Paul's Journal (February 28)

Six months.

One-hundred and eighty three days from vomit on my pants to the fall of civilization. John Dryden once said, "...mighty things from small beginnings grow."  Yeah, no shit.

There were more entities than we thought, hidden in other cities on other continents, and they all rose together in that terrible final struggle to fight us for control.  I was wrong to think I was strong enough to stop them.  I was so wrong.

At dawn, on the one-hundred eighty-fourth day of the war, all I can see from the roof of the House of Commons is the apocalypse.  Across the Thames, the London Eye looms over the riverbank like a broken metal sentinel.  There are fires in the gloom below--some lit for warmth, others burning out of control.

I had always wanted to bring Maya up here.  Now I just come alone.

Down on the streets, among the remnants of humanity that still drag themselves across the cracked concrete—there are still active entities within hosts.  Nukes took out the big ones, but there are more. I can sense them reaching out to each other like blind newborn mice, groping for information in the darkness, waiting to rise.

The colors that pulse and swirl under my skin; the evolutionary re-birth that changed me, that gave me inhuman strength and resilience, has also made me an outcast among the survivors.  Maya was the only one that stood by me.  During the bombing, we holed up at the National Gallery.  After it was all over, we saw no point in leaving and decided to stay.  We spent our days walking the halls and losing ourselves in the beautiful silence of Vermeer, Seurat, and Rubens, venturing out for supplies only when we ran low.  For a brief moment it felt like we had stopped time and none of the ugliness outside could touch us.

Then I lost her to the radiation.  And I never told her that I loved her.

Losing her was like being hacked apart again.  After you lose the most precious thing in your life, you go into suspended animation.  It's a hybrid state of blind shock and dead peace.  In order to protect you, your mind hides your sanity in a special place where you feel total calm, and your emotions fall away from you like dead leaves.  This is the last place your consciousness can go after you have nothing left to lose.

I laid her out on a bench in front of Michelangelo's "The Entombment" and then set fire to the room (I was drunk and in a dark, Viking funeral-pyre mood). Later that day I moved into the House of Commons.

Eventually I realized that loss gives you purpose.  I came out of my haze of pain and started listening to the primal voice that now lives inside me, the link that allows me to hear the whisperers in the darkness.  And I began to hunt.

The city calls to me—it begs to be purged.   I will take as many hosts with me as I can before I go.  It's ironic that they take me for a murderer.  Up until the time I twist Maya's knife inside them--they beg and blubber, trying to barter for their lives with their meager belongings.  Infected and dying from radiation poisoning and they still cling to the material culture of an extinct life.  They should instead thank me for delivering them from a fate worse than death.  They all die without knowing the evil they carry inside.

Even as they die by my hand, I pray.

I pray not to the gods of man, but to the Elder Gods, the ones that saved me.  Maya taught me how.  I do not pray for salvation but for deliverance.  I find it ironic that my focus is not surviving, but how long I will have to survive.  

Every day I sit here on the roof for a few hours so the radiation can reach me.   All I ever get is redness on my skin, but I'm hoping the internal damage is building up.  I know technically it's a suicide attempt, but I'm hoping the gods will give me a pass on this given the special circumstances.  I've never run into any others like me, so that gives me hope that my mortality can indeed catch up to me.

In the end, I guess we grasp at whatever remains within our reach.