Jeffrey - 26th and 27th September

I found one of them. I found one of them and I killed it, and as surely as it is dead, I’m dead too. They’re circling outside, baying and howling, and soon they will come in. Soon they will come in and tear me limb from limb. They’ll spill my blood like red dye and gobble up my bones, they will.

I swear they will.

But I got one of them first. So help me God I took one of them with me. After my close encounter this morning, the rest of the day and indeed the night went with the usual fantastic good luck I have faced in my life. No food, no water, the taste of bile and blood lingering in my mouth, and my nose streaming with that sick black sludge, I moved across the surface of this dead world like a zombie, my body feeling like it weighed a thousand tonnes as I imagined over and over again that poisonous air turning my organs to reeking slime.

I wonder if I’ll become one of them when I die? A creeping fleshy horror, cursed to run this world like a mad beast and sleep through the day and awake at night to rage and howl. I would probably try to take my own life but right now I barely have the strength to lift the pen to write down these words.

I don’t know why it’s become so important to me to do this, I suppose putting my thoughts into form makes me feel less alone, and more alive. Even with no one else left, I have myself, with my own thoughts and my own words. This was how it was a lot of the time… Before… and how it will be until the very end, which may not be far away.

I had reached another settlement at my shuffling pace, its name unknown to me. All of these towns were new to me. With no humans left in them they may have just been rock formations, and I’m sure if there was any ‘nature’ left it would be swiftly reclaiming them. Instead there was the black viscous and vicious fluid spewing everywhere, oozing from the cracks of the earth itself it seemed. The sky still bled red, purple, and even yellow, like a festering wound, and the dead wind made sludge ooze from every hole in my body.

I saw a building which looked like the kind of secure shelter I wanted to find after the horror of the previous night. It probably used to be a police station. The huge metal blast door lay ajar and I felt a surge of hope that maybe a survivor had opened it, but my heart sank when I saw a jumbled pile of bones that probably used to be several people, impossible to tell whether they were officers, criminals, or citizens, and it didn’t really matter now. The only things left now were me, a lone citizen… and those beasts, who were criminals against nature itself. In the small guard house a skeleton lay slumped over a blank CCTV monitor. I had a passing moment of curiosity as to what was happening here when the end came.

I gingerly moved the bones and closed the door as best I could behind me, despite its weight and my drained body. Inside I began a half assed (only because I barely had strength to stand) search for food, taking my chances on a coffee vending machine that gave me a steaming cup of black ooze, and an out of order vending machine that kept flashing a small message on the read out, ‘Due for electrical safety test WHEN THE SKY FALLS DOWN, please contact a technician on XXXXXXXXXXXXXX’.

This was despite the fact that power was out and the machine was not even plugged in at the back. I was beyond caring about this kind of thing, all I wanted was to eat and drink. My mouth was dry like firewood and peppered with oozing sores and cuts, constantly supplying what little taste buds I had left with that bitter and rotten taste of death. I’m pretty sure my stomach had eaten itself by this point too.

I decided to investigate the basement for supplies, hoping against all previous experience that there would be some sort of surviving food down here.

In a way, there was.

The basement was dark and moist, and it stank with decay and rot, and the black sludge leaked from a chest fridge and from bags, boxes, and cupboards. Small bars of light from the outside broke through dusty thick glass. In the middle of the room there was a single bloody footprint. It’s crimson mark standing out starkly in the muted colours and dull light of the room. As I moved forward, my rotting heart pounding in my throat, I saw another footprint, and another, and I followed them. Down another set of stairs, down deeper into the heart of this dead planet. The smell of rot became overpowering, and I was reminded of the stench of rotting bodies that seemed to cover all my memories of the war like a stinking filter.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and could barely see the footprints anymore, now just following the narrow corridor before me, running my hands along the walls to guide me. They felt sticky and damp, and I didn’t really want to think about what I was running my hands through. I felt the wall move away from me and could imagine the room branching out around me.

I felt a faint gust of the dead wind hit me in the face, and it whispered around the room like a phantom. The wind fell silent and I heard something under it. It was a faint rasping noise, like sandpaper on skin or the laboured breath of a dying man.

With trembling hands and an aching body, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a match.

I lit it and held it out in front of me cautiously, as if the dancing flames were lethal. The world burst into flickering view, and I think my heart stopped beating for a few seconds. One of those skinless beasts stood before me. It was so close that my nose and its two slits of nostrils, like cuts in a rotting steak, were almost touching.

In the empty sockets where eyes should have been, shadows danced in the flickering light of the match and I could have sworn I saw a dead grey mass of brain in the background. Rivets of blood and flesh dripped from the corners of its mouth filled with undeniably human teeth. It exhaled again and the match winked out without much protest. The darkness was complete.

I dived to the side without even thinking, hearing it roar as it leaped towards where I was and missed, hitting the floor with a sticky smack. My head hit the stone wall and the room exploded in white, leaving me dazed and confused. I pawed around pathetically on the ground with my hands, trying to get to my feet before it made another attack at me. I couldn’t see a thing, and even though it obviously couldn’t because it had no eyes, I had a feeling that it’s hearing and it’s sense of smell were possibly much better than mine, and I wasn’t going to take any risks.

As my hands slid around the damp ground, I felt one of them touch something hard and heavy. It felt like a length of pipe or a crow bar or something, I couldn’t be sure. I picked it up as I stood up and held it in both hands, like a blind, starved, and terrified baseball player. I slowly started backing along the wall, feeling safe that I was covered from at least one side.
I heard it pause, and I heard a sniffing sound, like it was a dog looking for my scent.

There was silence. A few pattering sounds met my ears and I imagined the blood dripping off it into puddles on the floor, and felt the stickiness on my only weapon and tried not to imagine what it was covered with, and tried not to vomit out my empty stomach onto the floor. Suddenly it screamed and came tearing towards me, the scream growing louder.

I closed my eyes (even though I couldn’t see) and held my unknown weapon out in front of me like the desperate last hope it was. I tried to swing it but my arms barely had the strength to hold it up. I felt it crash against me, feeling it’s heavy and deadly weight upon me, it’s raw primal power coiled up in its rotten muscles like a snake ready to strike, when it went suddenly went limp. Its howl cut off abruptly and I felt warm blood pour onto my hands.

I pushed it back off me, now nothing more than a sack of meat and bones, and I dropped my weapon. I was covered in a cold sweat and shaking so much from fear and adrenaline that I could barely fumble for a match and found it even tougher to light it. After 3 attempts and 3 dropped matches, one of them danced into life.

I looked down and saw my weapon for the first time. It was a length of rusted pipe, broken off with one jagged edge and one smooth edge where it probably connected to something a million years ago. If I had of held it other way it probably would have plunged through my stomach when the beast jumped on me. Holding it the other way had caused it to crash right through the monsters right eye socket and tear a tunnel through its brain before jutting out the back of its yellowing skull.

I sighed with relief and wondered why my one piece of good luck had come now when it probably would have been better for this thing to kill me. Kill me messily but quickly. I looked down at the creature and realised that its flesh hadn’t actually been rotting. I reached down and touched the threads of meat hanging from the ribs like ripped curtains. It was warm and soft, and peeled away in my hand easily.

My stomach rumbled and I looked at the meat before me. Silent tears ran down my face as I let the match flicker out and tried to forget the horror I was committing, lest it drive me mad like these creatures themselves.

***

And now here I lie, my body dying, my stomach rotting around the stinking meat in it, my nose, mouth, ears and eyes oozing blood and pus and a horde of those creatures banging against that metal door outside. I am trapped. I don’t know whether they are after me because I killed their comrade (but I doubt they have a sense of loyalty to each other) or just because they have my scent, but light is hours away and I can see them starting to clamber over each other, spilling over the gate because of their sheer volume.

Soon they will find me, and they will devour me like I devoured one of them. These are the final moments of my life. These are the final words I will write.

My name is Jeffrey Winchester. When the sky fell down I was sleeping in a fridge. I was sleeping in a goddamn fridge.