The Journal

Prologue

Times like these... It's times like these that really make you think of how you ended up where you are now. If I had to narrow it down to one singular moment in my life, it would have to be when I helplessly watched my mother and father die as I was trapped in the backseat, ensnared by the seatbelt after a car accident on a fateful winter night. What was supposed to be a celebratory evening dinner for my eighth birthday turned into a nightmare. Minute by minute, I fought to free myself as the life drained from my parents, literally drop by drop, like a slowly leaking sink faucet.

Our SUV had slid off the road, and rolled down an embankment, ending upside down. I struggled for what seemed like hours just to see the blinding, rapid flashing lights of an ambulance arrive merely minutes too late. It was after that most dreadful time in my childhood that I decided to become a doctor. I wanted to observe and study sickness and death to understand what I might have done to save the only true family I had ever known.

However, after my first rounds spent in a hospital during my second year of college studying nursing, I quickly realized being so close to death brought back too many unsavory memories to the foreground of my mind. That epiphany led me to the next chisel blow in my headstone, so to speak. I ultimately decided to switch my major in college to biology. I wanted to study something less morbid than death; life. This deviation brought me to the lab where I worked during my final semester, where all the unfortunate turns in fate culminated. Little did I know that in my pursuit to study life, I would become entangled in more death and destruction than I could even comprehend.

Well over a decade has passed since that fateful accident in the car where I consider my childhood ended. Once again, I currently have, under no accident, found myself trapped in another, most dreadful situation. I'm afraid this time; it shall be I who will finally meet my demise. Although, in this instance, my position is voluntary to some small degree, make no mistake, I am trapped. I've been trapped by my own hand in hopes of self-preservation.

I have locked myself in an old relic of a time past when civilization wasn't so uncivilized. Said relic would be an old, dilapidated shipping container. Its exterior is covered in a flaky, orange tinge of rust. The once vibrant ruby red paint faded long ago, and now the structure is disintegrating from neglect. Beaten down and ravaged by the forces of nature.

Luckily, it is being repainted with a brand new shade of red! Unfortunately, that would be with the most grisly and gory shade of red; human blood. The contractors in charge of this gruesome job would be those of the dead. Though they are not medically dead, scientifically, anything that was ever human about them is dead. Merely the husks of the intelligent beings all of them once were.

Some were mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and most tragically, sons or daughters; all, however, are now monsters. Humans who have seemingly devolved into savage cannibals and are only driven by animalistic instincts. Instincts that once helped Homo sapiens dominate the food chain, which in turn led the human population to disperse and explode exponentially throughout the entire planet.

Ironically those same beings that once conquered the planet will now topple everything they have built. Thousands of years of culminated civilization will be virtually erased from this world by the same animals who constructed it. And most appalling of all, it is these vicious beasts who will inherit the planet we modern humans have called home for hundreds of thousands of years if we are to fail our mission. Our mission was to help insulate the rest of the surviving human population from this bacteria that plagues us all. If we were to succeed, humans, not these monsters, would solidify their position at the pinnacle of the food chain once again, as it should be.

I can hear those monsters now. Their fists are beating with tremendous, almost inhuman strength upon the thin stainless steel walls of what will almost certainly be my short-lived sanctuary and future cold metal casket. Bashing so hard that their hands bleed, some beaten down so severely, only the stumps of forearms remain. Their bones are making the most stomach-churning clacking noise.