ENTRY 27:
It feels like the days are getting shorter here. But that isn't necessarily a bad thing. The place looks nice at night. It almost feels surreal at times. A small, peaceful civilization that’s just 50 meters up from absolute hell on land. I can hear the zombies moving around at night. You’d might think that it would make it impossible to sleep, but the sounds of distant footsteps touching the soil is actually somewhat ambient. And after all the shit that I’ve been through… it's a welcome change.
You’ll rarely hear about a dispute around here. Everybody has job, and they don’t mind doing it. Hell, there really aren’t many options. People need to eat and shooting down birds doesn’t seem sustainable. That’s why twice a week, they’ll send out a hunting team of 5-7 in order to scavenge animals and plants. Remember those forest creatures I was talking about? Well apparently they’re like a delicacy here. I almost spat out the meat when somebody showed me what I was actually eating. Still… they aren’t bad, I suppose.
Other than that though… not much to do around here. I’ve gone on about two of those hunting trips myself and they’ve been easy enough. I didn’t really notice when we first landed on the island, but the zombies are real slow. If you keep a moderate pace, they won’t touch you. As long as you tread quietly, they won’t swarm you. That’s why we’re advised to only use crossbows. Guns only in absolute emergency. We’ve encountered a few stranger creatures here and there. These include, but are not limited to: a tall, thin humanoid nearly resembling a stick figure and this three legged thing with what I can only describe as a rotating head. Yeah, that one was a bit freaky to look at.
I tend to pass the time playing cards with Brax and Smoker. I taught ‘em blackjack. Didn’t realize it was that hard of a game to understand. They seem to forget the rules every third time we play. Well… if anything happens guess I’ll write again. Dunno when that’s gonna be, though.
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ENTRY 28:
I should mention that I’m not really keeping track of how many days have passed. I just don’t see a point in that anymore, you know? But it’s been a while. I met a local girl recently. I’d just come back from a hunting trip, during which I'd saved one of the guys from getting his leg bitten off by a large crocodile-looking thing. Apparently, this dude was the girl’s brother. When he told her what had happened, she ran up and asked if she could hug me, which I thought was the cutest damn thing ever. She also doesn’t speak English, so I got Brax to translate for me. But I have been spending a lot of time teaching her. In return, she teaches me her own language. It’s one that I’ve never heard before and rather tough to learn, but the way that she speaks makes me want to keep going. Maybe I just like listening to her talk. She looks to be in her mid-twenties and has this dirty blonde hair and these light pink eyes that look absolutely stunning. She’s… great, to say the least. I don’t know how else to describe it. Oh, her names Jolan by the way. Pretty similar to Jolene.
From what I’ve gathered, she was actually born on the island, in a small village up in the mountains somewhere. One day, while she was still a little girl, her village was overrun, and her father tried to get her and her brother out of there. Eventually, he was killed by a swarm of zombies in an attempt to sacrifice himself so that they could get away. Her brother protected her the rest of the way, until they stumbled upon this place. She actually started crying while telling this story. I have to say… it feels nice comforting someone instead of killing things for once. It’s funny. I didn’t come here looking for love. In fact… now that I really think about it… I’m not really sure why I came here in the first place. Adventure, was it? Or was it just fear of living an ordinary life? Well… I can safely say that I don’t have to worry about that anymore. You know, I wasn’t planning on staying here forever when I first arrived, but Jolan’s making a good case for it. Even though we can barely communicate with each other, I’ve never felt such a connection. Such warmth. In fact, I don’t really like thinking about leaving her. Besides, I don’t really see a way outta here anyways. But like I’ve said before… let’s just see what happens.
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ENTRY 29:
Last night was… interesting. To be honest, it might have been the freakiest thing I’ve experienced while I’ve been here. And that’s saying a lot. I was having a nightmare… a nasty one. I was being chased through the forest by a naked woman with grey skin. And her face… It was just three large gaping holes where the eyes and mouth were supposed to be. It ran in this erratic, jerking motion that felt so unnatural I wanted to puke. And the fucking sound it made… It was almost like a low-pitched shrieking. Nearly croaking, if you will. I remember finding myself standing up when I was awoken, being restrained by Brax. He was whispering at me to stop what I was doing. When I saw what he was referring to, I nearly had a heart attack. I was about to fall over the edge. I looked around and realized that it was too late for a few others. But the strange thing is… nobody was making a sound. They looked like they were trying to sleep, but couldn’t, just laying with their eyes open. As I asked Brax what the hell was going on, he simply shushed me. That’s when I realized that, even though I was awake, the shrieking was still there. It seemed to be coming from the forest’s edge, so I looked over. What I saw probably won’t ever leave me. It was the woman from my dream.
She was standing, in some kind of obscure, crouched position, screaming like hell. When Brax saw me looking at her, he pulled me away and quietly told me to just go back to bed until it was over. I complied. I remember laying there, for what seemed like hours. In reality, it was only around twenty minutes. I started counting the time again, in an attempt to minimize thinking about that demonic noise. When it finally stopped, everybody still stayed down. I didn’t really want to get up either, so I did the same. It was only when sunlight finally seeped in through the thick clouds where anybody moved. What I didn’t notice during the night was that there were no zombies in our vicinity. In the vicinity of the woman. I’m guessing those two were correlated. Well, they were back now, feasting on the bodies of the people who sleepwalked themselves to death. There were some tears around the settlement that night.
I met up with Smoker later that day and asked him about it. He was paler than I’d ever seen him before. He usually had a stoic demeanor, but… not right then. He looked terrified. When I mentioned the woman, he just held up his hand and told me that the other guards had told him not to talk about it. That if we ever saw her again, to just avoid looking at her and act like we didn’t know that she was even there. I made eye contact with Kunz and Lauren as well, but their expressions told me that they also didn’t want to be reminded of it. Couldn’t blame them, to be honest. But for some reason, I still had to know. I went up to Brax and demanded that he tell what the hell that thing was. Hesitantly, this is what he told me:
That thing… the woman, if you could call it that, they referred to as a “Colorless spirit” here. Now, nobody knows what it is at all. They just know that you need to ignore it. You see, the first time that the settlement had encountered her was a long while ago. And they learned their lesson. When she came out of the forest and started shrieking that insanity-inducing sound, some of the guards started yelling at her, while others prevented the people from walking off the towers. Eventually, one of them ended up just shooting at her. That’s when all hell break loose. The arrow pierced her shoulder and she went silent. A few seconds later, she was joined by hundreds other that looked exactly like her. They ran towards the settlement, scaling the towers at a disturbingly fast rate. Nobody could do anything about it. About half the people there died that day. It would’ve been more, but they were saved by daylight. As the dim light bled in from the sky above, the Colorless spirits started running back into the woods. From that day on, they realized that the best strategy for dealing with these was to simply ignore them. However, it hadn’t happened in so long that Brax had forgotten to tell us anything about it. But now we knew. This was… a bad experience, to say the least. As I write this Jolan lies, sniffling quietly in my lap. Everybody seems a bit more reserved now. More afraid to go onto the ground. But… I suppose that this’ll change. We can’t linger on this forever.
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ENTRY 30:
It’s been a while since my last entry. Hard to pinpoint an exact time period, but I’m thinking months. Anyhow, it took a while, but things are finally back to normal around here. In fact, we’ve actually constructed some new buildings, specifically a bathhouse and a theater. It’s been a good time. Me and Jolan write our own plays and put them on for the children. They seem to like it. A lot more fun than throwing around balls, I suppose. We also reenacted Forrest Gump and even got Kunz and Lauren to take part in it. They loved that one. I guess cinema really is an inter-dimensional language. Speaking of Jolan, her English has gotten a lot better. So has my Dicere (The language that she speaks). Besides that, I don’t know what else to say. Everybody seems happier. I’m getting there as well. However… Smoker seems to be the exception here. Whenever I try talking to him these days, he just seems irritable and jaded. I kept pushing for him to tell me what the hell was going on, but he always said it was nothing. That was until yesterday.
For whatever reason, I couldn’t sleep that night. With Jolan curled up by my side, I slowly inched my way out of the bed. As I got up to take a stroll around the towers, I spotted Smoker on the other side, puffing a dart. I realized that I hadn’t seen him doing that since we left the prison. I walked over to him and asked him how he still had the cigs. Apparently, he’d stolen a bunch of them from the Warden’s office and stuffed them into a bag. He’d been smoking only at night ever since. “Don’t really want to share them.” He told me. “Rather keep it under wraps.”
He flicked it away and I watched as it cascaded down, right onto a zombies head. It just grunted in confusion. Smoker followed up by sighing before looking me in the eyes. “You like it here?” He asked. “I mean, I know you got your girl and all but… you really want to stay here forever?” I thought about it for a while. To be honest, I really wasn’t sure. I mean, this wasn’t really an ideal place to settle down or anything, but there didn’t seem to be any way out. So that’s what I told him. He just nodded. I asked him the same question after:
“What about you? This where you see yourself staying?”
However… I already knew the answer to that. He chuckled softly. “Fuck no. You know what I want, kid?” It’s funny. Even though I was in my early twenties, he still called me that. I guess it had to do with him being nearly half a foot taller. He paused before continuing: “I’ve had my share of this place. This entire world, to be frank. And… I don’t wanna be part of it anymore. I just want peace, you know? I want to be in Neo-Civitus”. At this point, I'd been hearing about the place so damn much, I decided to finally figure out what it even was. So I asked him about it.
“It’s a bright place in a dark world.” He told me. “With all this hell around us, it’s one of the only places where somebody can expect a semblance of normalcy. I mean, sure this place is civilized, but look down.” I did so, watching as the zombies meandered around. “It's still fucked. In fact, I don’t think any place isn't… other than Neo-Civitus.”
He followed up by telling me about what it looked like. It was an apparent paradise. Miles upon miles of glistening skyscrapers that lit up the dark skies at night. It sounded to me like a peek back into the old world I had come from. Problem is… it was damn near impossible to gain entry if you weren’t already born there. Some time ago, an outsider could’ve gained entry through military recruitment stations set up across various islands in a northern ocean. As it turns out… Smoker had tried enlisting in their infantry when he was younger. He’d made the long and perilous trek to a smaller, very dangerous peninsula where one of those building was set up. Despite all his effort however… he barely failed the physical tests. The thing is, he would’ve been allowed to apply again a year later, but the government over there inexplicably barred any more potential outsider recruits just 3 months after. There were still a few other ways you could become a citizen, but Smoker claimed that those were not feasible for him.
Him telling me all of this reminded me of my times back at Dusk Blue. What if it was all a ruse like Paradise X was? What if Neo-Civitus really wasn’t all that great? He just chuckled when I brought this up.
“I understand your concerns”, he responded. “But I’ve seen it. Inside the recruitment station, they had monitors set up, displaying the daily lives of citizens over there. It may have been propaganda, but it was beautiful. And it looked impossible to fake.”
He put his head down and sighed. It’s as if this whole conversation reminded him of lost dreams. “Whatever…” I heard him mumble. “We’ll see what happens.” After that, he just laid down. Guess there really wasn’t much else to say. I followed suit, going back to lying back down next to Jolan on my own bed. I didn’t really get much sleep that night. It got me thinking… is this really where I wanted to end up? Was Neo-Civitus a possibility? Could I bring Jolan with me? Did I even want to do that? I don’t know. It feels like I really don't know anything anymore.
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ENTRY 31:
You know what's fucking hilarious? It seems as if months will go by where nothing substantial happens at all, only for shit to get really interesting really quick. Some time ago, I started hearing talks around the settlement, about a hunting group that went missing sometime back. Not even too long ago. Maybe about a week before we arrived. That’s why these guys were so willing to take us in. Apparently this was pretty rare, but not unheard of. When they did go missing, another team would usually find their dead bodies sooner or later. But not in this case. Either they went real far, or they were captured by something.
Anyhow, when I first heard about this, I didn’t think about it too much. I mean, it wouldn’t really affect me, right? All that I learned was that I should be careful out there. However… things got real crazy yesterday.
It was my turn again to go out and scavenge for food and resources. This time, I was assigned to a team with Kunz. Along the way however, we ran into a bit of trouble. We ran into a swarm of those forest creatures again. I guess our subsequent shouting attracted a bunch of zombies, so they started chasing us too. We were in deep shit. We ran through the forest for a while, actually losing two of our guys before Kunz spotted an opening up ahead. We crashed through it, coming into a rather large clearing. At this point, we’d pretty much shaken off the creatures, but the zombies were still after us. We laid low for a while, not making any sound in an attempt to throw them off. Eventually, we did and they moved straight past the clearing.
When we’d gotten our bearings together, we realized that we were in uncharted territory. Now, it’s not like we’ve never covered new ground before, but this time it was different. When we really looked around and evaluated the area we were in, it became rather apparent that this clearing could not have formed naturally. There were flattened trees everywhere and what almost looked like tire tracks on the ground, leading to a man-made trail. It was peculiar, for sure. We decided to follow the tracks. I guess that we thought it meant civilization. People out there who were no different than us, just trying to survive in this crazy world.
As we walked along, we started noticing other… interesting things. Shit like sharp wires tied to trees, blocking the path, and what looked like improvised bear traps. It got really fucked up when wooden pikes with zombie as well as other creature’s heads started appearing alongside us. We’d started to realize that continuing on probably wouldn’t lead us anywhere good. We were about to head back when a member of our group pointed out a head that was different than the rest. It was human. And apparently one that he recognized. Brax inspected it closer and confirmed that it did indeed belong to one of the hunters that had gone missing before we came.
Now came time for a decision. We could keep going and find out what happened to them… and if there were any survivors. Or, we could still turn back. It was a tough one, for sure. As the leader, Brax couldn’t just abandon this discovery, but it was also highly unlikely that pursuing this would lead to any favorable outcomes. There were only five of us, after all. Eventually, we’d settled on going back and gathering more people, in order to give us a better fighting chance against whatever the hell this was.
However, as soon as we turned around, we heard the distant sounds of an engine behind us. And it was coming up fast. We knew that outrunning it wasn’t a possibility, so in a split second decision, we backed up into the dark woods and waited for what was coming. Not long after, a beaten down vehicle came into our sights. I couldn’t really describe what kind of car it most closely resembled. All I can say is that it looked… rough. Like the type of thing you wouldn’t want to see if you were by yourself on a desolate back road. As it got even closer, we could make out more pikes with zombie heads attached to the roof of the thing. Safe to say, this didn’t mean anything good. It stopped about twenty feet from where we were hiding. Two men got out, talking loudly to each other, like they didn’t even care about attracting shit from the woods. As I got a closer look at them, it appeared as if they were wearing ripped plaid shirts with dirty jeans. Now, this was surprising for a lot of obvious reasons. They also spoke with a heavy unidentifiable accent, and their voices sounded coarse as hell. And like the car, they also looked rough. We watched, not really knowing what to do, as they picked up old traps and started setting up new ones.
At one point, one of the men picked up a small rabbit-like creature that had been caught and start howling in hysterical laughter. I didn’t see what was so funny about it, but the other one joined in as well. At this point, Brax nudged me in the sides. He pointed to the vehicle and whispered “We’re taking it”. But before I could even react, he jumped out onto the trail and raised his rifle at them. We followed after him, ultimately doing the same.
Now, we expected these guys to show at least some indication of surprise or fear or… something. But no. They just stared at us for a second before starting to laugh again.
“What are you folks doing out here?” I remember one of them saying in a stupidly obnoxious tone. “It ain’t safe, did you know that? For anyone.” As soon as he finished his sentence, he slipped a small knife out of his sleeve and tossed it at Kunz in one swift motion. It stuck him in the shoulder before Brax subsequently shot them down. Kunz cried out in agony as he removed the weapon. Now, it didn’t go too deep, but the tip of the blade seemed to be covered in a sticky green substance. Kunz sighed when he saw this.
“Oh fuck…”
Brax took out a bottle of water and poured it onto the wound, but Kunz winced like hell and said that it burnt. It was obvious that we had to do something, but the problem was that we didn’t know what. To make matters infinitely worse, we started hearing more engines coming from farther down the trail. We piled into the vehicle, but by that time it was already too late. As Brax tried to figure out how to turn on the ignition, I turned around and saw the other cars approaching fast. And they weren’t stopping. My head slammed into the windshield as we were rear-ended hard. As my vision went blurry, I heard gunfire being exchanged before feeling myself get pulled out of the car and dragged on the ground. As I started coming back to my sense, the sounds of hooting and hollering filled the air around me. I looked around me, seeing dead bodies on both sides before looking up at the person dragging me. He hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t unconscious yet, so I took out my spare knife and slit his wrists.
While he cried out in pain, I lunged at him, sticking the blade right into the stomach area. As he fell limp, I realized that the two remaining people he came with were still engaged in a firefight with Kunz. Brax had been shot dead. He was the only one left. While they were still somewhat distracted, I tried sneaking up behind and taking them out that way. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. They'd noticed and I was shot once in the foot and another bullet grazed my hips. The good news was that Kunz managed to take them both out while they were dealing with me.
We both realized that there was no time to recover right then. As I walked over to him, I saw that he had two more knife wounds on his neck and thigh. They were also covered in the green stuff. But before I could say anything, he just shook his head:
“Don’t worry about it. Nothing you can do.”
I could tell that he was going pale, but ultimately he was right. There was nothing I could do. As we were about to hop into the vehicle again, I heard something a sound coming from the car that had rear-ended us. Almost like a muffled cry or something. I told Kunz to try and start the engine while I went to go check it out.
As I got closer, I could tell that it was coming from the trunk. Cautious as hell, I opened it. And I can’t think of anything that I could’ve found that would’ve been more surprising. It was Kagenori. I'd genuinely thought he'd died back in Paradise X. He was bound and gagged, looking beat up as hell. He was also missing an eye. He was stuffed in between two other limp bodies, but I could tell that he was still certainly alive. The look in his last remaining eye sent a shiver down my spine. He’d been through a lot.
I got him out of the trunk and untied him. We had no time to talk as the sound of engines in the distance started up again. As we stumbled over to the vehicle we were going to use, Kunz finally got it going. As we went in, Kunz looked at Kagenori and turned to me.
“Who the hell is this guy?”
In between breaths, I just told him to go. I could see a large shadow moving around in the woods beside us and the cars behind us were getting louder. He didn’t need to be told twice. It’s a good thing that Kunz has a pretty decent memory, because we made it back to the settlement without problems and without being followed.
After I explained what the hell had happened to everybody, I brought them to the infirmary. I only needed a few bandages. Here’s the crazy part, though… everybody seemed to recognize Kagenori. Said he was one of the hunters that had went missing. But before I could get an explanation out of him, he went unconscious. However, he’s stable. Just malnourished. They’re tending to him right now. Kunz on the other hand… well he’s not looking so good. His skin’s nearly gone translucent and all of his veins have become varicose. Nobody knows how to treat him. Everybody’s also in dismay at the loss of Brax and the state of Kagenori. I guess that it became evident to everyone that we didn’t have only monsters to fear… our fellow man wasn’t so safe either. The only thing really keeping me sane right now is the company of Jolan. If she wasn’t here, I think I might have lost it at this point.
As you can tell, a lot shit just happened… and I don’t really like any of it. Especially with what Kagenori whispered to me just before he passed out:
“Rust found something… something fucked up. We were wrong about this place. It isn’t an alternate reality… it’s our own.”
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Credits
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