To Split Rock Lighthouse-12

(From an entry labelled April 5th, 2013)

I’m still on the boat. It’s currently tied to a dock at a place somewhere that used to be Canada, and the endless winter weather not only abated, but Spring hit like a lion. Sure, it’s still cold here on the lake but the snow’s gone and with it the winter chill. The days are notably longer and Ken’s told me of survivor communities setting up crops. As for myself, I’ve been thinking of what to do now, and I’ve bugged Ken with questions as part of making sense of what happened.

Ken did me a solid and cleaned out the Lighthouse. If I want to go back, I can and Ken said he’d be okay with me doing that, but he would rather that I start over somewhere else. I’m inclined to take his advice and do that. Fake borders, lines on maps and such, don’t matter anymore so I think I’ll stay up here in Canada for now. This place where I’m docked has a small survivor group here, mostly made up of border folk so it’s mixed American and Canadian people- and, quite frankly, those things don’t matter anymore either. We’re just people now.

While Yuki’s truly dead and gone now—Ken made sure of that—the zombies are not. Out here they’re few and far between, but the thing is that everyone that was alive when the disaster hit—with some exceptions, such as Ken—is cursed (for lack of a better term) to turn and rise once they die. I’m not sure if that’s going to be true for babies conceived, but not yet born, and if it’s true of children we make now then shit is going to be bad for generations yet. However, Ken told me about something that makes this worse: the zombies has a leader, a dominant will that runs the dead as a hive-mind entity. Ken calls it “The Necromancer” and says that he’s fought this thing once already, escaping what used to be the Twin Cities—where this Necromancer rules from—and is now an increasingly alien necropolis.

Ken’s also taken me aside and given me some praise for keeping it together through all of this crazy stuff. He thinks that I’d be an asset to this group of survivors, and says I should stay here for a while at the very least to finish recovering from it. There’s a couple of head-doctors here, so at the least I can talk it out. Keeping this journal is also something he said was a smart thing to do, as it let me shed a lot of stress that would otherwise have crushed my mind and driven me nuts. I haven’t flipped out, drunk myself to death or otherwise killed myself, managed to adapt in very adverse conditions and so on and Ken respects that. At this time, I really needed to hear that I’m not a useless fleshbag marking time until I switch teams.

Time to take on the future.

To Split Rock Light house-11

(From an entry dated March 26th, 2013)

I have to write something. I can’t not write something. I have other way to make sense of what happened. What happened is impossible, yet I saw it and I know damn well that Derren Brown and Chris Angel are just flesh-eating walking corpses now so this was not a trick. It was real, it happened, and I have to write something to make sense of it or I will go mad.

The plan was a very simple plan. Ken would hide. Yuki would find me and do whatever she wanted. I would buy time by playing dumb-but-scared and make her talk. Then Ken would jump out of hiding and kill her. All I had to do was keep talking, and keep her talking, any way I could that didn’t put me into a hostage scenario. Simple plan, easy to make work, right? Ken even said “Don’t worry about the plan. I’ll handle the contingencies.”

Well, I’m glad that Ken didn’t put much effort into the plan because it went South, and I’m now certain Ken expected it to go bad. Sure enough, she showed up, and she showed up looking like she’s a sweet little girl in kindergarten or something about that age. Nonetheless, she showed up cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West as she glided across the water towards this boat, her long hair flowing in the winter winds keeping her aloft. Yeah, I remember it that vividly; you would too if you thought she was keen on killing you, hoping to escape certain death somehow.

No subtlety here; she flew to me, to the boat, and landed on the deck with a snowy flourish. I don’t think that this is how the old Japanese tales depicted her, but Hollywood happens to everything- even after the end of the world- I guess. Sanity is not on good terms with reality as I write this entry. Yuki saw me and moved to seize me, and I screamed like a teen-aged Jamie Lee Curtis just as Ken asked me to, which somehow flipped Yuki’s brain over to her exuberant girlfriend mode. She asked why I freaked out, and I pointed out the obvious to her, which somehow did not register.

You know that scene in the domestic violence made-for-TV movies where the abuser lays on the lovey-dovey guilt trip, the “Baby why you make me so crazy?” routine? Yeah, that. She told me that she loved me, wanted have all the babies—yes, “all the babies”, verbatim; I’d focus on being bred like a bull by an inhuman thing—and never wanted to hurt me. She just wants to be with me, that all this is just making her crazy, and we can work out- you know the routine by now.

All this, by the way, coming out of the mouth of a kindergarten-aged girl. Creepy is an understatement.

Then Ken jumps her, impales a jade shard into her head and smiles. Apparently he did loot the museum.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-10

(From an entry dated March 7th, 2013)

This world is insane.

Ken—that zombie-eating guy—used me to finish what remained of Yuki. It’s as if this whole disaster changed the laws of physics and he got the “crazy genre savvy” superpower, and being turned into a monster-eating white-like-snow mutant is just being Blessed With Suck. He knows that this is a horror movie turned to life, so he’s using the genre rules to his advantage. No wonder he’s hated, feared and—grudgingly—respected. He’s told me, in no uncertain terms, that he doesn’t expect me to get out of this in one piece; he said that my body language and attitude gives off “hapless chump” vibes, and he promised to put me down if it came to that. Cold comfort indeed.

The plan relies on the ties I had to Yuki. Specifically, that I slept with her and produced a child. Snow maidens don’t need to obey the rules of human gestation, so it’s quite likely that Yuki survived by birthing herself—that makes my head hurt—and starting over. Because demons, apparently. I still think he’s fine with letting me die so he has more monsters to eat, but it’s not like I have anywhere to run as I’m still stuck on a boat just off shore of Lake Superior. If I make it out alive, I’m going to run as far as I can from everything and everyone and be a hermit deep in the wilderness for the rest of my life- I think.

I had a survival plan. It should have worked. Why did it have to be supernatural causes?

So, Ken sits me down and gives me the information he says I need if I’m going to stay alive. He tells me that my shotgun is useless, both as a gun and as a club. The knife is useless. The hatchet is just as useless. Yuki’s got powers that make anything but very specific things—which he has I don’t—totally pointless; I might as well hit her with my fluffiest pillow for all the good it would do. So, all I have to do is keep Yuki talking long enough for Ken to get into position and take her down. Then I just need to get the hell out of Dodge and let him do the job.

I figure I got nothing left to lose, so I ask Ken what I’d need to take her down. He tells me that I would need some naturally-occuring jade, the purest of green jade, which means that if you didn’t loot the Minneapolis Museam of Arts then you don’t have any. That’s not good enough, because you’d have to know—in Japanese—the right spells that this jade requires. Double-screwed, right? Well, because mutations Ken’s got hard-counters for all of that stuff and can deal with her like any other predator in this crazy world of zombies and demons and monster-eaters (OH MY!). Then Ken put a bottle in my hand; he gets me.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-09

(From an entry dated March 4th, 2013)

The problem with being the only man on a boat is that you have to sleep some time, and I’m not that good at doing this boat stuff. I didn’t want someone climbing aboard and eating me, so I stayed way offshore and used the anchor to keep the boat in place, after I found the owner’s manual—I did not expect to find it, but there it was so I read it—and carefully read up on how to do it right. I ate, I drank, I slept and woke up not eaten by a grue so I figured that I did something right.

I also woke up to see Ken waiting for me in the galley. This didn’t set right with me, so I walked in warily. He put down a bowl full of corn flakes, and that was enough for me to stick around. He told me of his encounter with Yuki.

She’s dead. Let’s get that out of the way. All of the endless winter stuff will soon abate and the natural cycle will reassert itself, I assume. Ken told me that he surprised Yuki, making her think that he was me just long enough to get the deciding blow: a knife in the throat. That didn’t stop Yuki from a long fight in an attempt to take him with her. Even with a blade stuck in her neck, and her powers over weather nullified, the full physical prowess she displayed—which I already saw glimpses of before I fled—made her out to be truly monstrous. Ken walked away bleeding and injured, but Yuki died.

Ken said nothing about the child, other than Yuki didn’t have it when he made his move, so I don’t live with any concern over the slaughter of a pregnant woman, however inhuman she was. No, what hurt was what he said next. “Yuki Onna? Yuki no Onna, the Snow Maiden? You had a bona-fide Japanese monster in your bed and you couldn’t figure it out?” He didn’t let up. “No wonder she flipped out over the zombies and me running around out there. She planned on setting herself up here, Queen of an Eternal Winter Wonderland, with you as her captive man-candy and eventually extort survivors for relief from the ice and cold- just enough to stay alive and pay her tribute.”

Sucker. He called me a sucker, and he was right. Played on my sympathy, timed things to make her move most effective, quickly turned on me and pulled classic abusive girlfriend maneuvers on me to mess with my head. Sneaking out, quite frankly, was the smartest move I did in this whole affair. But I’m not sure that it’s quite over yet. Ken’s sticking around me, and he’s not the idle type; I have every reason to believe that something yet unfinished is coming for me as a loose end, and Ken is using me as bait to get at it- and both of us know it.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-08

(From an entry dated March 31st, 2013)

I might as well not exist. Yuki’s gone all super-villainess on me. She Witch-Queen Yuki, flying out there regularly—despite being obviously pregnant now—and freezing zombie herds solid before shattering them with hail storms. Spring doesn’t exist anymore either; Yuki, I swear, single-handedly fixed the weather to be in a permanent Winter and whether it’s idyllic or horrific depends entirely on her mood. It’s late March, and the snow is as thick now as it was in January. I just hide in the house or in the tower now, listening to the radio, and stay out of Yuki’s way; nothing I can say or do can sway her now and I want to stay alive.

In part the radio chatter, such as it is, is what keeps me going. I hear more and more chatter about the zombie-eating man. Writing this journal is the other thing, documenting just how everything is completely upside down now after the disaster. Either way, this is utterly insane; I’m keeping it together entirely through these tenuous ties to the outside world, such as they are. The plan remains the same, however, and that plan is to bug out as soon as I can; overland routes are not an option now, unfortunately, so I’ve been making a rope long enough to scale the cliff face and strong enough to hold me, my gear and maybe a canoe. It’s gotta work.

(From an entry dated April 3rd, 2013)

I’m out. It took a lot of hiding, facilitated by Yuki being obsessed with keeping the undead away, but I did manage to get out. I did not get out without help, however. As I sneaked out I found him, the zombie-eating man, sneaking in. I got to say that he’s as scary-looking as the reports say: skin white as snow, eyes a sickly yellow in blackened sockets, totally hairless and a lean and athletic build showing him to be an experienced and skilled tracker and killer. He came for Yuki. He found me, and—much to my amazement—he decided to hold off on Yuki and help me escape instead.

He said that his name was Ken, that the whole world is overrun by the undead, and that Yuki is not the first supernatural thing other than a zombie that he’s come across. He climbed up the cliff face from below, having stolen an abandoned boat to get here, and he helped me back down and into the boat. Then we talked a bit as he warmed me up, and I told him everything about Yuki. He told me to go after he began climbing back up to the lighthouse, to leave Yuki to him, and not to go to Duluth or Two Harbors, but instead head for the old Canadian border.

I don’t know why, but I trusted him and I did as he asked. Once out of sight, I kept along the coast and wondered “What now?”

To Split Rock Lighthouse-07

(From an entry dated March 15th)

Yuki’s got to have some weather control powers. This winter weather just won’t quit. The snows have yet to melt, the blizzards around us have been even worse than would expect out of the end-of-season storms, and it’s like all those stories of an endless winter after a nuclear war I heard about as a kid. Her behavior is increasingly manic, switching from being a pixie dream girl to a mad goddess. I’ve not been able to do much at all in terms of scouting out an exit route, nevermind any other preparations, and I think she’s using her powers to confine me to the grounds. I get out during the day to do work around the grounds or listen to the radio, but it’s always as if severe weather goes all around us. I have doubts now that Spring will come here.

Over the radio, someone broke in over the FEMA band. They’re claiming that the world’s overrun by zombies, ones run by a hive mind, ones with clear leadership and all the stuff that Dave told us before Yuki killed him. That’s not the most worrisome part. The guy making this broadcast said he’s alive only because someone killed the zombies about to get to him, someone completely hairless and with skill white like snow, someone that started to eat those dead (again?) zombies while he gathered up his stuff to bug out. Yuki, for the first time, stopped what she did when she heard this; she froze in place, her eyes went wide and she gasped- she clearly showed fear.

Since then I’ve listened for more reports. This man—this snow-white, hairless man that ate zombies—increased in appearances by individuals breaking into the FEMA band to report movements and other news. Yuki’s fear grew with each one. I don’t bother talking to her about these things any more, but just knowing that there’s something out there—close enough to scare her—gives me hope that I can get out from under this thing’s thumb.

(From an entry dated March 30th)

They’ve come. The zombies are here. Yuki let up—I think—enough for me to range well outside the compound, hoping for some late-season game. While out scouting and ranging, I found the first of them—hunters dead of exposure—who’ve wandered our way. I quickly took them out with well-placed shots, but soon more came. Yuki noticed when I came back without meat and out of ammo; I had to tell her what happened, and she flew into a rage- fortunately not at me.

I’ve seen Yuki do her thing now, and she’s terrifying. She flies, using winds as both weapons and locomotion. She’s flash-frozen and shattered groups, then hordes, of them all at once. I stopped with the kill count—as it were—after the first few hundred shambled our way. I don’t go with her anymore; I’m just a liability compared to her way of fighting. Instead, I stay locked in and on the radio; FEMA said they’re coming, but they keep running into freakish winter weather.

Zombie-eater man, I need you now.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-06

(From an entry dated February 24th)

Someone broke in from Two Harbors today. The man called himself “Dave”, and he was not at all calm or collected. Yuki and I listened to him for the whole of the morning. The man rambled on for much of this time about zombies, straight out of Romero moves or that TV show I never watched. (Yuki mentioned the many videogames, but I didn’t play them either.) According to Yuki, Dave described the bog-standard zombie initially until the last hour or so when he started talking about mutant zombies of a sort that mimic the living. They talked, ran, and were superhuman in ability; Yuki speculated that this is due to their lack of a need to pace themselves.

Someone broke in from Two Harbors today. The man called himself “Dave”, and he was not at all calm or collected. Yuki and I listened to him for the whole of the morning. The man rambled on for much of this time about zombies, straight out of Romero moves or that TV show I never watched. (Yuki mentioned the many videogames, but I didn’t play them either.) According to Yuki, Dave described the bog-standard zombie initially until the last hour or so when he started talking about mutant zombies of a sort that mimic the living. They talked, ran, and were superhuman in ability; Yuki speculated that this is due to their lack of a need to pace themselves.

Yuki took him to get him clean and fed. This meant going outside again, and that was when I saw Yuki freeze Dave solid and shatter his frozen form. She came back inside, and she snapped me out of my shock. She said that Dave was himself a zombie, one of those mutants, and a degenerating one at that. She claimed that he would have degenerated into your usual shambling flesh-eater within hours, and then come for us once he turned, so she killed him to protect us- all three of us.

I am no longer certain that I am sane. I witnessed the impossible, the literally impossible, and yet this woman who calls herself Yuki Onna tells me that she did it to protect me and our child. She said this as if freezing people to death was no different than shooting them in the head. Did she freeze that group of college kids in the car? This must be how Odysseus felt while with Circe, because I’m certainly afraid of this superwoman now, and yet the world beyond this lighthouse is probably no better overall- and likely to be much worse.

As for that child, if Yuki is real—and this is real—then her being with child is also real and that child is not human even if I am its—yes, “it”—father. I cannot delude myself into thinking that staying here is an option, not if she’s at all capable of turning that power on me. Now all of the oddities make sense, and once more I can hear the geeks and nerds back on campus laughing at me; I’ve become one big punch line to them, but for me this is becoming the protagonist of a horror story.

I just need to hold out until the season changes. Once the snow melts and the ice fades, I can make a run for it. If I can keep Yuki happy until then, I can escape from this place. As much I don’t like abandoning this lighthouse, I don’t think I have a choice anymore. In the meantime, I need to do what I can to keep others away; I can use that time to scout my way out of here when the time comes for me.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-05

(From an entry dated February 21st.)

I’ve taken to doing my radio contact from the top of the lighthouse during the day, looking out over Lake Superior towards Duluth. Yuki joins me, keeping a vigil for the promised FEMA rescue group. I’m told by the FEMA man on the radio that the disaster somehow the use of a heretofore unknown, but often theorized, bio-weapon and because of its effects FEMA has to shift away from its known disaster plans for the population to an entirely different plan- one that, fortunately, they were prepared to execute. Because of this need to shift plans, their response to holdouts like us is much delayed.

Yuki listens in utter silence when the FEMA man is on the air. She’s still not in favor of us going with them, but this is something else. When he pauses, she whispers into my ear, and she says that this man sounds like he’s affected by something. So, to nip this in the bud, I recorded the radio broadcasts and ran them through the editing suite on my laptop to show Yuki that she’s hearing things. Once I show her that he, at worst, is letting his fatigue interfere with his speaking then I thought that Yuki would back down and then I’d have the chance to convince her to go my way on this.

Well, that was the plan. It turns out that the voice patterns betray the man, albeit in ways that are subtle to ears not accustomed to searching for this difference. Long story short, Yuki’s right to be concerned. I don’t agree that he sounds like a dead man faking at being alive, but Yuki insists that we’re listening to a dead man and I’m just not familiar with the difference. “Not all of us didn’t listen to the old stories,” eh?

The world has suffered a global disaster, there’s a bio-weapon running around, and I’m trapped in a lighthouse with a Japanese girl who’s pregnant with my child and dancing around claiming that she can see spirits and dead people. The geeks in the anime club, if they could see this, would swear that I am now living out some hack comic writer’s fantasies in a multi-genre mashup that would only get on the stands or on the air in Japan. (No one in Hollywood would ever catch this pitch. That’s for sure.) I’m not sure which is worse: the possibility of this being a zombie apocalypse, or the possibility that my “wife” is insane.

At least Winter is on its way out. Soon February will be done, and the transition out of this and into Spring will begin. I think that getting Yuki to focus on this seasonal transition will be good enough to keep her mind in the real world and not off in Crazytown. Whatever’s holding up FEMA will certainly clear up once the snow and ice melt away. I have no reason to believe that rescue will be later than the end of next month.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-04

(From an entry written on February 15th, 2013)

Yuki’s knocked up. It’s been long enough to be as certain as it gets, and that happened to be on Valentine’s Day. I knew that there were some cultural oddities about body functions, but this took the cake; she’s been actively tracking her cycles for years, with notes and annotations. I’m a little squicked out about that.

Been talking with the FEMA operator lately, about once a day or so, and he’s filled me in as best he can about what’s going on. The disaster was world-wide, and apparently an act of terrorism unlike any before it. The ten cities, world-wide, with the largest population centers got nuked off the face of the Earth simultaneously. Then came a global tidal wave of blue-white fire, something no one ever saw before—not even in the most ancient of texts—and ruined much of what remained. Everyone that was topside is believed dead, or will be soon enough.

This squares with what I heard out of Duluth, down to the instant rise of marauding gangs that already resorted to cannibalism, until that guy either fled or got eaten. FEMA’s response has been tied down due to serious logistical issues and unexpected pushback from survivors, but they’re progressing steadily and should be able to get to us by the turn of Spring at the latest. This I welcome, as I wonder if this disaster might affect weather patterns and extend this Winter long past its ordinary duration.

(From an entry written on February 17th)

Yuki’s calling me her husband now, and she’s told me that she thinks that the baby will be a girl. She wanted to know what my mother’s name was, and what it meant in English. I humored her, as it’s kept her focused on the here and now and not on things outside her control. I asked her what her folks were like, and she told me that she was an Onna and thus had a great family that spanned all of Japan. I hadn’t filled her in on the true scope of the disaster, but she’s more or less decided on making a go at family life with me. She’s settled down emotionally, for which I am grateful, but damn if this all did not escalate quickly. I now understand why my uncles were such unrepentant deadbeat dads.

Yuki’s calling me her husband now, and she’s told me that she thinks that the baby will be a girl. She wanted to know what my mother’s name was, and what it meant in English. I humored her, as it’s kept her focused on the here and now and not on things outside her control. I asked her what her folks were like, and she told me that she was an Onna and thus had a great family that spanned all of Japan. I hadn’t filled her in on the true scope of the disaster, but she’s more or less decided on making a go at family life with me. She’s settled down emotionally, for which I am grateful, but damn if this all did not escalate quickly. I now understand why my uncles were such unrepentant deadbeat dads.

I’ve kept Yuki informed on FEMA’s activities, as much as I know of them, but she’s not that excited about it. She’s satisfied with staying here. I get it, but her stern tone has me thinking that she’ll resist removal, and she’s telling me that I ought to stick to my guns about making this a settlement and grow our own community here instead of going back with FEMA. I’m unsure about a lot of stuff about this now that FEMA’s involved, but there is one thing I am sure about: I never said one word about any of this to Yuki, so how did she learn what my plan was- is? She’s messing with my head.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-03

(From an entry dated February 1st)

Yuki’s my girlfriend. She hasn’t said so. I haven’t said so. There’s been no one to say it to, so we don’t need to say a damned word. Actions are enough, and her crawling into bed with me after she got done crying was enough talk for both of us. She and I shared that bed thereafter, and she’s become quite insistent on my affection. I tell myself that it’s just a freak-out reaction to everything going to Hell, something stressful enough for me who’s born and bred here, combined with her being a foreigner that expected to go home come the end of the academic year. Now she’s stuck here for the rest of her life, with no friends or family, so I’m not surprised that something had to give.

That said, I’m still uneasy about it; I’m just a bit concerned that if I don’t she’ll hurt herself, or me, instead. I keep the guns locked away when I’m not using them, and I lock up the axes and other tools I use outside when I’m not using them, but the knives in the kitchen are still good enough to cut someone to death. As I told her, no one is out there coming to our rescue, so I’m on my own here and I don’t need someone of questionable stability near lethal weapons.

She’s become clingy, needy and pushy. None of this is a good sign. Neither is her seeming ability to handle the cold while under-dressed.

(From an entry dated February 7th)

Yuki’s mental state still worries me. She’ll flip from warm and personable to clingy and near-violent at the slightest provocation, so I’m on egg-shells around her all the time. It doesn’t help that she’s convinced that she’s pregnant. While probable, the stress of being a survivor of a collapse of civilization likely has a lot to do with her period being wacky. At least I’ve got Yuki to commit to doing some of the chores around the place that she can take as being “domestic”, including reading up on the way that wiring and plumbing works around here so she can handle some of this stuff.

I stopped trying to keep her from going outside without proper gear when she told me that the weather’s been so very pleasant since she arrived, with storms coming only at night and never being too much for them to deal with, and no negative effects to her at all (other than being a little cool to the touch until I warm her up). She’s fighting me less about this now that she thinks that she’s pregnant, but Yuki’s still happy about being outside at least during daylight hours.

At least one major development happened recently. The other day I checked the radio. The Duluth FM radio warning about the city is gone, and AM is still silent. Instead, there’s someone else claiming to be from FEMA on short wave seeking contact with others within broadcast range. I broke in, and FEMA’s coming here.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-02

(From a mid-January 2013 entry)

Keeping track of time is difficult now. I’m glad to have my watch, but tracking the days is quite difficult now. If I didn’t have the calendar, I’d be totally lost as to when in the season it is. Instead, I’m aware that it’s mid-January and Spring is just over six weeks away. Supplies are enough to make it, but it means eating a lot of soups and stews. Fishing is not an option right now, so hunting is all I have for getting fresh meat and there’s been just one deer close enough for me to take. Dressing that was a bit of a chore, but it’s done and the venison tastes great.

The light works, and I run it regularly just to keep it in working order. The machinery will work, for now, and keeping up maintenance is what I do to keep busy most of the time. The rest of the time I either check on the traps while hunting or I plan on what needs to be done once Spring arrives. There’s been no sign of life on the radio, and there is no Internet access, so I presume that the disaster’s effects are truly catastrophic. At this time, I presume that there is no help coming; anyone that comes here is a survivor, not a rescuer, if they are not a marauder.

If this is so, then I must commit to making the lighthouse my base of operations hereafter. The old world is gone forever.

(From a late January entry)

It’s been somewhat lonely here. I haven’t so much as a dog for company, and I’m so far north that anyone that could get here is likely fleeing a collapsed shelter from nearby—relatively speaking—and now seeks someplace more solid, as I did, in coming here. That changed today.

A co-ed from the Cities arrived, a foreign exchange student from Japan, who came here for a year abroad. Her name is Yuki, and she arrived during a snowstorm, by herself. Once I took her in, I saw that she’d gotten Frostbite and Hypothermia, but she seemed unaffected by either condition. I insisted on treating her, and she (wisely) relented when I explained the gravity of her situation. When she finally warmed up and recovered, I got her some stew and bread, and that got her talking.

Yuki explained that she had some friends with family in Duluth, and she was with them when the disaster struck. She tried fleeing south back to the Cities, but I-35 got cut off early on and then they couldn’t stay in or near Duluth so they fled north. They stayed ahead of things, fleeing Two Harbors just a week ago, but ran out of gas some miles south of here; she was in the best condition, so they told her how to get to the lighthouse.

When Yuki felt up to it, we got into the Land Rover and went after them. We found them dead of exposure and returned immediately. Yuki wept.

To Split Rock Lighthouse-01

(From the journals of Daniel Hosterman)

It’s been two weeks after the disaster hit. The Internet is down. No sense checking the TV then, since it’s down too, and the landline is dead also. No cell service, so no wi-fi either. Satellite radio is off the air. Terrestrial radio had nothing but a recording by one of the DJs in Duluth saying that it’s gone and no one should approach. There’s no government presence. None of the folks or made it. I’m on my own.

I’ve got to move. This bug-out spot wasn’t for anything long-term, so the couple of weeks of supplies that we cached here are about gone. No sense trying to make this spot a long-term either. The networks are gone, so there’s no reason to protect this spot; what I’m leaving behind is now very pricy and fragile paperweights. I’m packing up what’s left, throwing it all in the Land Rover and making for a spot I’m certain is still all in one piece: the Split Rock Lighthouse.

I’m going there because it’s a known landmark and it’s close to here. Some others will go there, and I hope that we can build a long-term survival settlement out of it, using the lighthouse as a citadel. The place uses older tech, so if we can keep it running we’ll be able to handle ourselves well enough for long enough to stabilize the area and build up anew. But first, I need to clear the path to the road.

(next entry)

I’m now at the Lighthouse. Digging out the path took a while. The weather cooperated, as far as winter does that up here, but I had to pace myself to make the most of my supplies. Getting out to the road took longer than I expected, but fortunately the Land Rover didn’t get stuck. My caution seems excessive now, but it likely was why I got out as fast as I did. The roads weren’t plowed because no one was left to do it, so going was slow there too.

No one came out when I arrived. At least one ranger should be here. This bugs me. One of the residences for the keepers wasn’t locked, so I parked the Land Rover and unloaded. I grabbed the shotgun and checked the rest of the site. I found the rangers—both of them—dead, along with a couple of other corpses, outside another residence. All of them had head wounds, and the rangers had bite marks. I think that the rangers shot the others, and then killed themselves. I took the corpses outside and burned them, just in case. The stench was awful.

I secured the site as best I could, but that doesn’t mean much. If I can get the light working, then I’m sure that I can make it through the rest of the winter just fine. I’m already more worried about other survivors than I am about my own chances, and I don’t need weird shit happening.