Couldn't sleep at all last night thanks to probably the most disturbing nightmare I've ever had. In the dream, Kat and I were having sex. She was straddling me, while I had my hands gripped on her breasts. She was riding me so hard, her long hair - which miraculously grew back - flopped over head covering her face. All of a sudden, I felt her breasts go to mush in my hands, and the simple gravity of my raised arms was enough to tear her breasts off her. Her skin began changing color, veins of jaundiced yellow moving up her body while streaks of gangrenous green cascaded down. Patches of her skin began falling off and she took one of her hands off me, holding it front of her as the flesh peeled back from the bones like a banana. She threw her hair back, revealing her face, but it wasn't her's. It was Johanna's, her mouth slit from corner to corner with decay revealing rotted teeth. She looked straight at me and shrieked, "LOOK WHAT YOU'VE DONE!" and plunged her skeleton of a hand into her chest pulling out her heart, shriveling with each dying pulse. She bit into it like a ravenous animal devouring an apple, and then vomited pitch black bile on me.
That's when I jolted awake with a short scream. The motion of me jerking up was enough to rouse Kat. She instantly had a look of alarm on her face asking me if I was OK, and I told her, "I just had a bad dream, is all," and to go back to sleep. She really wanted to know what I dreamt about, but I refused. Reluctantly, she went back to sleep, but all I did was lay down and stare at the wall. Until sun up.
After breakfast, Carmello, Dustin and I headed west out to the woods to look for signs of more zombies. As we were patrolling, I mentioned that maybe we should work on constructing some kind of barrier that would protect us from the being attacked from the west. We could find abandoned cars and line them up and fill up the gaps with dirt or boards or something. Carmello thought it was a good idea, but we'd have to talk about some more and come up with a precise plan on how to do that.
Roaming around for a couple of hours bore no results, which meant good results. We decided to go fishing after that. To be honest, I never fished before in my life, but when you're trying to survive, you welcome every opportunity to learn something new. We headed up north to the Susquehanna River where Dustin gave me a rod and taught me how to get started. I flat out sucked at first, couldn't quite grasp the concept of how to properly cast the line. Once I got it down, though, beginner's luck! I caught a huge smallmouth bass after just a few minutes, but that was all I caught. Figures. Still, we ended up having a nice dinner from it. Augustina's amazing with fish.
But about an hour or two into our fishing, we saw something that spooked us a great deal. Two freshies were on the opposite side of the river. It was more than a thousand feet across, so it was hard to make out the details, but something about them seemed different. They weren't agitated when they saw us and made no effort to try to reach us. I've never seen a zombie swim before, but something tells me these two could if they wanted to. They were making noises towards one another, a series of guttural growls and clicks, like how you click the back of your throat. It didn't seem like simple communication, like when a zombie moans to alert other zombies that they found something. No, they were talking to each other. It wasn't the first time I've heard it, but it was to Dustin and Carmello.
A few draggers came from behind them and a couple of them began wading into the river, but there was a current and when they got waste high, they lost their footing and were swept away. The third would have joined them, but one of the freshies grabbed him and bit him on the shoulder. I've seen freshies eat draggers a few times as a result of extreme hunger and not being able to find live food, but this one didn't eat him. It let him go, who then returned to try to cross the river in vein. I suddenly had a very bad feeling of what I just witnessed, that feeling where a bucket of ice instantly materializes in your stomach. I looked to both Dustin and Carmello and without saying a word, we packed up and made haste back to the hospital.
Something bad is happening... and I have no idea what.
I spent the night with Kat, and we began talking about the future. I told her I still thought we should head to California and disappointed as she was, she understood. She tried to kiss me, but every time she did, I pulled back hesitantly. She asked what was wrong, and I just said I had some things on my mind, old memories surfacing and I told her about the weirdness across the river. I know it's weird for a man to say this, but I wasn't in the mood. I didn't tell her anything about the nightmare nor the guilt that I'm feeling about sleeping with Kat when I still am unable to let go of Johanna.
And there's Cheyenne. She waited for the rare moment Kat and I weren't together, and then she approached me in a hallway as I was taking a walk. She pushed me against a utility closet door and opened it, causing me to stumble backwards with her coming in right after me. She wrapped her arms around me as she spoke to me for the first time. "I'm going to fuck your brains out." Yeah, that was the first thing, the very first thing, she said to me. I seriously don't need this right now. With all the shit on my mind, the last thing I need is this mysterious stranger throwing herself at me. It was all I could do to get her off me, and I had to keep her from unzipping my pants and pulling myself out of them. After finally realizing she wasn't going to have her way, she backed up to the closed door and slid down and put her hands in her face and wept. Finally, I got to learn her story.
Kat assumed she was a prostitute, and that's exactly what she was. She was working the streets in Atlanta, but it was taking a serious toll on her psychologically. Most of the girls she worked with became numb to sex. They simply used it as a tool to do their jobs, but Cheyenne became addicted to it. She needed it, and sought it out, sometimes violently even from people that weren't her clients. A literal nymphomaniac, she even sought more sex than her pimp could handle. The only time she was able to snap out of her endorphin-fueled high was when she was with a client who suddenly became sick. I guess being thrown up on in the middle of sex is enough to ruin the mood for anyone. It's when she returned to her pimp and had sex with him afterward, she learned she was a carrier. She spread the vivensmortua virus to him through sexual intercourse. The zombie virus is an STD as well, apparently. Yet, even being a Typhoid Mary of the zombie variety, it wasn't enough to quell her cravings. In fact, she craved more, entering a destructive state and seeking to infect as many people as she could. She went insane.
After she told me all of this, she began to lift her shirt up, but I immediately grabbed her hands to prevent her from doing so. She said she needed to show me something, so after a few seconds, I took my hands off her wrists and let her take her shirt off. What I saw made me put my hand to my mouth. All across her stomach and sides and her ribs were long scars, three to four inches, in columns of roughly 15. I counted at least 12 columns that I could see. She said that this was her way of fighting off her temptations. Every time she lusted, she would take a knife and make a new cut, deep enough to bleed but not deep enough to need stitches. She focused on the pain until the wound stopped bleeding, and then she'd reopen it. Most of the time when she was feeling horny, she would reach under her shirt and rub her stomach to feel the bumps of her scars and that would be enough to calm her. There were times where she just couldn't take it. She took my hand and placed it on the right side of her left breast and winced a bit. I pulled my hand back when I felt a bit of moisture. Turning my hand over, I saw her blood. I was her newest cut.
So, she's shy as a protective measure. She said she tried to throw herself at all the men in the hospital before, even Nicholas, but they all turned her down. They didn't know about her history, nor her scars, but I asked why she decided to tell me. She said she felt she had to tell me after seeing me wake from the coma because like her, I knew what death was like. I asked her if she had a near death experience too. She said no. She WAS Death. That gave me the worst case of goosebumps I ever had. I told her she couldn't keep on going like this, and she agreed. She knew. She got up and let me out, but didn't follow. That girl scares me more than a freshie right now.
Kat is hounding me for info. She wants to really know what's going on in my head. I'm not ready to tell her about my nightmare just yet. I'm definitely not telling her about Cheyenne. I just said to her that I'm simply not ready to talk about some things and she hurmphed at me and went to bed without so much as a good night. I just want one good night's rest. I especially need it after this fucked up day.
Until tomorrow.
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