I'm sorry, last week I lied to you. Hopefully this time this will be the final except for Words on Wednesdays from No flies on you. I've been recovering from general anaesthetic, so have had to resort to supplying another day from the diary. Enjoy! You can find Day 1 here, Day 2 here, Day 3 here, Day 4 here, and Day 5 here Sunday, November 6, 33 PE
Dear Diary, The alarms went off after breakfast. They’re very loud. All of the lights change from white to red and they flash brighter and then darker. There are green lights that point the way to the evacuation areas. I was in the gardens. Hazel likes company even if we don’t talk very much. She gets me to help check up on the plants and make sure that everything is going okay. It means we crawl around on the ground in the dirt. If I was doing it alone I would think that I looked silly, but because Hazel is there as well I don’t. It makes it the right thing to do. We were with the flowers when the alarms went off. Hazel was mating them, which means moving the pollen from one plant to another so that they would grow seeds to make more plants. She said that on the outside insects would do this, but because there aren’t any insects inside we have to do it by ourselves, otherwise new plants won’t grow. My job is to pick off any leaves that are starting to die so that the plant doesn’t waste energy trying to save the dying leaves and it can grow new leaves and food. We had to leave the work where it was and head to the evacuation area. Our hands and knees and feet had to be cleaned before we left the gardens because there can’t be any dirt in the normal areas. I thought we would be late, but a lot of people were still following the green lights and holding their ears to block the sounds of the alarms. Hazel and I were blocking our ears too. There were still people behind us when we passed the first blast doors, so I didn’t get to see them close. The evacuation area is a big room near the engines, but still not that far down, and it’s next to where all of the food stores are kept. That’s in case we have to stay in the evacuation area for a long time. There is enough food in here so that we can eat for months. That’s what they told us in school. We have so sit on the floor, or stand. Some people lean against the walls. There are some boxes that people move around to sit on, but they get taken very quickly and I’m never here quickly enough to get one. People looked more worried about this alarm than normal. The alarms go off a few times in the year, but most of the time they are for practice. This one was very close to the hunting party who left yesterday. I think some people are worried that something went wrong when they left, or soon after they left. I don’t think that this is a practice one. There’s usually a warning before a practice one, even though we have to do the same thing anyway. There are lots of little groups of people sitting in circles. Hazel has her own friends and family that she wanted to be with, and I have my friends too. We stayed together to walk around and find our own groups. We had to step over and around a lot of sitting people. Hazel chose the way and I followed her. Someone met her eye and waved. Then she turned around and said thank you, no flies on you, and went to sit with her family. I smiled and returned her farewell. I knew that I am not welcome with her group. I have to keep looking for my own. I didn’t find them so instead I found a corner to sit it. It’s easy to sit and watch people when you are alone and no one is watching you. Everyone was accounted for. The person checking at the second blast doors came back and told the council that everyone who should be here is here. The alarms were still ringing, but they are a lot quieter in the evacuation room. I don’t like the red lights though. It makes everything look evil and scary and it makes it hard to find people. I have to be only a few steps away before I can recognise faces when the red lights are on. Brian, who is the head of the council, stood up on a box and raised both his hands. Not everyone stopped talking, so he had to shout for silence. That’s a funny thing. Being loud to make everything quiet. It doesn’t make sense but it works, some of the time. This time it works. Everyone is worried and afraid so they want to know what is happening. Not knowing things is what makes people the most afraid. That’s why I’m scared of darkness, because I can’t see what is there, or what isn’t there. If I was smarter I wouldn’t be so afraid of things. I’d like that. Brian told everyone that there is nothing to be concerned about, but that doesn’t help. He said that the alarm must have been triggered because it wasn’t a planned evacuation, and they know the area that the alarm went off and that it’s in a place where there is no reason to think that there was any kind of breach. He said it must be a faulty alarm. But then he said that he needs someone to volunteer to go out and make sure that it is just a mistake, because we can’t risk everyone leaving the evacuation area until we are all very sure that it is not a real alarm. Some people said that maybe Brian should go and check the alarm to make sure that it’s a mistake and that he shouldn’t be asking someone else to go for him. Brian said that he needs to stay here to make sure that everyone remains calm. He says calm of very important, because if we get panicked then that could cause more damage than even a breach would. That doesn’t make me feel calm. The other people that were around me didn’t look calm either. It was getting noisier again, and more people who were sitting down are starting to stand up. Brian told everyone to sit back down and to stay quiet. He said that whoever volunteered would be excluded from the next hunting draft. He said that it was a very generous offer. Somebody said that they would volunteer, and everyone stopped talking and some of them sat back down. Brian said ‘Thank you, Gregory’. I saw where he was moving from and spotted Anna and Geoff were sitting with him. Brian asked if there were any more volunteers, because he would prefer that two people went. It was safer that way. Anna volunteered as well. I got up and walked over to where they had been sitting to sit with Geoff. Geoff said that Greg had only gone because he was bored and nothing could be worse than what he does every day anyway. Anna went along because she didn’t want Greg to be alone. Greg works in waste management. Which is how people say working with poo because they don’t like to think about it so they make up different words for things to lie to themselves about what really happens. Geoff works with poo and with Greg as well, but Anna doesn’t. Anna and Greg are married. It was a long time before the alarms went off. The lights went back to normal, but we weren’t allowed to leave the evacuation area before Anna and Greg got back. Once the lights were on I could see properly and spotted where James was sitting, and Ms Crystal and Marcus. But I felt bad leaving Geoff all alone, so I waited with him. We didn’t talk much to each other, but it was nice knowing that we weren’t alone in the crowd. It was a while longer before Anna and Greg got back. Brian said that it was a false alarm and they’d be checking all of the alarms and repairing them for next week. It feels nicer being back in my room instead of surrounded by all of the people in the evacuation room. I think that I can smell the fear in the air. Maybe some people just hadn’t had showers yet this week. There’s a poster that Marcus helped me stick to the ceiling in my room that I like to lie down on my bed a look at. It’s not a movie poster. It’s just a big picture. It’s mostly all black, but in the black are spots of bright white lights. Stars. They’re like the sun but a long long way away and there are thousands of them. More than thousands. James says there are more than anyone could count. He says he can sometimes see the stars from the radio room when he’s in there at night time. I’ve never been at a window a night time. This is the only place where I get to look at the stars. Some of them have different colours, a little bit of blue or red or yellow or purple in the white. James said that when people lived outside they used to tell stories about the stars because they didn’t know what they were. They thought that they were spirits, or gods, or ghosts. They would draw lines between the stars to make pictures to show where the spirits lived in the sky, and the made up the stories by seeing the shapes. Sometimes I try to make pictures in the stars on my poster, and sometimes I just like staring into the blackness between the stars, and I can imagine that I am lost in it. Tonight I just want to look at the blackness. I find that it is relaxing and it calms me. James said that some people didn’t like looking at the stars when they knew what they were because it made them feel unimportant. It made them feel so small that they didn’t even matter, even if they tried really hard or did a lot of things, the stars would stay the same. It made them feel worthless. But I like it. I like thinking that nothing really matters. It helps me to not be afraid. No matter what I do, if I fail, or if I pass, if I die or if I live it doesn’t matter. The stars will stay the same.
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