So I moved through the crowd, acting like I was enjoying myself when I really just wanted to throw up. Part of it was disgust, yeah, but a lot of it was excitement. Everything had built to that moment, the new year—The Last Year—only a minute or so away. I even put on one of those pairs of cheap, ridiculous party glasses, the kind with the plastic bent into the shapes of stars. They hid my eyes, which was good, and they took attention away from the surgical mask I was wearing. I’d drawn a smiley face on it, so the few people that did seem to notice only pointed and laughed. Whenever they did that, I gave them a nod and shot them a thumbs up. They never even noticed the test tube in my other hand or The Complex falling out of it and sifting away on the soft breeze.
I dumped my last dose as the crowd started counting down from ten. The ball was dropping, and everybody was hopping up and down so that the crowd was throbbing around me. I got excited. Trailing the tube behind me, I smiled behind my mask, and I wanted to laugh. If I hadn’t been so scared of ruining my mask, I would have.
The crowd was chanting, “Three, Two,” as I shook out the last of the powder. I tossed away the tube as the crowd screamed, “One!” Then, I pushed my way out of there as the crowd burst into that New Year’s song that everybody sings. Maybe it would have been fun to stick around and watch things happen, but I agreed to document. That means I had to hurry my behind out of there and get home.
On my way back to the apartment, I heard more than saw the change starting. There was one woman tearing at her face with a broken bottle. She just stood there at the mouth of an alley, bent at the waist and crouching a bit on her knees as she worked and worked. Not once did I hear her cry out. It wasn’t until I made it another block that I heard the first screams, a man who could still form enough words to tell people to get off him. By the time I got within two blocks of home, the screams were springing up from every direction, some of them hard to distinguish from party noise and some impossible to mistake.
As I walked up the apartment steps, I heard a man grunting, a sound like stone colliding with stone ringing with each utterance. I don’t know what he was doing, but I think I can imagine. Maybe I should have gone and checked. I am supposed to be documenting, after all. Thing is, I don’t think I was ready to handle it. Dropping The Complex still had me all jittery.
Yeah. So, there’s the big reveal. Here I am, one of the few who was chosen to stay behind and document for future generations (if there are any), and I was too scared to do it. Why lie about it? I was scared. Not the best start, but I think I can do better.
I need some water. Back in a bit.
JANUARY 1ST, LAST YEAR, 2:04 AM
NEWS REPORTS ARE REALLY coming in now. Not surprising, considering there were already camera crews in the city. What gets me is that reports are already coming in from pretty much everywhere. Just watched a story on riots in a small Indiana town just across the state border from Cincinnati. I wonder if somebody got infected in the city and then went home and spread it, or if it’s some kind of sympathetic riot. That would be an interesting twist, all right, and I don’t think it’s one anybody saw coming. I’ll have to keep an eye on this…
JANUARY 1ST, 4:37 AM
IF THERE WERE DOUBTS before, they’re gone now. The news is showing coverage all the time now, calling it the New Year’s Riots. Ridiculous (I’m not supposed to editorialize, but I’m human). What I can hear from my place on the fifth floor is louder than any riot I’ve ever imagined. Screams and pounding and gunfire, roaring engines and the crackling of fires.
Hmm. I wonder if it will be the fire that gets me. That would be terrible. Not the dying part. That’s something I’ve been ready for this entire time. The record, though. Right now, I’m putting everything on the hard drive and printing copies up for binding. If and when the power goes out (because some things were kind of up in the air, as far as I can tell), I’ll need to switch over to pen and paper. What good’s the record if a fire sweeps through and destroys it, though? What’s more important, remaining passive or protecting the record?
If I knew who any of the other recorders were, I’d call and ask them. How stupid is that? At the end of the day, it’s just idiotic. Here I am, almost four hours into mankind’s last year on this planet, and I’m worrying about making phone calls. I promise you the switchboards are jammed up from here to San Diego.
Speaking of which, the West Coast should have started their last year by now. No coverage of it yet, but they’ve only had a little more than ninety minutes to relay.
Something just exploded! It was about half a block away. I checked out the window (part of my preparations involved boarding up the windows, but I left viewing ports like any good witness) and saw this van burning, just a big ball of flame. That was something I expected. The two people nearby weren’t.
One of them was on fire, but she either didn’t know or didn’t care. I think it was a woman, but it was hard to tell from a distance. She kept throwing fists at the other one, who appeared to be a man who was scared out of his mind. He kept trying to turn away, and she just kept hitting him. When he finally did get his back to her, she jumped on it, and then they were both on fire. She rode him to the ground and looked to be slamming his head against the street. I watched her do that for almost a minute, the man bucking beneath her, and then they both just collapsed to the pavement and lay there, burning.
Fascinating.
JANUARY 1ST, 10:14 AM
CAN’T BELIEVE I MANAGED to squeeze in a little sleep. I guess the fact that there’s not a lot of light coming in the windows makes it easier. When I woke up, there wasn’t a lot of screaming going on, but there was quite a bit of gunfire. I peeked out a few of my ports, and I saw a single military Humvee cruising the street below. There was blood smeared along the sides, and one of the doors was missing. I couldn’t get a good enough look to see if there was actual military sitting inside or somebody who’d jacked it, though. I wonder which is the case.
There’s a lot of smoke in the city this morning. A gray haze kind of hangs around everything. Through the cameras I placed on the roof, I can see at least seven columns of thick, black smoke rising out of the city. There’s at least one fire burning about five blocks west of here. I’ll have to go up to the roof later and see if I can get a better look at the rest of the area. Probably some interesting things to see. Maybe after I grab a bite. I’ll have to be careful. Never know how much of the building might be infected.
JANUARY 1ST, 11:56 AM
SOMEBODY JUST JUMPED FROM a window above me. Don’t know which floor, and I didn’t even hear them fall. Just the impact on the pavement. By the time I could get to the ports and look, two others had come out of the woodwork and were stomping on what was left of the body. They’re gone now, and the body is just a red smear on the pavement. When the two (they have to be infected) ran off, they’re pants were soaked up to the knee, covered in filth and blood. They’d probably spent close to five minutes just stomping on that corpse. I know I should have timed it for history’s sake, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away. That could happen to me. Most likely, it will. Surgical masks aren’t going to stop it forever, right?