Apocalypse

(March Madness #2)

April 17, 2070

I don’t know why I’m writing in this, the world is over and it’s not like anyone will find this journal and decide to read it. Most likely, whoever finds this will burn it for kindling to keep warm in the winter, so it won’t really matter if I document my life, but there’s a tiny part of me hoping that humanity can get through this post apocalyptic world, and maybe things can go back to the way they were. Everyone not living in fear that they’ll be eaten alive if they make too much noise, the world where you could just trade pieces of green paper for food or drink, and you don’t have to carry a weapon on you everywhere you go. That time seems like a blur to me, they feel like they were lifetimes ago, but it doesn’t matter right now. You probably don’t know if this post apocalyptic world was real if you’re reading this in the future, so I’ll start with how the world spiraled down into the hellhole that it is. I don’t know how it happened exactly, I was an animator before the “plague” (that’s what people call the beginning of the apocalypse), it began around August or October of 2065. These strange things started to happen around the world, it was like a sickness that had strange side effects. Like strange in the way that it made you absent minded, more hungry, and would speed up your metabolism so you would want to eat more, some people went to such extreme lengths that they would eat the first thing they saw. There was a story on the news about how one person caught a fish, and ate it raw, bone and all, but no one paid any attention to those things because to us it just sounded like weird stories about how crazy some people are. If only we knew that this was an actual disease and not just strange occurrences, and that this disease would help destroy the world. More of those strange stories started to appear everywhere, soon it became so big that people started to wonder if these really were just strange occurrences. Some scientists took some tests and discovered that it was a weird disease, they worked on a cure for it, but the disease would evolve and completely change. Making it impossible to invent a cure for it, people were a bit disturbed by this, so countries started to close down their airports and docks. They even started to move the infected people into neighborhoods (they looked like WWII ghettos Germany used to lock up Jews) to stop more infection. Seems a bit cruel, but this thing was very contagious, and it infected so many people that there were only a few people left who weren’t infected, making the economy slow down so there was barely any money to afford proper doctors and medicine, so the government went to drastic measures. About a year after the disease started, it infected almost the entire world. But that was just the beginning. Remember how I said earlier that the disease would evolve like crazy and completely change, well it evolved like crazy all of a sudden, and it made the people infected go crazy, it made them see things, it made them feel weak and hungry, then it would shut down the person’s organs, killing them. They would die, but they would come back, and they seemed to act on primal instinct. They would eat, anything that was alive, they would go towards any loud sound they heard, and they would chase whatever was running away from them. No one knows how the disease does this, but I think it reactivates the animal part of the brain, the one that says eat eat, and since the person dies delirious and hungry, the primal part of their brain thinks I’m hungry so I need to eat something, anything. They don’t seem to feel pain, and they don’t care if they get hurt, all they care about is eating, but since only a part of their brain is active and nothing else, their body starts to rot, even their brain, but it still doesn’t affect them. So of course people decided to call them zombies. And just like a classic zombie movie, the disease brings back any person that’s dead no matter how long they’ve been rotting in a cemetery, so I assume that the disease slows the decay of dead things since the zombies can last for so long. They don’t seem to need oxygen, so I assume that their nerves are active, but since they can’t feel pain I assume that somehow the zombies nerves tell the muscles to move even though there’s no oxygen but since they don’t seem to feel pain, it must give them some sort of congenital insensitivity to pain (otherwise known as CIP), which is a rare disorder that people can be born with making them not able to feel physical pain. So when the zombies die I assume they somehow get a weird form of CIP, and their nerves force the muscles to move even though they can’t get oxygen because their heart and lungs aren’t working. Oh wait sorry I got off onto a tangent, I’ve always been fascinated by how the zombies are able to move even though they need to breathe oxygen, and they need to have a heart and lungs to get oxygen to their muscles, and people have tested on zombies, and their lungs don’t move somehow, and when they breathe out, instead of breathing out carbon dioxide like what a normal person does, it’s still oxygen. So they don’t use the oxygen at all, except to make groaning sounds. Aaaaaand I just went off on another tangent, ok so when people started to turn into zombies, and since uninfected kept the infected people in tiny neighborhoods, it was like a bomb of zombies went off all over the world, and no one could stop the huge hordes, but the worst part was that not all of the infected turned into zombies, some would become animal like creatures and they were way more dangerous than regular zombies. Then animals started to get infected and would mutate into horrible creatures, but we mostly worry about the zombies because they’re everywhere, but the zombies are all different. There’re slow zombies that can only walk, there’s ones that can run, ones that have claws and can climb up walls, and that’s not all of them. But this journal log is getting a bit too long, so anyway to keep it simple, my name is Jackson Veerdon, and I’ve been a lone survivor for about two years and 3 months.