Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days Read Online Free PDF

perfectly
content and happy.
    I miss everything now -- the noise, the
bother, the eternal neediness of people, even the guards and
prisoners. George is sitting right next to me while I type this. I
miss him, too.
    As a shaman, I’m trained to be open to the
flow of life. I am transition. I create transitions. I know how to
put the slightest pressure on any given part of a change to get it
moving again. More than anything, I believe in my very soul that
life is change.
    And still, I miss them all so very much.
    I was the one who never wanted to be the
shaman. I only wanted to be left alone with my mountains, streams,
and big, open places. I didn’t want to save the day. I didn’t want
any part of the prophecy.
    But here I am. Alone. The last one
standing.

11/05/2056
    I should tell you more about the wasps. For
all we’ve experienced, we don’t know a lot.
    The infection destroys a person’s mind and
releases their soul. Their body continues to function. The body
eats, eliminates, heals injury, mates, and sleeps. I have some
question as to whether a wasp can love. They may not love, per se,
but they form attachments to each other over time. Wasps group
together in something like colonies or hives.
    Unlike in the movies, wasps don’t wander
around with filth all over them. Their skin doesn’t rot from the
bones. They also don’t stumble around with their arms waving in the
air. Wasps walk upright, like men.
    They are unable to verbalize but, over time,
seem to learn a kind of communication. I’ve wondered if this
represents an evolutionary to Neanderthal man, as they walk erect,
no speech pattern, hunt to kill, etc.
    The greatest difference between a wasp and a
man is wasps eat only living flesh. I believe they only eat
mammalian flesh, but George and I aren’t around fish, reptiles,
spiders, or birds. We’ve never seen them eat anything but living
mammalian tissue.
    After they first turn, their hunger seems
insatiable. It’s possible that they are so hungry because they need
nutrition to transform their bodies. Over time, either they seem to
adjust to the hunger or the hunger lessens. By the end of a year,
the wasps we kept for observation ate about twice a day.
    The transformation doesn’t appear to be
painful. Outside of the obvious discomfort of losing all of your
bodily fluids, the wasps don’t seem in pain when it happens.
Transformation is simply something that happens while they
sleep.
    We know that wasps:
    * live for a long, long time;
    * are impervious to heat or cold;
    * eat only living tissue;
    * mate, but, to our knowledge, cannot
procreate;
    * seem to have no memory of life before
becoming a wasp and limited recall of their life as a wasp;
    * are unable to learn. We tested this at the
Pen. No matter how many times they completed a maze, they never
remembered how to do it two hours later or the next day.
    * have lost all reason, decision-making
ability, forward thinking, or planning capacity.
    To a certain extent, wasps live in a perfect
Zen moment. They live in the present and respond to what’s right in
front of them.
    Early on, George and I captured a number of
wasps. It wasn’t very hard. With the entire Pen at our disposal,
and a lot of wasps around, we were able to create an entire
cellblock of wasps.
    Over the course of the next few years, we
experimented on wasp subjects. We tested what they would eat, how
they functioned, if we could train them, would they return to a
more human-like state, and a variety of other ideas we got from
watching all of those zombie movies.
    A few of them became almost like pets. Well,
pets that would prefer to eat you. Pets that couldn’t be touched.
We developed a fondness for them anyway.
    In the end, we experimented on what was the
most humane way to euthanize them. Their souls beg for peace. Their
souls wanted to move on, to complete their journey to the
afterlife. But the souls were unable to leave as long as their
bodies were in the semi-living state of