Damn, what a day it has been. Thank God it’s over. Here I sit, back in the safety of my own home. But for how long this time? How long will the food last? How little can we survive on before we start trying to murder one another just so there will be one less mouth to feed?
Safety? Is anything really safe anymore? I can barely walk out on my porch now without fear. The kind of fear from deep within that can make even the strongest men tremble. And men… I guess that is all that is left now. The children were the first to go, then the women only a few days after. I haven’t seen a single man affected by this disease, although the loss of the women and children has certainly taken it’s toll on them. First came the grieving, wailing, multitudes of men who had lost their entire families in only a few days. After that, the anger. The anger quickly spread like a raging wildfire in the driest mountains. Angry men with guns. Bound and determined to kill everyone and everything that breathed the breath of life. They didn’t know what else to do….God help them. They had gone mad. Mad with a sensational anger that seemed to spiral out of control exponentially by the minute. They slaughtered each other by the hundreds. Those of us who had been spared this madness quickly learned to hide in and around the few empty houses that hadn’t yet been set on fire. We could only hope that they would all kill each other and leave us alone.

The taking of lives left blood in the streets. Most of the women and children died in their homes or the hospitals and doctors offices. The men were piled knee deep in the middle of road, or so it seemed. The stench of rotting flesh in the hot sun was everywhere. The kind of smell that holds on to you. The muggy air makes it even worse. Is there nothing I can do to get rid of this smell? It reminds me of getting behind a tractor trailer where I used to call home. Those tractor trailers would ride their brakes from the top of the hill where I lived to the bottom. The burning break smell permeated everything. It seemed like it would stick to the inside of my nostrils and the only relief from the smell was to go to bed and sleep it off. When I would get up the next morning, the smell would have subsided. But the smell of the dead men only got worse with each passing day. A feeling of dread comes upon me every night before falling asleep because I know the next day is going to be worse than the day before.
Some of us want to survive this. Some of us are surviving this. But the others, they’re still madmen, and it’s not them I’m scared of, but the madness itself. Hell, a madman could come here right now and take us all out and not a single person would know we were dead, much less care. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. That’s what scares me though. I don’t want to be the madman, but how much longer can I hold on? How long before my brain gives up trying to maintain the body and allows the body to do what the body wants?
Home isn’t what it used to be. Home is no longer the place where my family greets me at the door after a hard days work. Home is now an unfamiliar place, full of people I don’t know, and don’t want to know. They’re All Savages – Just Like Me.
This is pretty dar, though probably close to reality. I’ve always thought society is held together with the metaphysical equivalent of baling twine, and could therefore disintegrate with the slightest of provocations.
Expect some more. This is my attempt at a short story written over the span of a few posts.
You might enjoy reading a couple of the sights I frequent. One is John Michael Greer’s site, which is called the Archdruid Report. The other is a British site called the Dark Mountain Project. Both deal with what happens when societies prevailing narattives break down.
I will check them out.
I don’t know why my post messed up. First sentence should end with dark, and the second sentence begins with though.