Stuck

The Will To Survive

 

 

Wails of the dying cut the night like sirens, studded with the crack of gunfire and moonlight winking on speeding bullets. The smell of burning flesh and rubber wafted through the air; the stench sickening my senses. Everywhere I looked, signs of a decaying world hit me.

Derelict buildings sat silent on random corners, ghostly shells sporting broken windows and rotted wooden doors that hung off their hinges. Large cracks lined the road, stone and rubble littering the pavement. The shadows converged as I walked along the darkened streets, catching occasional glimpses of an abandoned car.

Mounds of tattered scraps of cloth and bone were strewn across the uneven terrain. The bodies were so singed that it was difficult to discern whether they were once male or female. My heart constricted as my gaze fell upon a small body that lay curled into a tight ball near the side of a building. Approaching with caution, I gasped. Her skin was charred in places, bits flaking off as a slight breeze began to pick up. Her arms were wrapped around the remnants of a teddy bear; her chin tucked between its glassy eyes.

Tears rose to the surface as I gazed upon the child. I yearned to know who she was and how she’d come to be there, yet her life would forever remain a mystery. This made me all the more determined to provide for my family.

An encounter such as this one was an every day occurrence here in Boise, Idaho. You would never know that this was once a very prosperous and quite popular city. The world we now lived in was a far cry from the one we’d known.

In the early days, we’d lived with the belief that the earth would end in a storm of fire and brimstone, anxiously waiting for a merciful God to take his people to the Promised Land. Days passed and nothing happened. Years sped on by without anything of consequence occurring. Eventually, we came to believe that perhaps we were wrong about everything that we’d believed in.

Yet the predictions were right. To some extent. Fire and brimstone did fall from the sky, but not as an act of God. It came in the form of a meteor cluster passing through our solar system. With their path off kilter, they’d tumbled through space obliterating everything at such an alarming rate that we were unprepared for the destruction.

The impact took many lives. However, the world didn’t end as we knew it. It left most of us in limbo, trying to survive. The scattered forces of the military had tried to establish order amidst the chaos, but their efforts were to no avail. Vandalism broke out. People fought with one another to find food and shelter; countless lives lost over the smallest of things.

An abandoned Victorian house sat at the end of the lane, a large, gaping hole spanning the length of its roof. Yanking the rusted gate open, I walked up the weather-beaten path, taking care to avoid the bits of glass, pieces of wood and crumbling stone that were haphazardly scattered about.

The front door had been pulled off of its hinges and now lay disintegrating at the bottom of the stone steps. Climbing over it, I made my way inside. The strong scent of decay hit my nostrils as I shoved a hand into one of my pockets and produced a small flashlight. Twisting its base, I waved it about; its weak beam of light falling across dusty puffs of cotton and moldering curtains.

A broken cardboard box lay at the foot of the stairs, most of its contents scattered across the floor. Marching towards it, I pulled its tattered lids apart and rummaged through it in hopes of finding something of value. The tip of my finger stung as I grazed it across bits of glass that lay at its bottom. Sucking on my finger, I tossed aside a moth-eaten book, its cover falling off as it landed on the floor.