text } Images May Disturb You: the blog of Georgia Mason, entry #1

[choosetruth]

My name is Georgia Carolyn Mason. I'm a licensed journalist from After the End Times. Five years ago, on a website that is inaccessible from this location, I started my blog and wrote my mission statement: to always tell the truth no matter the cost. For the past several months I've been following Senator Peter Ryman's presidential campaign and reporting on his progress. For the past few minutes, I had been running for my life after someone blew up my trailer. It turns out that cost was a lot higher than I ever anticipated. And that was just zombies and a government conspiracy. What will the cost be for telling this new truth: that I seem to have woken up in a literal fairytale?

I tested clean five minutes ago, and hallucinations have never been one of the symptoms of Kellis-Amberlee. I'm forced to conclude that this is, indeed happening and not a very strange dream. I would like nothing more than a way to send this information home so that our readers could know about this, but I've done my research. All sources indicate that is, for the time being, impossible. So, I suppose, I'll just have to start reporting here, and know that someday, should the opportunity arise, I'll be able to bring the news home.

In the meantime, if anyone here is a doctor, or even better an epidemiologist or virologist, I have some questions.

Comments

[choosetruth]

Yes, it's common knowledge. We do have the internet, after all, and bloggers who won't allow institutions to keep important information from the people ever again.

It seems our Rising wasn't nearly as apocalyptic as it was in other worlds. Humanity won. It took a few years but eventually everyone had either died or come around to realizing the zombie pandemic was real and the army came in with blood tests and guns and started securing whatever could still be secured. We didn't get back everything, but we got back a lot. Humanity kept going. And normal may look different now, but it does exist.

[luckynumberthree]

Yeah, see, the armies tried coming in in my world. Except it was already too late by the time they figured out this wasn't just some new strain of the flu and people telling outlandish tales. Now they're just heavily armed zombies. Electricity's pretty much gone except for places that had generators that can run for a bit. A few settlements have sprung up - I was part of one before getting dragged here. We called it Abel, it used to be a self-sustaining farmhouse, so we had most of what we needed. But there's always the danger of the more people gathering together, the bigger draw you are for the zombies. And the bigger risk of one person getting infected and wiping out the entire settlement in the span of an hour or two.

[choosetruth]

That's what blood tests are for. Once you've been in contact with the Infected you can take one to make sure you're still clean. Then you have to take them again to get into any vehicle or building or pretty much anything. Gets a little excessive at times when they're giving you another blood test after walking ten feet and not coming anywhere near anything that could possibly make you amplify, but it works.

[luckynumberthree]

That also requires a supply of blood tests. Which is great, in theory. Not so simple in practice, when no one is making anything anymore. And what they made before the plague has all either been looted or is sitting in medical supply stores and hospitals - most of which are in the center of ground zero in any given city. Or what was a city.

But still more secure and effective than giving people a once-over anytime they come back in the gate to make sure they aren't hiding a bite or a scratch.

[choosetruth]

It sounds like we've fared better than most in our apocalypse. Never really thought of us as lucky before, but I guess everything relative.

[luckynumberthree]

Isn't it just. There's someone else here who might have an apocalypse even worse than ours. We get to see them briefly, sometimes. This place likes giving us 'events', which are basically a few days' glimpse into someone's world or memories that we get to experience first hand. Just as a head's up.

[choosetruth]

Like the Wizard thing that just happened?

[Which was, apparently, not a dream.]

[luckynumberthree]

Yeah, just like that. We've got some Potters running around here in Wonderland, it's probably from one of them. Every event is different. Some of them are pretty fun. Some weird. Some dangerous as hell.

[choosetruth]

Potters. Just to clarify, are you talking about Harry Potter, as in the protagonist of that popular Pre-Rising series they made us read in school? Because while I can accept that we're in somewhere that's at the very least, heavily inspired by Alice in Wonderland, that seems like a bit of a stretch.