Journal Entry #6

March 24, 2011

I am unsure as to how I should continue this journal. I wanted to record, for my daughter, an as accurate-as-possible accounting of the events unfolding around us as I perceived them. I am no longer certain that I want you reading some of the things I am going to write. I am no longer certain I want to write them at all.

I have never hidden myself from the darker side of humanity. I have looked upon the most horrific images of brutality and degradation that man could ever muster against nature or himself. They moved me, most certainly, but they never reached into my very core, into the recesses of my being and took….something…from me.

It was a parking lot at the very first check point we reached, about a mile from our front door. We were close to the front of line; there wasn’t much hope of turning around with any ease to find a way around. Two dozen or so Guardsmen and some medical personnel, perhaps from the hospital just up the road, were carefully screening the cars.

When the first blast rang from the rifles of the guardsmen we were in shock. One of the cars at the front had tried to drive through the makeshift barriers of barb wire and two-by-fours. The car lost speed quickly, bounding over the curb as it rolled to a stop. A few of the guardsmen rushed over to it, some of the medical personnel following close behind.

The body of a young mother wilted down onto the pavement as a man in a very elaborate medical suit opened the driver’s door. A lifeless young boy, not much more than eight or nine, was then pulled from the back seat.

I was relieved some minutes later when I saw the arm of the young boy, who I previously presumed dead, reach up. He was stretched out on the pavement next to his mother, with medical staff anxiously hovering over the pair of them.

Blood covering every inch of his body, the boy sat up and latched onto a nurse with a vicious ferocity. Like some impetuous, rabid animal he sunk his teeth into the skin of her cheek, tearing flesh from bone. Her colleagues fled quickly, leaving her there to her fate.

The cars in front of us tried to flee in any direction they could, blindly smashing into one another. I suppose I should be glad I did not have much time then to dwell on what we had all seen, I was in a race to avoid the inevitable grid lock that was sure to chain us all together in the panic of the moment. People were abandoning their cars, leaving on foot as hurriedly as they could carry themselves. I had had enough by then and used my very large and very heavy Jeep as a battering ram to push the abandoned vehicles out of the way. Others followed close behind, through the hole I had made.

We heard more sporadic gun fire from the road block as we drove away. In my side view mirrors I could see a great many people running in all directions. They dropped beyond view as we headed home, to once more re-evaluate.