The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(43)
And, yeah, his neck muscles are taut here. And his emotionless grin, too: I’m pretty sure that’s the muscles in his face constricting. When I woke up, he was stuck that way.
I slashed his throat a few minutes after taking this picture. It seemed to take forever. I cut into his neck, and nothing happened at first, and this dark blood began to flow, and I remember flinching back, like this was the first time or something. Then…then he started screaming like he woke up and the panic hit me like a flurry of fists. I shut my eyes and stabbed over and over again until the screaming stopped.
I’d killed before, mostly with Bradley, but we had to. When they come for you, faster than anything, eyes so desperate, you learn to think on that level. You get in their mindset, and it’s okay. Before I killed Bradley, I’d killed or helped kill four of those beasts, but when I did it I was a beast myself. Bradley was the first one I had to murder as a person.
No one should have to do that.
#21
Shot of my “family” I ran with for a few months down south by the Castro. After Bradley died, I thought I was dead. No way I could hope to stand off against one of those things face-to-face, not even with my bat. It was pure luck that got me in with some looters over by the Haight, then I wandered down into the Castro after half of those guys died in an ambush.
The old guy with the rifle, that’s Jamal. Peter and his boyfriend Graham are in the center. Terence is the one saluting, his wife Alicia’s the one laughing and raising up the bottle of champagne. They used to be both into computers or something before this whole mess. The small one is Karen. Always had a soft spot for her, really.
#22
Picture of San Francisco from the hills in South S.F. You probably recognize the Transamerica building. There are other buildings here, but I can’t name them. The center bit of rubble there used to have a bunch of those buildings. Some people say the military bombed that area but I’m pretty sure it was just a gas explosion of some kind.
Up on the hills to the left of the city you can see the lovely Sutro Tower as the fog rolls in like a white blanket to cover the city. We were on our way out, hearing about some army forming up on the Peninsula. It seemed like a good idea to me. After Karen died, I just…I knew I had to leave. I’d had enough.
They say there’s less of them out in the country, but they’re more dangerous. One’s likely to stalk you for miles without you knowing, I hear. It’ll follow you like it has nothing better to do in the world, dog you down until you’re tired and afraid and used up any ammo or reserves you might have. But I didn’t care. I was willing to take that risk.
Recently, I’ve started to think about May again, to tell you the truth. It’s like every once in a while I remember her, just something little, like the way her hair smelled or how confused she got by sitcoms. Never the important things. Just, you know, dumb stuff.
I wonder what it would have been like if I had gotten on that truck. I don’t know why I didn’t go. I think I was still in the pre-disaster mindset. Things weren’t working really well there, towards the end. It was a lot of little things, you know? The day those attacks started happening, the day our civilization was brought to its knees, all the rules changed with it. All that petty bullshit, it was nothing, but we had no perspective to see that. Until the end, but out of habit, I pushed her away anyways.
I guess I still have pictures of her, though.
#23
No, it’s not one of the beasts attacking me. But it sure looks like one, doesn’t it? This is actually a picture of the guy who developed my film for me. I traded him my camera because I can’t find film for it anyways. He and I sort of set up this shot because we thought it’d be funny. He could mimic one of the monsters really well, just sort of huff up and get all tense and bug-eyed.
Smart guy, too. Haven’t found anyone that knew how to develop pictures until him. He even had the chemicals. Some of them came out sort of weird, but what can you do? No matter what happens now, even if I twitch out and become one of them, I have my pictures, I have my memories.
Even if they are fragments, I don’t care. I can’t make a story out of my life, it’s never worked out that way. I just remember things as a collection of moments, you have to fill in the rest. That’s maybe why I got so upset the other night. The way people tell stories, it’s dishonest. They stretch those moments together, they put a framework that’s not there.
These pictures are my life, at least at that time. Like memories, only fragments. Impressions, really.
Like memories, incomplete. Twenty-three snapshots from a roll of twenty-four. Like the rest of my life, those pictures came out odd.
Some nights, when I feel the cold breezes come off the Pacific, I stare up at the sky and the thousands of stars I never knew existed, wondering how I’ll document these memories of mine: the sunsets over the sea, the valleys of redwoods that feel like sacred groves. The trees that are starting to grow through suburban homes. The people I’ve met, both good and bad. The scars on their faces, the calluses on their hands. Is it right to live life knowing every detail will die?
I’ve never been good at endings either, to tell you the truth. I mess them up all over the place. May could tell you that. She used to tell me that my stories were all jokes without punch lines. I never did figure out what she meant by that. I bet Kyoko’d say I was bad at endings, too. And Bradley, and Karen in her own way. So you might have to help me: