Author's Preface
15th March 2022
Cairn and Christine finally gave me my first official job in this new world: laundry.
Yep, that's right. Washing people's clothes even their smalls. It is actually surprising how much dirt can migrate into fabric. It's like the clothes are trying to soak up the apocalypse. The fabric holds onto this rank smell of rotten eggs, which is bizarre considering we haven't even seen a real egg, let alone a rotten one, in weeks.
I spent hours today with my arm throbbing, scrubbing out stains I didn't want to identify in a plastic tub of freezing water.
There's something deeply humbling, and slightly gross, about handleing the group's underwear. I used to spend my afternoons wondering which shade of lip gloss matched a client's skin tone; now, I'm wondering if I can get the scent of sulfur and old sweat out of a pair of M&S boxers. It's not exactly the brave survivor role I imagined for myself, but I guess even the end of the world needs someone to do the washing and let's not even talk about that time of the month in the middle of the apocalypse.
Rachael is a bitch on a good day, but trying to convince her that you actually need a pack of sanitary pads is like... well, it's like trying to get blood out of a sheet. She treats every item in the stockroom like it's a bar of gold she's personally mined. I had to stand there, feeling my face heat up, while she looked at me with that cold, judgmental stare as if I were choosing to have a cycle just to annoy her.
"We have to ration, Pauline," she snapped, like I was asking for a luxury spa day and not a basic human necessity.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tell her that if I don't get them, I'll just end up with more stains to scrub out of my laundry bucket tomorrow but I just stood there, clutching my arm, and waited for her to decide if I was worthy of a bit of cotton and plastic.
It's funny I used to worry about whether my eyeliner was even. Now, my entire dignity is at the mercy of a woman who hasn't smiled since Christmas. You know what's worse than haggling with a stone-cold bitch? Mike. I know I bitch about him a lot, but they just let him hide away in his corner like he's part of the furniture.
"He's special," Cairn said to me today, his voice low and cautious.
Special, my arse. I think they're all just scared of him deep down. They aren't respecting his boundaries; they're avoiding a confrontation. He sits there behind those winter coats, and you can feel the air around him hum. It's like he's a bomb ready to explode, and we're all just going about our business, scrubbing laundry and rationing pads, pretending there isn't a fuse burning down in the corner of the office. Cairn tries to act like the brave soldier, but I saw the way his hand twitched toward his holster when Mike shifted his weight earlier. Even the hero is waiting for the blast.
Special, my arse. I think they're all just scared of him deep down. They aren't respecting his boundaries; they're avoiding a confrontation. He sits there behind those winter coats, and you can feel the air around him hum. It's like he's a bomb ready to explode, and we're all just going about our business, scrubbing laundry and rationing pads, pretending there isn't a fuse burning down in the corner of the office. Cairn tries to act like the brave soldier, but I saw the way his hand twitched toward his holster when Mike shifted his weight earlier. Even the hero is waiting for the blast.
17th March 2022
We walked in on Mike yesterday having some sort of breakdown. His smooth, sickly hands were clutched to his head as if he were trying to rip his own skin apart. Then there were the noises-those horrid, wailing sounds that reminded me of a drowning whale.
He seemed to be muttering in a strange language. I asked Christine if he was foreign-maybe French-but she just looked at me blankly and told me she wasn't sure. Apparently, the bloke has only said a handful of words since he arrived. It's unnerving. We're all trapped in this space together, and we don't even know if the man in the corner is speaking a language from another country or something else entirely.