DISTURBING

35° DAY

This is the thirty-fifth day that I am trapped in this house. I fear that my resources will only last a few days until they are completely gone. The power generator lasted only until the fifteenth day. The water still flows in the pipeline, but it is completely dirty and muddy and greyish in color. The solitude of this place is my greatest friend. On the first day, I managed to cover the whole house in thick wooden boards. Winter is coming and the heater no longer works. Going outside is not one of my favorite options. The last time I was in the forest, I almost got caught. I decided that I would endure as much as possible stuck here. Communication devices, such as cell phones and computers, are without a signal bar. My cell phone lasted just two days after the generator's power ran out. The fear of tomorrow consumes my insides every hour of the day.

The sunlight, when it appears, is only visible through the cracks between the wooden boards that cover the windows. Now and then I see a shadow of what is out there, circling around the house and looking for life. One day, I could hear, in the middle of the night, one of them climbing the walls and walking on the roof. His steps were slow and heavy, crushing the wood and making it creak. It is evil, smart and intelligent. Something that sniffs out fear and anguish and feeds on pure pain.

The days are now cloudy and rainy, the nights are longer and colder. I'm in a house in upstate New York. The next house is approximately 6 miles away from here. I ran away to this old property of my grandparents, as soon as the first news of the radiation was broadcast on television. Many called me crazy for stocking up large amounts of food and escaping to a deserted interior of New York state. Most of those people are dead now. The ones that survived, have become one of them.

I know that there is still life out there. Maybe in other states, or even ... in other countries. I know that there is still life somewhere in this world. I know there must be people that prepared for these days, just like me. People who are out there fighting these things. Things that drive you crazy just for the slightest intention of thinking about them. Things that consume your rational state and that cannot be explained by human eyes. Things that human beings could never understand even with the greatest vastness of knowledge in the universe. Incomprehensible and unable to be digested by patterns of human eyes. Eyes that are just used to the acceptable and comfortable realities.

About these things that I mention here... They are out there and they are unpredictable. At first when they appeared, they were just the result of a light virus that used the human being as a host, manifesting its atrocities through the weakness of mankind. They left those who were infected possessed by a slight dizziness and mental confusion. Many passed out and the weakest ones had breath attacks until the last breath. Most of Those were finally kissed by death. The situation then became global, pandemic. The virus evolved and progressed in the human organism, leaving those who were affected by their infection, in a kind of insane and catatonic fragility. Their bodies became a large hollow, empty and lifeless pot, responding on mere autopilot. In the beginning, the loss of food appetite was an evident feature, since many withered away to death. We thought it was just a virus that comes and goes every year, infecting some and making others stronger. We all thought we would be better soon. The big pharmaceutical companies received millions and trillions of investments. Therefore, vaccines were already being studied and tested at a speed never seen before in human history. Everything seemed to have reached its decline and the light at the end of the tunnel seemed to be getting stronger. Some areas of the planet were not even infected and others managed to contain the infection with excellence. Our lives gradually fell into place again. Many, like myself, didn't even think it could get worse. I knew a lot of friends who got infected and got out of it. However, I saw close people dying without even a funeral because of the contamination conditions. People did not attack each other, they only died if they could not improve, as the symptoms varied from person to person. BUT PEOPLE DIDN'T KILL each other. We had reached a prosperous stage of finding a cure. Some vaccines were tested and many people had been immunized. And it's not the vaccine's fault. The vaccine was in fact capable of immunizing many of us against the first phase of the virus. The vaccine saved many lives, but not even it was able to predict what would come next.