Here's To Humanity

Chapter 9

Since the time I started walking, leaving Marina in the pit, I haven't seen anyone which makes me wonder if there are any others left, beside the one that met us outside The Underground and the British group as well. Is it possible that everyone else could be dead? I honestly hope not, because if we want to get the world back to what it previously was, we need as many people as possible. We managed to survive two-hundred years without a war. We all banded together to save our dying planet and now almost all of us are gone. Could it be for the better though? We were the ones that were destroying it. It's a whole bunch of mixed feelings. Besides not seeing anyone, I see lots of animals, still skittish of me, and not taking any chances with me. I saw a deer, an odd looking deer though. It's back was deformed, it's spine twisted left just half way to its tail. When it ran from me it tripped over itself due to its back, and the back legs to close to the other, reacting to fast and the deformity in his back. It's antlers were covered in dried leaves, pierced from his sharp horns. He was all alone. For the past two months that's how I felt, alone, no family, no friends, and the closest I had to either one of those was Marina. My family was the one to die first, in fact, my parents died way before the epidemic. My father died of cancer and later my mother overdosed, her drug habits started after my father died. My mom and dad were close, they were great together. One thing my mother always told me one saying about love when my father was sick, 'A person that truly loves you will never let you go, no matter how hard the situation.', it quickly changed once he died, after that I remember her saying to me, 'Love will always leave you broken.' This killed me. When she told me this, it was just when I started going out with Marina, she has always been quiet, well, quiet when I was around. I caught my mother injecting something into her left arm, I pulled it away from her.
"You need to stop!" I yelled at her, looking into her pain filled grey eyes.
"I need to, you don't know the hell inside my head." She said calmly, like what was happening didn't matter. "It hurts." I remember her grey eyes filling with tears and slowly turning red.
"It hurts because he matters." I replied. I came home from uni one day and she was lying dead on the kitchen floor, completely pale and tears still pooled in her eyes. I have never called anyone faster that I called in an ambulance. I didn't know who else to call in that situation besides Marina. My mom and dad were the only family I had, both came over from Czechoslovakia, I don't know if I had family over there, even if I did I don't know them and there would have been no way to contact them. When I called Mar, she was there, at the hospital in a matter of minutes. That was when were only dating for a month or so. She helped in so many ways, the quiet girl I thought I knew, the quiet girl who didn't say much talked with me the whole night, talked me through everything, said so many things I would have never expected to have happened to her, and her telling me I was welcome to stay with them at any point. I didn't quite know what to do, didn't know how to react. I think her nature of caring and understanding was the thing that made me fall for her the hardest. I don't say these kind of things at all, she asked me once what made me like her, I told her something completely different. In the beginning I didn't understand her, didn't understand her way of communicating, it was a little later, after lots of experimenting I realized she communicated with her eyes, after that she was an open book, she didn't know it which made it kind of funny, have a little inside knowledge with myself and her subconscious. She doesn't like people knowing her, something about once someone knows her they can become her worst enemy, someone who knows all her faults and flaws. I need to get back to her as soon as possible, with her being alone, stuck and in pain I don't want to leave her in that position for long.

After wondering for a bit I come across a small, run down clinic, the doors broken and rusted. I walk through fully knowing that no one will be in there, and I was right, well only partially. There are bodies piled in the the corners. The smell is terrible. The smell of rotting flesh is enough to make me dry heave a couple times, before getting control of myself. I walk to the back, behind the counter were they keep the meds and splints. I grab a splint and a shit ton of pain killers.

After forty minutes of walking, the sun is completely down and I'm not sure about finding Marina. I whistle with a distinct tone that sounds similar to a train, a regular whistle with a hum. I hear a similar reply but higher pitched. I stumble over to the sound and nearly fall in agin.
"I'm going to toss down a rope. Try to tie yourself in as best as possible." I instruct her. I toss the rope down. "Ok, now."
"Wait a minute." She says and a squirrel comes running up. I hear a small giggle followed by a groan of pain, followed by a few curse words. The rope tenses and she tells me to pull her up. I do my best, having a broken bone hurts so much, I broke my right arm when I was little.
"Son of a bitch." Marina mutters under her breath.
"You good?" I ask.
"Never felt better." She says incredibly sarcastically.
"No need for for sarcasm." I snap.
"I'm fluent in it thank you." She says back, reminding me of it. I continue pulling her up and she drags herself out on her stomach. She lets out a few groans.
"Where does it hurt?" I ask. I was in uni to become a doctor, well I wanted to be a paramedic, I just figured that a doctor was pretty good too.
"The lower part of my femur." She replies, pointing to the spot. Femurs are incredibly hard to break, she must of hit the ground hard or at a funny angle, maybe both. I put the splint on which makes her leg completely straight. She clenches her jaw.
"You need to stop doing that." I say, in reference to her clenched jaw.
"What?" She asks through gritted teeth.
"Clenching your jaw. You don't need anymore broken teeth because of that." I say.
"I don't have any broken teeth." She says back.
"Yeah, because you got them fixed." I tell her. She nods and releases her jaw.

We walk for twenty minutes to a small bungalow. Each step was slow and to Marina, painful. My left shoulder felt relieved when she sat down on the bed. We block off the door and lay down right next to each other. I just stay and look at all her features, her crooked nose that's shifted slightly to the right from her fight with a lamp post has a slightly extended shadow from the low amount of moon light. She smiles and closes her eyes and her smile quickly fades and her face relaxes. I find myself quickly fading until everything goes black.