O brave new world

When the bombs went off it devastated everything.  Those of us that survived were left desolate, alone.  Pockets of survivors like ships in a wasted sea.  We were cut off from everything, from each other.  No power, no food.  After a while even the water shut off.  Everything was from the cities, and the cities were gone.

The skies clouded with debris, and it rained for weeks.  Then it was just dark.  The leaves fell from the trees prematurely, and we were plunged, unprepared and shivering, into a nuclear winter.

Even more of us died, then.  The stronger of us were forced to return to primitive roots, wearing the fur from what we could catch or what we killed to defend ourselves.  Usually packs of wild dogs, ravening, all loyalty to us lost in an empty belly.  Some stayed, but they were few, and no longer pampered, but used.  We needed the companionship, both of us, a reminder of the times before.  A friend.

We huddled around our fires, our meager shelters, but we didn't connect.  Maybe it had been too long since we really had.  The habit of conversation was slow to return, especially in the lean times, when we were sorrowful, but there were so few of us left...

Eventually we traveled, trying to find others.  Praying to God, or whatever was left of him, that there were more of us.  That we weren't the only ones.  That we weren't alone.

It took a long time, but eventually we found them, the other tribes and vagabonds.  One by one, we found them, but never as many as we hoped.  Together, we ventured back into the carcasses of the cities, where steel stuck out of the snow like the bones of some great leviathan.  We found them there, the Hungry Ones.  Ravaged, monstrous, they were like some other species.  Haunted by what they had become, we wished they were.  Some of them still clung to sanity with desperate, bloody fingers, but in our presence they could not face themselves.  They withered like flowers.  The rest had long forgotten that we were kin, that our bands were anything but prey.  We could save none of them, so we burned the cities in our wake, leaving swaths of destruction behind us as we strove toward any salvation.


We never learn.