It has been 3 months since the mutation. Supply is running low. I’m afraid I will have to go out hunting. The only wild game large enough to feed me for more than a day is a deer, but to catch a deer I’ll have to fight a Titan Tick for it. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but word from the grapevine is they’ve started to conjoin with the the Kamikaze Beetle, making all my ammo effectively worthless. I’ve heard swords and spears work, with enough thrust in the right spots. Now I just need to figure out where I‘m suppose to get one. Or make one.

With an old cane, a kitchen knife, screws and a bit of ingenuity, James Sixir made one. It took a bit of whittling, bit of elbow grease, but he made his makeshift spear.

A nightmare tore at him that night. The memory. He wasn’t fast enough. He pushed himself, and pushed, and finally flung himself, but he couldn’t save him. The aliens had come and released some chemical into the sky. All of the Arthropods in the world began to rapidly mutate, increasing in size exponentially. The heaviest he had seen was a Hydra Beetle; they had swollen almost 5 feet tall about 7 1/2 feet wide and roughly 25 feet long, and they weighed nearly two tons. The tallest was the Bishop’s Mantis, which had grown to 15 feet tall.

He had been picking up his brother when it hit; from all around he could hear screaming, but that wasn’t what scared him. It was the thunderous beating of wings. Standing on the wall of the school was a Giant Mosquito, targeting his brother. The newly-named Hawk Mosquito started flying at him, and well, James didn’t make it in time. The long, wire legs of he mosquito curled and ensnared his brother. As its piercing mouth tore a hole through his posterior, medial back, just inferior to the scapula, all the way down to his aorta.

I fear my time is coming. The agony is worse, the claws of a bishop’s mantis would be better than this. I cannot sleep anymore. If the hellish pests rampaging doesn’t rip my eyes open, the night terrors do. The Katydid Mimics won’t let me forget nor move on. His scream… His scream is terrible, like walking along a field of broken glass and discarded needles, pain writhing through my head until I scream. But I can’t scream, can I? Then I’ll be just there with him. Dead.

That hadn’t been the only tragedy to happen to Sixir since the apocalypse. There was reason he was alone. Everyone he had been with, friends, family, his girlfriend. They had all been killed out there. Some he saw, some he didn’t, but all ended the same. The worst of these, apart from his brother, had been his mom. He had run home after his brother’s untimely demise. Too late, of course.

Inside, he found husks. The skin, the bone. The thought of what the spiders had done was to gruesome to bear. And from that day he decided to be alone.

Waking up for the final time that night, he decided to make his attack. To stray his mind from the carnage he’d seen, he thought of what to do for food. While he knew he could hunt, he had remembered seeing a delivery truck crashed, just about three miles down the road.

He had reached the container without trouble. He saw a kamikaze beetle, but it passed him by. Prying open the door, though, he was met with not just disappointment, but horror. Inside the container were at least two dozen moth chrysalises. They began to crack.

He ran. That was all he could do, run and pray. But there was no god that could hear him now. He saw an old, worn down house with an exposed hole that led to under the porch. He ran and dove under it. Outside he could hear the thundering of the gigantic wings.