The big car that’s spun out and on the other side from the two other cars you can see, by the shattered window, that’s a Pontiac Bonneville of a make and model that’s nearly exactly like the old Bonneville I used to drive around when I lived back in the Midwest.
#13
Picture of our neighbor’s door. Note the scratch marks: I think the doors were made of metal so whoever put their shoulder into this one had to have messed himself up.
Although there are Christmas decorations on the door, it says less about the time of the year that all those awful events happened and more about just how odd my neighbors were. I never knew their names. I saw them once or twice. Seemed like nice people. But the fact that they put up the Christmas decorations in December and then never bothered to take them down… well, it seemed a bit curious.
#14
Picture of Bradley and Mr. Sumpter. Thankfully, most of the blood here is Mr. Sumpter’s, but the bastard nearly took both of us down. He was hiding in the trash bin and leapt out, clawing at my face. We’d been alerted by this awful odor and were all keyed up what with all the blackouts and weird events in the city the two days before. Or we were just damned lucky.
Anyways, Bradley has poor Mr. Sumpter propped up here and is crouching next to him. He looks a lot more exuberant than we were, the camera sort of caught him in this smile so he looks more wide-eyed and mad than he was. Even in death, Mr. Sumpter’s muscles have a certain rigidity, like they all do. Just look at his neck. It’s crazy.
#15
Some National Guardsmen, smoking cigarettes on the Fillmore bridge over Geary Street Across the street and over the bridge you can see some buildings and some graffiti up there, and that little blues club. I think the Guardsmen were there to keep us from looting too much, which, now that I think of it, would have been a pretty good idea. None of us thought of it, though.
You can just barely read the headline on the newspaper in the rack, it reads “CHAOS!” Depending on what you read or which radio station you hear, the cause is all sorts of things. You know, a virus or some kind of biological warfare gone wrong, or God’s vengeance or a comet or…I don’t know. Everything. They’ve got all sorts of excuses for this mess.
May was with me. We were heading down the street to find a good corner store and to see if the ATMs were working again: sometimes we had service, other times we didn’t. We would have gone to the supermarket just a block back but the Guard had camped out in the parking lot. There was another one a few blocks away on Eddy Street but I’d never been there, and besides, I heard that the projects had gotten hit really hard and figured it’d be better to stick to routes I knew.
#16
Bradley and me with our makeshift weapons. At that point I spent a lot of time wishing I was a gun nut like my cousin back in Ohio. Of course, ten to one he got turned into one of those monsters and is using his prize semiautomatic AR-15 “that the Government will never take away” as a sturdy club.
Bradley’s weapon you can see is brightly colored-I think he had this weird idea that they were attracted to bright colors, like bulls or something. The whole idea being since they’re essentially ex-humans, creatures who have abandoned their intelligence for some razor sense of cunning, that they’d be somehow animalistic. In practice it never worked too well. Confused the hell out of one for a moment, though, which was just enough time for me to bash its head in.
Mine was my Louisville Slugger. You see, when I came to San Francisco, I had this idea I’d meet all these young, active people and every Saturday we’d hit the park and toss around a few balls or something and enjoy being in the California sun. It never happened. Too foggy, and everyone was always too damned stressed out about work.
Guess I found a use for the bat after all.
#17
Kind of hard to tell what’s going on here. I took this picture while running. To one side, those bright yellow blobs right there? I think that’s the flash from guns. The blur on the left side is someone else running away as well.
The Guard dragged us out of our homes and there was a ton of us milling about in the middle of the street. That’s when a bunch of the creatures attacked-and quickly, too. Like cheetahs jumping into a herd of gazelle. I saw two of them literally rip a woman in half before the Guard started opening up on them.
The Guardsmen were firing into the crowd. They didn’t even care.
#18
This one’s blurry. The picture is tan, there’s some sort of large dark object in the center.
I don’t know how this one ended up here. I think I took the picture by accident. But I keep it anyways.
#19
Group shot of refugees in a truck. That’s May there, frowning and looking directly at the camera. May was pissed that I wasn’t going with her, but there wasn’t a lot of room on the truck anyways. She’d stolen my favorite tee shirt of my collection and was wearing it on the truck. I’m not sure if it was extortion to try to get me to go, or if she wore it out of spite, knowing I’d probably want to stay.
Word was, that the Presidio camps were only temporary. The Government already set up bigger, more permanent facilities in the old internment camps they put all the Japanese-Americans in during the Second World War. I heard about the slaughters in those camps, but every once in a while I can imagine her up by Mt. Shasta or someplace like that, working in a field. Maybe doing laundry, I dunno.
#20
Shot of Bradley. Like the first shot of him, the flash has sort of bleached out a lot of the color here. Look at the beginnings of a beard he has. Sometimes I look at this picture and picture #5 right next to each other. It’s hard to think that only a few weeks have passed between the two shots, because he looks so much older in this one. It’s set in his face, a kind of constant panic.
And, yeah, his neck muscles are taut here. And his emotionless grin, too: I’m pretty sure that’s the muscles in his face constricting. When I woke up, he was stuck that way.
I slashed his throat a few minutes after taking this picture. It seemed to take forever. I cut into his neck, and nothing happened at first, and this dark blood began to flow, and I remember flinching back, like this was the first time or something. Then…then he started screaming like he woke up and the panic hit me like a flurry of fists. I shut my eyes and stabbed over and over again until the screaming stopped.
I’d killed before, mostly with Bradley, but we had to. When they come for you, faster than anything, eyes so desperate, you learn to think on that level. You get in their mindset, and it’s okay. Before I killed Bradley, I’d killed or helped kill four of those beasts, but when I did it I was a beast myself. Bradley was the first one I had to murder as a person.
No one should have to do that.
#21
Shot of my “family” I ran with for a few months down south by the Castro. After Bradley died, I thought I was dead. No way I could hope to stand off against one of those things face-to-face, not even with my bat. It was pure luck that got me in with some looters over by the Haight, then I wandered down into the Castro after half of those guys died in an ambush.
The old guy with the rifle, that’s Jamal. Peter and his boyfriend Graham are in the center. Terence is the one saluting, his wife Alicia’s the one laughing and raising up the bottle of champagne. They used to be both into computers or something before this whole mess. The small one is Karen. Always had a soft spot for her, really.
#22
Picture of San Francisco from the hills in South S.F. You probably recognize the Transamerica building. There are other buildings here, but I can’t name them. The center bit of rubble there used to have a bunch of those buildings. Some people say the military bombed that area but I’m pretty sure it was just a gas explosion of some kind.