and rice. There are a few more cans of veggies. One fruit cocktail. If I get bit, that’s going to be my last meal. I hope it has lots of cherries and pineapple—but I swear they’re mostly pears and grapes.
The bath tub is about ¼ full of water that I ran out of the pipes—that’s all the drinking water I have.
Winter is undoable here.
I only made it this far on my first try at supplies. I’m still on the same fucking road.
Damn it.
Oct 6 12:25pm
I was heading home.
I had about 8 ½ hours left in the car, between me and home.
Okay, let me back up.
We’d been at the resort for a week—really secluded, so we could catch up on a whole lot of years that were sewn together by now infrequent phone calls, some letters and plenty of emails.
We left our cars about a mile away—closer to ¾ a mile—to hike to our cabin. So private we didn’t know. We’d requested the most isolated cabin at the resort—so there were a lot of things we just didn’t see.
One of my friend’s husbands called at one point and was as clear about vague news broadcasts as he could be. Weird things in newspapers and word of mouth. Really weird things online. The word “hoax” came up.
Something weird was going on—he couldn’t wait until she got home.
My other friends turned off their phones when we first arrived.
We didn’t think much of hearing screams around a lake. There seemed to be a lot of helicopters. But what would we know? There was an abundance of sirens throughout each day, but accidents happen. There’d be lots of reasons for that. Campfires, boating accidents, drunks, fights, break-ins, heart attacks. Things happen.
But what we could not see and couldn’t understand then is terrifying in retrospect—in understanding. Like reaching under your car seat for the keys you dropped and finding out later there had been a poisonous snake under it.
We didn’t know people were leaving and the people who owned the resort had their own things to worry about.
Night five of six—seemed like a lot of sirens out there. And the perpetual pounding of helicopter propellers. Something really bad must have happened. My heart responded to the unknown tragedy. I remember the skin prickling on the back of my neck.
I was alone then, my friend Dee having crawled to bed sometime after 11:30. We were all exhausted from a week of the antics of longtime friends, so 11:30 felt pretty late. Dee and I’d been reminiscing – we also caught up on our latest horror movie discoveries – she being every bit a horror addict as me. We also bond over our love a Japanese music, especially Visual Kei.
Above any of my friends, I often felt we were too close to be anything but sisters.
That night is still so clear in my mind.
I was on the deck, listening to sirens. Loons on the lake—their “shrug-no-biggie-super familiar” song sounded eerie that night.
The soda in my hand was sweating.
My mouth was dry when the sirens woke me.
There was a chill wasn’t there? Maybe it was me.
The cabin was dark behind me and the woods were tall and black. The shadows were stubborn and ungiving. The moon was bright, but it still had a couple of days to fullness.
I knew my friends were awake, but they were lying still in their beds, probably thinking the same thing I was about the sirens.
I was perfectly comfortable on the deck of that unfamiliar building, in those unfamiliar woods, in the dark, in the middle of the night.
My watch face lit up in blue-green light and said 12:47.
I would never feel safe at night again.
That was the last time I’d ever stand outside and not question what was “out there.” Soon I’d be worried about what was hiding “in there” too.
I closed the screen door and swung the hook into the elbow of a bent nail that married the door to its frame.
The humidity was unforgiving, even at night, and we had not locked or even closed the inside door since we first unlocked it.
That night I closed it. Then I locked
The bath tub is about ¼ full of water that I ran out of the pipes—that’s all the drinking water I have.
Winter is undoable here.
I only made it this far on my first try at supplies. I’m still on the same fucking road.
Damn it.
Oct 6 12:25pm
I was heading home.
I had about 8 ½ hours left in the car, between me and home.
Okay, let me back up.
We’d been at the resort for a week—really secluded, so we could catch up on a whole lot of years that were sewn together by now infrequent phone calls, some letters and plenty of emails.
We left our cars about a mile away—closer to ¾ a mile—to hike to our cabin. So private we didn’t know. We’d requested the most isolated cabin at the resort—so there were a lot of things we just didn’t see.
One of my friend’s husbands called at one point and was as clear about vague news broadcasts as he could be. Weird things in newspapers and word of mouth. Really weird things online. The word “hoax” came up.
Something weird was going on—he couldn’t wait until she got home.
My other friends turned off their phones when we first arrived.
We didn’t think much of hearing screams around a lake. There seemed to be a lot of helicopters. But what would we know? There was an abundance of sirens throughout each day, but accidents happen. There’d be lots of reasons for that. Campfires, boating accidents, drunks, fights, break-ins, heart attacks. Things happen.
But what we could not see and couldn’t understand then is terrifying in retrospect—in understanding. Like reaching under your car seat for the keys you dropped and finding out later there had been a poisonous snake under it.
We didn’t know people were leaving and the people who owned the resort had their own things to worry about.
Night five of six—seemed like a lot of sirens out there. And the perpetual pounding of helicopter propellers. Something really bad must have happened. My heart responded to the unknown tragedy. I remember the skin prickling on the back of my neck.
I was alone then, my friend Dee having crawled to bed sometime after 11:30. We were all exhausted from a week of the antics of longtime friends, so 11:30 felt pretty late. Dee and I’d been reminiscing – we also caught up on our latest horror movie discoveries – she being every bit a horror addict as me. We also bond over our love a Japanese music, especially Visual Kei.
Above any of my friends, I often felt we were too close to be anything but sisters.
That night is still so clear in my mind.
I was on the deck, listening to sirens. Loons on the lake—their “shrug-no-biggie-super familiar” song sounded eerie that night.
The soda in my hand was sweating.
My mouth was dry when the sirens woke me.
There was a chill wasn’t there? Maybe it was me.
The cabin was dark behind me and the woods were tall and black. The shadows were stubborn and ungiving. The moon was bright, but it still had a couple of days to fullness.
I knew my friends were awake, but they were lying still in their beds, probably thinking the same thing I was about the sirens.
I was perfectly comfortable on the deck of that unfamiliar building, in those unfamiliar woods, in the dark, in the middle of the night.
My watch face lit up in blue-green light and said 12:47.
I would never feel safe at night again.
That was the last time I’d ever stand outside and not question what was “out there.” Soon I’d be worried about what was hiding “in there” too.
I closed the screen door and swung the hook into the elbow of a bent nail that married the door to its frame.
The humidity was unforgiving, even at night, and we had not locked or even closed the inside door since we first unlocked it.
That night I closed it. Then I locked
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