Day 711

Know your place, keep it memorised and secret.
Visualise the number of paces it will take you to get there, the seconds it takes to conceal yourself.
Etch the number of breaths you can take into your memory, how much air is there.

Your place was far away from your family's places.
To be separate is to be safer, attachments are weakness, if you see your loved ones in the herd don't cry.
You grew up hearing that every day.

Your place was never as hidden as you'd like, never as secret as the others.
Sometimes when the crusty lumps that were once humans came looking, they'd stare right at you.
Their eyes bulged out of their heads, wide like a frightened dog and bloodshot like one drink too many.

You'd clench the blanket with seasonal leaves sewn into it to match the forest floor and count your breath.
The rotting log you were under concealed you well enough but for the small peephole you needed.
Nobody else would tell you when the herd had moved on, of it they had moved on.

One less survivor meant more supplies for everyone else.
Occasionally someone would do the underhanded necessity of sabotaging someone's place.
Their screams never carried on for long - the only mercy the herds knew was to kill quick.

They liked their meat fresh and bloody enough to stain all down their fronts.
At least it makes it easier for us to smell them coming or hear the flies that follow them in clouds.
Made it easier for your scent to be disguised or entirely smothered by their stench.

Sometimes when warning texts came through it wouldn't be a herd, just a couple of stragglers or freshers.
The freshers fumbled about, easy to avoid but the stragglers were the ones you had to watch out for the most.
If they were too brutal for a herd to accept you could be certain that you'd be better off killing yourself.

Then the herds began to disband, the straggling kind came every day with no respite.
Just as everyone had gotten used to the rules this new society imposed, just as a generation was raised on it.
It became easier to forget your place and work around them when there were fewer or otherwise camp.

New routines were established, new rules and lessons and things settled once again for a time.
The new code was to run, to lure the stragglers into pits under the settlements to tunnels that led far away.
Scores were kept and those who lured the most into the tunnels were considered heroes.

Then they changed the rules again, swept the rug out from under us and sliced our numbers in thirds.
Before they wouldn't look about too carefully, they saw something and stared until it was truly gone.
Now they turn their heads, tilt them 180 degrees and they plan.

You can see it in their eyes now when they look you up and down like they never used to.
The way they glance left and right as they head for you, watching for your potential exits or closer prey.
And believe me, there's always closer prey, always someone too young, to old, to fed up to run away.