The Dystopian Diaries

by K. W. Callahan

  September 19th

  9:15 a.m.

  Well, the card games with the Salatro family didn’t go over quite as well as I’d hoped. I mean, we played for several hours and had a decent time, but much of the time, Benjamin would interject his complaints regarding a whole slew of issues. From the food we are eating and the bathroom arrangements, to being stuck in a stinky room all day with his parents and sister, his list of complaints was long and varied.

  Personally, and while I didn’t particularly like listening to his moaning and groaning, I couldn’t help but sympathize. Their room really is starting to stink because they can’t flush the toilet enough without wasting water. And now that the smell outside from the decomposing corpses is reaching us, we’ve been forced to close our windows. So now we can’t even air things out. It’s really starting to get bad.

  But Benjamin’s issue list got me thinking. We have a whole floor of rooms. And while I don’t think it’s wise to have us spread out willy-nilly all over the floor, I don’t necessarily think it would hurt for them to have a little personal space either. Therefore, I’ve opened a room across the hall specifically for Benjamin. The poor kid deserves a little privacy. Heck, it’s the least I can do.

  11:05 a.m.

  Manny took me aside a little while ago. He wants to go outside the hotel and try to find out what’s going on around us. I guess “wants” isn’t the right word. He’s curious, and he thinks it might be a good idea to find out if there are others like us or maybe a place where people have congregated or are working together. He said that they might have a better set up than us, a place with generators, fresh running water, and security.

  Personally, I’m against the idea. I think it’s dangerous as hell. While part of me thinks there’s no reason to risk our asses when we’re decently set up inside the hotel, the other half tells me that our living situation can’t go on forever. At some point, we’re going to have to re-establish contact with the outside world.

  The question remains, is it better to do that now or wait? If we do it now, we might be heading into a situation that continues to be extremely dangerous. Any number of pitfalls could be laying in wait – looters, people infected with the flu, government entities waiting to round us up like cattle and haul us off to internment camps. But if we wait, we could be missing out on a far better situation. It’s impossible to say. I told Manny I’d consider it and get back to him tomorrow. He seemed content with that response for the moment.

  I asked him he had mentioned the idea to his family. He said that he had. I asked him what they thought. He said that his wife Sandra wasn’t thrilled with the idea but that Benjamin seemed excited at the mention of getting out of the hotel. Maybe I should just let Manny and Benjamin go out. But then I’d feel bad about my cowardice endangering Benjamin. Maybe I should just go and get it over with. If we do it at night, it might not be too bad. I’ll admit, even I’M going a little stir crazy having been pent up in this hotel for weeks. And I AM curious as to what else might be going on around the rest of the city now that things appear to have calmed down a little.

  I’m just not sure what the best move is. Guess I’ll have to sleep on it.

  3:05 p.m.

  The high point of the day has been doing laundry. Pretty exciting! Not really.

  Anyway, I picked up two mop buckets and a cup of laundry detergent from housekeeping earlier in the afternoon. I took Sandra with me since she perked up noticeably when I mentioned needing to do laundry. She said she had a big pile of stuff that needed washing too.

  Once we got downstairs, we filled the two buckets with water from several of the toilet tanks in rooms farthest from where we’re currently settled. We added soap to one, using that as our wash bucket. We used the other one for rinsing. Then we hung the clothes up in our rooms to dry.

  It will be nice to have some fresh smelling clothes to wear again. It’s been far too long.

  Ah yes, the excitement of our lives trapped inside the Seville.

  September 20th

  12:09 a.m.

  I’m writing by flashlight. It’s raining outside, but even the sound of the dripping water against my window wasn’t enough to cover up the sounds coming from next door in Manny and Sandra’s room.

  Earlier this evening, they asked me to open another guest room for Emma. They said that she’d been nagging them since Benjamin got HIS own room. Manny said he wanted to give the poor girl some room to spread out a little. I thought that sounded completely reasonable, so I opened the room next to Benjamin’s for her. I’m a little concerned about having everyone spread out, just because it increases the likelihood of one of us being noticed. But noticed by whom? No one is around to see us, so I guess I shouldn’t be too worried.

  But now that I’m sitting here writing by flashlight to the sounds of hot and heavy sex next door, I think I understand the REAL reason for Manny wanting to give Emma her own room – and it WASN’T just to give Emma some privacy.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, they ARE human beings with urges just like anyone. I can’t blame them for wanting to relieve a little tension. I mean heck, they’ve been stuck here together for days now and probably haven’t had a single ounce of privacy. Still, listening to them is getting me all riled up. I mean, just because I’m not married doesn’t mean that I didn’t have my fair share of fun as a bachelor. I haven’t had a serious girlfriend in a while, but I had several girl “friends” with whom things would sometimes get a little frisky. They were more casual relationships – “friends with benefits” you might call them. But that was then. This is now. Now I’m alone, and I don’t even have any internet porn to help “relieve the angst” so to speak.

  Mmm, sounds like they’re peaking over there. Aaaaaaaand…they’re done!

  Good for Manny. Judging by the noises Sandra was making, he really gave it to her good. I’m not going to be a hater. I’m glad that at least SOMEONE can relax a little in this situation. I suppose I’d be doing the same thing given the chance. But I haven’t been given the chance. Instead, I get to close my journal, turn off my flashlight, roll over, and try to go back to bed.

  10:43 a.m.

  Time moves so slowly now. When I was working, the days – AND nights – just kind of slid by in one long, largely uneventful path toward retirement and eventual death. Now the hours creep by like days, the days feel like weeks, and the weeks feel like months.

  I agreed to Manny’s plan of making a search of the area surrounding the hotel. A large part of me thinks it’s a terrible idea and doesn’t want to do it. But another part, a part that is bored out of its mind, is willing to give this a shot if for no other reason than to get a change of atmosphere. I’m so tired of being cooped up inside the hotel. And I have to admit, I am rather curious to see what is going on around us. We’re just going to have to be careful…VERY careful. God only knows who is lurking out there, what their intentions may be, and what lengths they could be willing to go to in order to get – or TAKE – what they want.

  Manny and I are both going to take packs with us. Sandra made the packs out of pillow cases. They’re more like old-fashioned knapsacks. She doubled the pillow cases for thickness, and then used a hotel sewing kit to attach rope (she pulled the rope off the embroidery of throw pillows) so that we can throw the packs over our shoulder for ease of carrying. I thought it was a pretty great idea and complemented her ingenuity.

  Our packs contain several bottles of water, two flashlights a piece, enough food for a day or two (just in case we get caught out), and some general medical supplies (bandages, aspirin, antibiotic ointment, a sewing kit, and a small pair of scissors). It’s not much, but hopefully we won’t need much. We want to be able to travel light and move fast. But we both thought it a good idea to have some supplies with us in case we need to hunker down somewhere, or in a worst case scenario, barter our way out of a bad situation.

  We’ll head out tonight some time after dark. We’ll base our departure time on how thing
s look down on the street. Lately, stuff has been fairly quiet out there. You can hear the occasional distant gunfire, but it seems like things have been relatively peaceful in our general vicinity. Hopefully it will stay that way.

  I’m taking the gun too.

  We’ll just try to work our way out from the hotel, making concentric rings, a block at a time away from the hotel for maybe two or three blocks. That’s the plan at least. I have no idea how far we’ll get or what we’ll see. All I know is that we’ve rigged up several face masks. They’re fitted with an extra layer of cloth between the masks and our faces to try to bear the stench from outside. I cracked the window earlier today just to get an idea of what we are up against. It was bad…REAL bad. And if it’s this bad way up here near the top of the hotel, I can only imagine what it will be like down on the street. Between the bodies and the lack of sanitary conditions or water running through the city sewer system to cleanse them of any remnants, it’s really horrific out there. Even with cooler temperatures having arrived, it’s apparently not enough to combat the stench.

  On other fronts, our food and water supplies continue to hold out. I’d estimate that we still have at least several weeks of supplies, although I have to admit, meal options are starting to slim down. I wouldn’t call our meals “meals” per se. They’re more like large snacks consisting of foods you probably wouldn’t consider a “meal” normally. There is lots of peanut butter, crackers, olives, chips, pretzels, toaster pastries, cereal, canned fruits and veggies, pasta, rice, and dehydrated mashed potatoes that comprise the majority of our caloric intake whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner. I think everyone is getting a little tired of our available options, but beggars can’t be choosers, and in this type of situation, we should all just be happy we have food of any sort.

  For now, I’m going to try to get a little rest just in case tonight’s mission keeps us out longer than expected. It’s hard when I’ve been so inactive lately. The last thing I really feel like doing is trying to nap, but I need to try just in case. I’ve pulled shut the curtains in my room to make it as dark as possible. At least the cooler weather helps with sleeping. I’m not sweating my ass off anymore.

  7:43 p.m.

  I’m getting ready to head out with Manny. There’s not much to report since I wrote last time. I managed to doze a little bit here and there throughout the afternoon, but I never really fell into a deep sleep.

  I’m nervous about leaving the hotel. The closer it gets to time, the worse I feel about this whole thing. I mean, we have a nice little set up here. Perfect? No. But it’s not bad compared to what it could be. And after seeing what the looters did to this place, and hearing about Manny’s experience getting to the hotel, it doesn’t make me want to take any unnecessary chances. Yet here we are.

  I don’t feel that I’m a coward or anything like that, but I’m also not stupid. When you’ve got a good thing going, you don’t go out looking for trouble, especially in the apocalypse.

  But then a part of me thinks, yeah, but what if salvation is only blocks away? What if the National Guard, CDC or some other government organization has a base set up where they’re offering food, safety, and vaccines against the Su flu, and we have no idea about it? We could be staying here unnecessarily when we might be getting on with some semblance of a normal life again. I guess that if that was the case, they’d probably make some effort at letting people know. I mean, wouldn’t they go building to building alerting people? Maybe they have, and we missed it. Maybe they saw the condition of the lobby and street level, or checked the first few guest-room floors, and assumed that no one was here. But wouldn’t they just go down the street with bullhorns or some sort of P.A. system alerting people to the possibility of salvation?

  I don’t have the answers to these questions. I guess that’s why we have to go see what’s up. I still don’t like it, though.

  9:37 p.m.

  Well that was a bust!

  Looters are back in the hotel. I suppose I shouldn’t call them “looters” anymore since there isn’t really much left to loot. “Uninvited guests” would probably work, although I’m not really one to talk. I wasn’t “invited” to be here either. Just because I worked here doesn’t mean I have any more right to be here than these other people. So I guess that means I’m an uninvited guest too. I consider myself a slightly more amiable, civilized sort of guest however compared to the people downstairs. They’re a pretty rough looking bunch from what Manny and I observed.

  We didn’t stick around too long for fear of being seen. These guys – and a few gals – appeared to be drinking heavily and may have been on drugs too. And inebriated people like that wander into all sorts of places where you wouldn’t typically expect to find them.

  This group had a small generator running in the lobby (not a good idea due to the carbon monoxide) with several standing lights to illuminate the space. They didn’t really look to have made much of a camp here other than some bags and packs they had piled near one side of the lobby. Otherwise, people were sitting or sprawled on what remains of the lobby furniture. It looked like they had hauled down some additional seating from the lounge, and there were even some mattresses laid out on the lobby floor.

  The sight of the mattresses in particular concerned me. It means they’ve been into some of the guest rooms, and I can pretty much guarantee they didn’t have a key. That means they’re BREAKING in. And that’s a problem. These dudes are a raucous bunch. They’re drinking, fighting, firing weapons haphazardly, almost like some sort of an ultra-violent street gang.

  Where did the mattresses come from? How high have they ventured inside the hotel? How long will it be before they push higher into the hotel to where we are holed up? Hopefully they’re too drunk and busy fighting and cavorting with each other to get that high. But there’s no telling.

  Needless to say, Manny and I didn’t bother going outside the hotel since the appearance of this new group INSIDE the hotel bodes poorly for our prospects in the city around us.

  I feared that if this new group saw us while we were trying to make our exit from the hotel, it would be the end of us for sure. They don’t look like the type of people willing to live and let live. There are at least two dozen of them, maybe more. Either way, there are too many. It takes a lot just to feed FIVE people, let alone 25 people. That means they’re probably desperate for food, and people desperate for food will do about anything to get it. And that spells trouble for the ones who have it…i.e. US.

  Manny and I therefore beat a hasty retreat back upstairs. Now it’s doors shut and lights out. I’m writing from inside the bathroom just to be on the safe side. Even a little light escaping from underneath the door could be a flashing signal to these people that someone else is living here. Then, we could all be done for.

  Manny wanted to move the kids back in with him and Sandra, but they resisted. I guess they like having their own rooms. In all honesty, I think Manny and Sandra like it to. Therefore, Manny just told them to stay put and keep quiet. I was there, and I reinforced Manny’s admonishments. I didn’t want to scare the youngsters, but I also want them to be aware of the type of people with whom we might be dealing. They’re at that naïve age where everyone is still good and well-intentioned. They haven’t been around the block yet. And I don’t want their first trip to be one they don’t make it back from.

  I have a feeling I’m going to have trouble sleeping tonight. The fact that we have unwelcome visitors downstairs, paired with my having rested all afternoon for our big adventure outside the hotel means that I’m really not all that tired. Maybe I’ll sneak back downstairs and see what our guests are up to. I want to make sure that they aren’t getting too close to our position up here. I’m nervous that some of them might set up camp too close to our spot and then we’ll be trapped in our rooms. I was thinking that maybe we should move down to the basement. I doubt that many people will be searching for supplies down there. And we’ll have an access route through the sidewalk g
rate up to the street if we have to jump ship unexpectedly. I think it would be a lot easier call to make if it was just me on my own. But having a family in tow makes decisions much harder. Maybe I should just ditch them. But I wouldn’t feel right doing that. Plus, I’d have to leave a lot of my supplies behind. Damn it! Decisions are so much harder these days. Sometimes I just don’t know what to do anymore.

  Okay, if I sit writing here on this toilet much longer, my legs are going to fall asleep completely. I already feel the tingling sensation radiating through my ass and into the bottom of my thighs. Soon my legs will be so deadened that I’ll have to stumble out of here like a drunkard.

  11:49 p.m.

  As I feared, our uninvited guests have moved up higher inside the hotel. While I was making my way downstairs to see what the situation was, I heard a noise coming from the eighth floor as I passed in the stairwell. The sound was like a loud thumping.

  Therefore I stopped off along my way to inspect, carefully peeking out of the stairwell exit before creeping down the eighth floor hallway. As I made it to a corner in the hall, I poked my head around to ensure the coast was clear.

  It wasn’t.

  There was a group of five men standing in front of one of the doors about halfway down the hall. Several of them held flashlights trained on one of the guest room doors. I watched under the cover of darkness from my position. The glow of the flashlights illuminated several of them as they stood facing one another. They held something between them. I couldn’t see what it was until I heard one of them say, “One…two…three!” Then they swung back one of those police-style battering rams you see them use in television cop shows to bust into drug dealer dens when they’re conducting a raid. These guys weren’t as efficient as the police, and it took them several attempts (thus the thumping I’d been hearing from the stairwell) to batter open the room door before which they were standing.