Picture of the four-car pileup outside our apartment building. I’d seen a few car crashes before, but nothing like this one. Usually you’d see a car crash and it’d be two cars, one dented, and a bunch of people arguing. Not here, though, obviously. The building to the left is ours, the shattered window is the coffee house where I used to always get double mocha lattes with extra whipped cream in them. Those mochas ended up somehow tasting like some perfect mix of hot chocolate and coffee. It’s one of the things I miss the most these days.
You can only see three of the four cars, because the smoke from the first two is obscuring the last one. That’s Bradley standing to one side with a stupid grin on his face, near him are two cops. If you look closely you can see one of them has a gun in his hand; something I never noticed or even vaguely remember from the real event. But there it is, pictures don’t lie.
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