eating, in the that park. Many people were starting to get sick due to eating diseased plants or animals. By the fourth day, I started to see some desperation.
I had to make a decision here. I could come and go as I please. However, if I showed any evidence, that I ate anything, my cover would have been blown. I would have been in the middle of the park with a million potential hostiles. I had a 9 millimeter but that wouldn’t have gotten me out of the park.
I went for six days without eating solid food. Instead, I started ingesting supplements to ensure that body would not deteriorate to an unhealthy level. However, I started to see women and children starve. Some of the older people, in the park, were beginning to have a serious downturn in their health. By the seventh day, I voluntarily blew my cover.
I was surprised that no one expressed anger or disallusion when they found out my true identity. Instead, they seemed to trust me more. They knew we were all in the same boat. That’s when I started to sneak in and share my meager food supply allotment with three other people. It was at that point, that I started to spiritually side with the occupiers at the park.
We all started to starve a week after the food went away. You started to see people lose lots of weight. Everyone in the park started to get skinny. The kids really started to look bad. The city promised that they would feed the kids but they couldn’t feed the parents. So you had moms and dads make this decision. Do they give up their kids to the city so the kids could eat. Or do they keep the kids and watch them starve. Some gave up their kids. Others didn’t trust the government with their young. That’s when I started to lose my mind. Shit just didn’t make sense anymore. I prayed for God to come down and straighten this shit out.
I started to hallucinate. I had not eaten in four days. I would see these humanoid forms in front of me. I would hear voices in my head. And I would shake. I had never felt this level of hunger and desperation in my life. I kept saying, “Let me out. Let me out.” I wandered around the park for an entire day looking for a way out.
By the early evening, someone had escorted by to the outskirts of the park. I collapsed and a National Guardsmen placed me on a stretcher. They lied me down next to another woman. There were 35 of us. All women. We were all mumbling. The Guardsmen gave us water and an IV feed of nutrients. After an hour or so, I asked someone, “Where are the men?” One of the women answered, “They don’t have enough supplies for them.” I am only alive today because I was a woman. The men were left to fend for their own.
I was so hungry that I started eating the dirt. I didn’t even know where I was anymore. I started seeing things at night. It look like there were ghosts among the trees. Then on, day nine after we lost our food, I went crazy. I started running through the trees. I just kept running and running. I finally emerged from the park where a National Guardsmen shot me with a rubber bullet. Because they shot me, they had to take me to a medical tent. I got an IV. I got water. I was never so happy to have been shot in my life.
We started to see these dangerously skinny people emerging from the Park. It shook me. Whenever we saw a woman or a child, we would give them our food and out water. We couldn’t do that to the men. We simply needed to feed ourselves. But I never saw such starvation in the flesh. It looked like something out of the Holocaust films you see in the History Channel. I really wondered if I would be persecuted for War Crimes when this was over. I did know that God was going to punish all of us.
The condition of the people emerging from the park was horrific. It was something I thought I would never see on American soil. We were all hungry. We all had on loose clothes. But these people are on the edge of death. It scared me because I felt that this was going to be my fate within a few weeks. If you were not rich, if you were not connected, you were not eating well. And if you were in that park, we were not eating at all.
By the ninth day, people began to drop dead. We would take the bodies and try our best to bury them. But we were all too weak. The bodies started to rot and smell. By the early evening, one of the many people who had lost their mind, grabbed one of the corpses. He looked down at it. He bit down on the side of the dead man’s side. We tried to push him away. He growled at us. His mouth was filled with the blood, tissue and meat of the dead man. He began to drag the body off like a wild animal. He disappeared into the trees with the corpse. My blood ran cold. That’s when I realized I had to get out of that park.
Everything was calm until the tenth night after the food was confiscated. That was the night the giant bonfire started in the middle of the park. We saw black smoke. Then we heard the screaming and the chanting. We had no idea what the fuck was going on in their. It was the sound of hundreds of thousands of people turning into savages. They began to lose their minds.
By 3AM that night, we began to smell burning flesh. The stench was horrible. The mass of humans inside the park were screaming and chanting and yelling. A chill came across all of us around the park. It was then we knew that the people inside the park began to resort to cannibalism.
I looked down at the middle of the park. They had set up a massive bonfire. Hundreds of thousands of people began to walk around the fire. They were dancing and chanting like savages. Then I saw a parade of men carrying corpses close to the fire. I thought they were going to simply burn the dead bodies. Then I saw the men lie the corpses next to the fire and open up the bellies. They ripped out the meat and began to cook it. They passed out the meat to the people who began to stir into a frenzy. My heart nearly stopped. I could not believe what I was watching. Even through I was four hundred feet above the park, I feared for my life.
We got confirmation that the people inside the park were eating the corpses. All of us just looked at each other. It went unsaid. But we all felt the same way. We had to go into that park and kill each and every one of those people. Every last one. These people are no longer human. They have become something so frightening and so damaged that they would never be able to function in any society.
We no longer say sick and skinny people leaving the park. That next day, after the bonfire, no one came out. But the chants continued. The screaming was intense. They did not let up. Let me tell you something, I have reported from the worst war zones on the planet. And I had never been so scared in my life. In a war zone, you could understand the danger. In that park, we really didn’t know what was going on. This was an unknown fear that froze the blood in my veins.
The stench of the cooking flesh made us realize that we were no longer in an American city or in a protest area. We are in a war zone. Everyone took the safety off their weapons. We were all ready for anything to happen.
After dark, you could sense that the people inside of the park were watching us. I put on the night vision goggles and saw thousands of eyes staring at me. When I patrolled the perimeter of the Park, you could see an endless array of eyes. They were silent. But they were watching. I knew that these people were no longer the scared, hungry masses. In effect, they were the hunters and we were the prey.
It was the morning of DAY ZERO. Of course, none of us knew it would be Day Zero. But we knew about the cannibalism in the park. We knew about the strange behavior. But the overall calm in the park told made us feel that this would be any other day.
I went over to City Hall. The Mayor got his daily briefing about the situation at the current situation at the park. And then we went over to Lincoln Center to meet with neighborhood leaders. The Mayor seemed to be almost resigned to the fact that the situation was out of his hands. He really just wanted to finish his term and have his reputation intact. The thing is, we were all working for food right now. And the Mayor just wanted to keep all the powers that be happy so he could still have his political connections which was the only real access to food, energy, and security.
