Black Friday: Reality Sets In

<b>NOTE from the Department of National Records Preservation (DNRP) (</b>By a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act]<b> </b>Request<b>) </b>filed on September 22, 2040: This copy of the document known as “Black Friday, Reality Sets In” is released only for historical purposes and is not to be released to any foreign entity.<br><br>This is the fourth notebook in the series of notebooks discovered in August 2037 when the Army’s First Response team arrived in the author’s neighborhood to restore power and take a census of the survivors. The author wrote most of the journal in first person, and the Department of National Records Preservation has decided to leave them as they were written. Some misspellings may be due to how English was spoken and written before and shortly after the war.<br>This notebook deals with the issues the author called Reality Sets In, and the DNRP has decided to use his term when referencing the time period after the series of plagues swept across the world. Many assumed help would come at any moment; of course, it took years for any sort of organized help to arrive. We learned in this notebook that some people accepted their reality and others didn’t.<br><br>Some scholars have pointed out that in the days of the Bible the Lord did speak to common people. At least twenty scholars have debated if the Elder really died or had a dream, many people have had dreams so real that they thought they were actually living in the them. I for one happen to believe he did die and was sent back to save the remains of the human race from slipping back a thousand years.<br><br>There was no electricity or clean water, and they had to be their first responders. When a house caught fire, they had to put it out. If someone got very ill, and as discussed in this journal, new highly contagious diseases traveled the world, killing over sixty percent of the survivors. When people had left their shelters someone, the debate is open whether it was the Russians or Chinese launched ‘dooms day’ weapons at us.<br><br>The doomsday weapons hadn’t been updated in decades. Much of their radioactive material had half-lifed so they had lost much of its deadliness. The winds didn’t cooperate with the dispersion of the radioactive material. Much of it ended up in Canada or high upper-level winds blew it over the Atlantic Ocean.<br><br>When gangs, criminals, and other survivors attacked the community, they had to deal with the threat by themselves with only the resources they had on hand. In the notebooks. There was no one to call, there wasn’t any help coming, they were alone, and if they didn’t take care of their problems, it wouldn’t get done.<br><br>The survivors didn’t know how to work the land or how to keep their homes warm in the long and bitterly cold winters or cool them in the hot summers. Many died from frostbite or heat exhaustion. Some died from CO2 poisoning when they used their gas fireplaces as wood burning ones. The gas fireplaces weren’t designed to burn wood. CO2 flooded their homes. Many paid the ultimate price when they didn’t follow the Elder’s advice.<br><br>The Elder made mention in all of his notebooks to a person with the name of Murphy. None of the departments’ records have been able to identify any person related to or living in the Elder’s community with the name Murphy. We don’t know who this person named Murphy was. We can determine from his writings that Murphy showed up when he was least expected but should have been. (The department is still attempting to determine how he could have known when he was least expected, yet he showed up, and whenever this person appeared, bad things happened.