January 18th
Days I have survived: 1049
Dear Roddy,
I did it. Me and Dad got into a huge fight after we got back from the market and I’m on the run. You should have seen me, it was like a movie – I knocked Dad out cold, got into the back of Jeffery Grey’s van and then I jumped out of it as he got onto the road. I’m okay, I think, I’ve got a few injuries but that’s all been taken care of. I’ve been captured by an outlaw but don’t worry about me, he seems to be alright. He’s keeping me prisoner but he hasn’t hurt me, much. He seems just a little older than me, he lives out of a tent on a ledge, and his name is Liam, but I don’t know much else about him. He says he used to live in the Omicron Shelter, but I don’t believe him about that. He’s outside the tent right now, he let me sleep here last night and I think he’s cooking breakfast; I can smell fish. I promise I’ll look after myself and keep safe.
P x
I heard Liam unzipping the tent and I frantically tried to shove my journal back into my bag before he saw what I had been doing. He handed me a plate of cooked fish, and a bottle of water.
“Thank you,” I said in a small voice and sat up to take it from him.
“I don’t think you’d last very long by yourself in the wild,” Liam said condescendingly as he sat in the corner to eat his own breakfast.
“Why?” I frowned at him, taking a bite of the fish.
“You’re too trusting. How did you know there’s no Wolf Shot in there?”
“If you wanted to kill me, you would have done it last night,” I answered as bravely as I could manage and took another bite, too hungry to even care.
He seemed once again taken aback by my courage and grit.
“Maybe I’m waiting until I’ve used you first,” his eyes told me he meant that, but the smirk on his face made me think he was just testing me.
“Used me for what?”
“I don’t know yet, you’ll probably come useful for something. And besides, you know very well that Wolf Shot won’t kill you. Not at first.”
The Wolf Shot was an experiment conducted by a scientist in America back when the weather warnings were put in place, months before the storm hit. His aim was to develop a formula that could be injected into humans to give them the ability to survive arctic conditions. He wanted to take the best qualities of a wolf such as their tolerance to cold temperatures, their strength to walk for miles and miles in the snow, their sense of smell and many other positive aspects of a wolf that would help us live on after the snow storm. He sold millions of shots around the world and he instructed everyone to inject themselves with it as soon as the snow hit, but our family and thousands of others decided we didn’t want it.
The injections took a couple of days to show any real effect. There were over a hundred people at our Shelter who had taken the formula and they were being closely monitored by medics in a separate part of our camp. It didn’t take long for us to find out that the Wolf Shot had severe side effects, and people were developing the dangerous qualities of a wolf instead of the so-called survival instincts that the formula was meant to give them. They turned on us and got banished from the Shelters, locked out and sent into the wild to fend for themselves. They were now 'hostiles'.
Something didn’t feel right as I ate the last few mouthfuls of the fish; I felt light headed and my vision was doubling. He’d drugged me.
“Wait…you have put something in here…”
