16 DEC 2015

So it finally happened. An apartment opened up at the Eights and I picked it up. My friend Suz and I had been holing up in the hospital’s shelter rooms for a couple of weeks; with my promotion to Head Chef of Sam ‘n Ella’s I realized I’d be making enough money on the job to get us a place of our own. Someplace we can really call home.

Let’s rewind a little bit: I’m Jason Caliber. 30 years old, former chef from Chicago. My friend is Suzanne Sherman, 25 years old, former nurse from San Francisco. We first met in Arklay about a month or so after the outbreaks started. Didn’t take super well to the notion of trying to hack it out in a jerry-rigged society on an island; got curious what was going on out there. So we left and kicked around the mainland for ten months. There’s a whole novel’s worth of shit I could hammer down following that but I hate writing by hand so I’ll get back to the here and now.

Life is strange. It’s so fucking weird having a place to call my own after so long being separated from this notion of living in one place, staying in that one place all the time… Out there in the mainland, Suz and I, we did a hell of a lot of wandering. We got as far east as the border between Illinois and Missouri. I’d wanted to visit Chicago but as we saw how the world was between here and there I had a serious change of heart. But the one thing we always did was wander. Arklay’s not the only place in the former United States where people are trying to keep their shit together. But I guess neither one of us is super in love with the idea of settling down in one place. Even less so after what we’ve been through together.

The moral of the story, I guess, is I have no idea how to feel about this. It’s the most meaningful thing that’s happened to me since I met Suz; it’s also totally meaningless. It serves all the functions the hospital did. Even less, at that, since it’s not exactly as secure. But it’s ours. It doesn’t really mean anything right now other than not having to deal with other survivors when we want to wind down, but… I don’t know. At this point do she and I even remember how to wind down?

Seems the rats are starting to push up daisies with all the rain. Little fuckers can climb buildings but they can’t swim forever. So that takes care of that problem; I pride myself on getting the inventory at the diner out of their reach. But with all this rain the tarp and plastic wrap aren’t going to hold up forever and the flour and grains are going to get super fucked up by all the humidity. S’pose if the rats are dying out we can finally take everything down, but even then just moving it with so much rain falling is going to fuck shit up in and of itself…

There’s always so much on my mind these days. I can’t help overthinking everything.

I think… I need to kill something. More on that later. Got a couple more things to bring over from the shelter.

Suffer well,
– Jason