I’ve never kept a journal before but I’m doing a lot of things I’ve never done. I don’t even know why I need to write all this down, maybe it will make me feel like this all matters somehow. I guess I need to start at the start.

I hate camping. But somehow that’s what Inga talked me into doing for my 40th birthday. With a face like that she could talk me into just about anything. She was tall and smooth and pale like snow, born in Sweeden and immigrated when she was 10. I had a ring on lay-away, I was going to pop the question as soon as it was paid down. I guess that ring is still sitting there, or stuffed in some scavenger’s pocket.

So we went fucking camping. It was a beautiful place, and she was right that getting away was what I needed. I was even relaxed. Last time that would happen. I had no service on my phone so we listened to an old radio she’d brought. She put a candle in a cupcake for me and sang Happy Birthday off key, which makes me fucking cry when I think about it now. That’s when we started to hear the reports of riots on the radio, and what they were calling “civil unrest”. Later it was “a serious infection” and that turned into warnings to stay indoors and calling in the National Guard. But none of that helped in the end.

We got freaked out by the reports enough to pack it in and head back to Hollywood but by that time nobody was getting in or out of the city. We didn’t know what to do so we turned around and went back out to the woods, staying at rest stops mostly. We stopped again in a little town that we’d stopped in on the way up to the camp site, for gas and supplies. The place looked like it had been turned upside down and set on fire, a little Norman Rockwell town completely gutted overnight. Nobody was around to take our money so we filled up and loaded the car with everything our panicked brains thought we might need. That’s when I saw the first one.

It was a woman, somebody’s mother or wife, just a plain blue dress and sensible shoes. She was one of the slow ones, dragging her feet as she walk toward us hissing. God I hate that hiss. Most of her neck was gone, probably bitten off. Inga flipped out, the thing was obviously not friendly, so I did what I had to do with a crowbar. The same crowbar that’s been in my hand ever since.

We lasted about two weeks, living in the car and avoiding people and things. Lots of places were just empty, except for the bodies that seemed to be everywhere. We found an old warehouse that seemed safe for the night, it was coming on evening and… fuck if I know how to write about this. I left her for a second to go take a leak, neither of us heard it creep up. By the time I got to her it had torn up that sweet pale face that could convince me to go camping, and she was already gone. I killed that thing with a single blow and held her in my arms as she bled out, my sweet girl. And I thought it was over then. It wasn’t.

I was crying like a baby, mad as hell at everything including me for not being there, and I saw her twitch. I couldn’t believe it when she sat up, for a second I thought she was alive again, but that hiss, those eyes. It wasn’t Inga anymore, it was one of them. And that’s when I did a thing I never in a million years wanted to do, and I put my sweet girl down.

I was lost. I was cut loose from everything at that point and had no plan. The car was out of gas so I packed what I could into some bags and stepped into the woods, which was the most “away” place I could think of. I spent months out there tying myself up in trees so I could sleep. Months just wandering afraid and alone, watching my supplies dwindle and not knowing what the fuck happened to the world.

And then one day I saw a bridge, and people on the other side. Living people, survivors like me. I like it here, I’m going to stay. But I keep going back to that bridge and thinking about everything I left behind.