Life and War in a wasteland

Enemies

Well, back to the memory of my first time outside of our home building. We would travel to the grasslands on the countryside to gather herbs and water from the river. Our leader had a crude map of the city that he had marked it in great detail to avoid our enemies. But we ended up bumping on to some anyway on a large road.

We had a few more men than them. We both started sizing each other group up. My father pointed to a young man, who looked weaker than me and told me that in case of battle, I should go and kill him and in general to look for weak or preoccupied enemies to kill. The most experienced of us would handle the rest. It wasn't smart of us to sit there all day long. We all went on one side of the road, to show them that they could pass from the other side and that is what they did. They didn't look like they wanted a fight. Both are groups were nervous but also curious. We didn't get to talk to people outside of our collective, we were too afraid to seek them out, but it was something we all wanted very much.

Yet the only thing we ended up discussing, through our leader, was about how dangerous were the grasslands at this period of time. They told us that there were more Hunters than usual, but if we stayed away from the hills, maybe we could pass unnoticed, just like their group managed to. We saw that they were carrying tin cans, surely full of water. It was very tempting to attack them. If we could take them on, we wouldn't risk a battle with the Hunters, we wouldn't risk getting all the way to the countryside and getting tired, only to be attacked by another group, like they were. We could see that the long walk and the weight of the water had taken their toll. We could be back home the same day.

When they moved away, our leader told us the plan. We would attack them and take what they were carrying. Those who retreated in fear before us would be allowed to leave, but our scouts would follow them back to their home without being spotted. They would mark their building to out map and bring back as much information about their defence as possible. Our battle should be fast and as quiet as possible.

We approached them again. We didn't have to draw our weapons for them to know what was going to happen. They had the bad luck to meet us while they were coming back, tired. They were easy targets. And they knew that. They drew their weapons first to show us they were ready.

It didn't feel right, hitting that kid on the head with my club. Neither did he. He only gave me a half hearted hit to the ribs, before I got him. After I finished him, I saw a man who had pinned down my father and they were fighting hand to hand. I hit him on the back of the neck. My father pushed him off him, grabbed a large rock and crushed his head under it.

We started looking for other enemies that were preoccupied with fighting our men, so we could kill them. That was our tactic and more of our people started doing that. It helped that we were more than them. My father killed a young man who killed one of us. It became clear that they had lost the battle. Some retreated as we have predicted. Others stayed and fought, because the rage from seeing their brothers dying was too much and it blinded them. We lost some good men too. As it was our ritual, we carried our dead back to our building to eat them. We left our enemies there to rot and be eaten by maggots and flies, as I learned from my father. I didn't like that thought. After all they didn't try to hurt us. They were not that different from us. They didn't deserve to not be honored by anyone. But those were the rules of our leader.

The next day, our scouts returned with the location of our enemies home. It was a residential building, like ours. It wasn't too defensible, it had too many entrances. They also didn't have enough men to guard them all. Most of the sentries where the people who retreated from our battle and they even had to have their women stand guard. We decided that they didn't have too many men left. We left some of our people back to guard our home and the rest of us marched against our enemies. We took with us more than we needed, we didn't want to risk to lose more men in this attack. As we walked I could feel the power of my dead friends inside me. I could feel it in my muscles, the strength that I got from the ritual, from them. We would attack during the day. We would let the women live and capture them, since we didn't have many of them in our collective.

To our surprise they didn't even try to fight. They were all hungry and thirsty. We were offered to take from them whatever we wanted, in exchange for letting them live. We chose some of their women, some fertile soil, food and seeds and what was left of their water. It was a death sentence for them. They knew it. They said that they would try to live on the grasslands, hoping that they wouldn't get caught by anyone and that they could live there. Our elders knew that it was suicide. In the countryside they would be exposed and in constant danger from the Hunters. But we didn't say a word. It was us that had forced them in this situation after all.