It's the stillness that gets to you first. After a life in the age if sound and colour the world seems faded. In every sense. At night the silence becomes intolerable. Almost like a physical thing, creeping into your ears and expanding. You dig in your fingers to relieve it. So much blood can come from an ear. Finding a place with some sound is a luxury. I wish I had never learned to speak. I found an old train once, it creaked and moaned even when there was no wind. It was a friend to me in a world of hostility. The seats still had padding and some were big enough to lay strait. I stayed there with a stockpile of food from the end of summer until late winder, nursing my leg back to health from the last raid I had done. Quick in, quick out. Shadow person. I fed a few scraps to some rats and gave them names, what were their names in Cinderella? I can't remember. Fed them up and they trusted me. They were a good source of protein when I left. I kind of regret that. I'd like to go back there this winter, but the train was yellow and most likely some group have found it and claimed it. They may have even gotten it working again. Taken it elsewhere. In a world so still and lifeless it's surprising how much effort can be wasted on something that is too far gone to save. Nothing is permanent but the passing of the day. Even the silence isn't permanent and some nights you pray for it's return. Those nights when they are out there, there is not much you can do but listen. On the darkest nights of summer they are insane, much louder. Digging into corpses and eating each other. Winter slows them. But winter slows me.
He was resting on the tracks when I found him, maybe he was rusted into being motionless, maybe no one could have moved him. All the windows were covered in dirt and stained green from the rain fall. The station platform was an old cobbled stone one, with wooden shelters and and a stone clock tower, frozen at eight forty five. Weeds and grass had pushed up against the cobble leveling to create a surface much more challenging to the foot. A tree had started growing from the door of Carriage A, it was only little more than a bush really. A snow had fallen unseasonably for a few days now, hiding the greenery from view creating more danger. I was more wary of being followed than running into one of them, so I was lax. What I saw... The cold had frozen one to a chair. She was strapped in anyway with electrical wire, a note frozen on the seat next to her. The wire had dug into her flesh.
I need to keep moving on. Stay still, get caught. There is not a lot of fight left in me now, not after all of this. I'm staying in someone's old apartment tonight. One of those small apartment blocks above shops, like the one I lived in when I was nineteen. Other peoples possessions still here after all this time, dusty but unmoved. Some canned fruit, not bad yet. I may save it, it will be my birthday soon. Not that I know for sure. I've pushed the sofa to the door and this is where I will sleep. The window prepped with rope. A loss of rope better than a loss of life. Or perhaps not? Check the pipes for water, only a small amount but better than none. Boil it. I've been looking at their photographs. A couple lived here about my age. They are slightly overweight and don't look like they love each other very much. I guess all relationships get like that. I wonder if they broke up or if they are still out there fighting together, longing for the days that they fought each other. If they are alive they will have to fight until they are dead. Or they have become one of them. I wish I could find them when this is all over. Though I don't think I will see that day, if it ever comes. We could have a drink and look back at the past few years and laugh about it. Laugh off all of those we loved and lost and those we were robbed of ever meeting, like the good old days of news papers, jokes and memes. This couple are two of my best friends, the third is a train.
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