Issue #121

I don’t know what it is that gives me the urge to run. I don’t know if it’s the sound of the meat cooking and wondering when the day will come that I’ll be next. Don’t know if it’s the storms, now so constant that you can almost feel the electricity in the air.

I don’t know why I feel the urge to run, mostly because there isn’t really anywhere else for me to go. It’s not like anyone would take me in, not the wandering packs of soldiers or any of the scattered villages who are too afraid to defy the soldiers. We’re out here on our own and it’s our responsibility to make things work out.

The camp was attacked again, late last night. Funny how the military seems to know if one of us dares to spend the night under a roof, or in a bed, but couldn’t care less if we try and kill each other out here in the waste.

I can look up from my perch in this tree and see the city, off in the horizon. I love watching the lights, imagining it to be more welcoming than it really is. It’s fun to imagine what life could be like, protected within those walls, but in the end, we have to live out, with what’s been given to us.

The supply of meat has increased over the past few days and I try not to dwell on the fact that this comes at the same time that we have had several deaths in the camps. Bodies just seem to disappear, tokens given up for the survival of those that are still here.

The children have started to ask what things were like, before the wars, and I don’t even know where to start. I suppose there was a time when people didn’t have to live in fear, had the resources they needed to survive and support each other. Now, the world is a graveyard with no memory. I don’t even remember which countries these armies once paid allegiance to, or who was waging war on whom. The world itself, at some point became one engorged battlefield, landscapes doused with the blood of the fallen.

This is what life has become for us, those not fortunate enough to have been born within those protective walls. We can go neither forward or back, merely exist until the moment of our inevitable death.

They’re signaling us again, someone spotted a scouting party headed our way. Another call to arms. Maybe I’ll ignore them and get myself killed for betrayal of my unit. Or, perhaps I can get cut down by whoever is on their way, and all this can end. Anything has to be better than this. Even if, when crossing the bridge from our mortality of life into death, we find nothing on the other side but darkness, it still seems preferable.

It may be my only escape.