Chapter 24.

Mutant Journal.

Sarah Reyes.

Time/Area: Paris. July 13th. 2013.

“Are you sure we’re even going the right direction?” Doc asked, taking the map from my hands.

I nodded, trying and failing to take it back, “Yes!” I declared, annoyed, “It’s my plan!”

Doc rolled her eyes, “While heading towards Jordan’s private jet is a good idea, I fail to see why I can’t lead for a bit.”

Right now, we were...somewhere in Paris?

We were on a highway, following a map I had found in the electrical store.

That’s right, we were walking down a highway.

The cars available for hijacking weren’t exactly...usable.

Bare hunks of shredded metal now lined the road, flames illuminating the deepening smoke filled night as my mind was forced to wander. Aside from the crackling of the fire and the constant cries in the distance, a strange calm had settled over the war zone. It wasn’t the good kind of calm though; no, not in the slightest. It was the calm that came when there were no more voices to intercede. The calm that was caused by something missing, not gained. The calm that came when there was an absence of life.

It was the calm of death.

The highway went only two directions, forwards and backwards, for what I perceived as miles. It was more like a bridge suspended over water really, imitating a kind of corridor littered with debris. My feet were tired, my eyes burned from the sheer amount of smoke in the air, and my ears were ringing over the countless booms or inhuman screams piercing the sky. The only thing keeping me going was the will to see my family, and the sporadic yet constant conversations with Doc. But it wasn’t the debris that was threatening my sanity. It wasn’t the burning eyes or bone rattling screams either. It was the bodies. They...were everywhere. Our pace slowed every time we came across a sizable group of them, trying and failing to ignore those vacant eyes and wide open mouths. Eyes that couldn’t have possibly known what would happen here...to the whole world. There was no discrimination among the dead either, making it clear that these creatures had no remnants of mercy left in whatever form of humanity allowed them to laugh. To smile. To roar. To eat.

We must’ve just been exiting the fashionable tourist attraction that was Le Marais, as even without the raging destruction surrounding me I could still tell when the aesthetic had changed. Large bars shifted into small flower shops, expensive looking boutiques faded into eerie bus stops, and the entire borough seemed to end on whatever stretch of road we were on now.

Maps, clearly, were not my thing.

But hey, if Doc could lead better with maps, I was okay with that.

I wanted nothing more than to get out of Paris. The things I had seen would undoubtedly leave a permanent mark on my mind, and thoughts on my family didn’t necessarily help. We had no way of contacting anyone due to the ongoing blackout, interference cloud, or whatever was going on. We had slept in an alley the previous night, not sure if we would even wake up the next morning, and we stayed low to get by monsters.

Monsters.

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It seemed like everywhere we went had one. I had even begun making a journal on the creatures. I was able to do this through a small pad I had originally brought along to record notes on the lab test. I obviously hadn’t expected this to happen, but the few scraps of paper were where I put all my thoughts down on the subject.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Doc said, pulling me out of my thoughts, “You can lead after a couple of hours if you want.”

I rolled my eyes, “I hate not doing any-”

“Then write in your journal Sarah,” She interrupted, “That thing might actually come in handy.”

I pondered this.

I guess it would be pretty valuable. My journal had everything I knew about each kind of monster. I tried to classify them by which emotion I thought they best represented, since that’s how this whole thing started, but I included nicknames as well. I had based it off those Character Bios in that game Damien and Jason were always playing. Fight4life? I think that was the name anyway…

Regardless, I had seen the writing (ironically) as more like a distraction rather than a help. I guess it could be both.

In terms of food, we were surviving off of crackers in Doc’s purse and snacks we found before we got on the highway. It wasn’t exactly paradise, but it more or less worked. We walked until I felt my feet nearly give out from underneath me, the highway now overlooking an island littered with fancy buildings. It unsettled me, watching the tall silhouettes of buildings without the illumination. Without light, architecture seemed to lose its gift of beauty.

...Maybe I shouldn’t use the word ‘without’.

There was light on the island, but it was simply coming and going. Little dots of all different colors on the electromagnetic spectrum were dancing up and down those silhouettes, each one looking for another human to rip to shreds or to turn into one of them.

Another place in this country equally darkened by the monsters.

“We can take a break here,” Doc announced, grimacing at an exposed human hand from beneath a sedan ten feet away.

I let out a breath of relief as I plopped down on the road, not caring at all about cleanliness.

Doc explained to me where she thought we were based on the map.

According to her, we were now on the Highway’s exit, meaning we were basically halfway to our destination at this point. My smartwatch had run out of battery, so I had no idea what time it was; all we knew was that it was dark.

“Here.”

I looked up to see Doc, a cracker in her outstretched hand.

I sighed, “I’m sick of crackers.”

Doc shrugged, “Crackers or death, take your pick.”

“Can’t argue with that.” I thought, grabbing the stale piece of baked flour and popping it in my mouth.

After chewing the item in bitter distaste, I cracked open my journal.

So far I had charted anger, lust, humor, and Joy. Joy and anger seemed to be the most common, and out of the one’s we’d seen, lust seemed to be the most rare. Lust was the one with the scary metal armor (I guessed). Every monster we had seen was at least a little bit different, but some things never changed between groups.

Like lust was always the slowest, but joy was always the fastest. In contrast, some of the things were just random, like Flesh Spike count and hunger level. I was now officially calling those spikes that seemed to grow out of their arms ‘Flesh Spikes’ by the way. I coined it. It’s mine. It wasn’t like a million different people had probably already thought of that name….

As you can imagine, it was pretty gross finding this stuff out, but I couldn’t not see what was in my brain.

“Are we going to go now?” I asked, looking up from my Journal.

Doc was laying on the road, “I changed my mind,” She said, “Instead of this being a break...it is now nap time.”

I chuckled a bit as she fell asleep. Despite everything that had happened, we had still somehow kept it all together. Though life was extremely grim right now, Doc had still held on to her billion dollar humor. It wasn’t that we were ignoring reality, we just decided not to look at it so much. Doc was way better at that than me though, although she didn’t have any surviving family to worry about in the first place. At least, none that I knew of anyway.

I sighed, closing my journal and tucking it away in my pocket.

I gently laid my head on the road, closing my eyes while again questioning whether or not I would wake up tomorrow. It was calm.

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