Survivor Diary - Suzanne Miller - Recovered from Old Rochester, NY

-begin excerpt-

July 19th

I don’t know what to do anymore. Bill is gone. I don’t know if he’s alive or not. He went out to go to Kroger and never came back. Cari won’t stop crying. The power is out, and we can’t make any food. I’m so hungry.

July 20th

I had to go next door and see if there was anything to eat. Joanne and Simon are dead. They committed suicide instead of facing whatever the fuck is going on. I cried over them for ten minutes. They have some food though. Suzanne was a coupon queen, but Simon was very sick. MS, I think. Doesn’t matter they are dead and now Cari and I have some food.

July 24th

Cari is dead. She just died. Went down for a nap and never woke up. I don’t want to live anymore. World War 3 has started, and the bombs are falling all over the place. I might follow Joanne and Simon.

July 25th

Everything is wrong. Everything is going mad. I don’t want to live like this. This will be my last entry. Goodbye

-end excerpt-

I went back to my room, lay down, and tried to sleep. It was a fleeting hope, however. I was too anxious about the ant and whatever reinforcements it might bring back. When dawn peeked through the shutters, I woke with a start. Fuck this spot. I went outside and climbed the ridge with the bike on my shoulder. I realized now that I hadn’t really made it all that deep into the city.

I also realized that things were not all that they seemed. On the other side of the ridge was a sight that gave me a bit of the chills. Nature had reclaimed the area, and the city itself was more of a swamp than the ruined cities I had been passing through. I saw thriving trees, but they weren’t normal trees. Some of them were mushrooms the size of trees. Among them moved bugs. Big mother fucking nasty-looking bugs.

The normal ones were easy to identify. There was a pill bug or roly-poly, but it was massive. I felt it should have doors and tires instead of a bunch of legs. A small herd of smaller ones skittered around its legs, and each was the size of a soccer ball. I watched as a wasp swooped down out of the sky and tried to attack it. It sounded like a helicopter coming in for a landing. The wasp tried to punch a hole through the shell of the pill bug, but it rolled up, becoming a stalemate. The wasp was green and black and looked like it could carry me away without trying.

My stomach turned. I hate bugs in general. Spiders are okay because they eat bugs. The spider I saw next made me shudder, however. I hadn’t seen it until it was mid-air as it leaped onto the wasp. It could have been an eight-legged horse for its size. The brown fangs latched onto the wasp, and they tumbled, crashing into a building. In a moment, the wasp was wrapped in silk and on the back of the spider. The spider scuttled off with its prize and disappeared behind a ruined building.

The pill bug unrolled and released its brood of young. They all went back to grazing on the ivy and mushrooms. I had seen reports of mutant life like this. The bull I had tangled with was evidence of this sort of evolution. I felt like I had been miniaturized. Spiders were supposed to be no larger than my thumb and pill bugs the size of a pea. Here was one that was as large as a car.

I paused in thought. An entire ecosystem was obviously thriving in a radioactive and toxic environment: craziness, total System bullshit, and shenanigans. I thought about what sort of places I might need to go into for some good salvage. It had to fit inside my backpack and be valuable enough to tote it all the way back to Columbus. Guns and jewelry were the best choices here. Both were heavier than I liked, but with my new strength, that wouldn’t be too much of an issue.

I looked around and sighed to myself. There wasn’t an easy map of town I could reference. I got down off the hill and out onto a street and headed deeper into the city. I saw a couple more pill bugs and avoided them. They looked placid, but it’s more straightforward to avoid them.

I had to swat a couple of the wasps. The new mace was an impressive swatter. As long as I was paying attention, I could predict where the wasps were coming from and hit them before they hit me. They were good experience at a thousand each too. Maybe I should have stayed home and just gone after that wasp nest near Columbus. Ahh, whatever. I was here now, and the Conservator experience was filling my bar slowly but surely.

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I came around a corner and about shit myself. I had heard the creature long before I saw it. It was on my map, and even my vibration sense had given me a clue before I saw it. The cockroach was disturbingly large. Seven feet long, maybe more? Waist high and four feet across. It was big and silver. Yeah, silver, not the usual bloody shit brown. As I came around the corner, I saw one of its feelers swing toward me. Then the whole thing turned towards me. It had been happily munching away on a car, eating through the metal supports for the roof. Eating the metal. Eating it, fuck.

I paused and had a sinking feeling. I dropped my bike behind me, and one of the two feelers seemed to follow the cycle. The other was pointed right at me. Its black buggy eyes were undecipherable. I pulled the mace up and waved it around. The second feeler followed that like it was a beacon. Fuck, it wanted my head basher for a snack.

There was only one option here. No way was I going to give up my new toy to a giant metal bug. I saw its carapace crack open as it flared its wing case like a peacock. Its mandibles looked like giant shears big enough to snip my head right off. It scuttled toward me and opened its jaws as if to bite into me. I stepped to the side and easily evaded the attack. Then it dawned on me. This was a grazing animal, not a hunter. I tried to circle it, but it was pretty quick when it was trying to keep my mace in sight.

I had a silly idea and threw my mace over and behind it. The big shiny bug spun around to follow the mace. I placed the muzzle of the sawn-off against its exposed backside and pulled the triggers. Bang! Screee! It screamed and tried to turn. Holy crap, it survived that? Some of its legs weren’t working right, but it was trying to turn. I circled with it and got around to scoop up my mace. It turned back around.

This was a comically slow fight. As it tried to get away from me, I smashed its head in easily. It still was moving! How much punishment does it take? It was blind, leaking goo from two ends, and was kicking its legs weakly. I started smashing. Its carapace cracked and bent like sheet metal. After a few moments of smashing, I finally got the message.

*ting*

[You have slain Mutant Roach, Metalline, experience gained

First-time kill experience bonus earned.

Survivor bonus experience earned.]

Huh, another thousand experience for this easy fight. Excellent. A couple more bugs, and we’re in business as an Engineer. I grinned and looked around the area. This was an urban spot with several ten or so story buildings around. None of them were whole anymore, but whatever. Scanning around, I just picked one. I stepped up into the wrecked display window of a clothing store.

Water-stained and faded posters clung to the walls, and the plastic mannequins had been picked clean of fibers. Many of them had been chewed by something. I walked through the empty space, feeling the tick-tick-tick of my watch illuminate the darkness for me. The area in the back of the store was a wrecked mess that opened out into an atrium of some sort.

I tapped my mace with my ring, and the ping echoed through the vast open space. This had been a mall at one time. Old signs were broken and faded above various entryways. Metal security gates had been eaten through and the interiors ransacked by massive insects. I made a face as I looked around the area. Water pooled and stagnated on the floor. It was dripping down from above. I headed up the stairwell to my left, and my eyes found a possible prize.

The old electronics store was ruined by more than bugs. I saw the tell-tale marks of energy weapons. Lasers or pulse rifles, I thought. The Android Hivemind had been here and cleaned it out. They had to fight the bugs in the area to rescue the smart devices that had once been there. Fuck, there goes that idea.

I knew that the Android Hivemind had gone around the world and scooped up almost every electronic device they could shortly after the Fall. The only electronics they allowed us grounders to use were not advanced enough for their purpose. If they picked up a signal from a phone or computer, they would come and take it. Feck.

I went back outside the building and looked around. Metal-eating roaches really put a damper on my plans. I continued working my way through the area with the few big buildings. I would go inside, do a quick scout around and check upstairs for goodies.

I found out a couple of things.

The first chilled me and had me running away. One of the buildings was infested with ants. There was an entrance to their hive in the central hall of the hotel. The Soldier Ants were huge. Workers were like big dogs, the Soldiers like big horses. Their mandibles were each as long as my arm. Luckily, they did not seem aggressive toward me.

The second was my jackpot. On a gut instinct, I climbed the stairs up into an office building. It must have been designed by the same guy who had made the office building where I lived in Columbus. The layout was the same. On the fifth floor, I found something interesting. There was a space that looked lived in, or at least once upon a time lived in.

Most of the walls in this building had been destroyed, and anything edible to ants, roaches, or whatever had long been consumed. The area I found was a reinforced space. Someone had taken plastic drums full of sand and built a wall around the stairwell to block it off. One of the drums was empty, and I pushed it through the wall with no issue. The area beyond made me grin.

Someone had built a safe room, a safe apartment, really. I don’t know where this guy had gotten so many plastic drums and cement boards. Layered on the floor were cinder blocks two deep, and the roof was wire-reinforced sheets of cement. The space was pretty ample. A real bed, table and chairs, and closet. They had lived here for a while to have built something like this. I grinned. I had found a safe place to hunt from. I poked around the cabinets and found a nice 1911 pistol and a couple of boxes of ammo. The remains of the clothing suggested a smaller person, probably female, from the ruined lacy garments. You never knew, though. Sometimes all the underwear available was stuff you might not have otherwise worn.