Scarecrow

1.

"This is your time,
Your life's flashing before your eyes.
And soon enough you will realize this is goodbye.
But what if I gave you a chance?
You just have to sell your soul."

Glass penthouse in Central Tower, Fallout City

22 years, 8 months and 1 week after the solar flare

'You understand that I have to punish you for your mistake, don't you, mister Escamilla? And I think I can assume you are aware that the sentence to theft is death by fire squad?'

'I am.' David shifted his feet when a drop of red blood fell from his face on the clean, white floor. He didn't want anyone in the room to know he was feeling scared and guilty, so he just focused on staring at the Raven. The man was all dressed in white. Everything in the entire room was so white, it almost hurted Davids eyes. A rare beam of sunlight was falling through swiftly shifting clouds and enormous windows, lighting up the shiny floor and the glass desk top of the Raven for a moment, who tapped his fingertips to each other and stared back at him, contemplating. Or, so David thought, since the Raven's eyes were always covered with goggles and he could not see them.

Oh, how David longed to be able to step outside into the sunlight and not get contaminated immediately...

The Raven stood up from behind his desk and David was impressed by his full length. Never had he seen the man in real life, only on broadcast on tv. Fact was, the Raven was the so called leader of Fallout City, formerly known as Dallas, Texas.

In the years before it all went down David's parents were living a normal life on the surface, like everyone else. A huge, apparently unexpected solar flare ended that life; the world had barely time to prepare itself to survive.

Of course governments all over the world had known for a long while that the disaster would eventually happen, and had taken proper precautions for surviving; they buried themselves underground, together with those who were fortunate enough to come with them. There was still some space left for normal citizens, and just because David's mother was a nurse, she and his father got selected. His mother just got pregnant with him around that time.

They hid underground in the hills surrounding Dallas. It was crowded, uncomfortable and terrifying, as his mother always said.

After the solar flare hit the earth, the atmosphere had changed into a toxic environment that wasn't suitable for any living creature. The whole planet had been on fire; not only had all nature burned down to ashes, also all chemicals produced by the human race had exploded, burned out or toxicated the world in any other way. It turned the sky a weird, darkish yellow from pollution, which hardly let through any direct sunlight.

The air settled over time and turned lighter and seemed cleaner, so three and a half years after the solar flare, scientists from NASA said it would be safe to go outside again.They randomly selected and forced people to try going outside into the burned wasteland from time to time; they didn't survive. The scientists tried again, but nothing seemed possible, until they found out the human race could surface again, if only they kept inside ventilated areas. Therefore the society build up again, hiding from the toxic air inside buildings in central Dallas which still stood tall. They cleaned and strengthened the buildings and vented them with filtered air from outside, to protect them from pollution and radiation. It took years and David's father was one of the hundreds of men who helped building up the city again, until he died in what they called 'a fatal accident on the construction side'. He just never came back one day. David had been twelve years old around that time, and his sister was only a baby. He had been rebelliant against the system ever since, doing whatever he could to make this known. The Raven had his henchmen track David down several times, trying to make him stop, but they somehow never managed to get him. Until now.