Journey to the End of the Night



The Order assembled and when the bell rang for the hunt to begin, we were immediately broken in half. Meeting up at checkpoint 1A Ebay says, “Fuck you guys, we are going North. You make decisions too slow. We are using strategy.”

At checkpoint three I turn to our Ghost and ask, “Have we heard from Ebay?”

“She says she will meet us at four. She just finished checkpoint two.” Then he says, “I don’t see why we don’t just wait for her?”

I squint. “Because I don’t trust her. Because she’s been caught.”

“Well, there is that,” the Ghost tells me.

Senator Markov appears from the shadows and asks, “Why aren’t we moving out?”

I tell him in cold hushed tones, “We are going to wait for Samantha.”

“That doesn’t seem unreasonable.”

We mill about at the young woman’s birthday party, we take pictures in the deep green light. I eat her popcorn and some of the Senator’s peanuts. Sam doesn’t show up and I gather us up to move out. Right before we cross Sheridan a bus comes and a young girl in a pure blue ribbon gets on.

On the bus sit five red ribbons, sharp, white teeth a blast and sharpening. “Blue! GET OFF THAT BUSS, BLUE!”

She tells me, “What? It’s a safe zone, stupid.”

“GET OFF THAT GOD FORSAKEN BUS. IT’S FILLED WITH RED!”

“It’s safe.”

“They can’t eat you on the bus, but you can’t get off the bus, you’ll be trapped on it forever.”

She looks at them as if to ask, is this true? They shrug, and the driver shuts the door. She’s never heard from again.

As we cross the street I call Ebay. “Where are you?”

“We just made it to three, we are headed to you at four.”
“You fucking red, mother fucker.”

“What?”

“We waited for you. You aren’t at three, and you never were.”

“You waited for us?”

Click.

On the other side of the street we meet up with Dela Dejavoo. She tells of us of her grand deeds.




Satisfied we travel with her. Shooting down a back alley I start to scope out a back yard. “What the fuck you doing?” A man on a porch asks.

“We seek safe passage out of this alleyway,” I tell him.

“It ain’t me,” he tells us plainly and we move on. A half block further south we hear him gnawing on dying chaser. “What you mother fuckers doing in my yard! I all told you fuckers to stay out. Come back here! I’ll fuck you up! You in a game, mother fucker, I’ll fucking tag your lilly ass, asshole!”

We speed up the pace, find a hidden garden that gets us out of the alley and back onto the main streets. Now Ebay calls the Senator. With a smirk he hands the phone to me, but before I can say hello her red venom starts to spew, “Listen to me, I think Senator Dan’s red. If he calls you and tells you anything, don’t trust him. He’s not on your side anymore!”

“This—is—Dan.”

“Oh SHIT! No, if this is you, send me a picture of your blue ribbon!”

“Hahahahaha!” I am laughing at her dulled red brained foolishness, it is not my blueness that’s in question but hers. There is no time for further bullshit, a chaser leaps out in front of us.

A Female redblood, she throws out her arms, bring it style, and says, “All four corners,” she drools, indicating that we’ve been trapped.

We sprint away. In beeline formations we buzz in and out of the street. Thinking us stuck the redbeards pursue us slowly. They do not know about the secret garden. We go back through the gate and under the arch and vanish.

Feeling stuck, we decide to head back to checkpoint three and get our bearings. But there is a lost chaser in the alleyway and one of us is tagged. Luckily we are close enough to the checkpoint at this point to argue the tagging and win, the venom wears off.

From three to four I am split from my compatriots.

I finish by 11:48 with the Senator and right before one of the men who guided me with his mystical maps from last year.

The chasers this time were a vile concoction, the chasers, as shown accurately here, were subhuman. But it seems a change to our Every Day Life World is being undergone.

Upon completion of this task I run into Rubin!

When I wake up the next day, Chicago’s landscape has changed.

I seek the Order’s compound and no one is there. I seek the Senator’s office, and I can’t find him.

Almost 200 of us survived the May 7th Journey, but it seemed the red virus hadn’t stopped spreading as it had in previous iterations of Journey.

Overnight it had manipulated and morphed. Evolved, if you could call it that? I don't know how I slept through it but when I awoke all these buildings, once beautiful and strong, were turned into burnt out husks. And the Reds... the Reds were everywhere. Devouring, assimilating!

Those humans left, in posting this, I beg you, I plead with you, stay in contact, we must regroup and run again! I have a plan. We will escape the red.

For we have found ourselves no longer in an era of Everyday Life, it seems we’ve found ourselves in the era of JEN.

I will try to update this when I have more information on the,

DissorderoftheWildOnion,
-dan

PS: Also for those able to reach san fran, think about running here.