Journal Entry #3 (Original Dystopian Story)

July 24, 2023 8:04pm

I haven’t been able to write for a couple of days. There was a bit of an “incident” and I was made to relocate. I’ve made my way now into central Oregon and I’ve only now started to feel safe again. As if I didn’t already have enough to worry about, I woke up the morning of the 21st to a MASSIVE column of black smoke to the North. Under normal circumstances, this sort of thing wouldn’t worry me, the fire department would handle it and my day to day life would be unchanged. As I’m sure you are aware by now though, these aren’t normal circumstances. I am fully aware of what lies to the North of Richland Washington. While many people are aware of the Hanford nuclear site and the cleanup effort that has been ongoing now for years many people are unaware of the fact that Energy Northwest operates, or used to operate I suppose, a huge nuclear power plant in very close proximity to that site. I knew this day would come to be honest. I didn’t hold any illusions that the ticking time bomb to the North of me would keep operating without human intervention. I didn’t expect it to melt down this soon but then again, I’m no scientist. Long story short, I have been running from that shadow of a cloud for these days I’ve been absent. Who knows, maybe in 30-40 years I’ll be able to go home. But I don’t think I’ll live that long anymore. Now days I’m an old man. You don’t live past your prime anymore they make sure of that.

I’ve never really gone into great detail what they are. To be honest with you, I don’t really know. I figured that if you’re reading this you probably have a pretty good idea what’s out there but if you’re sheltered enough to be in the dark I guess I’ll tell you what I know. For millennia humanity has been the apex predator on Earth. Until last year that was true. When people started disappearing in the night at first police treated it like kidnappings or crimes. They couldn’t have known there was a much more sinister creature lurking in the darkness than man.

Before the world came to a standstill there were whispers of sightings that floated on the internet in chatrooms and creepypastas. Originally they were fantastical tellings that seemingly ascribed many great and terrifying stories to a single mythical creature called The Rake. Now I know that these sightings were not of a single creature but of many creatures. I don’t know what changed between then and now. I don’t know why they no longer hide in the dark recesses of human myth. One of the earlier accounts describe them as a man or a large hairless dog. That does them no justice. They may look humanoid but they are anything but. They can slink through the darkness without a sound and steal into homes through windows without even waking the dog they were compared to. Rakes are fast, ruthless and terrifying beyond imagining. The only thing I can imagine that pushed us to where we are today is that perhaps they got a taste for man. They seem to reproduce at an alarmingly high rate but I have no way of knowing any exact gestation periods. I do know that once they became bold enough to attack and take people out of the night there were too many of them to be stopped. There were entire small towns that blinked off the map overnight. The remnants of the horrorshow is all that people found. Blood and gore covering beds walls and floors. The homes that they weren’t able to sneak into they forced their way in through doors and windows. There were seldom any survivors to tell the tale of what they saw. The government didn’t know how to handle this. Mankind was hunted to extinction. Was it aliens, mad scientists or mother nature? Who knows and I’m not qualified to make that assessment. I’m writing this by the candle light from the trunk of my car. They don’t seem to come out during the day if they don’t have to but at night they hunt. The only reason I’ve made it this long is I’ve always been a paranoid man. I used to tell Joan “It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.” I miss her so much.

Photo found on creepypasta.

Journal Entry #1: https://steemit.com/fiction/@akuda/journal-entry-1-mountain-money-original-work-2017719t121847784z

Journal Entry #2: https://steemit.com/fiction/@akuda/journal-entry-2-original-dystopian-story

Please let me know if you enjoyed reading this, it's really just an experiment at this point but I would love to continue to write more. Thanks! Akuda