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This is how you die.


AdjutantMonster

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So the gun store is locked up tight. Going to need some serious equipment to get in there. My axe barely rattled the grilles over the windows, which was like ringing a dinner bell.

 

Might as well turn up and bang a gong if I'm going to draw them to me like that.

 

Why am I writing this? Why is my handwriting so shaky? Because I've had my anti-depressants and I haven't had my beta blockers, respectively. I'm in the mood to work something out, while I'm only sweating enough to smear the page slightly. I'm not going to talk about what happened in Mendy's kitchen across the street (thinking about it makes me dizzy and sick; looking out of the window at the place makes me break out in the kind of fever sweat that is cold everywhere but your armpits and groin), but the rest of it, yeah, sure, why not.

 

I'm on my fifth pill of the day and it's not even noon. Good old propranolol, one of those words you don't know when to stop saying. I find Prozac easier, to say and to swallow. Why don't they make pills taste nice? You'd want them more that way. I've tried to stop taking the pills but then I get cold sweats about coming off them. I'm taking them to cope with everything, and I can't even cope with not taking the pills.

 

At least I'm not washing them down with whisky.  I've got a couple (alright, a dozen) bottles under the sink, and I like to think about getting a good drunk on one of these days, just, somehow hooking the bottles up to the faucet like a whisky IV, and getting myself a nice tall glass full.

 

I'd have to come off the pills first.  The drug interactions alone (Prozac, Sumial, sometimes Valium when I get the fear and can't sleep or have nightmares) I don't dare think about. My first week on Sumial my heart kept slowing down for a minute and then going like a trip hammer. I puked out of the window one day, out of the blue. Checking my emergency exit rope ("Like the Ghostbusters' pole, but floppy." as a girl I once knew once said, she's dead), little bit of vertigo, and then the world surged up out of my guts and I baptised the crowd below.

 

They didn't seem to mind. Reached up as if for more, in fact, with my hot spew on their cold dead faces and that made me sick again.

 

Pill time.

 

Better now. Enough orange soda to drop a diabetic, and pills, lunch of champions.  I'm going to sit here and write a little more. They get excited when I move around a lot, and I'm restless. Best channel that through my hand (har har) and stay seated for a while. Still plenty of glass intact nearby, store windows and the like, and after Mendy's, the sound of them smashing makes me jump. I think they mistake reflections for people. I can't take too many shocks like that. The bank next door has a little mob inside, and every so often they seem to barge through what must be a row of glass partitions or windows, and I have to put my hands over my ears and just wait for them to stop or I end up in tears.

 

Enough about them. More about me. I'm up on the second floor of this crappy motel, and I've got the place locked down. Well, my part of it, anyway. The two downstairs entrances are barricaded, and at the top of the stairs I've built a sturdy door (I took inspiration from a baby gate I saw while I was looting a store, I'm not a genius). I come and go using the set of shaky metal stairs at the back, and because I'm paranoid, I built a partition across the corridor to my room, with another door set into it. I call it my zairlock, which doesn't make sense but it makes me laugh. It's a nice place to leave kit I use a lot, and it's another defence for them to smash through when they come up here.

 

It's a pretty nice set up, anyway. There's still food around, the drug store has been smashed up but not looted, the book store is bound to have a few of the authors I like, the dentist's reminds me to brush, floss and rinse with mouthwash religiously three times a day (what will I do if I get a cavity? If I need a tooth removed? Wisdom teeth later on? Tom-Hanks-and-an-ice-skate job? I don't think so, somehow), the bank if I need money (great for lighting fires, which is all it's good for now), the police station if I need ammunition, a hardware store if I need a hammer for all my problems...I may have it made here.

 

If only the town wasn't filled with the dead. Standing, shuffling, staring, swaying. The worst part is the brain-damaged cries they give when they see me, or see themselves, or see something that makes them lurch into hungry motion.

 

One of them surprised me when I was barricading a door downstairs. I took a break from nailing boards, had a drink of water and a strip of beef jerky, enjoying the way the salty meat made me thirstier and drinking more water (Rule #213: keep your electrolytes up) and it came around the corner and almost got me. I've still got the nail marks on my forearm. If I hadn't been wearing gloves it might have gouged my wrist open. I dropped my bottle of water and pushed it away.

 

I forgot all about the pistol on my hip, and the shotgun next to my pack might as well have been on the moon. I couldn't think, just reflexively shoved and shoved that dead weight back, until it knocked me backwards and I almost tripped over my axe.

 

As I staggered, my hand slapped the haft, and knocked it from where it had been leaning against the wall, next to the door I had been working on, to clatter on the concrete in front of me. And as the dead stood over me and grabbed at my shoulders, I snatched the axe and pulled it close, and the blade snagged an ankle, and the dead thing fell.

 

I stood up, kicking its hand away, and raised the axe. It's no good getting angry. It's like any other task. If you get angry, you get a burst of energy and then you're spent. If the job's going to take a while, you do it calmly, and methodically, and you keep doing it until it's done.

 

I brought the axe down.

 

Pill time.

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