Please, Oblivion

Please, Oblivion
Jack Vital

My haven is my prison. The door is closed and locked. I’ve gated myself in to keep me safe and to give me time. I am affording myself plenty of time for hesitation. Plenty of time. Balking is the only thing that gave me comfort during life and now is the only thing giving me comfort as I journey into death. I am stalling with death just as I did with life. The only time I felt comfortable was hesitating to make moves in life. This bathroom floor and locked door is providing me that same comfort.

If only Grave would stop moving out there I would truly get to enjoy it. Well, not enjoy it. No. I would be able to feel the nothingness that comes when my hesitation eclipses my fear for what lay outside that door. Nothingness is better than fear. In this new world fear is everything and I have the bullet wound to prove it. I can hear Grave manically moving around preparing. Getting ready for something. Our next move. He is always getting ready. He takes notes all the time. Hastily writing down thoughts and ideas. He talks to himself describing the behavior of those beasts outside the window. He talks to himself about how we will survive. When I hear him say my name it is a reminder that he will require action from me. Upon hearing it I instantly come back into this bathroom. I can’t stand the idea of an expectation.

In the nothingness I can let that blackness take me over. I come into this bathroom, close the door. Lock it. Then I close my eyes as my finger glides through the air with some unnamed determination. I am a fiend for a mind made of nothing. Empty space is better than the thoughts. Grave starts shouting about how he knows he is going to die by the hands of those beasts. A sermon that usually precedes his bit about how he is not afraid.

I know there are far more of you than myself. Your stink will prevail long past my momentary existence.

He won’t shut up long enough for me to run through my routine into nothingness. My hiatus from fear. My vacation from blackness.

My finger finds that bullet wound and feels around to make sure it is there. The pain affirms it.

You will stand victoriously over me! One foot firmly rooted on the ground and the foot proudly staining my befallen chest with blackness, shit, and blood. It will stay standing there while I turn to dust. I know this. The stink you and your minions have left to remind me is nothing new. Nothing! It is not defiance of you, though I confess it shades my confession.

He goes on.

I attempt to tune him out. I push my finger down more firmly and I become more certain of my infection. I pull my finger away to see if it is the blackness that leaks out. I am certain it is.

… allowed me to have. My seconds are limited by the counted number you have braised on the back of my head where I can not see. But my fingers can read the tattoo by touch and I will not allow myself to forget that you have given me a zero hour. I will keep your presence a part of my every second. Forgetting is a luxury I will not allow myself.

Why won’t he shut up? I want to forget him. I want to remember remembering. I want to forget this place. Shut up Grave! Shut the fuck up. I look back to my finger it is a bright ruby blood that has inhabited my finger. Disappointment and determination.

…and I shall see you as a friend. My friendly reminder that today I am alive. What fear should I have for you if you provide me even a single day before that dark day? And what shall I do if the days that precede that darkest day are dark themselves. I will reach behind my head to feel my tattoo so that I can be reminded that that moment may be dark, but it is not the darkest. What fear should I have if…

Fear is all I have. The blackness is in me. I take a deep breath in, I can smell that darkness from outside the room. Or is it from me now? It smells terrible. I exhale and take another deep deep breath in. I start to gag and allow my finger to penetrate the wound. The pain chews up my thoughts. Fear mixes in with pain which then balances out to nothingness and

… fear. Fear. Fear. Thank you for it. I understand its purpose now with your minions knocking at my door. I see now that fear drove me. A day where I fear you is a day I get things done and check things off my list. But the day I accept you is the day I no longer need to get things done. Fear. Fear. Fear. Today is the day I begin to live without fear. And Jack will…

Oh God. Oh God. No. I jam my finger in the wound. I can feel my pupils dilate as my eyes spread out and then roll back. Sweet release. Just one more minute, I ask for. Just one more minute. As I fade to static I hear Grave.

Jack and I will look you in the eye and thank you for our moments without asking for more. Because with our understanding comes justice. We can not live forever. Your minions won’t allow for it and neither will you. The clock ticks. You’re foot taps for us while you hold our coats waiting. We will meet. Jack. Myself. You. We will meet. When absolutely does not matter.

The Freeze Instinct

Jack


The voice and the infection are tied together somehow. The voice is familiar but since I've become infected it has a presence. It feels like it has a face and arms that reach out inviting me to a dark place.


The more I read online about these people eating other people the more that stench crawls into my nostrils and into the back of my throat. The more that voice shackles and weakens me. Plagues and infects me. Debilitates and cripples me. I'm left with a sense of powerlessness I think I've felt my whole life but is now magnified by my profound inability to survive. The blackness crawls in me and torments my brain. I'm dying.


It comes with every thought to move or take action I have. It goads me into getting up off the bathroom floor. Yeah get up. Let's see what you can do you stupid brainless shit. I don't get up and the blackness spreads. I slice at my arm trying to get it out. I find my way up to my feet and look in the mirror. You've never done anything right. You are going to fuck this up like you fuck everything up. Pathetic. I look directly at my eyes swearing that my eyes look blacker. My pupils taking up more space. I look at the bullet wound in my arm. I'm infected. I know it. You're going to die. You've never been able to do what you say. You think you can get out of here? Kill somebody? You couldn't even save Dee. You were a failure and a deadbeat in the that relationship you impotent shit. Life was never anything you could handle.


Somewhere out there is a basement room with a toilet in the middle of it. Out of this toilet shit pours out with rats, infectious waste, and people's forsaken entrails. A place where the blackness that is inside me overflows from abundance. This is the home for my mind. Since that bullet coated with infected blood lodged itself into me it handed over the deed to this new one bathroom apartment in the basement. This is home for me now. Where blackness, doubt, and fear determine my existence. 


I find myself telling this to Grave.


My body is infected. Every time I think about leaving I think about how I'm going to freeze when one of those things comes after me. I think about hesitating while this voice reminds me I can't. I can't. I am unable.
Grave looks up from his notebook.
You're frightened.
Yes!
You are frightened because you believe at you're core is incapability. When that ultimate test comes you'll fail. We are creatures governed by our mind but our minds our governed by our perceptions, our subjective beliefs. Do you know you will fail or do you fear you will? 
I think I will...
He interrupts.


Our capabilities far extend past our perceived capacity. But if our mind does not believe it our body makes it so. People say that the animal instinct in each of us responds with flight or fight when our survival is threatened. But people so often forsake the most human of all instinctual responses. Freezing. 
I'm going to freeze, Grave. Threat is all around me. That stink is a constant reminder of this darkness creeping inside me and those monsters creeping outside.
Seemingly uninterested in my worry he continues.


Instinct is predicated upon the idea that thought does not interfere with action. Survival, do you understand. Survival is at stake. So, the body calculatedly forfeits the luxury of reason and rationality and responds immediately for the sake of surviving. For some, when survival is threatened their very first reaction is to freeze. 
I can sense the blackness moving up me now. He is exposing some piece of me I don't want to wrestle with. I begin hoping to disappear. 
My instinct is to freeze, Grave. There is no thought process. Just a response that will kill me outside that door.
Jack, pay attention. Arms, legs, and eyes of stone. Gripped. When that threat finds you Jack, you will freeze. 
I want to fight.
We aren't animals. Our instincts are muddled in our minds. Minds determine instinct for humans. Behind a fighting instinct may be someone who grew up thinking that to get by one must fight. So, one has a predisposition to fight when under threat of extinction or when one simply runs into confrontation. For those who run perhaps they learned that by avoiding confrontation, they too have survived. But those who freeze... it is their fearful doubting mind that educates their instinct. A sense of incapability like you describe. A belief in one's smallness. Doubt. Doubt. Doubt. Like the blackness you falsely believe infects you. It spreads to our heart and our mind so that when we look death in the face we believe we know we will lose. So we don't fight. We don't run. We handicap and paralyze ourself. Human instinct is tied to the mind and your instinct is tied in fear.
How do I become a fighter?
You don't. Fighters fight for better or worse as do runners. If you fight every time you die. If you run every time you forsake those you may need to protect.
I won't survive if I don't fight.
No. You won't survive if you don't kill. You don't have to be a fighter.
What then? What do I have to do? Run?
You will need two things Jack? Two things only. But it not enough to hear them. You have to live them, breathe them, and know that it is these two things coursing your veins. Not blackness.
What are they?
Understanding and faith.
Grave, I don't really believe in God...
No. Listen. 


I'm scared of what he'll say. These two things are what he thinks I'll need, but they are also an offering. A path he is showing me I'll need to walk. My whole has been spent being given opportunities I didn't take for fear that once I did, I would be expected to perform. I didn't do well with expectation so I didn't give people a reason believe in me. I never allowed people to see me, just a watered down version of me I found out people were much more likely to accept than to think anything much about or reject. It wasn't happiness I found in this, just other people's approval and a true self that was buried alive. A buried self that I could hear screaming to be exhumed.
Grave went on. 
Understanding and faith will determine your instinct. You come to a place where you will understand that you, Jack, will die. It may be walking into a hord of the dead. It may be by the living. It may be tomorrow or during old age. You're instincts and thoughts will be predicated not just on a thought, but a belief and an understanding that you are going to die. So, when 50 of them beat down that door they will they evoke an acceptance and understanding of your connection to them. This understanding leaves no room for fear. For the room that fear occupies is not filled with anything. Just dead space. When one fills that void with the understanding that they are undoubtedly going to die the acceptance allows room for potential and capability. There will be no fear of failing. Because hey... what's the worst that could happen?
And faith?
In the light not a darkness inside of you. You can't have delusions about what you can control and what you cannot, but you cannot fear your capabilities. You must have faith in them. To believe you can't walk through a door is to close every door that lies beyond that one door. There is true capability in each of us. That is our light. Fear blackens our light and clouds our thoughts with perceived incapability. That is not real. You have capacity. You have capability. Put you're faith in them.
You mean I have to just believe I can do it?
It can't be superficial. Blind faith is to put your life in the hands of something that will come to control and dictate you. There are the earthly capabilities of you have that thirst for you faith. You think you can't walk out that door and lodge a knife into the skull of another person you are wrong. You can and will. Then there is faith in your capacities that lie beyond earthly understanding and more in you connection with something spiritual. There will come a time when having faith in your capabilities will mean understanding their limits... and getting the hell out of dodge. The understanding and the belief must be real.
How do I.
I pause. I can't grasp it all. I swallow and the stink shoots up my nose as I inhale. You'll never, ever be able to...
How do I get there?
You are there already, but the fear creates a veil blocking your vision. It blocks your understanding and faith. We must dispense with your fear and your darkness. Pick up that hammer and that gasoline. We're going to burn this place down. 

the house across the street I

These days I wake up earlier than I ever have before.  I make instant coffee and sit staring through a crack in the boards that overlook the greenhouses in the front field.  Behind those, perhaps a few hundred yards, the road cuts across and bends lazily to its right and behind some trees.  From my seat by the window i can watch the morning light creep onto and through the little block of gardens and rows of lawn.  The scratching sounds from the basement aren't so audible in this front room; i imagine the thing down there has dragged itself towards the back kitchen-corner of the house.  It's quiet and calm, the cars that once passed by even very early in the morning are no more, and I can sit and pretend that I, and the thing in the basement, are the only things left in the world.
Lately, though, I've started imagining what i'd find in the house i can just make out across the street.  Shelves full of canned food or even dried pasta or fruit, or batteries.  Tarps or have-a-heart traps.  A bigger knife, or more razor blades.  more guns.
A carpet spongy with blood, flies buzzing.  A locked room, tidy, but with a closet full of unmarked video tapes.  White corpses with black hands.  Shit and rotted food and bugs.
It's so far away, and a needless risk, but i'm starting to think I need to go over there and see, so I can come back and sit in the mornings and not have a head filled with dares and imagination.
But first, the basement.

The Scene

Jack

I'm back in the bathroom. Back in this windowless tomb that is the only comfort I can find after I close the door, lock it, and lay on the cold tile floor.

I got out of the bathroom a few days ago. The infected part of me telling to stay put and Grave telling me to come out, eat, and prepare. Prepare to leave the apartment because we are running low on food. You'll never make it. You're pathetic. You are going to die.

Grave told me that he lives in one of the buildings nearby and that it got over run by the dead. That's what he calls them. That was when he found me. He said that he had a family that he watched die. He said he left them without hesitating the second he realized saving them would have meant all of them dying.

Quick, calculated, emotion-free decisions are what will save us, he says. Most of the time you will only have a moment to decide and it is better to calculate and pull the trigger then hesitate for even a moment. Even if that means pulling the trigger on the person you love the most. Do it. Survive. And deal with it later.

He is still sure I am not infected. But fear grips me. I can feel that black stink beneath the surface. I can hear a voice calling my name, tapping his foot and holding my coat for me.  I can smell the stink. It is overwhelming and all the time. It is me, but Grave thinks it’s all these dead.

I just stopped writing to search the web for updates. More and more places aren't updating their sites. One place says government test gone wrong. Another says the virus came from infected birds. One place said that a terrorist group has claimed responsibility. The associated video link shows a bearded man in a cave with a flag behind him. It sounds like it’s just the US and quarantine efforts have been expansive. All these sites say that the president is still alive and meeting with advisers on how to proceed. They recommend heading north to the cold but list protected safe zones. They say these things only seem to be driven by killing and can not survive the cold.

I asked Grave what he thought. He said I'm only worried about that front door and preparing you to handle what's on the other side of it.

I had left this bathroom 3 days ago. I did it because Grave said we are going to have to leave to gather food. He asked if I wanted to live. I told him I thought so. He said I'd have to do better.

He said that the only them that stopped them was destroying the brain. The internet confirmed that. So he showed me how he had killed them. He showed me how to walk around quietly and sneak up on them. He showed me how to stab them in the brain and kill them quietly. He said he couldn't tell if they heard well but knew they saw well enough. I kept telling him that I'm weak and infected. I'd never killed anything. He said it was my life or what was left of theirs. Right now, he said, survival is as good as it gets. You're parents are dead, you're family, you're friends... they're dead. Once we get to the cold it will be about more than surviving. Until then think fast, pull the trigger and never hesitate.

After he said that I went and looked out a crack in boards of one of the windows. I realized I hadn't looked outside. I was so content to let the infection overrun me I didn't even think about it.

What I saw is what made me crawl back into this bathroom.

I saw this old man walk out his front door. He looked sickly and hungry but not infected. He started throwing up and dry heaving. It is the smell. It wasn't the blackness that came up. So I assumed he wasn't infected. He was walking into the street. He was saying something. Crying for help. No. Food. He was hungry. I started panicking. Should I save him? Yell to him? I couldn't open my mouth. You fucking loser. My stomach tightened. Go save him! Do it! You can’t do it. You’re pathetic. You infected gutter of shit. I could feel the darkness crawling inside. Tensing me up. I heaved. I told Grave to come over.

Oh no, I said. Oh God, no. God please, no.

I saw one of the dead. It wondered out from the other side of the street. The man turned to her. It? And started pleading with it. Asking for food. She was naked. Completely naked and young. Maybe late teens early 20s and disturbingly tight and perky. The rain had left a clean shine on her and I remember thinking she may have just gotten out of the shower.  Then I saw her face and her chest. The only stain on her body was the blood being soaked off her mouth. Her neck. Her chest. The deep redness of it was thinning out. She looked so clean. I remember thinking about the juxtaposition of that blood running down her body and the clear clean perfect looking skin just beside it. And she kept marching towards him. Go save him! What is wrong with you? Look at how weak you are. Look at how pathetic you are. You can’t even muster the courage to save that man. Just go back into the bathroom and die. Just go…

We can’t save him. Too risky. We go out. The dead see us. They could swarm us. We don’t know how many are out there. He means nothing.

Grave sounded so sure. My weakness was appeased. I was relieved.

I couldn’t close my eyes. It was pouring rain. The dead sort of stumbled on to him and they both fell to the ground. The old man didn’t brace for the awkward tumble. He just folded. His head smacked the concrete and the dead fell onto its back. The dead rose up. Possessed. It crawled onto the unconscious old man and buried its teeth into his neck. It pulled away, jaw still engaged, and took part of the old man’s neck with it. A flap of skin aching to stay connected stretched off and blood flooded out of the wound. Not in spurts or squirts but a flood.

The dead readjusted herself. Calculated. I don’t even think I blinked. This dead thing then started slowly pushing its hands down on this old man’s soft stomach. It was a gradual pressure led by her nails.  Finally it punctured. I remember thinking how easy it seemed for this lifeless weak dead looking woman to get underneath the surface. Surprised at how corporeal and soft that stomach was. How permeable and vulnerable its, my skin really is. And then heaping fistfuls of innards were shoveled into its mouth. I threw up. It gorged and binged like it had not eaten in days. Parts of this old man’s insides fell off the heaping handfuls back onto him like the food that hits your mouth and falls down from oversized spoonfuls. Rain came down hard onto the scene and spread the thinned blood in every direction from the old man.

He killed him with the bite on the neck and now he’s feasting. That black gaze of emptiness doesn’t look satiated does it? Grave asked.  

It ate and then threw much of it back up. Ate and threw up. Blackness intermingled with flesh.

I fell to my knees. Wept and remember thinking this isn’t possible. This isn’t possible. And as the thought transformed into a whispered repeated mantra I found myself closing the bathroom door. As I did I saw Grave writing things down in a notebook. His eyes skated over to me and then back down. He started talking to himself. I thought maybe he was infected. Then I thought about me being infected. And then I felt the blackness crawl up from my heart. As I started passing out I heard Grave say that tomorrow we will have to kill somebody.

before II

I almost threw up.  I couldn't tune out the sounds and the room felt like it was spinning.  I knew there was someone in that car but i was simply frozen.  Looking back I wish I had done something, yelled or tried to kill that gaunt, white ex-human that was smashing its arm to pieces on the glass of that car.  I simply couldn't function in any other capacity but to run away, put as much distance between it and me as i could.  I have no idea how i managed to get back into the front room and grab my bag and the rest of my stuff, but I know it took me a while to muster up the courage.  I could still hear it banging away, but I ran into that room just the same as if it were right in the kitchen.  Then i went out the back window, crawling through the window and down between the yew and the house, then out, dragging my bag.  I stopped and stood listening, my stomach twisting, head turned.  Then, after an what felt like minutes but was probably seconds, I heard another wet thud and ran for the woods that separated the back yard from the marsh behind the house.  Beyond the marsh: route nine.  And then just a few more miles to the only place I could think of to go.

Grave

Jack Vital


Stay alive, he whispered.


I haven't posted in a while. He took my phone saying I need to rest and worry only about healing. I was too infected to argue. Too weak.


I've been awake for a few hours now but for the past several days I've been in and out of consciousness. Terrible dreams of dark tunnels, Dee, Trevor, my parents, rooms full of blood and shit, and the stink. Oh god the stink. I would wake up to it and will myself back to sleep despite it. Waking up to it was waking up to the blackness that had reined over my life for the past 2 weeks since Trevor died and came back. You should have saved him. You can't do anything right. Pathetic! You actually need someone else to help you live. He'll know you're infected. He'll know...


You're not infected. You would have turned already. You'd be one of the risen. Anyway, you can't spend a spare second thinking of it, he says. 
I'm not even sure of his name.
Grave. My name is Grave.
He leaves some food that he says will help me heal and then walks away.


During these past days when I'd wake up I could feel the blackness inside me. It haunts my sleep with the dreams, my waking life with the stink and with the doubts. I'd wake up to thoughts of how infinitely incapable I am. I'd wake with my senses confused. I'd waiver between feeling as though I was producing the stink, to wondering if I were dead, to being sure I was dead, and then the doubt would incapacitate me.
You loser. You pathetic piece of rotten shit. My stomach would cramp trying to stave off the thoughts. A battle clashing inside me. The blackness versus... something. Me?


I remember thoughts like: you won't get far, you have no idea how to stay alive, you couldn't save Dee or Trevor, you couldn't even open your mouth when that cowboy came in shooting the place. 


The thoughts were somehow unfamiliar but critical in a way that felt familiar. I'd never done anything special. Never been popular or good at my job. I float between inconsequential and completely apathetic. This voice knew that. It would wake me up.
It would tell me to look under my skin and pick at my bullet wound. It wanted the black out, but not to purge it, but display it. I could feel it and I was sick. My stomach would cramp and my mind would fight but I couldn't do it. I'd go pick at my wrists or at the bullet hole. I'd shiver and ask for my mom. I'd shiver and ask to just end it. I'd shiver and bargain with a God I'd never talked to.


But every time I did it seemed that Grave would come in.
You're causing your own suffering. Your body and mind must be healthy. Fight the thoughts and rest.


He'd say that Dee was out of my control. He'd say that in order to survive I must listen to him. He'd say it isn't safe where they are and that we need to head north to the cold. There is light there, he said. 


Grave just came in and asked how I was feeling. He asked me a bunch of questions about how I was feeling physically and mentally. I didn't say much. My stomach hurts from trying to fight off the thoughts and it doesn't leave much fight left for the pain, the tears, or the smell.


So, here I am. Healing. Is anyone out there? What is going on in the world? A lot of sites aren't updated. Grave keeps telling me I shouldn't worry about it right now. It seems like this isn't just happening in Boston. If you have information post it here, please. We need to know the truth.

before

Sometimes I look back on that morning to forget about the scraping sound in the basement here at the farmhouse.  At times I feel safe here despite the sound, but I know I'm not.   My days are numbered.  Back at the beach house I was in a place filled with warm memories: i had always felt safe and happy there before, but i could feel the danger creeping as the days ticked down in that house.  I would pace between the kitchen and tiny living room and all i could think of was getting out.  That morning I woke up early, ready to leave.  I got dressed, crammed a handful of granola in my mouth and was still chewing it when i heard the first thud, just as i slammed my heel into my loosely tied boot.  I looked out the little window of my front door and could just see the emaciated thing smashing its fist into the rear window of a Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway next door.

It's one of the starving, I thought, and I backed away form the window as the next wet whap left a splatter on the now spider webbed safety glass.  Up my spine shot that feeling of unease: it raced through my shoulders and up my neck to the back of my head, and drained down through my legs to weaken my thighs and my knees.  Not just fear, but a breath-catching, eye-watering, stomach churning sense of complete wrongness that was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, alive and squeezing into my thoughts for good.

I heard the third crunch as what i imaged was left of the thing's hand smashed a tiny hole through the glass, but at this point i had grabbed my bag and the pile next to it and retreated back where i had been sleeping, closing the door too loudly, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and squeezing my eyes  shut until they ached.