The stupid thing about horror movies is that the people run around in the dark. Mad clowns, psychos with chainsaws, fucking zombies, man, and nobody turns the lights on. Like that, over two months now. Stumbling around in blackness. Except it isn’t, blackness, exactly. More like what you see at an amusement park at night, as you race down the track of the roller coaster, a mad calliope of flashing lights.

I kept to the woods, traveling by night. Easier, by day every windblown bush turned into a biting, rotten corpse in my mind. As for people, well, Grandma warned me. Speak to few, trust even fewer. She wasn’t jaded like that, Before. Naw, she took in every loser, including her abandoned and disabled grandson. Regardless, I traveled alone. My food dwindling, unimaginable horrors. Except, if you’re listening to this then, you can imagine them too well. I found cough drops, dug up grubs. Cherry-menthol earthworms. I never came more than ten feet from a Biter. Not since…Grandma…a pair of ellipses in my voice. I can smell them, a blend of curdled blood and really bad feet. That and the fuckers shuffle, they don’t walk like people do. Not even the completely beaten humans drag their feet like a zombie.

I was walking that way when I found Arklay. And Trey, and our little gypsy. The colors here are more Impressionist paintings done in skin and earth tones. People pick their feet up, for the most part. Still smells though, death and unwashed bodies. Fear has its own pungent patina. Acrid and it tastes in my mouth like when you suck on a copper penny. Terror and hope, the dead and the living. I *see* everything.