By Lawrence Butts
Published October 9, 2033
Year 2 of the Second Dark Age of Man
No one knows how many have died so far. There are estimates of course. We get reports from online sources (when it works) but no one really knows how many are gone. With most of the civil authorities dead or dying, we have to rely on the Pure Bloods who may be involved with disposal or keeping infrastructures functioning to tell us what is happening. How many vaccinated are left is also a mystery. We can only guess at this point. There are reports that the rioting and killing that has raged for the last year has subsided but I don’t know if this is true or not. The violence that we had here seemed to subside about a month ago. It probably varies depending on the area. Everyone says to stay out of the big cities. I talked to two Pure Bloods who escaped last year from Chicago and ended up here. I asked if I could record our conversation. They had no problem with a recording. When I talked to them, John and Jennifer had only been here for a couple of days. They were both still visibly shaken by what they had been through. Here is the transcript of our conversation:
“When did you guys decide to leave the Chicago area?” Just then a car sped past us which seemed to spook both of them until it had passed. When their attention returned John began to speak. “We lived in Park Ridge just a little north and east of the airport. It’s a nice area with houses that cost nearly three-quarters of a million dollars. They aren’t palaces by any means but they are all very nice houses. We had lived there for almost five years after moving from Palatine. Things started getting crazy about a week ago. It was right around the time that video of that young girl started going around.” I had seen the video and asked them, “You mean the video of the teenage girl crying because her father, mother, and brother had all died and she was afraid she would be next?” They both nodded their heads with John saying, “Yes and then there were dozens of similar videos right after it. It just opened up the floodgates to what was happening. After that, it seemed that vaccinated folks just started to freak out big time. And criminals started to take advantage of the situation. We started smelling smoke and hearing gunshots in the distance not long after the video hit. Our friend and neighbor showed up a few days later at our door with his rifle. He was heading to his daughter’s college to bring her back home. He was vaccinated and had lost his wife last month to a stroke.” “I just got to get Emma out of that goddamn school and get her home here with me. I’m afraid something is going to happen to her.” “He didn’t look well at all. He asked me if I wanted to ride ‘shotgun’ on the trip to the school. I declined not wanting to leave Jennifer alone in the house. When Bill left to get his daughter, we decided it was time to leave the city and head south for the countryside. For the next two days, we packed everything we thought we would need into the Jeep Cherokee we had recently bought.”
“We started packing on Monday and we were pretty much ready to leave on Wednesday morning when we heard loud bangs and screaming down the street. Three houses down from us a group of kids was in the process of beating our neighbor with clubs as three other kids dragged his wife into a parked van. They appeared to be moving from house to house beating anyone who resisted and abducting the women like they were collecting stray cattle. It wasn’t long before they broke down our door with a makeshift battering ram. When they came through the door, I shot them all with my AR-15. I moved outside and shot as many as I could before they could run away. I killed seven of these kids. I don’t think any of them was over seventeen years old. A couple of them took a while to die. They begged us to help them. We opened up their van full of terrified women and left them to die where they fell. The next day we started driving south and didn’t stop until we got here.”
John and Jennifer are still here in town. I saw them the other day. John is in charge of south-side town security and Jennifer is working at our new orphanage. We are lucky to have them here. I never asked what they did before the Dark Age began. It doesn’t matter. It’s a different world now.
2027, I think. I can't quite imagine another 5 years of watching the walking dead slowly fall, I think the cabal will engage their 5G killing machine system by then. If I didn't have some folks out here in the ether who know what's what, I would not be able to function day to day. No one in my actual proximity is even close to understanding any of this. Thank you, awake ones, in this broken web of life. May the good spiders repair the webs that need, and spin new ones not made of greed.
Frankly I’m hoping you are wrong about the date. Let’s move that up to 5 years and not 10. In fact, let’s move it up to 2023 in lieu of 2033. The sooner the morgues overflow and the body bags line the streets, the sooner the rest of us can begin the arduous process of trying to stitch the pieces back together.
Today, I still have enough physical strength and mental acuity to want to see it through. A decade from now I might not care. Or, my ashes may have already been scattered across the vastness of the North Atlantic.
LFG.