Apocalypse Journal (Final Draft)

April 18, 2070

Today I went to Target to look for any loot. I was running low on food and water, and was hoping to find something to use, but I knew the most I would find would be a stale granola bar if I was lucky, and if I was really lucky maybe I could find some equipment since I was running low on ammo for my handgun, and all the knives I had were starting to get dull, so I thought maybe someone forgot to check a nook or cranny, But mostly I was just telling myself that so I would have a reason to go outside. My home is a small smashed house, it looks just like a normal pile of rubble, but I found a hole barely big enough for me to fit through that leads to a small opening, that’s about as big as a small basement with enough room for me to stand in.

 I stepped through the smashed glass doors that lead to Target and looked around. I tried to remember what it used to look like before the apocalypse, but I can’t. Everytime I try to think about the old target all I can remember is a partly destroyed store, shelves bare except for the occasional useless item, and the floors all yellow due to no one cleaning them with the occasional blood stain on something.

Some isles were knocked over and a dead body was lying on top of a fallen isle about 10 feet ahead of me, the skin was all dry and pale, making it look like a dried up prune. The eyes were sunken in  its head making it look like it had no eyes. As I got closer to the body I saw that there was a bullet in it’s head, and black ooze around the wound which I’m guessing was blood. The mouth was open and dislocated, dangling at an impossible angle and seemed to only be attached to the body by the skin. The back of the body was in the middle of the knocked down aisle, so his butt was slipping into the shelves, kinda like when you sit in a skinny laundry basket. If I saw this five years earlier I probably would’ve vomited, but seeing a random dead body now was like seeing a crumbled down house in a neighborhood (there’s always at least one destroyed house out of every 5 houses).

 I walked back and to the left of the body, where the food aisle was, and just as I suspected all the shelves were bare, and even though the store was unbearably quiet I still kept my eyes and ears up listening for the smallest noises and looking for the slightest movement. The last time I was in a store looking for supplies I was just walking around casually like the world just didn’t go to hell, and I almost got bitten by a zombie because of my carelessness. I ended up bashing it’s head in with a PS50 controller that was on display.

 I slowly made my way to the camping and sports aisle with my knees bent, and my hand on my knife ready to pull it out of its sheath. The sports aisle had a hockey stick on the ground with some blood on the side that you use to hit the hockey puck with, and a pair of kids soccer cleats and since they were way to small for me, I only took the hockey stick, then I made my way to the hunting aisle where I found a small package of barbecue utensils hiding under the aisle. Inside the package was a small knife, a little pointed stick used to pick up small things off of the grills, and some useless stuff. I took the pack with me and went in the toy aisle to see if there was a bike I could use or a baseball bat, but found nothing.

 I did a whole sweep of the store just to be safe and found nothing else of value to me and walked to the exit, and when I was about 20 feet away from a hallway that led to the exit, I heard a harsh breathing sound, like someone had something stuck in his throat, but it also made a growling sound every so often. I froze dead in my tracks hoping it wasn’t a zombie dog pack. I slowly cut through the clothing aisle and peaked my head out over the side of a shelf and faced something that even now just thinking about it gives me the willies.

 It seemed to be just a mess of human and animal parts with 3 faces. It about ten feet tall and had some kind of tail thing, it looked like it had the body of a bunch of human chests stitched together, with half of a person’s face stuck looking up which was attached to the left shoulder, making it look like it a weird birth deformity where someone had a half born face growing out of their shoulder. Another face on the lower side of it was what looked like a zombie bear, and the main face in the center of the monstrosity seemed like a human that had half of the skin on its face ripped off, making it look like Two Face from batman. It had two bear legs in front of it, 3 human hands on the back side, acting like bug legs, and two human legs at the very back that were bent backwards. And it had 3 more human hands randomly put on the body and one arm near the front was about the size of a gorilla’s. The main face of the thing stared me in the eye and I saw the face of a dead man frozen in slack jawed terror, its eyes never moved nor did any part of its face, but the body had a mind of its own. As soon as it saw me it stopped and stared for a second, then it charged.

 Even the way it ran terrified me, it was like a giant insect as big as a rhino running full speed. I ran toward the monster. The thing swiped one of its hands at me, but I twirled around and narrowly avoided it and went up a side aisle that led near the exit. I sprinted down the aisle getting as much distance as I could between me and that abomination. I took a quick look over my shoulder to see that thing turn around and charge down the aisle quickly gaining on me, it reached out its giant hand towards me and as soon as it was about to grab me, I dove to the left out of the end of the aisle, and rolled back onto my feet to see the thing try to stop, but had to much momentum and slammed into the wall across the hallway. I turned around and ran out of the store, and I didn’t stop running until I was in the safety of my little house. Now I can stop and get my bearings together.

What was that thing? I’ve never heard about anything like that creature, let alone seen it. The closest thing I’ve heard about that’s like the monster I ran into is a rumor about  zombies fused together to make a giant undead blob, but that process takes forever and they need to stay in the sewers in order to not dry up and fall apart. That thing was. . . unnatural, even now, where the undead walk the earth, that weird monster I evaded was alien.