“It’s been 864 days since I last ate Kraft Dinner. I used to put ketchup in it – not a lot, just enough to give it some extra definition.”

“Day 1-7
Sometime in December/January, 2015

So, like I said last page, I’m writing this approximately 64 days in to The Outbreak. That’s what they’re calling it, by the way, ‘The Outbreak’. I’ve heard a few people I’ve run into say it now; personally, I was voting for ‘The Rising’ or ‘Z-Day’, but I guess there wasn’t really a vote when it came time to call the day our lives ended something official. As I write this, I’m sitting in a shack, somewhere in mid-western America. Maybe you found this journal there, and I never went anywhere else. I hope not, I hope this was found world’s away from here.

My records from these first few days are great in one way – they’re mostly forgotten. Those of us that are left probably feel like the survivors of the first 15 minutes of the Hunger Games; people dropped like flies those first few days. I was absent from that first scrum, locked away deep beneath the southern Louisiana town in a basement as I was. I remember the coolness of the floor, the way it was too dark for my eyes to adjust. I even remember the way he smelled, when he was still alive. It wasn’t so very different from the way he smelled dead, to be honest.

I’d gone poking around his property, on a tip that he was abducting children. Instead of solving a mystery a la Velma from Scooby-Doo, I got myself caught. I prayed for the apocalypse every moment I was in there – I prayed for a lot of nasty things. I prayed so hard that it almost didn’t surprise me when those prayers came true. One night, when he’d pulled me out of the hole in the ground he locked me up in most of the time, he left the room in response to some noise. I suppose that was when it happened; when he got bitten.

I heard crashing, noises of struggle on the floor above, and struggled to escape my bindings. In his complacency, the monster had left one of my ties loose, and I found myself pulling loose and standing up for the first time in days. That was the first moment I knew I was going to live, though I had no idea what I was going to be walking out to. When the old bastard came back, I was waiting for him with a hammer from his tool box. I hit him, cracking his skull, before I even registered the teeth marks in his face, or the blood that covered him.

It was instinct that kept me hanging on to the hammer, pure instinct. That little voice in the back of your head when you do something risky says ‘take this, it’s not safe to go unarmed’ and you either listen or you don’t. I listened, and it saved my life several times over as I exited one hell and walked out into another.”

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Day 854
April 14, 2017

It’s been 864 days, 19 hours and 26 minutes since the last time I ate Kraft Dinner. I used to put ketchup in it – not a lot, just enough to give it some extra definition. Mac and cheese was one of the great American comfort foods, and KD was that wonderful food distilled down to it’s gooey essentials. Some might consider it gross, I would say they’d never had to live off it in college. It was an acquired taste, even if it was ‘noodle shaped goop’ in a bowl.

That stuff, today, would be a delicacy to have appear in front of me. I miss the old broke-ass university days, sitting on the floor on a pillow eating KD because I spent all my money on rent and internet fees. I had KD, I was good.

I got a job working at the S-Mart, and I’ve been looking around for a new place to live. I guess I can’t stay at the Shelter forever, right? It feels weird, doing all these ‘normal’ things. Looking for a job and home seems kind of pointless, when the world is what it is; but then again, maybe it has more of a point now than ever.

What do you do after the world ends?
I guess you just keep going.

Until next time;
L. Aventide