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The vista pinned out in front of me was wreathed with lights – broken down merry go rounds, decomposing roller coasters. If you watched, the lights blinked on and off sickly, their wires spindling and wrapping in a death grip around the crumbling children’s rides. They hadn’t seen children here in many years – the closure had been as sudden and final as the explosion that wiped out the nearby city.

One of the slight, softly illuminated signs canted to the right, splintered and crushed against a post. Sprinkled amongst the grass, out of season splashes of colour still marked where the newer flakes and thick, crusted splinters had disgorged below, vomited into the earth, and left to hang there in ropy, whimpering gouts.

I bypassed the sign, heading down the main midway – ignoring the stalls that had collapsed in on themselves – their rotten canvas smelled vaguely odd, and here, and there, occasionally, flies paddled in the air above them, blots of decay marking bodies that had fallen in their headlong run from the Haunters. They had a habit of dispatching people with a shotgun blast in the back, pellets made from scraps of disintegrated metal, the rust marking out the pieces that they could break into ammo, the boundary between life and death as arbitrary as decay.
I was almost surprised when they took the corpses, leaving only bloody pools of gore in their wake, squalls of red gashes falling against the main tent of the big top before darkening to an almost oddly placed brown stain – pre bombing, you could almost have believed it was a mis-stored canvas, stained with rust.

I’ll stalk out amongst the fairway when things settle, into the solemn dusk. It’s reminiscent of the first couple of weeks after everything went to hell in a hand basket. I occasionally see others; I seem to be the only soul willingly haunting this charade of human experience. I can find food, amongst the ruins; I’ve become quite an adept hunter, though strictly vegetarian. I don’t know how sick the beasts are around here, so I pick for things that I can eat on the go. I’ve got tins of things back in my store too – that I rescued from a couple of the trailers when I arrived here. A couple of them go out of date in a few months, but they’ll be used soon. People will be back before then.

We’re on the outskirts of a crater, you see – you can actually map where the blast shifted from instantly vaporising to simply deadly. The fairway was once concrete, and there’s this odd, sooty line on it, along with some vaguely human shadows that appear to have detached from their owners. One is burned into the helter-skelter’s only remaining wall – a jutting, shattered tooth in the gumless maw of the crater edge. It’s a fifteen foot drop on the other side of that wall – I try not to go too near too often, just in case the land breaks under me, like it did when I first arrived.

My leg is bothering me again – I can’t really run, so I’m glad that they don’t chase me often – there’s little that can be said, or done when they decide they want YOU. Like the finger of god, coming down out of heavens that have turned their back on us,

‘ITS YOU!’

It’d be almost comical, cartoon, japery, if it weren’t for the fact I know that, yes, one day, it’ll be me. They’ll fell me like a creaking mare that’s not fit even for the cart. They used to come shattering into the night looking for women to breed with – the ‘librarian’ before me told me that Jacelle had been taken and her screams had echoed across the crater for about three days and then had abruptly died back. I responded dully, that I didn’t expect they cared about continuing the race, and that living here probably made all of us barren.
Unlike the plants, it appeared. Jewel like fruit began appearing this autumn, plums that glowed ruddy purple in the wan moonlight, ruby red apples, and emerald green pears. I’d eat them greedily if it wasn’t for my stomach always being so upset. It had been for a while now, since they took their song, and followed it north – sombre, but the jangle and cacophony piping them away was hypnotic, a beacon of hope for most of them. I couldn’t follow – recently broken, and battered, the best I could hope for was that they’d left me enough food.
We’d abandoned this area, before the bombs, and nature was slowly clawing it back. Paths split, apparently from the pressure underneath them – earthquake effects caused by mutated plants, rather than tectonic plates.

I picked my way to a vantage point, opposite the stabled horses from the merry go round, some still hanging on the rack like forgotten clothes, others leaning or destroyed on the floor beside them – ornately twisted tethers and poles shattered and warped beyond recognition. On the outer edge, a couple were singed, their coats brown dapples of soot, and oddly shaped lumps where the paint had become carcinogenic lumps of material in their flanks. One or two were carved as if they were neighing and their bulging, almost accusing eyes followed me as I picked my way back to my meagre belongings. I slept in their stable, because it was easier to hide behind the jumble of legs and shattered bodies than in the open.
I pulled out the last photo in my wallet, the one that was tucked behind my ID. Creased, oddly wrinkled, and peeling, it was a photo of my dog. His brown and black fur fluffed perfectly for that first photo in our new home. I could remember the feel of his fur under my fingers and the dank, doggy smell – it bothered me back then, but I miss it now.

Life became odd, and as it is now around a year ago. There was this bottomless slip that left most of us hanging over the gap that had opened up below the collective human race, and then, mercifully, we’d slid to a stop. Those documentaries about it being “five to midnight” and that, if our government didn’t get the world under control, that we’d be dead within a couple of years, was more ironically apt than most of us could grasp. It was our own government in the end that had killed us all – that unsettling, discourteous slip towards the abyss that was threatening to devour us was oddly, interestingly the last real marker of history I can affix on. None of us talk about THAT day, seared in our memory as it is, those of us that collect and collate and document – that remember books as well as we can – and carry the few precious ones we find with us – either partially damaged, or completely obliterated will all attest – history WILL forget the bombs. None of us will ever tell our stories.
Eidetic memory, my ass – I choose to forget. Or to pretend.

Some of this conversation – some of the recording I do, depends on someone understanding why someone would archive and catalogue human misery the way I do. Why I would assume that people could even read what I was saying – there is every possibility that I’m talking to you over a void that I’ll never surmount – that I’m communicating a pain that you’ll never understand.
That the simple act of writing, on soluble, or flammable materials is pointless, and will wither, and die, with or without me, at some point in the future. I’m scared. I miss my family.
I miss my dog.

That’s something I haven’t seen lately – dogs. I don’t know why – I’ve seen rats that would almost pass for mongrels, save the twisted, oddly hunched pose, the short legs. And I hear them yipping and yowling in the night. Its definitely not dogs – there’s something human, yet feral about those noises – it could be the rats, or something equally deformed, and destroyed. But I’ve never seen a dog. Maybe the Haunters took them down first – target practice. Cats are another thing I’ve missed – even the feral ones that used to stalk through this place - gods of all they surveyed - are gone. Very little seems to have…there is very little life to speak of left. Flies, cockroaches the size of my feet, but very little else. And I don’t know how I survived either. Maybe I’m not - my handkerchief is bloody, and there’s nothing I can do about it any more. My mouth permanently tastes coppery - even after eating. I’m so sick of being sick. I think the fall did it, which is why I stayed behind.

And I’m the only one of our small band left. They’ll be back soon, I hope. I’ll endure this inhuman feeling for a couple of more days, and rest up, letting my leg, and my ribs heal.