The Journal Of The Life Of Tom Marks

Before I go on I should probably explain why I decided to write my life in these journals, well truth is I do not have a whole lot of time left to live.  The year is 2072, I am now officially 80 years old today and my name is Tom James Marks. Now one would think that 80 years old would be cause for celebration right? Sadly i cannot be that excited since I only have exactly two weeks left to live.  In this chaotic age we live in you only get two weeks after 80 years to get your affairs in order. Once you have, you then get to pass on to your next life through a quick ceremony.  The ceremony can be one of two things either a quick bullet to the head and then the heart to make sure, or you get a hobo bag an get kicked out of our glamorous community that we had built over the years.  Personally I choose the bullet.  I would like to avoid becoming the thing I have fought for more than 50 years. The “Brutes” are what we call them, or I guess a really strong version of your everyday zombie.  Brutes have a few defining characteristics, for one they are stronger than the zombies you always heard story’s about (hence the name), it doesn’t take a horde of them to f**k up a hideout, I promise.  The second is somehow after your bitten by this beastly thing your I.Q. either goes up or it goes down. If the I.Q. goes down they become what I like to call a super brute, but thankfully that did not happen often, to my knowledge.  The third characteristic is a rare one, I only came across a handful of these,  but they almost develop a job class. I came across one that made a kind of ram to break barricades (scary right)!  The fourth characteristic is that the Brutes have, is that they didn’t need to survive on just human flesh. It was more of an extremely high protein diet.  They would also eat animals, cheese, and things like that.  The last major an most ambiguous characteristic the brutes have is unlike your conventional zombie you think about, these motherfuckers did not travel in hordes, more like a small group of 6 to 8 at the max.  There are two ways to kill a brute one is to explode the heart usually a shotgun does a good job, the second is a bit old fashioned but if you destroy their hard ass heads they usually stop moving.  Now as for the ceremony we had figured out; via some scientists my group managed to save, that the virus was airborne an not just transferred by being bitten and or scratched, so our solution was a humane way out or some good ol’ good luck basically.  I reckon I am going to miss the community I had the chance to help build in what I believe was a mid south town in Tennessee. We named it “Smokeysville” on the count a few of are group where collage football fans back in the day.  We originally weren’t going to settle here, but turned out the soil was good for crops an there was still livestock roaming around in remote farms with few brutes around as well. We used a lot of the old buildings that were in a square in the town to build a wall like thing around us the best we could, then it eventually became this haven like area where survivors came and help build more and more making bigger an better  walls.  Now it’s like a 8000 acre fortress where the Brutes even tend to avoid, so it’s been peaceful in my later years thankfully.  Well I guess it’s time to get onto my story of how we ended up here in this wasteland of a world, as my children asked me to write this as a founding father of “Smokysville” to carry the history and heartache on the generations to come.