Hey friends!

First off, I have to say that I am completely FLOORED by the number of ebook downloads This Is The Fall got during Indie Author Collective’s Sci-Fi/Dystopian book blast. I never imagined getting any more than 100 or so downloads let alone 816 in just a few days. Holy moly!

Here’s to hoping they lead to some (good 🤞🏽) reviews. It has always been my biggest fear that the book’s blurb or cover would draw in someone other than the target audience and because of that, I would end up with a scathing 1 star review. Now that the book is in so many people’s hands, I worry about it bit more…but I suppose that’s pretty normal.

After all, even The Way of Kings, ACOTAR, Dungeon Crawler Carl, A Game of Thrones, and The Hunger Games have gotten one star reviews so…🤷🏽‍♀️…it’s gonna be what it’s gonna be.

Anyhow! Moving on to more fun things…

I received my paperback proof copy of Creation’s Quest this weekend. What a surreal moment to hold a book I never planned on publishing in my hands. Creation’s Quest is where all the lore behind This Is The Fall (and every other book and short story I have ever written) lives. It’s the backbone of my entire world…and I was going to keep it to myself forever, but a few very important people convinced me that there were other people out there that need to read it *you know who you are* so, here we are! 

There are a couple of formatting issues that I need to address and a freaking TYPO on the back cover that I somehow missed every time I looked at the blurb over the last six months 🤦🏽‍♀️ But, as soon as those couple of things are figured out, the paperback will be out in the world! Very exciiiite!

Thank you all for coming along on this weird-ass journey with me!

Walk in Light and Truth.

~ LynnErin

And with that, I give you…

Amber’s Apocalypse: Part 3

PART THREE:

March 25

     It’s still raining so I’m still here at the camp store cooling my heels.  My gut is telling me that I should leave this place but the sick feeling I get if I stray too far from the store has me staying here.  It’s like my body doesn’t want me to leave.

     I found a few interesting books in the house though.  A couple of smutty romance novels and a bunch that will be much more helpful. 

     A wild edibles book, an herbal medicine book and a survival book full of the lost ways of our ancestors.  I dismissed that one at first thinking it was full of mumbo jumbo, but it’s pretty legit.

     Between those three and the farmers almanac, I have all the info I need to start really preparing for my journey.

March 29

     I’ve been devouring that survival book.  There is so much to learn!  It says that the most important thing about primitive survival is staying healthy.  Well, I’m working out now. 

     Let me back up a little bit.  There was a crap ton of good usable stuff in the basement.  Camping gear out the wazoo and old workout equipment from like the 80’s or something.  Ive been doing some light lifting and mild cardio.  With the camping gear, I can cook real food now too.  Most of the meat in the deli spoiled but there was still some that was mostly frozen in the box that was most buried.  The little camp stove is great and the house had plenty of pots and pans.

     Anyhow, my spirits are up and I’m feeling better.  A little bit of knowledge goes a long way to making a girl not feel completely helpless.

     When I leave here, I think my best bet is going to be to just haul ass as fast as I can back home.  Dilly-dally and whatnot could lead to me getting into trouble.  I’ll be going into the unknown so I need to be as prepared as I can.

April 3, 2021

     I got a picture of what is in the forest. It’s huge and it has to be what got Dan.

     A couple of days ago, I was running sprints in front of the camp store and I got that funny feeling in my gut again.  The clouds weren’t that thick and it wasn’t raining, but the feeling was still there.  Like something was watching me.  I looked toward the trees.  Just beyond the road the foliage disappeared into shadow.  It was almost always dark in the forest.  I scurried back inside and grabbed my camera and a pair of binoculars.  Standing on the doorstep, I scanned the tree line, binocs to my face.  I couldn’t see anything.

     So I pulled out my camera and took a couple of shots with the telephoto lens.  I just pointed and snapped in the direction of the weird feeling.  I don’t know how to describe it.  It was like, I knew where the thing was and that for some reason, it couldn’t get to me where I was at.  The camp store is like a safe place.  Every time I leave, I get about a hundred yards away in any direction and I can feel…something is missing.  It’s almost tangible, the feeling here is like the warmth of grandma’s hug just after she lets you go and if I get too far away, I’m out in the cold.  It sounds weird, I know it, but something is protecting this place and those things can’t get past that warm barrier.   Anyway, the next morning, was sunny, not a cloud in sight, so I hopped on the bike with a few supplies for trading and headed down the road to the town. 

     The fires had burned out and it was a legit ghost town.  If there were any people around, they were hiding.  There were blood stains on the ground though as well as that black gelatinous stuff that I found on my way to the camp store.  I got brave and stuck my finger in some of it.  It smelled like dead thing and I gagged.  There was stuff everywhere.  Discarded shoes, pieces of clothing, a purse with the contents still inside.  Wrecked and burned out cars, chairs, glass, a mattress.  What the hell happened?

     Lots of the buildings were burned to the ground but quite a few survived.  Apparently there are places that even desperate people wont raid during the apocalypse.  The craft store was still mostly intact and the electronics stores were pretty much untouched.  Everything else had been picked pretty clean.  Old school photography stuff was hard to find but the pharmacy had a photo department and wouldn’t you know, they had actual photo chemicals and paper.

     The machine didn’t work, obviously, but I didn’t need a machine.  I could do it by hand.  After processing the negatives, I rigged up a makeshift dark room in the darkest corner of the store.  The enlarging process was a lot of trial and error.  I used my flashlight to expose the paper and then tied a red plastic over the light end of it so I could see the photo trays. 

     When I tell you I about shit my pants when the photo developed, I’m not kidding.  My bowels turned to liquid. 

     The print was blurry since I didn’t have a proper enlarger but it was clear enough to see a pair of white, glowing eyes peering out of the bushes staring right into the camera.  If I was correct, the top of that little shrubby bush was about five feet tall.  The glowing orbs were fairly close to the top.

     “Holy shit,” I whispered.

     I jogged outside with my stack of negatives and held them up to the sun.  There were more than one set of eyes.  There was more than one creature.  Three at minimum…maybe even five.

     I didn’t know much, but it seemed that they only came out at night or on dark cloudy or rainy days.  An aversion to light?  Where had they freaking come from?  They had to have stripped this town bare.

     “Good god damn.”  I mumbled.  Looking around I yelled.  “Hello?  Is anybody still here?  Hello?”

     Was everybody really dead?  There was no way.  This was a small town, true, but there were a few thousand people that called this place home.  Someone had to have survived and I needed to find them. 

     But first, it was going to be a long, hard ride back up to the camp store and I absolutely had to make it there before dark.

April 9

     The weather is still good but the farmers almanac says the second half of April is supposed to be very wet.  I’m not sure how much I can trust a farmers almanac but so far it seems to be pretty close to correct.  If it is to be believed, the middle of may will be mostly dry.  I think that is when I will try to make it home.  If I don’t,  I’m going to be stuck here until the end of June.

     A lot has happened since my last entry.

     I have been trying to get a good shot of the creatures, but cant seem to capture much more than their glowing eyes no matter what kind of film I put in my camera.  I bet you’re wondering how that old thing still works, huh?  It’s completely mechanical and 100% manual.  The only electronic thing it has in it is the light meter and that has been broken for years.  Ya just need a basic knowledge of photography to do the math and get great pictures.  I won’t bore you with the details, but it is totally possible.

     Anyway.  I made a couple of trips back to the little town and have never seen another person, but then again, I don’t go into the neighborhoods at all.  My gut told me to avoid it, so I listened. 

     I found a bike wagon, the kind you put your kids in and drag them down the road in, and hauled a bunch of stuff back to the camp store.  My way of developing photos with the makeshift enlarger just wasn’t cutting it.  I went in every store I could and scabbed together some things to make an enlarger…with the ability to focus and everything.

     Hopefully now I’ll be able to find out what exactly those things are.

April 13

     I have got to get better at writing in this thing every day…even if what I did was boring.  I would have never thought that the apocalypse would be boring but on sunny days, it’s just like any other day…except I haven’t seen a single other person since Dan.  It’s been a month and the weather is getting better and better but there are never enough in a row to chance trying to make it home yet.  Part of me really wants to just stay here forever but I have to know what is going on with my mom and brother.  Until I know what has happened to them, part of me will always wonder…and the longer I stay here, it seems less and less likely that I’ll find them alive.

     I got lucky.  Extremely lucky.  The warm feeling around the camp store, I call it “The Glow” keeps whatever those things are in the forest away from me.  When it’s sunny, I can move around just like I would in the regular world, I just have to be back at the camp store before dusk.  I wish I knew where those things went when the sun was out.  If I knew that, It would take away some of their mystery.

     The days are getting longer and warmer…I planted a small garden and it’s growing pretty well.  I wonder if I could get back home, find my family and then bring them back up here?  That would be perfectly freaking ideal, actually.  Assuming they’re still alive.  Every time I go into the town down the road, I cant help but think about what has had to have been going on in our city. 

     Are there more of those creatures in other areas?  My logical mind says yes, they can’t be isolated to this one area.  There is no way for me to test that theory out without putting myself in absolute, you’re probably going to freaking die, kinda danger.  I think I need to start practicing staying outdoors at night.  It’s going to take me a solid week of walking to make it home…and that is if I don’t run into any issues.  Realistically, I think it could take as long as a month to get home which means I’m going to need to learn how to survive without The Glow to keep me safe.  I think I’m going to practice near the camp store first and then maybe just outside of it.  That way I’ll have a better chance of making it back to safety if things go badly.

     Should I pack a small tent?  Judging by the condition of the town down the road, those things are incredibly strong and destructive.  I don’t think a tent would do a damn thing to stop one. 

     So, while I’ve been wandering around the town, I’m starting to put the puzzle together.  I think the creatures were tied to the earthquake.  And even though Dan said that it was an EMP that caused everything electronic to fail, I think its bigger than that.  I think it’s either supernatural or some ancient creature that hibernates or something.  It sounds crazy, but really, what’s crazier than what is happening to me right now? 

     Anyway, What I think happened…I’ll go back to the beginning.  Ya know, I claimed to not pay attention to the news, but that was only a half truth.  I avoided it, for the most part, but in a world where headlines pop up wherever you look, I couldn’t ignore it completely.  My mom even told me not to take this trip because she was worried that I would get stuck somewhere.  She was right, as always.  And I am stuck.  Right-good stuck. 

     Some of the headlines I’d caught were talking about the regular stuff, shootings, gas shortages, supply train interruptions, inflation, another great depression coming on, Russia and China positioning themselves to become the new world superpower and stuff like that.  But other stuff I had seen was even more frightening.  So many people just vanishing, hikers being ambushed by animals in the forest, only the survivors could never say for certain what kind of animal it was.  Most ended up dying from some novel bacteria or virus.  The doctors were stumped as to why their wounds wouldn’t even begin to start to heal.  Even if the damaged limb was removed.  The people just died.

     Then there were the hundreds of sightings of strange things in the sky.  Some said UFO others said they had to be governmental experiments gone wrong or escaped.  Out of hundreds of videos, only a handful were clear enough to see.  The one that had the world in an uproar was of what appeared to be a winged human breaking out of a government building somewhere in South America.  Apparently the footage had been leaked.  The people responsible for the getting the video to the public had been killed.  The religious communities were saying that it was a sign of angels and the second coming of Christ.  That had been more than a year ago and people were still talking about it.

     Other instances were reporting sightings of unexplained events in the oceans and remote areas all over the planet.  I didn’t really know what to make of it and since none of it was happening near me, I shrugged it off.  That was absolutely stupid of me and everyone else on the planet that ignored such obvious signs. 

     Anyway, so that’s what was going on in the world just before my car died.  I think this whole situation is much bigger than Dan or anyone else thought.  I think these creatures have been here for a very long time and something woke them up.  Maybe it was the blast of energy that killed the electronics or maybe it was the earthquake, I don’t know for sure, and it really doesn’t matter.  They’re here now and we just need to figure out how to stay alive with them stalking the forests. 

     I imagine that some time after the earthquake, the creatures made their way out of the forest and down to the town where they started picking people off.  By the time people realized what was going on, they had been overrun.  They set fire to buildings to try and kill the creatures and the fires got out of hand.  In the confusion, the creatures had a free for all and took out everyone in the town.

     I don’t know how they could have done it without getting injured but I wonder if injuries that cripple people and animals don’t really have an effect on these things.  I’m positive the black stuff is their blood or something and it smells like death.  What if they aren’t really alive?  Like a sentient zombie or something?  They stalk and hunt for sure, one was clearly stalking me the day I saw the town on fire from the lookout, so that means they’re able to think and reason.  A lot doesn’t make sense though.  What is it about The Glow that stops them from getting me?  I should be easy pickings, but they won’t come within 100 yards of this place.  If there is something protecting this place, then there has to be something out there that is as good as these things are bad, right?  Something that would build back what the creatures have destroyed?  It can’t be humans…we singlehandedly ruined most of the planet.  There has to be something else.  Are these things of the Devil and that winged human of God?

     I suppose it doesn’t really matter.  Wondering about it isn’t going to change a thing.  I just wish I knew what the heck was going on.

     Try as I might, I can’t get a good shot of the things.  Their eyes always come through, but the rest is just shadow with no distinguishing shape.  I shot a roll of color film at them the other day though and their eyes actually glow red.  I couldn’t see it with my own eyes, but the camera picked it up real faint-like.  Just the eyes.  I think I’m going to start calling them “Shadows” or “Shades”?  Maybe “Dark-Things”?  I mean, they seem to like the dark.  They’re always lurking in the shadows.  “Shadow Lurkers”?  Bah, it doesn’t matter what the heck I call them.  They’re dangerous.  They like the dark, and shadows and the forest and hate the sun.  If I didn’t know better, I’d think they were vampires or something.  But they are definitely not humanoid.  The ones I’ve glanced run on all fours.  Werewolves?  Nah.  They don’t howl and from the tiny glimpses I’ve gotten of them, they don’t have any fur.  I just want to know what the hell I’m up against here…And what is so destructive that it trashed an entire town within a week?

     I’m sitting here in the bedroom of the living quarters.  It’s been dark for a while and my eyes are straining while I write this.  I made a triple wick candle out of a tub of Crisco.  That little tip was in the survival book.  There were more than a dozen tubs in the storage with the dry goods for the deli and grill so I have one for every room.  It saves batteries.  There are only so many C cell batteries left and I want to save them for my trip.

     Anyway, I should probably wrap this one up.  I promise I’ll be better at writing more often.  I’ve never been good at journaling though.