Author: Peter Jones

I think I must have eaten some meat gone bad.

That last few days have been a monotonous drive for resources.  I’ve nearly turned my island into a treeless wasteland.  My grain field is nearly walled in.  My cow pasture has its own water source in a cliffs nook.  Wood and sod walls are now stone blocks.
…and I have no idea where it is.  At some point, I must have eaten some tainted meat, as my only record of the last week, based on the bloated moon, are these blurry photos:

I remember having a panic attack.  I was the last man alive.  The expedition was a all a figment of my imagination.  There was nothing else beyond the desert.  I know I ran, searching for anything, searching for home.  In some way I must have thought of returning to the fort, as I think I left torches sticking from the loose sand like bread crumbs or a string of pearls.
I found people in my delirium.  They didn’t speak but grunted.  Using their savage hand signs, they offered me emeralds in exchange for luxuries that I hadn’t seen since taking this forsaken commission.
I saw how their village was exposed to the night.  People,  who in the waking world I knew were dead, wanted warmth at the village’s hearths.  In a haze, I frantically built walls, I tried to warn them to lock the doors, but they only responded with their gibberish.
I felt the walking corpses getting behind me, the dead were banging on the doors, trying to get to the villagers.  I helped barricade where I could, but pangs of hunger clenched my stomach.  I could no longer hold back the dead I went on the offensive, but my muscles were weak.  In my dream I don’t know if my muscles turned to sawdust from the hunger, or if it was the arrows portruding from my abdomen.  I thought Jenkins had been a poor marksmen while living, as a corpse though, he was far too effective.

When I woke from my fugue, I was at the bottom of a small ravine.  There was no outpost, no village, no snow, no fields and no people.  I had nothing on me but soiled rags and weeks old dust.  I have nothing.

At the edge of the field are trees.  I made myself an axe from a fallen branch and a piece of granite.  I’ve built myself a tree fort to spend the night.  That miserable Jenkins is still out there.  The extent of his new found accuracy is surprising, but its luckily tempered by his laziness.

Tomorrow I begin again.