From the journal of John Archer, the Archivist, July 25

July 25, 2017

     Yesterday, while going through the stuff left from Charlie's group, I found a journal kept by Carla. It was fascinating reading. It started back in 2016 and was a normal journal for a year, with sporadic entries about regular life stuff. Movies she'd seen, dates she went on. Turns out Irene was her half sister and there were entries about going to her house for birthday parties for Mason, Faith and another child that wasn't with them any longer, Hope.

Picture of Carla found in her journal

     I skimmed through the entries before the pandemic, just to see if she was normal, or if she was already showing signs of mental illness. From her entries, she was just a normal, thirty-something, secretary, living paycheck to paycheck. Charlie and Irene were married and threw parties where they tried to set Carla up with some of their friends, raised their kids and lived their suburban lives.

     After the pandemic, everything changed. Carla wrote that Charlie had always had possessive tendencies and was a conspiracy buff, but as soon as the news reported that the dead were rising, he went straight to survivalist. He unlocked the gun safe that no one else had been in before and pulled out a arsenal. He left the house and came back with a Humvee pulling a loaded, enclosed trailer full of supplies from a storage unit Irene knew nothing about. He made them all pack clothes, food and anything else he thought might be useful and then loaded them into the Humvee and headed to his grandfathers cabin in the mountains.

     Hope died on the way to the cabin when they were surrounded by a small horde of undead at a corner store they had stopped to search. Shortly after that, they ran into a group of seven, a family of four, two twenty-something college students and a retired doctor. They traveled with them for a couple of weeks before food started to become sparse and Charlie started telling Irene and Carla that they were holding food back from their family and they were going to take out Charlie and the others for whatever they had. He pushed them and pushed them that they needed to take out the others first, before it was too late. Eventually, he convinced them and they ended up ambushing the family and the college students, but tried to keep the doctor alive. He killed himself shortly afterward to escape from Charlie and his small group.

     After that, it became their habit to join a small group for a few days, then kill them for their supplies. With each one they took out, the journal became darker and less human, more evil and self serving. Charlie had spent hours each day preaching at them about how this pandemic was God's punishment for the sinners and it was their duty to help him take out the sinners who were still alive. The zombies were the righteous and some day soon, when Charlie felt they had sacrificed enough people to God, they would join the righteous undead and continue doing God's work. He pounded it into their heads and kept them as isolated from others as he could, unless they were trying to fool a group into accepting them.

     Our group was just one more in a long line of groups they'd tried to “join” and were planning on killing. They just didn't know how many people we have. They only saw a few of us and assumed that we were all there was in the compound. If they had managed to take our little group out, they would've been really surprised how many people they would've been up against.

     Reading Carla's journal made me feel that we had no choice about executing them. They wouldn't have stopped and lots of other people would've suffered because of them. Sad, to read her journal was to read the disintegration of a human being into a mindless, psychopath. Sad.

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