mauling. He hadn’t been allowed inside. The pain had made him scream and we hadn’t been able to risk it. When he went quiet after three days, we knew he had either died or was taken from us. The guys had gone out to locate his body, to give him a burial. He didn’t exist though. Only a pile of blood. I know because I saw it. I wasn’t supposed to, and they’d wanted us to stay away. They’d all been shaken up though, as if they’d seen something they weren’t supposed to.

I only saw the blood and the necklace. The chain still had blood caked on it and no one knew I had it. It was never questioned and because of that, I was pretty sure that neither of the guys had noticed its existence in the first place. Why Brandan had even had it, I wasn’t sure. It could’ve been his mother’s, his sister’s, even a girlfriend’s. It was mine now though. I didn’t care who it belonged to, it belonged to me. My own little secret that I was thrilled about having. Because when you lived with five other people (minus Brandan) and there was no one else around for miles or possibly, ever again, secrets became difficult to keep.

In every foster family I’d ever had, from the start, I’d always kept one secret close to my heart. These guys, however, knew that one tucked away in the crevasse of my heart. It had been mandatory. We’d each been made to spill a dark secret that we’d never told anyone before in order to live as peacefully together as possible. It was all that I’d had to myself. It was the only one I’d been able to tell.

Now I had another. One that I refused to give up no matter what they wanted from doing so. The golden heart framed a diamond one. In the light, it gleamed and sparkled. I keep it tucked under my pillow, the one and only place I can feel is the safest for me. There is no privacy otherwise. I can’t even go to the bathroom in peace. The door had been ripped off, by the last owners I could only assume as it was gone long before we’d gotten here.

Brandan was dead. He’d been the only other one my age. Twenty-one. I was officially the youngest with him gone.

Hilary and Lola were twins, apparently inseparable despite being twenty-four. Maybe that was a good thing. They had one another and mourned the deaths of their younger sister and parents together. At least neither one was alone.

Norman was twenty-six. Jack and Elliot were twenty-seven. Apparently all really good friends as they’d arrived together and knew one another’s secrets. They talked as if they’d been in diapers together, constantly reminiscing about the past. They grieved Brandan’s death, especially Norman. By the way he talks about him, I can only suspect that they’d been brothers. That definitely can’t be easy to get over.

I am completely and utterly alone. There is nobody for me.

There is no word yet if we ought to leave and find any form of civilization clinging to life. Nobody says it, but I know it’s because we’re all too scared to do it. I’m terrified. This house is the only reason we’re even alive. As long as we follow the rules and don’t make noise while outside the walls, we’re safe. Out there, in the lands of the unknown, there is no telling what is lying in wait.

Norman’s brought it up only once. I think he wants to leave. I think he wants to go out and find any clutches of civilization. I think he has the hope that somehow, someone from his life will be out there waiting for him. I know better.

From how they talk, I’ve come to realize I’m the only one who grew up in a foster home. I’m the only one who knows that nobody waits for you, blood or not. I know better than to trust anyone, and I definitely don’t trust any of these guys. I’m here to survive and that’s it. I was taught by the age of eight to never allow anyone to make promises of safety for me.

They, however, are obsessed with other people waiting on some other end of this.

There won’t be an end for a long time though. I know better than to hope. I know how to survive. I know how to go forward and that’s all I want to do. Which means staying put in a place that swathes us in safety. I doubt anyone would listen, but I don’t think I have to bring it up for a while. Norman hasn’t said anything since that one time and nobody else tries. I think Brandan’s disappearance has put the idea of traveling off any time soon.

We’re supposed to trust each other, but with the golden heart necklace hidden beneath my pillow, I know I can’t. No matter what. I know better.

I miss the smell of the flowers. I miss waking to the chirping of birds singing in the early hours of morning. I miss the hustle and bustle of city life and the low rumble of the ground as cars chugged along the roads and people scurried about in a hurry for their day of activities to be done.

I miss the entire world. I miss what once was and it never can be again. Nothing exists. It’s all just desolate, and I’m stuck right in the middle.