Hidden, a diary through hell
Dumbfucks. The next scene has been written to look as the rest of the entries to keep, as much as possible, the feeling of the diary even though it clearly wasn’t a diary entry.
If you don’t like it go fuck yourself.
To be honest, I don’t give a shit.
October 3rd, 1989, new LA
5:30 PM
Frank walked to the closed door of the 27th house of the day, tired, and looked into a window: “Hey Jamie, I think I found another empty house. Come here!”
Jamie answered, yawning and cocking his gun: “..you sure?”
“Yeah, pretty sure. I’ll crack this window, you know the drill.”
“Yes mom. Come on, crack it. We still have eight of this fucking hives.”
“Ok, ok. In 3, 2, 1…”
*glass cracking*
Jamie whispered while waiting for a sound: “Do you hear anything?”
Frank waited almost a minute: “Nope. This one is clear. Let’s go to the next one.”
“Ok, I’m coming… no wait a minute! Frank, that is a man!”
A feeble sound came out from the inside: “help us… godfuckingdammit…”
Frank was walking away from the house: “Yeah and I am Theodore Roosevelt. This one is getting old Jamie, come on.”
“No I’m telling you! This is a normal man! LIKE US! He’s talking!”
“WHAT?! IS HE FINE?!” Frank ran back immediately.
“I don’t know, let’s check him.”
“Be careful, it could be infected anyway. You know, a B+.”
“It seems like he’s sleeping.”
“No no no! He’s opening his eyes!”
“…where …where am I now?”
“You’re in LA man! You’re going to be fine… fuck! He’s not alone!”
Jamie was already checking the others: “They seem to be fine, I just checked on them. Come on, I’ll help you take them to the Jeep. Wait, what’s this? October 3rd 1979 New LA 5:23 PM. HOLY FUCK! This man was in L.A. during the last days!”
“It could be his diary, come on high-school girl, we’ll read it later. Now let’s take them to the camp.”
“We’re safe… ha ha… dumbfucks!”
October 3rd, 1979
New LA
5:23 PM
I hate writing and I hate talking to someone who doesn’t exist but I haven’t seen a single human being in two years and I think I might go apeshit if I don’t do this.
Angry. Thirsty. Damn I was thirsty last night. Seven fucking days without water.
This period of time in New LA would have killed any other human being, but not someone like me; not the ones with the “antidote”. A lot of people moved from here, like there was a single chance to survive.
Dumbfucks.
I’ve always loved Venice Beach at night, the sand and the moon with the fresh breeze from the sea and a couple of beers. I always loved being here but I couldn’t find a good cerveza in the whole neighborhood and going around at night is pretty dangerous nowadays.
For your information the antidote was the blood, the ones with B+ were the elected according to the Church and the strongest living form according to the doctors.
Dumbfucks.
There was and there is no elected strongest living bullshit. There was the war, the revolutions and before all of this came the gas with the infected fuckers.
I’ve always been able to hide and disappear.
I was
I am
Well, after all of this I don’t have a real job. They used to call me a sociopath and cruel killer. I’ll just say I loved my job and I wasn’t really the definition of extrovert but you wouldn’t expect a healthy and full social life from a killer.
It took me almost 3 hours to write a couple of words; it’s not exactly easy for me. It’s 8 PM and the siren has been screaming again, as usual, for 5 minutes. I must turn off my light. The screaming bastards are starting to get out.
Goodnight Betty.
still October 3rd, 1979
New LA
10:10 PM
I’m on the roof. I found out that I don’t need a light when I have the moon to write and I also found out that writing doesn’t make any noise so I can stay here and talk without fearing them to hear me. It’s not a smart thing to say. These are simple things that even a baby would notice and understand but believe me, after three days without water the brain starts to fall.
It has been three months since the last time I saw the moon. Beautiful, isn’t it? Simple, clear and hypnotizing. I’ve never been the romantic kind of guy so fuck it.
It’s beautiful but it still is a big piece of rock which is also miles away from here and it won’t bring here her fat rocking ass with a bottle of fine fresh Moët & Chandon so, as I just said, fuck it.
Let’s face an important issue: I saw three bottles today, two half empty and one full. I haven’t noticed them before because they hid them but yesterday they moved them outside.
I don’t know why they hide water and other liquids because they don’t drink them but when all this broke out a lot of people started buying huge quantities of water and food so it’s not easy to find them. It also won’t be easy to get them since they are right under one of their hives but I have to try anyway.
Tomorrow it’ll be the day, maybe I’ll start with one to see if they freak out enough to come out and face the sunlight. They hate it, damn if they hate sunlight.
Maybe one day someone will read this and I didn’t even explained what, when or how.
I have to make an apology but I am pretty tired right now so, let’s make a deal:
if I get the bottles you get a story, fair enough? Let’s see if this works.
Goodnight Betty
October 5th, 1979
New LA
3PM
It was vodka. Half bottle of pure fine Stolichnaya 100 proof blue label.
I love vodka.
It wasn’t all water but I was way happier to drink this one. I’m sorry it took me two days to get back to this but I was drunk as hell, I haven’t had a drink in so much time I can’t even remember it.
I also got the other two bottles. They were respectively full and almost full of water. Now I have my own supply and I can easily make it last a couple weeks.
It wasn’t difficult in fact, they moved from there. They started moving and they started acting real strange recently. As I promised, now, I will tell you everything, or at least I will try. This is the start of everything:
May 21st, 1975
LA
10AM
A simple day in LA, nice weather and a good, well paid new job for me. I just had to kill a Russian guy who claimed to own the western part of LA and wanted to sell coke in it. My client, the real boss of the western part of LA, wanted that little dick out of the scene, easy job for my friends and I.
For those who are now wondering who my friends are, here’s a list:
one M40
one AA-12
two Beretta M 1951 (my dear, dear Berettas)
two Chinese deer-horn knives
one push dagger
one steel Tonfa
Pretty strange weapons, I know. I guess everyone has his own taste.
I should have been driving in my new red and white 1970 Pontiac GTO straight to that little bitch main lab and then to their headquarters, but wanted to make a stop at Jimmy’s house for a simple reason: his wife called me earlier that week and it was a really strange phone call, plus it was on the way.
I was listening to the radio as I always did (one thing I must tell you is that I used to listen only to the news, not the music, I hated that commercial pop shit) and I was carrying only one of my beloved Berettas. I later would have known that I should have been carrying my entire set of friends and maybe a couple of their colleagues too. Like an RPG or a fucking old school bazooka.
At that time the Cold War was the only thing everyone was talking about, especially on the radio, but it turned out to be only a cover for something else. Something even worse.
In 1973, in Pakistan, an undercover cold war started raging between the Pakis and the Chinese to decide who should have controlled the iron and oil supplies of those lands. The Chinese government didn’t want to leave those gold mines to a bunch of muslims and the Pakistani government didn’t want to leave the same gold mines to a bunch of commie farmers. As soon as the CIA and the KGB (respectively the Central Intelligence Agency and the Komitet Gosudarstvennoĭ Bezopasnosti as in Committee of State Security; US and Russia’s secret agencies) knew about this, a decision was made: the US government would have supported the Pakis and, obviously, the Russian government would have supported the Chinese. What my inside man didn’t tell me was that the Chinese discovered what seemed to be a new element under the state of gas in a well in the Pakis territory and it was something that the world should have never seen but not even he knew something like that.
By the way, my inside man was my ex colleague in the CIA Lieutenant James Wilson Connard or as everyone used to call him: Jimmy Four Guns.
Yes I was CIA but you know, shit happens. For me it meant Dishonorable Discharge or as I prefer to call it: a pile of smoking horseshit. I’ve seen people being pulled off from their own skin just to be informed of where someone was, but pointing a knife to an Iranian Captain’s throat apparently is too much. Well, it was too much for me.
The only little, insignificant and superficial thing is that I didn’t point anything to anyone, at least not that time. It was Jimmy who was threatening the Iranian bitch but I was too stupid at that time so I said to the court that I was the only one in that room interrogating that poor bastard. I also did it because Jimmy promised me that nothing would have happened to a really good CIA agent like me. Lying son of a bitch.
He owed me my entire life and my entire career, which were both lost in a matter of minutes that day in the court, so we made a deal: I didn’t kill him but he promised to tell me if at anytime, anyone in the CIA or any other secret service was looking for me and to make my work as easy as possible; I have to admit that he really helped me out with my new job. He used to find me clients and he used to find me even addresses, phone numbers and any type of information I needed for my cases.
He paid his debt and I let me say it, being your own boss is pretty relaxing.
I was driving when I saw the first infected on the other side of the road. It was running like hell and screaming like its balls were on fire, hitting every person on its way, buck-ass nude and completely bald.
It ran for a couple of blocks and then it hid in a corner with no sunlight, shaking, screaming and whimpering. It was like seeing a Jew back in the 40s, fucking scary.
We were shocked, I mean me and my Pontiac. I’ve never cared of what people around me thought so I just stopped and parked to understand what in that almost 2000 years ago hippie guy’s name was going on. As I stepped out of my car a young woman tried to talk to the poor creature to calm it down. Stupidest decision EVER.
As soon as she got close, that thing came out of the shadow and scratched her face. I then knew it, it wasn’t a it but a him.
When he raised his left arm to scratch that young lady’s lovely face it showed a black and gray tattoo between his shoulder and his elbow, in the front part of his arm: a smiling h-bomb with a plaster on its tail, the CIA logo right next to it and the words freedom and truth above and below the bomb.
I would have later been told that James spent the last three weeks of his life breathing that infernal shit in Pakistan on a secret mission for the Agency. He started becoming paranoid, pale and he also started losing weight and all of his hair two days after he came back from that infernal place.
His wife Mary-Ann didn’t know who to trust and was worried so she called me but I couldn’t show up because some agents were following me and I could’t risk our cover.
The same Agency that should have helped them was the same Agency that sentenced her husband to death. She tried to tie him to a chair in their bedroom. He broke out, almost killed her by scratching her entire body trying to eat her belly and started running scared by the sunlight of a window.
That poor girl, with her pretty face ruined, started to yell like a shadow exposed directly to sunlight and cry while losing blood like a god damned fountain.
I shot Jimmy seven times. The first three shots went straight into a wall, he was moving fast. The other four hit the target, I saw him falling.
He helped me and I helped him, the both of us in our own ways.
A lot of people looked at me and clearly saw my face but I couldn’t kill dozens of human beings with only one shot left in my Beretta. I got back into my car and drove to Jimmy’s house to find Mary-Ann crawling in her blood and hair.
She looked at me while bawling like a kid with a broken bone and an open wound. I shot Mary-Ann in the head with the last shot.
That was way too much heat for me in one day. I got back in my car, drove to my third secret apartment where I left all my friends and waited for something on the radio.
I sat there more or less 45 minutes on that white, comfortable and soft bed before anyone said anything about this. I knew I was going to miss that bed, the red walls and the big window on the 17th.
“40 minutes ago at the 1133 of 6th Avenue a white male, 6”, 35/40 years old has been sighted running naked and has attacked a young woman right before being shot three times by a man who disappeared immediately in what the witnesses described as a red 1968 Pontiac GTO with a hidden plate; more information will come in about fifteen minutes in our next…”
I switched it off. They didn’t know it was me. They didn’t know the year nor the plate of my car but I couldn’t be sure.
I knew that they didn’t recognize me but the Agency surely did. I had to get out of the country immediately.
I wrote for 5 straight hours now and the siren just started screaming, you’ve had enough for today.
Goodnight Betty.
NdItomi: Questo è il primo racconto in inglese che pubblichiamo su Cool Story Bro, è un esperimento, diteci che ne pensate nei commenti.
