Just another day in Arklay, right?

Well, I found another piece of paper while I was fixing up my own face. This is the second time I was out scavenging for herbs and got jumped on by those damned biters. Picture perfect image of Arklay, I suppose. I could be the poster child for Arklay’s tourist pamphlet, if anybody actually wanted the position. Or we actually got tourists.

I need to stop being so careless or I’m really going to get myself into trouble. These little knives aren’t going to protect me if it’s more than one or two that show up. I’m not a skilled fighter at all, but I’m getting the hang of this. That doesn’t mean I’m Chuck Norris and I can punch a thousand of these things to death with just a pinkie finger. Don’t we all wish that old meme was real and not just some silly joke?

Well, I got the herbs I needed, though I had to blow some of them to help with the bruising all over my face. At least it’s better than last time. I almost thought I was going to need stitches, but I managed to slide through with just some antiseptic.

Anyway, still no sign of Dad, but it’s not like I can go ten steps out of town without an undead man-eater trying to kill me or turn me into one of them. Still, every time I see one that isn’t my Dad, it gives me a little hope that he’s still out there.

It’s days like these that I actually miss college. Who ever thought I’d miss school? I mean, I never really hated it, but who wants to actually do any work, am I right? Now we’re all worn down, just struggling to take a breath out here.

It’s not the big things I miss, but the little things. I miss my crazy roommates, drinking or smoking their pot until the wee hours of the morning while I’m trying to study or sleep. I miss the smell of brand new textbooks and chalk on a chalkboard while the professor jots down notes. The sound of laughter or music of my peers as they socialized…

All of that is gone now. Now I only see rotting corpses and bruised faces, smell death and decay (not to mention body odor because we have bath day only once a week), and hear only the screams of the dying or the groaning of the already dead as they shuffle forward, coming for you.

I don’t know how it is for everyone else, but my chest aches every time I have to take the life of a zombie. Of course, it’s always me or them, I understand that, but what if we ever found a cure for this? If we could have fixed all of the monsters we’ve killed? I guess we can’t really, since once you’re infected and die, you really are dead. I don’t know, guess I’m just trying to see the light at the end of this tunnel. It’s the hope of our struggles here bringing a better tomorrow that keep me going. If I didn’t have that, what’s the point of living, making friends, trying to create families, if the human race doesn’t have a better future ahead of it? There would be no point for all of this struggle, all of this suffering.

Will it end one day, so we can go back to life as we knew it?

I’ll hold out a little longer. It’s one of the little things I can do.