Um, Mom told me I should start recording my thoughts when I’m in these kind of moods, so this one might be short. I mean duh, it’s my first one. At first when she said I should record myself, I was like, okay, no. Because she’s crazy, and I don’t want to seem crazy, too. That’s no exaggeration by the way. I mean, she’s been a total whacko ever since I turned thirteen. Also, I mean, who cares about what I have to say? It’s not like I’m ever going to listen to this.
But… here I am. Probably because I really am going as crazy as her, but also because I go nuts thinking about how nobody else cares that we’re trapped here. I get it, we’re alive, so we should be grateful. But do you know how insane it makes me being the one person asking “why” when everyone else is acting like this is just the way things are? God.
Anyway, guess I’ll try to keep this up. I’m supposed to meet with Allison tonight. Don’t know what we’ll do. Try to find a new movie in the Blu-Ray collection, I guess. I think one of the boys said the Scavengers hauled up a game system from the Deep Creep. I haven’t seen one since I was a kid. The last one we had broke when I was, like, ten. That’s what? Seven years. Dang. I’d really like to play a video game again.
Recording Two
Should I start these off by saying “Second Recording” or “Recording Two”? I don’t know. I guess nobody’s going to care how I document myself. I mean, who’s going to listen to this, right? I probably won’t. Why would I? I’m just recording this so I don’t get as psycho as Mom has.
Which, by the way… I haven’t gone psycho, right? Sounds like I’m trying to convince myself. It’s just that I feel like ever since I turned seventeen, life is just… weird. Different.
Hard.
About turning seventeen. Wow, yeah. I’m getting old. That’s depressing.
Speaking of old, the oldest person I know is Mr. McCauley. He lives in apartment 8-12. Uh, should I explain that? Everyone knows that the apartments are labeled by floor and room, right? Eighth floor, room twelve. Yeah, anyway, that’s Mr. McCauley’s place. Guy’s eighty-four years old. Eighty-four. Think about that. He’s that old, and even he doesn’t really know about what happened before the Before. He claims that a long time ago, there was no Darkness and no Creep. Duh, everyone says that, so it’s not like he’s some fountain of secret wisdom or anything.
But he does say interesting stuff, like, that this tower was old even when the Darkness came. Like, super-old. He says this place used to be for poor people who couldn’t live in nicer towers, but when I ask him where the nicer towers were or what they were like, he just kind of mumbles and trails off. Weird old guy, but I like him. Still, I don’t think he actually lived before the Before. Unless someone wiped his memory or something. The reason I say that is because if he’d lived before the Darkness came, he’d have, I dunno, more details or something. He doesn’t know when the Scavenging started, and he doesn’t know what it was like to be outside the tower. He can’t even tell me what the ground was like. Honestly I get the feeling he’s just telling me stories he heard from other people. Maybe from people that came before him. That would mean we’ve been living at the top of this tower for more than eighty-four years, at least. I can’t imagine that.
How did I even start talking about this, anyway? Wait, I was going to talk about my birthday. That’s right, I was going to start talking about how depressing that was. Yeah, Mom was trying her best to keep her head together, which she’s barely been able to do since I was a kid. It’s like the minute I became a teenager, she lost it. Now she’s always so flighty. I guess I just don’t get her anymore, you know? One day she’s acting like she doesn’t have a care in the world, and the next day she’s so depressed that she doesn’t get out of bed. I worry about her, but it’s been like this for a long time. Sometimes I feel like just giving up on her, but, I mean, it’s Mom. Who just stops talking to their mom? Plus, she was at least putting in an effort that day. And Dad? Dad was… working. I don’t exactly know what he does, but I know his job is on Floor 3. That’s where they do science stuff. So anyway, my birthday was going good enough, I guess. There’s a conference room on Floor 4, where I live, and every kid’s birthday gets celebrated there. Well, except Tommy’s, but that because his Mom’s more of a nutter than mine. They had his party on the rooftop, which was pretty dang depressing. Celebrating a birthday beneath endlessly black clouds… Yeah. Happy birthday, Tommy.
But no, mine was definitely more depressing. A lot more, which sucks since things were going fine enough until the alarms went off. You’ve got a dozen kids my age trying to enjoy cake, and can we please remember that cake isn’t exactly something we can cook easily here? Anyway, we’re just trying to eat our cake when the alarm sirens go off. Yeah, exactly, right in the middle of eating something you can literally only order for yourself once a year.
I never exactly found out what happened, but I’ve got an idea. I had a chance to talk with the other kids about this, and it turns out Allison’s dad is in Security. Man, what a bad end of the straw. I’d hate to be picked for Security. It’s like having the risks of being a Scavenger but never being allowed to explore the Deep Creep, so what’s the point?
Anyway, Allison says there was a Creep infestation. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, just… damn. The entire tower feels like a hornet’s nest. Everyone gets antsy, starts buzzing around, and then lockdown kicks in, and we’re all forced inside our rooms.
Maybe I should explain that a bit more. See, the Creep doesn’t stay put, waiting for you to die. It’ll straight up hunt you when it wants. The people down on the lower floors are in charge of pushing it back whenever it starts to move, but they don’t always get the job done. The problem is when the Creep gets into something and starts making its way up. Maybe it gets into an old elevator shaft, or maybe it finds its way up some old piping. That’s okay. When that happens, it’s easy enough to get rid of. I hear fire normally does the job.
Once in a while, though… it just gets up into the halls. Fast. I never got the full story about what happened, but if I heard right, it crawled straight up the stairwell. That’s bad, and not like a “we’ll be okay” kind of bad. It’s real bad, since the stairwell’s our only way of moving between floors. It’s blocked up below Floor 21 specifically to keep the really bad Creep from pushing up into the higher levels. Like I’ve said, though, Creep’s kinda in a lot of places from Floor 12 downward. Nothing too intense, but bad enough.
There are days when the Creep gets angry, though. Sounds weird, right? How does something like that get angry? How should I know? All I know is that it does. It starts to pulse and grow real fast, and if it were ever to choke up the stairwell, it’d be impossible for us to travel up or down the Tower. So when it does get angry and we’re all stuck in our rooms, that’s called a lockdown. These automated iron shutters lock in front of our doors, and the only people allowed in the halls are Security, who have to track down the source of the Creep growth and do whatever it takes to get rid of it. Most of the time that means flamethrowers, but I heard guns that day. Lots of them. I don’t know how firing bullets at the Creep helps, but there’s nothing else they could have been firing at.
I hope.
Worst part is that lockdown went all night and kept going until noon the next day. I was never able to fall asleep. I just kept staring out of my window, looking at the other towers in the distance and wondering why we can’t get out of here. I’m not sure what’s worse, the flinching I did when the gunfire started or how I got used to it after a few hours. Dad wasn’t able to get home that night, and Mom pretended as if she couldn’t hear anything. She just read a book all night. Yeaaaah, kinda crazy, but I guess I don’t blame her, I mean, that night really sucked. Major. You could hear screaming now and again, and the next day there were a few people missing. I guess they must have been part of Security, too. They’re gone now.