Sunday, April 17, 2011

Inside the cordon

I went into the Christchurch city cordon yesterday, right into the heart of the ruined city. My job was to retrieve personal items from our office building.

There is NOTHING as creepy as being in an empty office building that has been turned over by an earthquake and abandoned for 6 weeks. The smell is really bad (rotting food mostly). It is also quite dark as all the power is off.

I wore a hard-hat and had an LED headlight and the only other person in the building (we have to travel in pairs) was 4 levels below me. This building housed over 800 staff two months ago and they all left in a hurry.

Going up the stairs (in the pitch dark) and going through open plan offices it is eerily quiet. All I could keep thinking is, 'I now know what the zombie apocalypse will really be like.'

As a writer I have never been so inspired, as a resident of Christchurch I have never been so heartbroken to see the destruction.

Writing is good therapy, so I am writing a zombie short story using the earthquake as a vector for the outbreak and some other ideas.

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