A/N: Hey! I'm sorry it's been a while but it's been busy! I was suppose to be writing up coursework but instead I began writing this. I decided to jump out of Europe and head over to the Americas. I used Google Translator for some parts so excuse the bad translation to those native Portuguese speakers. Enjoy!
Name: Adriana de Paulo
Age: 29
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
How I got out alive I will never know. Papai was so sick but more alive than I had ever seen him before in his old fragile self. People were frantic, running back and forth. The corridors were beginning to look like a horror film I had seen before; the clinical walls were red with splattered and sprayed with arterial blood; Puddles forming on the floors from the bodies strewn on them. I was only here to see his body. They told me he was dead; died from his terminal illness that there was no cure for. All I had to do was view his body in the morgue through a glass window. Nothing more they said. The last thing I didn't expect to see was my old papai clawing at the glass with his blooded hands. It all felt like a horror dream that I couldn't quite wake up from but it was all real. That man WAS my papai. The morgue assistant said he was surprised as he took the body out of the cold storage as he had been bitten. I don't know why I didn't see it before. His arm was turning purple and I could see the beads of sweat rolling down off of his forehead. It may have been midsummer but that doesn't happen to a native. I turned away and ran. Ran like there was no tomorrow. I didn't actually realise the next couple of weeks would be the hardest and that I could end up dying. I'm surprised I didn't die just entering that hospital when I think back about it now.
I had heard on the streets weeks beforehand that there were problems in America and the armies had been deployed all over the USA to try and close all the borders; keep the disease in the country rather than spread it across the globe. For about a week we had heard on the radio people had been streaming in through Columbia and Venezuela via Panama. The bar manager would always turn the radio off and comment on how the Americans go crazy over any kind of disease. He told me to just smile and carry on serving up the drinks to the never-ending party in Rio for the foreigners. In this current weather, I knew drinking the amounts of alcohol these people were consuming was bad. It was sweltering weather, the sun was high in the sky and the roads were crawling with people running from the disease. Every night I listen to the radio and watch the pandemonium unfold in the states. Whatever it was it was getting closer. I saw people running and jumping over the Mexican border just to get away from the crowd of dead things. Every late night, I went home and checked my gun in my drawer next to my bed. Papai would kill me if he knew I had one of these but I needed it for my own protection. My manager had me serving drinks up until the point someone was bitten, taking a drink from my own hand. I was stupid enough to believe my manager that things would be okay, I'm just glad I had Pedro to protect me. He was one of the lifeguards on the front, I always had a particular soft spot for him, giving him free drinks and he was a great listener. His papai had died two years ago and it was just him and his mamma. His mamma would occasionally cook for my papai and go and see him when he was in hospital. Pedro had grabbed me just as the thing grasped at me. I said nothing and just followed his drag to my car in the lot. He told me he had already been home and his mamma had committed a sin. She had committed suicide and left a little note;
Eu não posso ser um fardo sem mais. Eu quero a minha alma para torná-lo a seu pai, em uma única peça. Rezo perdão a Jesus e seu pai, Deus e espero que eles me abraçar com os braços abertos.
Eu te amo filho.
(I cannot be a burden no-more. I want my soul to make it to your father in one piece. I pray forgiveness to Jesus and his father, God and hope they embrace me with open arms.
I love you son.)
I can still hear those singular voices calling out, "Os mortos estão andando! Louvor Jesus Cristo!" (The dead are walking! Praise Jesus Christ!) as I ran through the corridors that day. Whatever it was had gotten here a lot quicker than the news people anticipated. People were driving, flying, trekking and sailing in. The borders were closed but people were still coming in. Many of the local people I knew sailed out before the hordes of foreign people got here to get away and I wished I had done the same thing. All the shops and bars were closed but the one I worked for. He was too pig headed and I was silly to listen. Common sense would tell me that you can't run away from whatever this was and that it would get me eventually. Within twenty four hours of the new arriving Americans, there was nothing left of the Rio seafront I saw every day. That beautiful sun kissed sand and glittering of the blue sea was now nothing but a scene of destruction. Unmanned boats floating the sea, decapitated bodies and blood smeared into the ground, the sand and sea, red from destruction. It was the first time I saw the seafront in Rio dead during the daytime. The smell that was once fresh and rolled off the sea was now the smell of only death, decay and sewage. Each day we spend here, it gets worse. Pedro has told me for the last week we need to leave and I've told him to go without me. He's still here, waiting for me to change my mind. Last night while I was finally sleeping, he said he'd heard that there was a safe zone on the island off of Sao Paulo, Ilhabela. He said the radio had picked up an emergency signal with direction of what to do. I wish I knew what was really happening. People died everyday yet now they come back to life? I'm skeptical but he believes it has to be better there than it is here on the empty front. I'm still sat here waiting for him to come back and I'm scared. I didn't tell him that I was too scared to leave.
Was this really what Jesus and his Father meant when they said they would rise the dead again? All I can do is look up at Christ the Redeemer and pray that there is a place Pedro and I can go where we can survive.
A/N2: I don't know when the next update will come around but it will be another one in Brazil, much later into the apocalypse. This one is more for the earlier days, who knows? Will Ilhabela be safe? Stick around! TWD entries will appear soon!