Fragments - Flash Anthology

Nineteen

"Do you think they have it?"

"What?" He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. "The Sing?"

"Yeah."

"Nah." He put the pack back into an empty grenade holster and lit up using his charging-cable jack. "They ain't stupid."

The two boys sat on the cliff overlooking the smoking battlefield for a while.

Then, the fourteen-year-old boy took his half-gone smoke and passed it down to the nine-year-old. "Wanna try?"

"That's illegal. And it kills you."

"Just a toke."

"Okay, I guess." The younger boy hardly got a single puff before bending over and coughing uncontrollably, holding the smouldering cigarette toward its owner.

"Yeah, it's hard at first." The older took his smoke back.

The younger boy flipped his exosuit's visor back over his face and let the computer filter in air to help him recover. "That's terrible," said the speaker grills on the side of his helm. "It felt like it was killing me, like the smog we fought in."

"Don't worry. We'll be dead long before cigarettes can kill us."