Preamble
I keep waking up, but I never fall asleep.
Each time is a little different, but there are some commonalities. Usually, if I have been working out of a particular area for a while, I'll awaken at or very near my campsite. I'll be wearing nothing but my threadbare undergarments and feeling like the second morning after a bender, the day after the hangover- not exactly unwell, but not at a full hundred percent, either. For all of that, though, I'll also be perfectly healthy. Any sprains, cuts, or illnesses I had are gone. This leads me to believe that a significant amount of time passes during my lapsed memory. I am not hungry, nor am I thirsty when I become aware again, even if my last memories are of starvation...
… and my last memories are always, invariably, ones which seemed as though they should lead to my imminent and unavoidable death.
There are differences at times, too. If I'm transient during one of my episodes and without a campsite, where I awake is a complete crap-shoot. Sometimes I'm near where my last memories take place, but overwhelmingly often I'm somewhere else. Occasionally that somewhere else is impossibly far away, distances that would take me days of well-stocked and tireless traveling to reach. Rarely, I awaken with a pack of basic provisions already strapped across my shoulders.
Disturbingly, no objective amount of time seems to pass during my indisposition. The moon is always in the same phase, plants are always at the same level of cultivation, and corpses are at their expected level of decomposition. Even if I've traveled those impossibly far distances I previously mentioned.
In my expansive travels, I've met a few folks. There have been traveling companions in my past, people I've paired up with for mutual protection, or even just so I could hear another human voice as I traipse through the apocalypse on my way from nowhere in particular to another flavor of the same. I've come across settlements as well, and stayed long enough to trade or to heal up, to trade news and stories or to get knowledge of the local terrain.
Nobody has ever had the same experience as me.
However, that doesn't mean that nobody will, or has. Perhaps through making this journal I might glean new insight regarding the missing time, and uncover new truths regarding what exactly happens, of why it happens, or even how. Because while this keeps happening in situations that are hopelessly lethal, I can't help but notice that I'm very much alive.
Day 1
For lack of a calendar that the remnants of humanity can agree on, I'll simply label this first entry in my journal as "Day 1". Time once was that I could give you a rough approximation of the date by describing the season and our progress through it. "It was late summer, and the air was just beginning to carry the suggestion of chill that evoked scent-memories of applesmoke and browning leaves" would give you an idea of the time of year, but that sort of thing doesn't matter any more...
Maybe you're new to the world. More than one person has come to their senses in this madness we call reality with absolutely no understanding of what happened or why everything changed. There's no shame in madness in this new order, no stigma against it as long as it doesn't take the form of hurting other folk. Common wisdom states that madness is the new norm, since new patterns of thought are required for new patterns of existence.
If you're one of those folks that are just waking up to the way of the world, consider this your primer.
First thing to know is that the dead walk the earth. They hunger to eat of your flesh and will attack you if you stray too close to them. They feel no pain, but they can be briefly incapacitated. Their head is their weakest point, and destroying it is the quickest way to render them harmless. They are attrition hunters and will follow you for miles once they catch your trail. They are attracted to certain sounds, smells, and sources of heat and light. They have some connection with the moon, and are stronger and faster at night. When the Blood Moon rises, they seem to gather in greater numbers and rampage through the wastes of the world, seeking human flesh.
We call them zombies, collectively. There are varieties, but that's the intro-level stuff.
Maybe you remember the moon as a silvered orb that worked its way through a twenty-eight day cycle. Nowadays the moon flashes through a seven day cycle, from new to full in a single week. Full moons are crimson and give the zombies a sort of herding instinct. We call these groups "hordes." We call these moons "Blood Moons," partly due to their color but mostly because of what comes of them.
Seasons no longer exist, and days are all the same length. During the end days of civilization as we knew it there was a nuclear missile launch. The world was on a hair-trigger, and before we knew it the world was ending in an orgy of radioactive retaliation. Best any of us sitting around the make-shift bars in ramshackle trading-posts can figure is that the nukes knocked the planet back onto its axis. No tilt, no seasons. We think the zombies are the result of a mutated virus, but if there's any medical research going on there's no sign of it here in the wastes. Something happened to the moon as well, but nobody has any clue what that could be. And the swirling maelstroms that spin above and away from the rad hot-spots have caused bizarre changes to local weather patterns- deserts abutting snowy coniferous forests, areas burnt to perpetually smoldering embers next to lush and verdant temperate meadowlands, not to mention the areas so rad-blasted that the air itself will kill an unprotected man in seconds.
Essentially, the world is well and truly fucked.
For that matter, so am I.
I've awoken from one of my episodes with no supplies and no idea where I am. I'm wearing nothing aside from my skivvies, inside of a scrap metal fence surrounded on all sides by zombies. I've avoided attracting notice so far by staying hunkered down and not moving much, aside from a quick crawl towards a backpack laying on the ground near where I came to. Since the only thing inside was a scrap of charcoal and a bunch of paper, and seeing as how I had no idea how to go about drafting a last will and testament, I figured this journal would be a way to kill time until an idea came to me.
Truth be told I may have spoken a bit too soon regarding the emptiness of the enclosed yard in which I found myself. There's plenty of sand and a few scrub grasses (which couple with the bright sun and hot air to tell me that I'm in a desert of all places), a few piles of useless garbage, and the top half of a fellow named Jim. Says so on the stitching above his breast pocket. Well, it might be Tim. Hard to tell through the blood. Poor bastard has a rib poking out.
Oh... there's an idea.
[The next lines in the journal are rust-red with dried blood, about a three finger widths expanse.]
Sorry about that. Good news, though- I get to write another day. Nothing too heroic happened, to be honest. I took a yank on old Jimmy's rib until it broke off in my hand and posted up next to the door leading out of the yard. I waited until a zombie walked by it, yanked the door open, and dragged it in. A quick pop through the eye put it out of my misery, close the door, and Bob's your uncle. Go through Zombo's pockets, take whatever clothes weren't too corpsified to wear and wait for a break in the zombie conga-line. Then run like the hounds of hell were after me.
No hounds this time, though, thank God.
I ended up on the roof of a Shamway with a moldy backpack filled with three tins of food and three bottles of fresh water, along with a beer. I'm wearing boots and pants from Zombo, and a blood-encrusted shirt that might read "Tim" in the stitching above the breast pocket, but probably reads "Jim". I have enough plant fibers left over after crafting a crude stone ax to lay out in a rough approximation of a bedroll.
All in all, today was a good day. I'm still breathing.