Fiction.

I guess I’m awake.

I doubt anyone’s going to be reading this from Richmond, but I feel some responsibility to keep these posts up as long as I can. If I hear anything gurgle-like at all, though, I’m hitting submit and running for the hills, just like yesterday. Sorry I didn’t get to finish the story, but I had to get going with a pretty high degree of urgency.

I’ve made my way south into the suburban areas around Wilde Lake, south of Short Pump. I spent all day sleeping in a broken and abandoned house and keeping out of sight. I guess I’ll keep going south to the river and try to pick up Ross and Val if I can get there without dying.

The problem with being alive and in no way undead at this juncture isn’t just the actual undead who are pretty enthusiastically trying to convert as many followers to their undead ways, but also the other survivors shooting anything that’s moving. Which, sure. I mean, the previously obvious benefits of not shooting or eating your fellow man haven’t seemed to apply for the last few days to most people in the greater Richmond area. People on either side of the un part of dead have been (I suppose justifiably) feast-on-the-living- or trigger-happy, as the case may be.

It makes me sad that there’s so much looting and burning, though. I can’t even tell what damage has been done by ambulatory corpses and what’s the handiwork of regular-type human have-nots trying to take from the haves in optimistic preparation for living at least one more day.

Okay, man is the real monster, you get it. I’ll give it a rest. Sorry. I guess I’m just bitter. I’ve outrun the zombies I haven’t had to kill, but unless the real-life zombie rules are significantly non-Romero, it was a plain old 100% alive person who shot me in the shoulder this morning. If I’m a little misanthropic and generally not as much fun as I was yesterday, that’s going to be your reason why.

It’s not bad. The bullet just grazed the skin, really. The whole thing’s wrapped pretty tight, and only throbs a little. I shouldn’t be slowed down too much tonight when I move again.

Do you know what makes me the saddest, though? Richmond. We spent way too long being the Capital of damned Confederate Racism to much of the country for years, and now unless this thing’s bigger than I know, we’re going to be the source of the undead plague that destroyed Western Civilization. You know what, ungrateful world? The food here used to be really good. We enjoyed hanging out and drinking great beer. We care about families and communities here in Richmond. In the 150 years between being ripped apart by war and being destroyed by an apocalypse from the grave, there were some really great people in this town doing some exceptional things. RVA’s too good a town to have to be brought down by chatty flesh-eating cadavers.

Okay, that’s enough. Maybe it’s being shot, or maybe it’s the unstoppable invasion of unholy throngs of decomposing ghoul-spawn, but I’m grumpy. It’s almost dark enough to move again. At night I know I’ll be too hard to see to get shot, and the living dead aren’t quiet enough to sneak up in the dark. I’m going to go gather up what food I can find and move south.