A Collection of Ruins

Chapter 4 - Just To Know You're Alive (Matt)

Matt

My eyes remained firmly glued to the pavement, as if each crack, each fissure held all the wonder left in our godforsaken world. Maybe it did. Twelve when the Morbidus hit, it hadn’t taken long for all the wonder in my world to die.

The virus was never supposed to spread to those of us within the Met – it was what the acclaimed Met wall was built for after all. But a corrupt council is exactly that—corrupt. It was insulting to think our council truly believed no one would figure it out. Especially those who were forced to work in the outer city, forced to face the rapid disintegration of our world. The outer city was reserved for those who had had to fight tooth and nail for their place in the Met, those the world had forgotten, and even then it was a place at the very bottom. The police were noticeably less strict, they left room for error, and now the disease was slowly seeping into the Met. Yet that wasn’t why those in prime positions refused to step foot in the outer city, no, it was the close proximity to the rebels that kept them away. Even if to those nestled safe within their homes rebels were just a rumour from a long gone past. They were the nightmares of many and the dreams of dreams of few. That select few unfortunately included the mother of my girlfriend, had I known dating her daughter would end like this I don’t know that I would have still made the same choices. I wasn’t bred to be the hero. That was the rebel’s job. Pulling in a deep lungful of air, I rapped my knuckles against the door.

* * *

I had forgotten the complexities of conversation within the Met. It had been built as a guard and, as a result, birthed guarded people. A man I once knew well stood before me. A once-brother. It was the twitch in the man’s heavy set eyebrows that revealed that his honey-dipped words were false; that his words were carefully keeping something from me.

“Where is she?” I thanked the gods for those long months with Ellie and Ronan, otherwise I feared my voice would break and reveal my panic. I needed to know.

 Dev’s eyes were dead and cold as they focused on me. A harsh glint of silver served as my only warning before a gun was pulled on me.

“You think I don’t know where you’ve been? I know you better than you know yourself and I don’t like knowing that you’re a traitor. Our whole world is turning to shit and you just up and left. To chase pretty stories spun by a pretty woman. You left me.” He spat.

The hollow sound of an empty gun is one I’ll take to my grave.

For a short second, disappointment and relief are at war for place on his face before Dev stalks forward and presses in tight, until his lips are at my ear, “You betrayed me, brother.”

My next breath sounded as sob, air refused to enter my deflated lungs. Tears burst forward unbidden and he took a step back as I retched.

He looked back only once as he went for the door, seemingly oblivious and unfazed by the fact that he just tried to shoot his own brother. “I don’t know where she is.” He whispered. “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

His brother would never look back again. In Matts world everyone had an after, after the virus, after the death of loved ones, after the Met-wall. And now he would leave the few and join the many. After the gut-wrenching experience of being abandoned by perhaps the only person he had ever just loved. With no fear, no complications, no reservations. It was in this moment that he would realise it, that when your time was up life amounted to no more than a series of snapshots. When asked to one day tell his story of rebels and daughters of police chiefs and the kind of bravery that left a man with a fear he would never again shake, that is what he would say. A story is never told in its entirety. Bits get scraped, edited, forgotten. His story was a collection of moments, snapshots of lives and the ruined people who had lived them. And when one day, when someone asks the right question, he hopes he remembers all the right parts.

* * *

I hunched into my jacket further as the wind sliced at my skin. Ellie was going to kill me. Pain flared in my foot as a passer-by knocked it aside, curling in tighter I struggled to think. I couldn’t go home – apart from a murderous brother, I had been too high profile to just drop off the face of the planet without the wrong kind of people noticing. The plan had been to go and never look back. To seek refuge with the rebels and embrace the attitude they adopted. I hadn’t realised until I got there that it wasn’t adopted but forged. Forged by choices with blood stained hands and historical eyes. It was almost as if they felt so much that they almost felt nothing at all. A nothing that threatened to drown. They spent their whole lives chasing something life couldn’t give them – a glorious death. Ellie’s conviction of this plan’s success stemmed from a rebels’ desperation. It was raw and gritty, a white-knuckled grip on the fraying edges of hope. Young and bloody, death was nothing to fear if you chased it – instead of letting it chase you.

My heavy eyelids felt like sandpaper scraping against my eyes as they slowly drooped. My fingers raw from clutching the gun I had liberated off the last police patrol – sloppy bastards hadn’t even noticed. They had been in a hurry; running to seek the comfort of what they know, warm beds in warm houses. The basketball court was deserted, it was too cold and too close to the outer city, for anyone to end up here. It had seemed the smarter decision to hole up in here then to continue getting kicked in one of the alleyways. That was, until there was a resounding wet thunk.

I had time to look up and met the daughter of the police chief’s stare before the form of an infected stepped from the shadows. Fear licked its way down my spine, an icy ball in the pit of my stomach. My fingers barely brushed her shoulder, miscalculated, as I clumsily rushed to rise from my sitting position.

“Down, get down.”

A gunshot echoed throughout the neighbourhood. Ellie’s people. I wasn’t ready; it wasn’t time for me to betray her yet, not yet. Jesus, please. Thesalia moved in my hold—

“Keep the girl down!”

I pulled her in towards me, hard – if they were anything like the rebels, disobeying didn’t bode well. A bullet brushed our heads as another groan sounded out. These weren’t rebels, they were rats. And then she was pulling her arm from my grip, I angled my head towards her in confusion. I hadn’t prepared for the fist she was swinging at my nose. Nor the dart that made home in her hip. Jesus.

“What on Earth are you doing?!” I asked the shadows exasperatedly. This is not how I had expected the reunion with my ex-girlfriend to go.

“What needs to be done.”

I stood slowly, unsure, to inspect the damage. Goddamn. The two infected were spluttering messes at my feet, wounded but not dead and the daughter of the police chief was unconscious. Goddamn.

I had seen Ellie and Ronan both drop the diseased as if it were nothing, nothing more than the simple pull of a trigger. I hadn’t accounted for the skill behind the hands on the gun. I kept my eyes on the infected and prayed. Eyelids peeled back to reveal tortured eyes, blood-shot and blue. Mouth working soundlessly, forming the same word over and over. Help. If only I could.

The spilt blood has spread to engulf my boots, god I hoped these weren’t the pair with holes. The look of utter relief on the pain riddled faces as they identified my gun was something I would never forget. Nor was how quickly that same relief vanished when they realised I was nothing more than a man from the Met. Bile rose and for the first time in my life I found myself regretting not learning the art of bloodshed. Maybe I understood more about the rebels than I wanted to.

* * *

A long drawn out sound could be heard from the shadows of the abandoned court; “I was really hoping you wouldn’t be as stupid as Ronan made you sound.”