Rose Blumen ~

(Luka)

The holidays that had been nice for so long, they turned to hell. The week of vomiting without being able to leave the bed was the easy part...

After the others had left, it went worse. We struggled to stand, depleting what little was left of our food here.

A growing mountain of rubbish accumulated in a closet below our main dormitory. Bugs were multiplying already. The days were quiet as we simply lied, trying to rest and recover.

The nights though turned more horrific...

Animals were growling or moaning in the streets. Louder every passing night. Rattling at the doors, barking, trying to get in...

A sense of threat and doom was growing very badly and rapidly.

We reached the point of no return, with bugs multiplying in corners, and other things weirdly growing where water was leaking.

Our friends had left a few days ago already, and we never saw them return nor any other help coming for us. The communications were still cut with our machines.

Now we really needed to make our way back to base camp on our own, or we would begin to risk starving here.

Shura and I were the ones most able to stand on these days. I was sweating a lot. Everything was stinking.

We excited the room and went across the dirty corridors of that shady hospital. Its colours had been changing all this time, making me feel like the building itself was turning alive to swallow us.

We were nervous, still holding our nausea every step of the way.

Yura had given us his biologic sensor, that he had more or less recalibrated. Everything now was way higher than in the past. If things got even worse than they already were on a germ exposure level, this tool should warn us. There's only so deep a sceptic tank can go I thought, when he handed me that, but I thanked him anyway. If it reaches smallpox levels of noxiousness, it should warn us. Hopefully before we definitely empty ourselves.

The group crawled its way to the hall, where the hospital opened to the street outside. But the morning sunlight made everyone feel uncomfortable. Walking outside and breathing fresh air should be good, but it was painful, and we weren't sure of what was strolling around at night. So when to go away was hard to say. We could barely walk, but were running out of food anyway.

Shura pushed the heavy doors open again this day.

We saw from outside the marks of claws all over them, and stains of mouldy stuff that clearly weren't there in the previous days. Nor everywhere around the streets we looked at again, there were these new stains that were nowhere when we were fooling around in town. The streets themselves we could barely recognise.

There's a thick layer of mud with fresh grass growing on it now, covering like a new carpet most of the empty streets grounds.

The three others in the group waited inside and by the bus stop at best, feeling dizzy just walking a few metres outside. Shura and I managed on this day to push forward. Hopefully we can make it to base camp before the night.

~

The streets looked desolate before. Now it was worse. It's like a century had passed in our handful sick nights.

L - Maybe the lake and river levels grew and flooded the streets...

S - That's weird. These new lichens and mushrooms have grown so fast. And look, there again.

We see footsteps that are not exactly of shoes we would wear, nor any animal we recognize.

And they've been clawing and scratching the doors of every other building at night, not just the hospital on this street.

They try to open doors?

We're worried, but walk our way north toward the hills, through this place that feels changed, to reach hopefully the outer wall and camp before nightfall.

A bad fog more typical of our season has risen and taken the city. I guess the warm weather we had lately finally ends.

We see the thin clouds of a plane in the high sky, although they seem to change to weirder colours before they vanish. I'm probably just dizzy.

Our phones found connection for a few moments since we went outside, but not enough to really connect back. We still don't know what is going on.

By the small bridge in the woods, over a small stream, we find a gutted body. We stepped back in shock at first.

We recognise some footsteps beside and around, but the dead beast there, not quite.

L - What the hell is that...

It's a weird dead animal, like a small boar in rough appearance perhaps, with uneven teeth that are like broken bones. The skeleton has turned translucent where it protrudes from the putrefying flesh. It's been there for a while, liquefying in places and releasing an awful stench.

As we got closer, Yura's tool began to ring an alert. It tells us this odd animal without fur now decomposing is hazardous. No shit, it's like its skin is crawling away from it from within. We're not touching it.

But it does worry us.

This bulging dog of a weirdest kind, it's been more teeth than legs, and more like ripped flesh than tail.

We move onward, while this thing still decomposes in slithering shades under the sun. It's like there's a swarm of maggots eating it inside.

And sadly not far further, we find the dead body of one of our friends. Or what's been left of it. It's even worse, it's a massacre.

S - Fuck...

We pass the shock since there's clearly nothing left to do. We don't want to linger here. It's horrible, even if we didn't know him very well. But now we just don't want to risk ending up the same, and we walk away in more fear than sorrow honestly.

My phone caught some pieces of a message from my mother, but it's corrupted and unreadable. She was probably worried...

I keep sweating profusely and feeling dizzy. We're getting lost through the forest, more often than expected, but we finally reach it.

The old white wall, bleached on this side.

And then the camp where we had left a crane near, with many crates and supplies.

The ladder is gone. The crane has fallen, broken. We can't use it to climb up our way across anymore. We're stuck inside...

And the remaining supplies have been wrecked and scattered all around by wild animals.

Shura holds tighter in his hand the key to his car. It's still somewhere on the other side, most likely. But the ladder we had here probably was left on the other side by one of the friends that left. The crane from Orel's truck is at our feet, not looking like it can be saved.

We're stuck inside the lazaretto... There's no more supplies, and night will fall way before we make it back to the others in the hospital.

We're hearing light steps and odd moans somewhere in the woods around.

Now things really turned bad.

~