Exhibit 314: The Zombie in the Rye: The Outbreak Archives, #2

Foreword

Like the hundreds of other journals, notebooks, and documents (exhibits) published over the past hundred years by the Outbreak Institute and Archives, Exhibit 314 presents an intimate and personal experience of The Outbreak through the eyes of a survivor. These exhibits were almost always created by everyday people, so they are incredibly varied, unique, and raw. Exhibit 314 is like the other exhibits that way—its author is a self-proclaimed average joe, who doesn’t claim to have exalted social status or any special skills that would make him extraordinary. However, the disturbing contents of this exhibit set it somewhat apart from others.

This particular exhibit was discovered tightly rolled inside an aluminum container, likely a water bottle, at the Cedar Bluff Reservoir and Park in U.S.C. in 2189 by a fisherman. Processing was delayed for some years due to reasons discussed in the Afterword.

Stylistically, this exhibit is a bit difficult to classify. The author is extremely honest because he believes that he will eventually destroy the journal, therefore destroying any evidence of his actions, so his thoughts are often unguarded and very organic. Therefore, Exhibit 314 is still an excellent resource to the period of time known as The Outbreak. Today, history of The Outbreak begins early in school. A time of immense tragedy and drastic change, historians often look at our human timeline in terms of Before Outbreak and After Outbreak, acknowledging The Outbreak as the most significant event in our modern global history.

Today, we refer to the infected as those-that-were, acknowledging their human origins and defining them as such, rather than what they became. We have identified several names various populations developed to describe the infected, including, but not limited to: boogeymen, creepers, dead ‘uns, demons, ghosts, the hungry, the infected, the lost, lost souls, monsters, saints, tainted, turned, walker, the walking dead, zombie. The author of this journal largely calls those-that-were zombies, a term originating from former Haiti (present-day Isla Tres).

A Note on the Time Period

This journal begins in early spring of 2015. By this time, The Outbreak had been raging for about three years, and at this time there was no end in sight. Survivors often express distress in their journals at not being able to communicate easily with other humans; in truth, had this option been widely available at the time of The Outbreak, we at The Institute believe The Outbreak wouldn’t have lasted nearly as long as it did.

Please keep in mind that technology at the time was largely limited to electrical power sources, which heavily impacted communication and information sharing. Had The Outbreak occurred even ten years later, technology may have been advanced enough to prevent the Power Down that occurred simultaneously, which isolated many survivors, including those featured in this exhibit.

Disclaimer

As per the Outbreak Institute’s procedure for exhibits, I will let the reader experience the journal with limited interjections, except for footnotes to offer corrections and help explain possibly unfamiliar concepts and terms. These exhibits are invaluable resources and often provide readers with extremely personal and informational accounts of The Outbreak. At the end, I will provide my comments.

This resource is not meant to be used solely for entertainment. However, we at the Institute acknowledge that exhibits are often interesting to process, and we enjoy seeing different personalities in their authors.

While all exhibits contain disturbing content in one form or another, this particular exhibit is more graphic than most. Proceed with caution.

Reminder: apart from footnotes (identified by parentheses as such), this journal has not been edited in any way. Therefore, all spelling and grammatical errors, as well as strikethroughs, euphemisms, colloquialisms, idioms, and misused words are the author’s original marks. Corrections and explanations are usually notated a single time only; it is assumed the reader will replace subsequent errors with the provided corrections.

Foreword and Afterword by:

Margaret L. Fisher

Head Archivist

Outbreak Institute and Archives

Old York, U.S.N.E.

Beginning of Exhibit 314

For the Survivors

MARCH

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March 2

Doc (an abbreviated form of doctor) suggested I start writing down my dreams. He says that will make them less real, but I think, if anything, it would make them more real. Don’t words have power? That’s what I was always taught. Anyway, here’s the dream from last night:

She’s eating me. Fistfuls of my guts getting crammed into her red mouth as she moans and moans, not even chewing, just shoving my guts down her throat. I don’t feel any pain, just this sensation of surreal. Like, I know it’s a dream but I wonder why I’m so calm? I’m being eaten alive by the thing that used to be my wife. But no, I just sit back and watch her like I’m watching a game (probably American football or baseball) on TV (television: a screen for viewing various media).

Doc says I can’t let go of Sally. That’s why she keeps eating me, night after night. It’s not always my guts. Sometimes she’s munching (chewing) on my leg or biting off my fingers one by one. She always looks the same, though: blond hair parted on the side and framing her face perfectly, even though she’s been dead a few weeks. You can tell because her eyes are getting all milky looking and her skin is pretty dirty. But her hair is always perfect. Sometimes, in my dreams, I stroke her hair while she’s eating me.

Wow. Maybe Doc was right. Maybe this writing thing will be kind of healing. I feel a bit better already.

March 3

Mondays are busy here at the farm. There’s this running joke that the days of the week don’t matter anymore, but that’s one of the rules here. Not only do they matter, but they are still what we base our routines on. Just like we all used to. So, Mondays we do all the catch up from having Sunday off. We still have to feed the livestock on Sundays, but we don’t do any of the other stuff. Planting, crafting, repairs, those sorts of things. We even have a little church (a place of worship, similar to a modern-day temple) set up on our farm, but not all of us go. I don’t go. Anyway, it’s been a long couple of days and since it was the same dream, I’m going to skip writing it down today.

March 4

Last night was a bit new. Sally was eating my eyes, but I could still see her doing it somehow. I don’t think I should think too deeply on that.

March 5

I never introduced myself. I mean, why would I? In a normal journal, back before this hell descended, I really wouldn’t need to worry about anything happening to me or my journal getting lost to obscurity. But now that’s a pretty common fate, so if I do die suddenly, and this journal somehow survives, I want you to know who I am, at the least.

My name is Malcolm Geoffry Johnson, though folks (colloquialism for people) have called me Mal pretty much my whole life, except my mother. I’m just an average Joe (a term meaning common or regular). I’m thirty-eight. I used to be on the pudgy (overweight) side, with a beer gut (abdominal protrusion composed of adipose tissue) and some flab (excess adipose tissue), but I’ve trimmed way down (lost weight). All of us have. I keep a beard now, mostly to protect my face from the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter, though Sally never liked it. I almost miss her complaining.

Sally was my wife. She was so beautiful, with perfect blond hair, like an angel, and always tan but she never went tanning (a process of exposing skin to ultraviolet radiation to darken it, purely for cosmetic reasons). I never understood what she saw in me or why she said yes the day I asked her to marry me, twenty years ago. We were high school sweethearts (a term meaning the couple met and pledged their union during secondary school) and a part of me always wondered if she simply never wanted to bother looking anywhere else. We never had kids because she had bad endometriosis (a condition that affects the endometrial lining of the uterus, which is currently treated with gene therapy), but once we decided to stop trying we became a lot happier with our lives. For years before that we were convinced we were missing something, which I suppose is true, but mostly because our relatives kept insisting that it was true. All I know is, after we hit our 30’s and said, To hell with it! (an expression of dismissal), we realized all we needed was each other to stay happy. We only had a few years of that before everything changed.

I really miss her. It’s been hard. Harder still because it was basically my own fault for letting her get bit. And when all this zombie shit started happening three years ago, we promised each other that if one of us got bit, the other would take care of it. Meaning, I had to put her down (kill) myself in order to keep that promise. I waited until she was gone from this life, but she still knew what was going to happen. The last words she said to me were, I’m sorry.

And that’s what haunts me.

March 7

I’ve been living on the farm for about two and a half years. Sally and I were from a town called Great Bend (currently the city of Greater Bend, in U.S. Central), about fifty miles from here. Truthfully, us folks here in Kansas (one of the former states that currently makes up U.S. Central) were probably the last ones to jump into action, but one of the better types of people to be naturally prepared for something like this. Even if you’re from town, you know the basics of farming and being outside, and you more than likely know your way around a gun. So when Sally and I finally decided that the threat was real, we were prepared. We had a few friends with farms, so we packed up our truck (four-wheeled vehicle, typically with a seating area for two up front and a long box, called a truck bed, behind for hauling), grabbed our guns, and headed out to the country.

Our first stop was the Smiths. Well, we meant to stop, but we didn’t. Their barn was on fire. So, we crossed ourselves (the act of blessing oneself by first touching one’s forehead, followed by chest, right shoulder,