intercourse, any kind of food but the most iron-laden morsels (iron vitamin capsules and liver being the chieftain of these, though the supplies of such were extinguished rapidly; we knew not the importance of rationing), even thirst has become secondary.
Oh, God, the pangs. I cry out to Him -yes, even after all this has happened, the capitalization of the H seems necessary- day and night, but I find no respite. Is He ignoring me? Is He ignoring us? Has He forsaken us? Is that the reason for our disease, this Hell? These questions are not meant to be answered, for I know they won't be in my lifetime, they are meant more for your own pondering than for resolving. Why does He let bad things happen to His faithful ones? This question has plagued men for centuries, millenia even; how could I hope to answer it before we run out of iron and die the rest of the way? One day we shall know, but that day is far off, I believe, perhaps getting farther off . . .
April . . . I don't know the exact date anymore.
It surprised me how quickly I gave up trying to keep this diary updated daily. This makes three consecutive days I've written, which is a new record for me. All I know is it's some time in April. I've lost so many days. Some have been skipped altogether, slept through, some spent in hiding, others I've wasted away staring at the whitewashed walls. It's hard to keep up a reason to carry on anymore. I keep telling myself that if Nadia were still here then I'd have a reason, but I don't . . . I don't miss her company any longer, I don't desire the warmth of her skin, I don't pine for her breath on my lips. It hurts to say that, but the only thing that matters to me anymore is iron. What a wretch I am! I wish this need would leave me alone and let me long for my wife once more, for a single moment if nothing else. But even the will to mourn her absence is strangled out by this . . . This hunger.
Truly, I am a cursed man—or 'zombie', as the children preferred to call me. Many of the adults did as well, but most of them used words like 'infected', 'carrier', or even 'host'. I'm almost fond of that last one. Host. Yes, I do favor that one far above the others. It retains a measure of dignity about it. It may be an unwarranted dignity, but it lets me feel in the slightest way human again. Being human once more might not be an overly positive notion, not after what they've fed our brains.
It just occurred to me; you may very well not know what it is that we hide from. It is the sunlight. Some of us have hypothesized and come up with valid theories regarding what's happened to us. The contagion infects our marrow centers first, so our bodies no longer produce hemoglobin. Oxygen isn't carried by iron-based red blood cells anymore. We're forced to take in excessive amounts of iron to keep the oxygen flowing. Without it, our bodies rot from the inside. I've had to make due with my right hand to write with, as this atrophy has caused three of the fingers on my left to fall off. Occasionally, some of us give in to rigor mortis if we are completely inactive for too long. But the sunlight and why we hide from it, our skin is all but dead at this point, sloughing off in gray, pasty chunks like a lizard or snake shedding its skin—but we have no new skin underneath, only ashen muscle tissue and bone. The sun burns. Only on days like this can we go outside, when the cloud cover and smoke join together sufficiently to diffuse all sunlight into a dull, gray, almost post-apocalyptic ambiance. Post-apocalyptic might be a more accurate description than I intended when writing that—to us at least. Our world is all but destroyed, the streets are lit at night by the countless flames that resemble flickering Christmas lights as they fade into the horizon a mile or more down the road. Without the iron in our blood, our body temperature has fallen and we have become cold-blooded creatures of the night, “Kreatur der Nacht,” if you will, and we crave heat—just not UV rays. Littered with papers and garbage, the interiors of the buildings now employ vast numbers of canvas sheets attached to ceilings and walls to form makeshift tents and shelters, with scarcely room to walk between accommodations. The entire city now reeks of rotten flesh, mildew, smoke and stagnation. Add a sunless, cement-colored sky behind the pallid skyscrapers and the hopeless world is completed. Hope, if there ever was such a thing, is gone here. Humanity has taken it from us and left us in this desolate wasteland to die. They don't realize how much we have died; we are but souls still bound to their lifeless bodies.
We've had no electricity since . . . It couldn't have been more than a couple weeks after the outbreak. Many of the others here were able to manage with generators for a short while, but the city's power grid was not in the slightest way independent. Just outside the quarantine, a concrete wall was established with no gates, guarded by armed officers in hazmat suits and automated turrets during its erection. So many people were killed trying to escape; I'd like to think one or two survived, but that would mean the rest of humanity could likely have been infected and we'd be set free of this place, but no. No, we are still shot at if we try to scale the wall. We can't even dig out, for they shoot any diggers, throw their bodies back in the holes from which they came, then fill them in with cement. Even dogs are not shot for digging. Are we less than dogs?
Iron is getting more scarce all the time. There are breweries, where metals are left in a salt-water paste and stored, stationed around town where metal is oxidized and the rust gathered to mix with whatever delivers it to the bloodstream the quickest. Some people steeped their portions in Dimethylsulfoxide and rubbed it on the skin like a lather. The look in their eyes, the dilation of the pupils, the heavy breathing and sudden empowerment; a lot of them gave the appearance of a drug addict receiving a high. Wry smiles twisted about their faces, perhaps because they were once again able to concentrate on something aside from iron . . . But even DMSO is now a rarity, rarer than gold or diamonds.
We ran out of the iron tablets so quickly . . . I had stashed some in the apartment, but after the fourth or fifth consecutive day of it having been ransacked and looted, someone found the last of them. It's almost like contraband now; people are killed and robbed just for being suspected of carrying any kind of iron supplement on their person. If someone isn't as pale as everyone else or have all their digits, if they seem to have less than absolute lethargy about their step, then they are followed by one of these thieves to a dark alley and beaten until unconsciousness or death, then scavenged. It wasn't this bad until sometime in March. That's when people grew desperate and the muggings became common. We've learned to ignore the cries from dark corners; there are too many to heed. I tried to help once. That's when I lost two of my fingers. I'm fortunate to still be here . . . Fortunate. Such a relative term.
It's rather depressing to think of it like this; no longer is our existence considered 'living'. We aimlessly wander the streets to keep from giving over to rigor mortis. Such an existence as this is not 'alive', so then what is it? Is this perpetual death; a body that has died and yet the soul has refused to surrender its earthly bonds? We have no hope of a cure, no dreams for a normal life. Alone I wander the streets looking for a piece of steel to suck on, sometimes even a dull knife that cuts into my tongue, cheeks and lips. And why? Because this craving for iron is stronger than my craving to give up. So I still stumble about without reason, care, hope or life. What is left of life but death?
Some time in July, I presume, 2014
I found a shard of a mirror today. I had broke every mirror I could find because I was tired of seeing my face growing paler, reminding me that my body is in every way dead. I broke them all right after . . . Nadia! Oh, God, it took me a couple seconds to remember her name!
The mirror showed not a dead man anymore, but a rotting corpse. At first I did not recognize my own face. My eyes were hollow now, like that of a cornered beast in the wild, acting solely on instinct; the whites had become yellow as sulfur and the irises an oily black. My gray, bald scalp was blistered and decaying. Abscesses that never heal covered my beardless face—I once had a beard but it, too, had fallen out, along with my eyebrows. I knew myself to be hairless, for it fell out by the handful and each time I rub my scalp there is nothing but rough, foam-like skin above the soft bone tissue that h
as become almost pliable. The spots and wounds do not heal, do not scar over, they simply stay. A gash -who's origin escapes me- across my left cheek, from just below my eye to the edge of my mouth, still hung open like a butterflied piece of meat; the pale, colorless flesh underneath is somehow still moist. We can barely feel anything because our nerves have deadened almost entirely. But the sores still itch. Oh, how they itch! And the flies will not leave us alone. They come by the thousands in the heat and swarm over our bodies. Some of them land and begin to press themselves against us and vibrate, presumably laying eggs in any exposed sores they can find about us. I won't go into detail about what happened the first time an egg hatched in one of them. It still causes nightmares, when they allow me to sleep. Even makeshift mosquito nets don't keep them all out.
I have not spoke a word to anyone or eaten in days. I'm not sure if anyone has, because the last known nonperishable food items ran out last week. I've scoured every inch of this and the neighboring buildings for something left in a cabinet or drawer or