Doomsday Diary

17th June 2072:

I have to write, I have to write and if I don't I'll go insane. My hands shake as I write this. Oh God I just killed her! Like she meant nothing to me. I am damned for this! But that bitch just wouldn't shut up! I mean we were supposed to be in hiding for God's sake. The Zealots were rounding up the last of the stragglers and rebels and I just didn't want to die.

I feel I need to explain myself here. I'm not a murderer. I mean I'm the kind of person who wouldn't argue with the coffee guy if he got my order wrong. Or at least I used to be.

Things have been so messed up lately. Some people say this is the beginning of an apocalypse - doomsday even but it sure as hell doesn't feel like it. We're alive aren't we? Just a bunch of people at war with each other. People are always fighting aren't they? The army's going to save us soon.

It wasn't my fault she just wouldn't shut up. Froze up like an animal she did. The Zealots were in the building next door shooting everyone... someone could have heard us. In the end I choked her with that damned necklace. I used to like how it glinted around her slender neck when we could still have coffee in the shops. A little heart with our initials carved at the back...

I felt relief wash over me as she finally stopped flopping on the floor and fell silent. Even pissed herself. Took our packs and made a run for it. Took hers too, she wouldn't be needing hers now.

20th March 2068:

Dinner with Alyssa at Tortino's today to mark our seventh. I surprised her with a little heart necklace. There's not enough money for a ring right now but I hope to soon enough after that big promotion. I miss chicken and tuna but there has been a ban on meat ever since the whole anti-vaccine debacle back east. Some people think all fish are dead because someone poisoned all the lakes, which is why there is so little or none to buy. Must buy some dry groceries tomorrow. Last week a woman tried to prise off a box of wheaties off my hands and I let her. No point arguing with the clinically insane.

2nd April 2069:

Too many cutbacks at work this month. I'm not sure if we could survive on unemployment. The house needs to be repainted, my paints are almost dry and I need a refill on my meds. Coffee's been too expensive lately. Maybe we could start drinking the roasted nettle stuff people drank during World War or whatever...hahahaa

12th March 2072:

We tried heating soup over a candle last night. There are three left and we are saving it for later when we go back to our house. It's quiet here sometimes when the guns stop firing.

People kind of lost it when they locked up all the food stores and shipped the food off to the encampments. We were all told to leave our homes and leave in the convoys for the "New World Order". I can't believe we were actually happy when they took over the Government and jailed the MPs. Finally, there would be an end to the shortage and corruption!

Alyssa and I had hugged each other with tears in our eyes as the Leader gave his impassioned speech about honesty, integrity and raining down wrath upon all who had wronged us.

That was years ago, ages ago. Right now we're hiding out in a stranger's apartment. An old lady was living here. Used to live here - her caretakers were long gone and left her to starve after drowning the family cats. We went through the cupboards and found a stash of stale soup cans in the floor. Some luck at last!

3rd August 2081:

We're all just a bunch of cockroaches. We just don't die. All those years with mental illness as a teenager wishing I would just die but, when the time came I didn't have the courage to do it. The instinct to survive is too strong.

After Alyssa I thought I would be overrun with guilt and unable to live on but discovered much to my shame that I'd rather be alive. I wore that little heart around my neck in her memory wishing and regretting, sometimes waking up crying from my sleep but I could not take it back.

I lived a few more years off of whatever I could forage from the waste dumps. Sometimes my hunger forced me to venture out near the barracks where the soldiers stood guard, hoping to lick off food from the empty cans they tossed off. But they soon wisened up to this and took to burning their garbage inside their camps and shot at me when they caught me skulking about.

I snuck out of the city one night following the highway to open farm country and thence to the woods. I figured my best chance of survival was by a lake maybe or an isolated farm. I might meet fellow survivors there. After the food ran out on the shelves people had descended in droves upon the last few crops standing and now there was little left to eat. Some people said that farmers had hoarded and preserved hundreds of grains of sacks for the Zealots and were living off the few they pilfered for themselves. There was no more livestock but that which could feed on the dwindling grasslands and it all belonged to the Leader and his cronies.

It took me days of crawling on my belly and eating bugs to reach the countryside. A 30 minute drive I remember, when we would go out there on picnics.

12th August 2072:

A warm welcome was not what I expected today at Elma and Nick's farm. They ran out to meet me when I staggered exhausted against the fence and even offered me some water to drink. It tasted to good! I haven't drunk fresh water in years now, unless you count muddy puddles and licking dew off the pavement. They say they have a secret well the soldiers didn't poison and I could even have a bath! Nick was impressed by my notes and has offered me one of the pencils he'd been saving. I was really grateful because mine was reduced to half an inch and I was contemplating burning sticks for charcoal.

They have actual meat stashed away in their smoking house! I could only manage a mouthful while they tut tutted at my frailness and "how your flesh is just hangin' off the bones." Apparently they are like a modern day underground railroad and claimed to have been helping people cross over to neutral territory for years now.

"So many of the farms are empty and these lost cows wander into our fields sometimes. Poor things must have escaped from their confines in the city".

Tonight I will be sleeping on an actual bed after ages. Elma gave me clothes she says another traveler had left behind - she said it was nothing because there was plenty lying around. There were a few rusty looking stains on the sweatshirt but it felt like heaven against my skin. The hay smells lovely and my bones feel so weary and my arms so heavy after all that food. I'm going to call it a night and after all those years of running I finally have some hope for the future. I might just survive!

"I hope you didn't put too much of the funny salt in the food this time" grumbled Elma as she skillfully skinned off the meat.

"No, no don't you start" said Nick as he hacked off the limbs and chopped them into bits, dropping them with dull thuds into a bucket. "I used just enough to lull it to sleep".

"Humph" said Elma and scowled as her paring knife got entangled in the chain around her neck, dropping a tiny golden heart onto the ground. "I suppose we could find some use for that" she said as she scooped it off the ground making out a barely legible A+I at the back.

A shuffle of pages fell out of the bundle farmer Nick was now stuffing into the stove. Soon, they too would end up in smoke.