Post by Admin on Feb 2, 2016 0:21:29 GMT
Hey! Mute Bios coming soon, and I think this time I'm not lying.
We had no alternative to walking. So we walked.
I could end it there really. Most accurate account of our trip yet.
There were no people to meet us on our way. There were no sounds of trucks or battalions on our road, but that didn’t stop us from tuning in to that station 24/7. At the slightest hint of an engine, we both knew to duck straight off the road and out of sight. But it never happened, which almost seemed to make the suspense even worse somehow.
Though the days were long and silent, we both seemed to know how long to go before stopping and taking a break. Every time we stopped and slouched by the side of the rural road, sometimes passing rations, sometimes not, I thought about Leon. I just thought about him.
I'd think about what he’d done for me, the good and the bad, the jack ass big brother he’d always been to me. I'd think about the impossible promises and necessary lies he fed me to motivate me to go another yard, being the jack ass little brother that I’d always been to him. I'd think about the last words he’d said to me, before "run", which I still had yet to recall. So I’d rack my brain, trying to. Probably hand me the lighter or make yourself useful or some other incidentally infamous phrase that I would continue to hold on like the irreplaceable, unimportant piece of nothing that I would cherish to my death bed.
Where is he now? Right now, at this very time. Held captive? Held captive or
While sitting there on the raggedy road, I would try to think up a way this could turn out okay again. I would try to envision the ending. I thought about the many possibilities for the futures of him and Myra and me.
But before I could come to the conclusion of any of my useless predictions, Myra tapped my shoulder and urged me to get up and walk again. I don’t think Myra knew every time she did that, she saved me from my own descending thoughts. Like every time she broke my concentration, the mental jigsaw shattered right back into the 500 pieces that had come in the box. Always just a few pieces away from completing the forecast and seeing how we might theoretically end up in this or that hypothetical future. Always glad I didn’t have time to complete it.
Nighttime fell without much of a transition in these slopes, so at about 6, according to my watch, we’d stop to stake camp for the night. By this point, we knew our way around the sturdy tent well enough to set it up and take it down in 10 minutes flat with considerable coordination. Each sunset, we’d set it up a few dozen feet from the road, down in the brush, so if there happened to be another party that came along, we’d be mostly concealed.
It was never supposed to happen, and that’s why he was taken. So rare, so impossible that ANYONE would come down these backwoods roads, and it happened. It happened.
We’d make a feeble fire to warm ourselves, at least enough to keep the insects away which were just beginning to dwindle in the fall weather. Before we would know it, winter would be on us again. The second winter spent in anarchy would soon arrive. And although I didn’t know the exact date, the first anniversary of the Great Collapse had probably already passed.
Staring at the sun, shying away behind the distant, grey-blue mountains, it was hard to imagine how easily we had lost control. So easily, and so quickly. Famine had been considered a thing of the past. Starvation was an obstacle solved by modernity, a laughable ‘problem’ of the 21st century. Too bad overpopulation wasn’t. The Great Depression happened nearly a century before the Great Collapse, and it struck twice as hard.
I turned back to Myra who was busy laying out the sleeping bags and what rations we had left inside the tent. Pretty soon, the cans would be all but gone and hunting would fall on us. Hunting – a job I once thought Leon would be happy to take care of as long as we lived out here in the sticks.
We tried ‘talking’ to pass the time until bed, asking each other what we’d do if we won the fictitious lottery, truth or dare, and other similarly shitty games. I kept my answers even shorter than her brief scrabble phrases, so I think she got the message and politely went back to reading the book she still had from our house, The Hobbit. It was the last one she had in her pack. I never bothered to ask where or how she had lost the other ones. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to take a second crack at that Animal Farm.
Maybe my tastes have changed since middle school. Though too late to try now. It’s for the best, I guess. All the extra weight and space that books take up just serve to slow us down… Good god, I’m sounding more and more like him…
I almost let a smile slip.
After a while of staring at the baby flames, I decided to retreat back into the tent to lay half asleep until morning came and the day’s cycle started over again.
It must have been sometime around 10 when Myra retired to her own sleeping bag, the light of the glowing coals against the tent flap providing a background for her silhouette to move languidly across. The soft rustling as she pocketed herself in her bedstead soon smoothed back out into the familiar equilibrium of silence. Though the quiet was the same as it had always been out here, I swear I could sense Myra trying to find the words to help me out in some way – some impossible way. But as I thought, she said nothing, and after a while I could hear her sleeping breaths beside me going in and out like teeny tides washing over a warm beach.
And that sound meant more to me than any words she could’ve spoken.
At night, when the mountains are most quiet, I can hear death. I couldn’t hear it nearly as much in the city. But now, I don’t know how I could’ve missed it. To me, it seems just as loud, if not louder than the bombs we left behind us.
As if this place had read my thoughts of death the previous night, our road passed straight through a field full of bodies in mid-afternoon. Their many faces were frozen in terror and pain. Some belly up. Some young and some old. Some piled up into great mounds like trash in a land fill, but most just laid out in their personal space, decomposing mannequins posing under the cool autumn sun. No doubt, most of them had crossed through here this summer, before they knew just how far the factions would go to get supplies and target practice for their soldiers. Now they knew.
Not much of a good ghost story in any case.
I could tell Myra was trying her hardest, same as me, not to linger her gaze over the fields around us. It just turned out to be an impossible game to play, so I finally accepted it and took a panoramic view of the fields, of which we were about halfway through crossing anyway. But looking around the morbid scenery as we passed slowly by only served to make me more anxious somehow. It wasn’t a possibility that Leon was one of the dozens and hundreds of bodies that littered this strangely peaceful meadow. Every corpse was riddled with an abundant number of dried bullet holes, weeks and months old, and whatever clothing hadn’t been scavenged stuck to their half decayed and muddy remains, like soft taco shells to sweet meat.
…Mm, yuck. I’m getting myself hungry.
I continued the rest of the way through that meadow in both mental and verbal silence, using Myra as a model. Besides, the silence did us good. It was as if any word spoken here would only make us stand out more against the dead.
Another instinct of the road: whatever the background was, we would have to become it to blend in and continue undetected. Thus, as if spoken words could spawn soldiers, we plodded through this place like the dead, silent as the grave.
I think just as we entered the line of trees and the open air tombs came to an end, I was becoming a little too used to the scenery. And after the last bodies disappeared from hindsight around a curve in the lane, Myra half turned to me and offered a shaky smile for no reason other than to reassure each other that we were both still here. I reflected it right back at her while we strolled along, as if the fields never existed.
On the fourth morning of our journey by foot, a quaint ploom of smoke loomed on the horizon, dead ahead of us. As we steadily approached it, the first thing that came to my (and probably Myra’s) mind was, The Red Rebirth troops. They’ve struck yet another small town.
It was common knowledge that troops of all factions went out on massive raids of peaceful towns out in the countryside. Many organized battalions went about a boring, but effectively applicable system. Break into the first building in town, separate surrendering survivors into different herds – captive camp group (mostly men), rape-and-then-dispense group (mostly women), potential enlist group (mostly children) –, check thoroughly and quickly for supplies, then onto the next door. But that sort of endeavor could only be carried out on towns that weren’t already sapped of life and supplies. And as far as I knew, all towns within a hundred miles from the burned out City of Herrings had been sacked in this way, weeks ago. The past many months of reinforcement and supply convoys coming from every angle had sent all residents either into captive camps or into mass graves. This was precisely the case for the ghost town where we lost Leon, as they left no one and nothing the way they found it.
That was just it. There was billowing smoke ahead, unexplained and unaccompanied by any noise whatsoever. No sounds of life from here, no clues. So you can imagine our combined confusion and suspicion practically birthed a floating question mark above our heads.
This couldn’t be a raid... so could it be a showdown between two factions? Then after the struggle, all of them died or skedaddled off? Maybe…
I glanced back at Myra and found her eyes straight on me like twin green arrows. Something about the way she was looking at me filled me with a renewed sense of dread, like she had figured out something terrible before I had even caught on.
?
Why is she looking… at my reaction? The smoke, could it be the…
That was the last thing my mind thought with any degree of sanity. Next thing I knew, the trees on either side of the sloping road were blurring by me, as if I were suddenly shooting by in a Lamborghini. Myra somewhere behind me. I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop.
The outskirts of a quiet mountain community appeared on the road ahead, the smoke originating from beside some building in the heart of the town. The trees that whizzed by my bolting ragdoll of a body turned into side streets, mailboxes, stout buildings, and street signs. And my eyes kept straight and true to the mystery smoke climbing above the stout buildings ahead, my dire destination. Just ahead. Smoke rising from something on the road.
I came around a street corner store that used to sell tourist Cherokee figurines and decelerated to a shaky halt, unaware of the raging gasps that tore the inside of my throat to ribbons. My feet were instantly cemented to the concrete. The lane around me did a little swirl as the sight registered.
Not 20 feet away from me, a thing that had once been a truck, painted red as Redemption, lied on its side, reduced to a hunk of smoldering junk. Every inch of metal lay defeated, blackened, dead. Its contents, though virtually impossible to see through the steadily swaying flames, were undoubtedly ash. The same went for the other vehicle, parked about 10 feet from the first wreck, only that one was burning on all four tires. And to further solidify the statement, a lonely, simmering corpse clad in dripping red armor was impaled atop a street pole beside the two desecrated wreckages. The image of the nameless soldier’s painful position kicked me to the ground.
Then the pain knifed through me, right down the middle of the street and right down the middle of my spirit, splitting a cavity within me as deep and as wide as the past is from the present. For in that moment, I could only remember Leon passing into thought.
Leon was a memory.
I could see the bastard leaving me and walking away from me,
His broad, strong frame becoming a distant speck, striding down the road.
Just a dot in the distance now.
Then I couldn’t see him at all.
Needless to say, I was all but blind to the silhouette emerging from the adjacent alleyway, pointing a semiautomatic rifle at me. I didn’t even know or care.
We had no alternative to walking. So we walked.
I could end it there really. Most accurate account of our trip yet.
There were no people to meet us on our way. There were no sounds of trucks or battalions on our road, but that didn’t stop us from tuning in to that station 24/7. At the slightest hint of an engine, we both knew to duck straight off the road and out of sight. But it never happened, which almost seemed to make the suspense even worse somehow.
Though the days were long and silent, we both seemed to know how long to go before stopping and taking a break. Every time we stopped and slouched by the side of the rural road, sometimes passing rations, sometimes not, I thought about Leon. I just thought about him.
I'd think about what he’d done for me, the good and the bad, the jack ass big brother he’d always been to me. I'd think about the impossible promises and necessary lies he fed me to motivate me to go another yard, being the jack ass little brother that I’d always been to him. I'd think about the last words he’d said to me, before "run", which I still had yet to recall. So I’d rack my brain, trying to. Probably hand me the lighter or make yourself useful or some other incidentally infamous phrase that I would continue to hold on like the irreplaceable, unimportant piece of nothing that I would cherish to my death bed.
Where is he now? Right now, at this very time. Held captive? Held captive or
While sitting there on the raggedy road, I would try to think up a way this could turn out okay again. I would try to envision the ending. I thought about the many possibilities for the futures of him and Myra and me.
But before I could come to the conclusion of any of my useless predictions, Myra tapped my shoulder and urged me to get up and walk again. I don’t think Myra knew every time she did that, she saved me from my own descending thoughts. Like every time she broke my concentration, the mental jigsaw shattered right back into the 500 pieces that had come in the box. Always just a few pieces away from completing the forecast and seeing how we might theoretically end up in this or that hypothetical future. Always glad I didn’t have time to complete it.
Nighttime fell without much of a transition in these slopes, so at about 6, according to my watch, we’d stop to stake camp for the night. By this point, we knew our way around the sturdy tent well enough to set it up and take it down in 10 minutes flat with considerable coordination. Each sunset, we’d set it up a few dozen feet from the road, down in the brush, so if there happened to be another party that came along, we’d be mostly concealed.
It was never supposed to happen, and that’s why he was taken. So rare, so impossible that ANYONE would come down these backwoods roads, and it happened. It happened.
We’d make a feeble fire to warm ourselves, at least enough to keep the insects away which were just beginning to dwindle in the fall weather. Before we would know it, winter would be on us again. The second winter spent in anarchy would soon arrive. And although I didn’t know the exact date, the first anniversary of the Great Collapse had probably already passed.
Staring at the sun, shying away behind the distant, grey-blue mountains, it was hard to imagine how easily we had lost control. So easily, and so quickly. Famine had been considered a thing of the past. Starvation was an obstacle solved by modernity, a laughable ‘problem’ of the 21st century. Too bad overpopulation wasn’t. The Great Depression happened nearly a century before the Great Collapse, and it struck twice as hard.
I turned back to Myra who was busy laying out the sleeping bags and what rations we had left inside the tent. Pretty soon, the cans would be all but gone and hunting would fall on us. Hunting – a job I once thought Leon would be happy to take care of as long as we lived out here in the sticks.
We tried ‘talking’ to pass the time until bed, asking each other what we’d do if we won the fictitious lottery, truth or dare, and other similarly shitty games. I kept my answers even shorter than her brief scrabble phrases, so I think she got the message and politely went back to reading the book she still had from our house, The Hobbit. It was the last one she had in her pack. I never bothered to ask where or how she had lost the other ones. Actually, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to take a second crack at that Animal Farm.
Maybe my tastes have changed since middle school. Though too late to try now. It’s for the best, I guess. All the extra weight and space that books take up just serve to slow us down… Good god, I’m sounding more and more like him…
I almost let a smile slip.
After a while of staring at the baby flames, I decided to retreat back into the tent to lay half asleep until morning came and the day’s cycle started over again.
It must have been sometime around 10 when Myra retired to her own sleeping bag, the light of the glowing coals against the tent flap providing a background for her silhouette to move languidly across. The soft rustling as she pocketed herself in her bedstead soon smoothed back out into the familiar equilibrium of silence. Though the quiet was the same as it had always been out here, I swear I could sense Myra trying to find the words to help me out in some way – some impossible way. But as I thought, she said nothing, and after a while I could hear her sleeping breaths beside me going in and out like teeny tides washing over a warm beach.
And that sound meant more to me than any words she could’ve spoken.
At night, when the mountains are most quiet, I can hear death. I couldn’t hear it nearly as much in the city. But now, I don’t know how I could’ve missed it. To me, it seems just as loud, if not louder than the bombs we left behind us.
As if this place had read my thoughts of death the previous night, our road passed straight through a field full of bodies in mid-afternoon. Their many faces were frozen in terror and pain. Some belly up. Some young and some old. Some piled up into great mounds like trash in a land fill, but most just laid out in their personal space, decomposing mannequins posing under the cool autumn sun. No doubt, most of them had crossed through here this summer, before they knew just how far the factions would go to get supplies and target practice for their soldiers. Now they knew.
Not much of a good ghost story in any case.
I could tell Myra was trying her hardest, same as me, not to linger her gaze over the fields around us. It just turned out to be an impossible game to play, so I finally accepted it and took a panoramic view of the fields, of which we were about halfway through crossing anyway. But looking around the morbid scenery as we passed slowly by only served to make me more anxious somehow. It wasn’t a possibility that Leon was one of the dozens and hundreds of bodies that littered this strangely peaceful meadow. Every corpse was riddled with an abundant number of dried bullet holes, weeks and months old, and whatever clothing hadn’t been scavenged stuck to their half decayed and muddy remains, like soft taco shells to sweet meat.
…Mm, yuck. I’m getting myself hungry.
I continued the rest of the way through that meadow in both mental and verbal silence, using Myra as a model. Besides, the silence did us good. It was as if any word spoken here would only make us stand out more against the dead.
Another instinct of the road: whatever the background was, we would have to become it to blend in and continue undetected. Thus, as if spoken words could spawn soldiers, we plodded through this place like the dead, silent as the grave.
I think just as we entered the line of trees and the open air tombs came to an end, I was becoming a little too used to the scenery. And after the last bodies disappeared from hindsight around a curve in the lane, Myra half turned to me and offered a shaky smile for no reason other than to reassure each other that we were both still here. I reflected it right back at her while we strolled along, as if the fields never existed.
On the fourth morning of our journey by foot, a quaint ploom of smoke loomed on the horizon, dead ahead of us. As we steadily approached it, the first thing that came to my (and probably Myra’s) mind was, The Red Rebirth troops. They’ve struck yet another small town.
It was common knowledge that troops of all factions went out on massive raids of peaceful towns out in the countryside. Many organized battalions went about a boring, but effectively applicable system. Break into the first building in town, separate surrendering survivors into different herds – captive camp group (mostly men), rape-and-then-dispense group (mostly women), potential enlist group (mostly children) –, check thoroughly and quickly for supplies, then onto the next door. But that sort of endeavor could only be carried out on towns that weren’t already sapped of life and supplies. And as far as I knew, all towns within a hundred miles from the burned out City of Herrings had been sacked in this way, weeks ago. The past many months of reinforcement and supply convoys coming from every angle had sent all residents either into captive camps or into mass graves. This was precisely the case for the ghost town where we lost Leon, as they left no one and nothing the way they found it.
That was just it. There was billowing smoke ahead, unexplained and unaccompanied by any noise whatsoever. No sounds of life from here, no clues. So you can imagine our combined confusion and suspicion practically birthed a floating question mark above our heads.
This couldn’t be a raid... so could it be a showdown between two factions? Then after the struggle, all of them died or skedaddled off? Maybe…
I glanced back at Myra and found her eyes straight on me like twin green arrows. Something about the way she was looking at me filled me with a renewed sense of dread, like she had figured out something terrible before I had even caught on.
?
Why is she looking… at my reaction? The smoke, could it be the…
That was the last thing my mind thought with any degree of sanity. Next thing I knew, the trees on either side of the sloping road were blurring by me, as if I were suddenly shooting by in a Lamborghini. Myra somewhere behind me. I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop.
The outskirts of a quiet mountain community appeared on the road ahead, the smoke originating from beside some building in the heart of the town. The trees that whizzed by my bolting ragdoll of a body turned into side streets, mailboxes, stout buildings, and street signs. And my eyes kept straight and true to the mystery smoke climbing above the stout buildings ahead, my dire destination. Just ahead. Smoke rising from something on the road.
I came around a street corner store that used to sell tourist Cherokee figurines and decelerated to a shaky halt, unaware of the raging gasps that tore the inside of my throat to ribbons. My feet were instantly cemented to the concrete. The lane around me did a little swirl as the sight registered.
Not 20 feet away from me, a thing that had once been a truck, painted red as Redemption, lied on its side, reduced to a hunk of smoldering junk. Every inch of metal lay defeated, blackened, dead. Its contents, though virtually impossible to see through the steadily swaying flames, were undoubtedly ash. The same went for the other vehicle, parked about 10 feet from the first wreck, only that one was burning on all four tires. And to further solidify the statement, a lonely, simmering corpse clad in dripping red armor was impaled atop a street pole beside the two desecrated wreckages. The image of the nameless soldier’s painful position kicked me to the ground.
Then the pain knifed through me, right down the middle of the street and right down the middle of my spirit, splitting a cavity within me as deep and as wide as the past is from the present. For in that moment, I could only remember Leon passing into thought.
Leon was a memory.
I could see the bastard leaving me and walking away from me,
His broad, strong frame becoming a distant speck, striding down the road.
Just a dot in the distance now.
Then I couldn’t see him at all.
Needless to say, I was all but blind to the silhouette emerging from the adjacent alleyway, pointing a semiautomatic rifle at me. I didn’t even know or care.
