Came Up Unnoticed**18–19.11.2013

**

I never imagined that the end of the world could go unnoticed.

Or rather, not quite that. I never thought I would fail to notice the signs that something terrible was approaching. I believed that if anyone wouldn’t miss a single warning, it would be me—it wasn’t for nothing that I’d once read a ton of post-apocalyptic stories and probably watched a million movies about global catastrophes.

What I didn’t consider was that by the time it actually arrived, I would have no time for it at all. Before, I practically lived on websites that chewed over theories proving how soon our world might collapse brick by brick—remove one, and the rest would fall on their own.

Now my priorities had changed. When you’re at home with a child and still have to somehow get by—no one to rely on, maternity pay isn’t enough, and expenses have grown significantly—there’s no room for fantasies about the end of the world. The end of the world feels like an ordinary, everyday occurrence.

At least, that’s what it felt like until I was rudely shoved face-first into harsh reality and realized that my personal hell didn’t even reach Limbo, let alone the ninth circle… Now that we’ve all ended up in hell, I have something to compare it to.

On the eve of the day when it all began (at least for me), I had just received yet another freelance text by email from the category “prepare-for-print-as-soon-as-possible-it-was-needed-yesterday.” Awful graphomania, to be honest—I always wondered how anyone could publish such stuff, even for money, but… it paid, so I tried not to nitpick the quality of the text, even scrubbing out the mocking comments that composed themselves from the notes. Why offend the person who pays you?

I brought the disorderly chain of sentences into something resembling a decent form (relatively speaking, of course—if you compare the final product to gods, Hephaestus comes to mind rather than Apollo) and sent it back to the client. I tried to be on time.

And in the evening I discovered that Sonya had fallen ill—her face was red, her forehead hot. I danced around her bed all night, soothing her, measuring out spoonfuls of yellow children’s paracetamol, and in the morning, when I called the doctor, I was too tired to react to the fact that the doctor herself didn’t look well either. I just stood nearby, listened, wrote down the recommendations, and saw the young woman with a gray, exhausted face to the door, tuning out her complaints that calls were coming one after another and their entire department was swamped—people were being pulled in even on their official days off…

During the day I had enough worries not to think about the doctor’s words. All I could see was my sick child, who needed care, and there was no time to think about other victims of autumn colds. A whirlwind of tasks. Not a free minute.

And when by evening Sonya’s fever finally broke, and I was close to finishing a 200-page Word document, I decided to read my bookmarked diaries…

That was how I finally heard that our world had shifted off its axis in a truly King-like way, and it was hardly possible—now in a Frai-like manner—to shove it back into place.

The diaries were full of short posts written in all caps. People poured out their despair there: some confessed they couldn’t reach relatives who had gone to work in the morning; others reposted YouTube videos where bloodied people slowly but inexorably advanced toward the camera in a wall; and some were already saying goodbye to everyone, typing error-filled posts about dozens of palms pounding on their door, dozens of bodies pressing against it, and the door being wooden and unlikely to hold for long…

The TV was saying the same thing, although—as I later found out, frantically skimming popular blogs—at first no channel wanted to tell the truth.

**Jane_Patrick, 19.11.13, 10:21**

Today on the stairwell a neighbor tore her child apart :΄-( I’m absolutely sure—it wasn’t my imagination. She brought him out, barely dressed, then leaned against the wall as if she were just dizzy, and then peeled herself off the wall and staggered toward him. So be careful. Don’t go outside! Or at least arm yourselves with whatever you can. A bat. A hunting rifle. Anything you can find at home.

**Zvezdochka, 19.11.13, 11:15**

Yes, we saw it too :-o =O… Near the swings in our yard there are two wandering around—I first thought they were drunk, but then I found my husband’s binoculars and looked… One of them has his guts spilling out, trailing behind him like a ribbon… And the TV isn’t saying anything about it. I specifically waited for the news block on Channel One…

**White Stripe, 19.11.13, 11:28**

Now do you understand what kind of scum is in power? They will never tell you anything—they don’t give a damn about you!!! >:-) You could all die for all they care… Damn medveputy!!! They’re probably already sitting in bunkers, stuffing themselves with presidential rations… And the whole government is already safe. Bastards… No one will help us, and no one is going to. Remember the peat fires? That was just flowers!!! The berries are being generously poured into your hands now. Eat up, don’t choke!

*(User White Stripe has been banned for one week for using obfuscated profanity)*

However, now they were cautiously talking about it on TV as well. They announced that the government had “everything under control” and that people should simply stay home until the situation was normalized. They said a decision had been made to stop public transportation, which had become a threat to public safety. They stated that the authorities were working on solving the problem, and therefore it would be resolved in the coming days.

The Russian Orthodox Church blamed America for everything—its official representative noted that what was happening was apparently inevitable. We were being punished. God’s wrath had descended upon us—for the fact that, looking to the West, we had forgotten what an Orthodox person should be like.

Onishchenko advised banning the import of American and European products, which supposedly might carry potential infection.

And I froze at the computer, unable to believe that what was happening was truly real. I had often dreamed about zombie apocalypses before…

Maybe this was just another dream? Judging by the level of nonsense and lack of logic, it certainly seemed possible.

What convinced me that this was indeed reality was Sonya waking up and screaming…

I picked her up and went to the window with her—just in time to see our HOA chairwoman being knocked to the ground by two—judging by their appearance, young men, former—and bitten into, spraying bright red drops around. They tore off a substantial chunk of her shoulder, almost completely ripped off her left arm, and rummaged thoroughly in her stomach, yet that didn’t stop her, a few minutes later, from getting up and moving after her executioners.

Romero, Fulci, Snyder, and whoever else were right. When a victim dies, it stops being food. It becomes… something else.

Sonya spat out my breast and squeaked softly, like a kitten.

I pressed her to myself. She was the only thing I had. The only thing I valued.

I was ready to give my entire self for her future.

And now, it seems, there will be no future at all. For anyone.

**24.11.2013**

Behind the door that leads to the elevators and stairs, the dead are walking. One of them, apparently, got here by elevator while they were still running and now doesn’t know how to get off our floor. And he seems to sense us. When one of us approaches to look through the peephole, he rushes at the door, growling and slamming into it with his whole body. I don’t even know how he manages it—we try to move quietly. Maybe he navigates by smell. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t leave. He knows there are living people here. Food with legs. Canned goods in a jar that has to be opened to get the prize. The door is the jar. We are the prize.

I think I’m starting to ramble. We all are.

Five days ago I checked all my food supplies. I understood that I was unlikely to risk breaking through to the street. I wouldn’t leave Sonya alone—not for anything: what if I got killed and she was left alone? She would scream, dying of hunger… No. Never.

But I couldn’t take her with me either. I didn’t know what was out there. If Anna Mikhailovna was eaten right near the parking lot by our building, and I saw it myself, then who knows how far I could go—especially with Sonya. She could start screaming at any moment. Draw attention. You can’t explain to her why she shouldn’t do that. And I had nowhere to go anyway. How do you leave without a car?

So I just counted the cans. Stewed meat, condensed milk, tuna, mackerel, sprats. Also packs of pasta and grains in the cupboard. Batteries of water bottles—our tap water is awful, rusty, hard to drink even when boiled and filtered.

My parents did manage to make me at least a little farsighted. I remember that at home—in that very house which was now fifteen hundred kilometers away from me, and which I couldn’t stop thinking about every day, every minute—we always had a solid food reserve. So when they came… back in September, we went to Metro in their car and stocked up. I couldn’t have imagined then what exactly those canned goods would be needed for…

I try not to think about why my parents’ phone doesn’t answer. While phones were still working, I tried calling—landline, mobile. Useless. The landline didn’t answer, the mobile kept giving overloaded network messages… just like on New Year’s Eve.

As of today, there’s silence in the receiver.

I try to reassure myself that they live in a small town—no airport, no railway station—it shouldn’t have reached them too quickly. But… it doesn’t really work. When I tried to find the cause of how it all began on forums—ours and foreign ones—I found that there was no concrete answer. Everyone named different causes and fiercely defended their own. However, two facts seemed undisputed.

1. The first cases of infection were in the USA. Most likely in New York.

2. The riots at John F. Kennedy Airport, from which Judgment Day is counted, happened on the night of November 13–14, and I only learned about what was happening on the 19th…

I feel terribly slow. Last year I read so attentively about the “Miami naked zombie attacks”… only to shamefully miss the real news this year—real, not fake.

Please, Lord, let my parents be okay… Let someone protect them. Please.

**29.11.2013**

The electricity was cut off about a week ago, and the water about five days ago (I think?). Good thing I always kept the bathtub and all containers full. I was terribly afraid of being left without water… and here I am. Now there’s no way to replenish the supply. We’ll have to rely only on what we managed to save.

Heating was only on during the first days, and even then it didn’t bring relief—the barely warm radiators didn’t heat much… It was just that before, it was still quite warm outside, but today it suddenly got cold—down to plus three or four at most.

I took wool blankets out of the closet and wrap myself in them. I warm Sonya with my body heat, but she’s still cold. And I’m cold too.

The neighbors accepted my idea to band together, since we’re trapped together: none of us can go out the common door—not a cheerful prospect. They’re worried because their son went missing on November 18—didn’t return from university—and now they can only guess where he is, whether he barricaded himself somewhere with classmates and professors, or is already wandering the streets with half his face eaten.

Sometimes, when it’s unbearable and I want to hear a human voice, I knock on their door. Sometimes they knock on mine. That happens less often: there are two of them, they have something to talk about. They knock only when it becomes unbearable to remain alone with each other and with memories.

But most of the time we just sit in our apartments. Each on their own island of loneliness.

The laptop is dead, and the Internet died even earlier, but I’m writing in a notebook. Found some old one, half-filled with lecture notes… I write there. It somehow… helps. If only my hands weren’t freezing so badly…

Probably I should be addressing these notes to someone dear, but I’m just writing without addressing anyone. Those I want to address won’t read this.

**8.12.2013**

Today the neighbor couldn’t take it anymore. He decided to try going down the stairs, especially since the dead one guarding the elevator landing had disappeared a couple of days ago. Either he figured out how to go down the stairs after all, or he just reached the common balcony and, failing to keep his balance, fell down from the eighth floor.

I didn’t know what he planned to do. I only heard the sound of the door slamming, which Lena closed behind Sergey. I would have said it was a bad idea, but he probably wouldn’t have listened. If he didn’t listen to his wife, I was nobody to him.

**9.12.2013**

Everything is bad.

Yesterday, of course, we didn’t go back to our apartments. We stayed by the door—Lena explained that her husband said he wanted to check whether the staircase to the first floor was clear, and if not, try to clear it. For this he took some piece of iron—either unscrewed a metal table leg or found a piece of pipe somewhere. I don’t know…

In any case, nothing worked out.

The staircase was packed with corpses to the brim, and he didn’t even notice at first—he expected zombies on the very first flights and, after a couple of empty ones, relaxed and continued more calmly, lighting the steps with a dim flashlight.

And they were there. In the darkness. Standing motionless, conserving energy.

He told us he hadn’t gone far… Only saw rows of our former neighbors, standing rigidly upright like Urfin Dzhyus’s wooden soldiers before they got the powder. He hit a couple with his weapon and immediately rushed back up the stairs.

At least, that’s what he emphasized—“immediately.” He had to prove to us that he hadn’t been harmed, that he’d been lucky…

Lena, crying, threw herself into his chest, asking him to promise that he would never, never risk himself like that again and that if they ever left, they would leave together.

He really did look unharmed (though the light of a couple of flashlights in a dark corridor isn’t the most reliable aid), and I didn’t have time to look more closely. Lena dragged him into their apartment and then turned the key in the lock from inside.

That was the last time I saw that door open…

The next day I knocked on their door, but no one answered anymore. Shuffling. Howling. Scratching sounds.

I don’t know exactly when he turned and what happened there… When he infected her. When she died.

And does it even matter? The fact matters: they are dead. They howl behind the door, and I can hear it even now.

Now my daughter and I are completely alone.

**15.12.13**

I’m burning the last candle. Once, when everything was still normal, it was given to me for New Year’s. Beautiful, shaped like a train—the “Polar Express.” I wish it were a real train. Then we could board it and escape from here.

To a place where terrible wheezing doesn’t come from the neighboring apartment and no one pounds on the wall, trying to get to you…

It’s terribly cold at home. It seems our building is dying—after the electricity, water, and heating were cut off, it itself became something like a zombie and has no desire to continue existing in this form. At least, the smell here matches.

Sonya keeps crying. She’s lost a lot of weight—the little I can give her now is no longer enough. And I couldn’t even imagine in my worst nightmare that I would have to live on canned food alone while feeding a child.

I try to calm her—I’m afraid she might attract attention with her crying—but I understand that it probably won’t work. And how could it? She has so many reasons to cry. My poor frozen girl…

**21.12.13**

That’s it. The canned food is gone too. The last cans—beef with buckwheat, pork stew, tongues in aspic… all turned out to be spoiled.

Now there are only two options.

Just die here.

Try to follow Sergey’s path.

I don’t know which is better. My head isn’t thinking at all.

All I can hope for is that one more rule from zombie movies will work… How was it? They’re dead, so low temperatures make them freeze and stop moving?

I just looked out the window. As far as I can see, here and there there are little mounds, slightly covered with snow. It’s gotten very cold in the last days—judging by the outdoor thermometer, it’s about minus fifteen, and it feels even colder…

Inside the building the temperature is now also well below zero—I don’t let Sonya out of my arms, holding her close, wrapped in a fur coat. If so, it may well be that the corpses on the stairs have undergone the same thing as those outside. Or at least slowed down enough for us to slip past them.

So now I will put on the thickest clothes that will be hard to bite through.

Prepare a hammer—the most frightening weapon I managed to find at home.

Put Sonya into a sling and tie it so that she’s on my back.

Try to go down. If I reach where the frost is, it will be easier. The main thing is to get down…

I hope we’ll be lucky.

It has to happen sometime, right? Right?