Week 109

Contains gore, self-harm, and violence

Sunday, August 16

It’s important to keep track of the days. It’s scary to think that I might lose count and have absolutely no way of finding out again. And it might be interesting for whoever finds this journal to know that the last human died on Sunday, August 16th, 2028. There’s a real chance that I’m the only one still going.

The truck’s starting to make weird noises and I have no idea how to figure out what’s wrong. I’m sure Ava’s weight isn’t helping. I can feel the truck shudder every time she lies down, stands up, or kicks at the supplies I’ve stashed back there with her. She still spends most of her time with her massive, splotched head leaning through the broken rear window. I’ve duct taped a cushion where the glass used to be, and now she spends hours at a time watching the road with me, chewing on what remains of the head of the passenger seat. She doesn’t seem to mind the noise. I’m not sure how good cows’ ears are.

I normally write at night, but when I pulled over to try and check the engine, Ava decided it was time to graze and climbed down from the truck as soon as I broke. I can’t believe I used to tie her to the side of the bed. I guess I was worried that she’d wander off into the wilderness or throw herself out onto the highway while I was driving. Now I see keeping her unleashed as part of our agreement. It would feel weird to not give her the option to leave.

While she’s been grazing, I’ve cleaned her shit up. I’ve started tying the corners of the dirty blanket she stands on together like a trash bag, swinging it around a little, then launching it onto the road behind us. There’s something satisfying about the way it flies so heavy and silent before it bursts against the asphalt. Ava always raises her head and watches too.

I checked her things while I was back there. Her Home Depot bucket is mostly full of water, and she’s still got a garbage bag of cut grass, though I’m giving her plenty of time to graze anyway.

A lot of the road signs here have been overgrown or knocked down, so I’m using my paper map. We should get to Springfield tomorrow, and I’ll be relieved to see something other than fields. Sometimes it’s pretty, most of the time it’s boring. I’m not going to write a lot about the fields.

Monday, August 17

We’re in Springfield. When she sees big buildings, Ava gets excited and starts kicking the back of the passenger seat hard enough to make my foot jog on the gas. She loves cities because she likes having new things to sniff and chew and trample. I like cities because I like having supplies.

My priority today was to find food, which is never fun. It’s like the buildings themselves are decomposing, especially the grocery stores. The produce sections have turned to swamps of gray-black semi-liquid rot, swarming with flies, roaches, and rats. I always try and avoid the meat sections, though today I heard things scampering away down the aisles, either raccoons or cats that were once stray and are now feral.

I go for cans, as the plastic and cardboard packages are always reeking or blooming with mold. The problem is that everyone loots with the same priorities. I knew which was the can aisle before I checked the sign, because it was the only set of shelves that were completely bare.

We went to a library next. I read some books about people having sex while Ava explored. She likes knocking over bookcases, especially if she gets them to topple into each other. If I ever find a china shop, I’m letting her go nuts.

I’m writing this by the side of a hotel pool. The water’s disgusting, but somehow it turned even dirtier when Ava jumped in. She’s been paddling around for hours. I dragged a bed from one of the rooms into the lobby, where I can watch her swim through a window. I like my sleeping bag, but it doesn’t compare to a real bed. As for Ava, I’ve backed the truck over the fence surrounding the pool so that she can climb back into it when she’s done swimming. She only ever sleeps in the truck.

Tuesday, August 18

I found another person. He's called Johnson. He’s been heading south because the weather’s easier down there. I told him I heard that Florida gets hit by a hurricane a day, now. He laughed and the conversation stopped. He does that a lot. I don’t think I like him.

I got some books about cars from the library, and was searching for a vehicle to practice on. I found Johnson’s compact outside of a mall. I should have known from the way that it was parked right up against the door that someone was still using it. I’d been about to start prying open the hood when Johnson saw me and yelled for me to stop. He walked towards me with the stock of his shotgun pressed tight into his right shoulder and his left hand wrapped around the pump under the barrel. He didn’t tell me to, but I dropped to the ground with my head bent down to my knees and my arms raised up on either side of me.

He put the gun down once he got close enough for us to talk. He apologized, saying he’d run into dangerous people up north. I wasn’t in a position to do anything but forgive him, so I stood unsteadily. He was wearing a beanie over his shaved head and had motorcycle gloves over his hands. I could clearly see the individual hairs in his loose beard, twitching as he spoke like little insect legs.

He drove me back to where I’d left Ava and the truck. He laughed when he saw her. She seemed mostly unbothered by him, but as we talked more, she kept swinging her head over to keep him in her sight. She doesn't know what a gun is.

Johnson said his friend had been a mechanic before everything ‘kicked off.’ He offered to look at my truck for me. I warmed spaghetti from a can while he worked, but when he was done, he turned it down, saying that the last time he’d eaten the brand he’d vomited half of his body weight. He ate some canned corn and tuna instead, then helped me attach his car to the back of my pickup.

We’re leaving the city tomorrow. Together, we have a good amount of food, but I’m not sure how long he wants to stick together.

Wednesday, August 19

Johnson stays in his car, sitting with the engine off and his hands on the wheel. We spent the morning siphoning the gas out of his vehicle and into mine. He suggested that we pool our supplies completely, and put half in each car, but I declined and said we’d find time to do it later. I want to trust him, but I don’t yet.

I don’t think Ava does either. She stands backwards in the bed of the truck, staring at him through his windshield. Without her head poking through like normal, the front of the car feels empty.

We passed a body on the side of the road. It was a bloody, half-decomposed lump that I would have dismissed as roadkill if it weren’t wearing jeans. Johnson shouted something about wanting to stop and ‘check’ it, but I pretended not to hear him and kept driving.

When we stopped for the night, Johnson started to gather sticks to build a fire, saying something about his days in the Boy Scouts. I wasn’t sure how to help him, so I just sat on the step below the driver’s door with my feet in the grass and watched. He warmed a can of baked beans for each of us, while drinking from a bottle of whiskey. He had four more stacked in his backseat.

There’s something off about him. Of course, everyone still alive is a little crazy, that’s to be expected. The man I found in the woods in Virginia was naked and screamed when he saw Ava. The woman living under the dry bridge I met last year asked me to impregnate her. The three people near Pittsburgh took turns playing each other in Othello and using the same needle to shoot up cough syrup.

Johnson and I talked for a few hours. He asks a lot of questions. He asked if I was gay. I said no, and he laughed. He then asked how old Ava was, and I told him I didn’t know. He laughed even harder. He was quiet for a moment and sat with his head lolling slightly on his shoulder. Then he asked me why I was heading west. I said I was bored of heading east.

Johnson said I need a gun. I said his was good enough for both of us. This made him upset. He said there were people ‘out here’ that would kill me for my supplies, and that a cow only made me a better target. He’d heard of people in Canada that ate each other, and whole families in the Appalachians that slept in dirt burrows and had forgotten how to speak. I told him he was the first person I’d met that had pointed a gun at me. He said it was because he was smart.

Thursday, August 20

We ran into a pack of wild dogs. Ava’s not hurt, but she’s freaked out. I’m freaked out too. Johnson is keeping it to himself, but I think he’s satisfied that he got to shoot something.

We’d stopped by a field. Ava was grazing while Johnson checked on my engine. He does that a few times a day, as if he wants to keep reminding me that he’s useful. He doesn’t have to. It’s not like Ava’s helping me out with anything.

I was standing in the bed of the truck, replacing Ava’s blanket when I heard the barking. She came running, letting out a bellowing scream. They were all around her, racing through the grass and snapping at her legs. I saw nothing smaller than a Labrador, and their teeth were all bared and slick. Ava was trying to run back to the truck, but I didn’t know what to do. The dogs would just leap right up into the bed after her.

Johnson ran to his car and grabbed his gun. He pumped it once and shot. The blast was quick and brutal, and any noise the closest dog made was hidden by the gunshot. It died instantly, pressed down into the dirt like a squashed insect.

The other dogs ran at the noise. Ava tore her way to the other side of the road. Johnson yelled something at me, then chased after the dogs, letting off a few more shots to keep them running.

I went after Ava. As the sound of the barking and gunshots grew more distant, she slowed, with her eyes wide and her massive lungs bulging against her ribs. I wrapped both my arms around her neck and pressed my head into her shoulder. She was shaking, and holding onto her was like leaning against a spin dryer. After a while she let me lead her back to the truck. Johnson had put the dead dog in the trunk of his car, but didn’t tell me until later.

It had been dark for hours when we stopped for the night. I wanted to put as many miles between us and the dogs as possible. We found a town and drove to the top of a parking garage, where nothing could get to us unless it tracked our scent up all five floors.

Ava isn’t eating her hay. I keep picking it up and holding it to her nose, but she just sniffs it, then looks away. Her eyes stare at the ramp down into the floors below, the edge where the concrete drops off into the night, the places where the clouds break overhead and we can see the stars. I don’t know how to convince her she’s safe. I don’t think she is.

Johnson made a few trips down the stairwell. He cooked the dog’s severed legs over a fire lit with paper towels and a cigarette lighter. Part of me recognized the dog meat as disgusting, tough, and dry, but the rest was absorbed by the heat and the taste. I hadn’t had anything fresh in a while, and I gnawed and sucked on the bones until my teeth felt loose in their sockets.

Friday, August 21

This morning, Johnson showed me a place he’d marked on his map. It was a dairy farm, north of St. Louis, and looked the same size as the one in Virginia where I found Ava. He said he had a plan. I asked him what he meant, and he laughed and said I’d see.

The farm was quiet and overgrown. Ava followed us to the entrance but stopped there. The wooden buildings had a disgustingly sweet smell. I wanted to search the storage areas, but Johnson said to look for the cows.

We found them behind an unlatched metal door, in a large room lined with machines that must have been for milking. One wall opened out into a dirt pen enclosed by a series of metal fences.

The animals were dead, lying with their insides splashed out onto the floor. Some had parts missing – limbs, chunks of ribs, massive, rough cuts torn from their bloated bodies. Their mouths and eyes were furry with maggots and sopping with yellow-white liquid. Crows hopped from corpse to corpse, pecking at where the skin had been split and rancid flesh exposed to the dry air.

Someone had been here, only days ago. They’d killed and half-butchered every animal on this farm. Then they’d vanished.

I looked at my feet, trying to ignore the smell and not think of Ava. I heard Johnson kicked the side of a cow. He said he’d thought we could stay here, that we could keep my cow with the others, and even breed them if we needed. We’d have all the food we wanted, and we weren’t far from St. Louis. I told him we should leave.

He said that there was no point, that I wouldn’t have agreed to stay anyway. He was crying, and his voice was thick as he started to yell. How long was I going to wait to eat my cow? How hungry would I have to be? Would I rather die? Would I rather eat him? Of course, I wouldn’t be able to keep the meat refrigerated, him or the cow, would I? I’d have to be careful, cutting parts off of her or him to keep all of us alive. In that case, why shouldn’t I just eat parts of myself? I only needed one leg to drive, didn’t I?

I waited for him to stop shouting, and when he did, I heard him open the metal gate and leave the pen. I watched as he walked out into the field, in the other direction from where we’d come.

Saturday, August 22

Last night, I made a fire to give Johnson a way to find the cars again. I sat with Ava and ate macaroni from a can, and after a few hours he came back. He said he wasn’t hungry, and then went and got his whiskey. We didn’t talk until he’d emptied the bottle. Then Johnson asked me what I knew about why the world ended.

I told him I’d heard that we were in a nuclear holocaust, though I wasn’t sure. The woman under the bridge had talked about solar flares. The naked man in Roanoke had been quoting the Book of Revelation. I’d heard that the coasts were underwater, that Russia was a toxic wasteland, that meteors had destroyed most of Europe. Every country bordering the Indian ocean had been hit with a plague that turned people blind and made them shit out their lungs. The cough syrup people murmured that Australia simply wasn’t there anymore.

I told him I woke up one day in Columbus to the sound of sirens and broadcasts saying to evacuate. I told him I didn’t think we’d ever find out why. Johnson nodded. Then he went back to his car, sat in the driver’s seat, and shot himself in the face.

I don’t know how long I sat there, watching the fire, before I got up and looked. The front of his head was smashed open, his face replaced by two massive clumps of torn, sticky flesh, positioned on either side of where he’d pressed the barrel against his cheek. I could see his eyebrows, but not his eyes. The remains of his jaw hung open, and loose teeth had dropped into his lap. I wrapped him in one of the spare blankets then went back to the dairy farm to get a shovel. It was morning by the time I had a good enough grave dug. I buried him with his whiskey, but kept his shotgun.

I tried to wash the blood out of the fabric but gave up and left the whole seat by the side of the road. Now there’s more room to fit supplies back there, and Ava gets more space in the bed. Her pillow’s almost pressed flat again, I’ll need to replace it next chance I get. For now, she’s back to leaning with her head in the passenger seat, nibbling at the remains of the headrest, and staring out onto the highway ahead.