I happened upon a journal as I rummaged through the bedrooms of a lonely house sitting in the curve of a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of a deserted city. All cities are empty now. No one would dare congregate in a city. I doubt humanity could fill even a small city. I’ve seen only ten or twenty people since my brother, and I went our separate ways five years ago. They are watched and often searched by the vampires who are driven by their desire for sweeter meats and the memory of the past. The countryside had not been good to me recently and a decrepit old house with walls covered in faded blue vinyl siding and a sagging roof seemed safe enough to risk for a chance at food. It sat on the outskirts of a small town in a stand of young pines and saplings that were a bright yellow green in the light.
A tree had fallen through the living room roof and was propped up at an angle on a crushed wall but was still half alive even though its roots were exposed. It had sent fresh young branches out across a rotted couch. A family of wild dogs, brown and black with long floppy ears burst out of an open closet from atop their nest of muddy coats barking, growling and baring their yellow teeth at me as I walked along the length of the tree trunk into the house but I ran them out whooping and waving my arms until they fled. They remained just outside sniffing my tracks and eying me suspiciously. Under the collapsed lumber and dry wall of the fallen half of the living room tiny shards of glass from a television screen glinted as the sun light streamed down over them.
Luckily, the kitchen was intact and undisturbed though a green mildew grew all along the tiles. I ate three cans of spam scooping the pink mashed meat out with two fingers and carefully licking each can clean before moving onto a can of chicken noodle soup which I simply drank swallowing the slimy noodles without chewing them. I pondered sitting at a chair around the table, but I did not like the looks of any of them. Their patterns had peeled off revealing the chunky wood beneath, so I simply leaned against a counter and drank from my canteen. After a long drink from the canteen my stomach felt so distended and weighty that I thought I was in danger of falling forward at any second. I felt bulbous and ungainly but satisfied. A feeling of utter fullness that I had not experienced in weeks washed over me beginning with its dampening effect on my mind and extending to a stomach now begging for nothing but stillness. I went up the stairs carefully, testing each step before adding my weight to their damp and dingy carpeting. The overabundance of food had addled my mind so I gave the bedrooms only a cursory check and then I collapsed on the driest of the beds, a little pink metal framed bed that was so short that my feet hung off the end. As I lay there listening to the gurgles of my processing stomach and growing increasingly more relaxed, I saw the diary laying on a short flaking dresser underneath a black metal lamp. It was white with a small golden lock and a rainbow on its cover that wrapped around to its back. The edges of the pages had that yellowing, brittle look of paper that’s been exposed to the elements and a slightly musty smell. With my screwdriver I pried the lock open and flipped through the pages. The inside had remained somewhat dry and I was able to gently pry them apart although they did not turn well. A thick sprawling hand that drifted in and out of the blue guiding lines covered the pages in huge swoops and loops of airy writing. I held it over my head in the fading light of day and examined it in the light.
When we were children my mother had taught us to read from a coverless book with golden edged pages that she’d carried despite its weight since she’d been a teenager. She had read from it almost every night and had told us that its words had power over death and the power to protect us from the undead and their undeath. It saved her from the latter and I buried it with her so that she would have it with her in paradise, in the earth unsoiled that her book had promised. After she had died my brother had left me following the river into the North.
As the day died and the shadows of the room lengthened my eyes wavered as the food settled and the heat of the day fell into the humid warmth of the night. The first entry was dated August 28th, 2008 and read “My name is Janice. I live in Missouri with my parents and my little sister Missy, but she will never read this diary because I will lock it and never lose the key. I will keep the key with me always and if she tries to take it from me, I will swallow it. Then I can write secrets here that no one else will ever read.” I skipped towards the end of the journal which had gone blank about half way through its pages, but there was no mention of vampires, or the crazy times, or really even the time before so I tossed it into a corner of the room before I fell asleep. A forgotten piece of a forgotten time worth nothing now that it’s author had surely died, but as I fell asleep I wondered if she’d been turned and if she was a vampire would she want this relic of her time as a human girl, would it mean anything to her.
The
