Saturday, August 3, 2013

When You're a Stranger

This is Beckley

So a guy died last night.  I don’t know what his real name was, but he went by Grady.  We’re still not sure how it happened exactly.  He was a Havenite and he was found, outside, at the base of the wall, ravaged by the dead.  The dead really are starving because the few out there picked him clean to the point where very little was left.

Some people are blaming someone from the UAS.  Honestly, there’s no reason to think that anything happened outside of this guy falling off the wall.  He was due to have a shift pretty late at night and he could have had a heart attack, an aneurysm, been clumsy, or just been drunk.  Stuff like this happens, unfortunately, but now it could be a spark that will light off the tensions here.  We just have to make sure that doesn’t happen.

What bugs me is that, even as we’re rebuilding society, we didn’t really know this guy.  Even those that did know him personally didn’t know him well.  The only agreement is that no one thinks his name was actually Grady.  One of his friends swears that Grady came during the amnesty agreement for marauders.  Another informed me in no uncertain terms that “Grady weren’t one of them gods damned killers.”  So I really don’t know.  It just seems so wrong that in a time where there’s not many of our species left, we still don’t know each other that well.  I guess that makes sense, and maybe this whole apocalypse has fostered a sense of unrealistic solidarity.  We feel like we stand together, but do we really, on a personal level?  A lot of us are still loners, either because we’re running from something or because we don’t want to let people too close, in case they die just like everyone else did.  I’m guilty of doing both as are most people I’ve met.

One thing I do know is that my tolerance for the destruction of this world has gone down.  I honestly felt sick looking at Grady’s body, after it had been found and the dead cleared back.  It took me by surprise.  How many times have I seen mutilated bodies?  I can’t even count.  Hell, I can’t even count how many times I’ve seen someone get killed or eaten directly in front of me.  And yet I’m not permanently numb.  I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Then again, I don’t think I was ever completely numb.  I’ve said before that I really didn’t handle the early days of The Fall well, but even more recently, all I do is try to keep the pain at bay.  I isolate like a lot of people do.  I also make jokes, that are probably only entertaining to me.  I try to remind myself of simpler times.  Looking back at things I say to people, or even past blog entries, it’s like I have a constant need to crack a joke, to make life not quite that serious.  Or to make a 90’s reference because when I say that zombies are wiggity, wiggity, wiggity wack, it lets me think, for a minute, that I’m a kid again with no responsibilities and without this world of death.  I don’t know.  I guess it’s kept me relatively sane.

Anyway, that’s really all I got.  Again, I can’t stress enough that there’s no reason to suspect foul play with Grady.  Honestly, I think the only reason that this isn’t being accepted as an accident, no questions asked, is because people are still a bit edgy regarding the UAS moving in.  So let’s all keep cool.  And as we deal with this newest death, we’d probably be well served to try to deal with some of the past death too.  Rebuilding humanity is good, but it will be better if we’re not all broken beyond repair.

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