Robert Freund
Creative Writing
Period 2
A Man Now
Broken
Chapter One
There is no sunrise in the wasteland, only hazy light at day and pitch black on most nights. I remember that morning well, the first day that set me on my path to the emptiness beyond. Of course, I was not in the wastes at the time, so that morning was greeted by the rising sun. In almost all respects it was a day like any other; the same light shone on the ramshackle town in which I lived, greeting us in a monotonous morning just as dull as the last. I was awoken by the same sounds as usual; the clamber of rickety merchant carts and the playful shouts of children who didn’t know what it was to worry, totally unconcerned about the death and slow rebirth of the world. For them, things were as had always been. Carefree, happy, ever a chance to play and have fun. All children, regardless of environment, seemed as such. But it was this unerring childish happiness that seemed to make life all the more grim. I wondered what their reactions would be when they got older and could finally see our world for what it was; a miserable shell wrought with death, disease, radiation and crime.
Yes, even when nobody had possessions to be stolen, thieves somehow managed to run rampant. They always found that one bit of food, the single coin, the extra shoe. And no matter what that little thing was, they would always take. Seemingly every object had value in our world; every object, but not a single person. Such were my daily thoughts in those times, a young man still untouched by wasteland life. I resided in a village of sorts, a gathering of shacks patched together from scraps and burned out, crumbling buildings. There was even a makeshift wall of timber around the place. What it was meant to protect us from I do not know to this day, but I supposed it provided a general sense of security, no matter how false it was.
We called the place Hartsville; nobody knew why. Every morning’s routine was the same. Merchants rolled out their carts of precious goods nobody could afford, barking out trading opportunities into the air. The children would be out playing, the adults wandering about almost aimlessly going about various tasks. Primarily it was trying to obtain another day’s worth of food for themselves. If they could get some for their family too it was simply a bonus.
All the things we had, with few exceptions, had been brought in by the merchants and traders that frequented the debris littered streets of Hartsville.
Jack Halder was a frequent trader in our town compared to most. His caravan would roll into town about once a month, teeming with goods he’d gathered from who knows where. Of course, the items he had in stock all depending on which direction he was moving. If he were going towards the East Coast, he usually had some useful stuff aboard his carts. The East Coast had been hit the hardest in the war, apparently, and they were in constant need of supplies. Jack was one of those guys who decided to provide them. Moving back westward he’d have a bunch of trinkets and knick knacks the Easterners had traded him. He was a lenient fellow, so he would often accept such things from them even though they had no real value in relation to survival. Somehow, he always managed to trade them off in the west and return with full stock again.
The most prized commodity that Jack brought into town was in the form of weapons, the most valuable of course being firearms and ammunition. With robbers running rampant, having a gun at your side meant a lot. Humans like to make it appear that they don’t care, that they are fearless. If a person’s life is threatened, sometimes the easiest way for them to survive is to make it appear that they wouldn’t mind being dead anyway. The observant person knew when a man really didn’t care if he lived or died, however. All those thieves; they cared. They wouldn’t go through the trouble of stealing from people if they didn’t want to live. It was the people who had nothing and did nothing to change it who didn’t care for life.
We’d see them all over the place, sitting against a crumbling wall, eyes blank as they gazed off into the infinite space that lay hidden all around us. More often than not they were thin; breathing skeletons with skin stretched over their bones. Why eat if you want to die anyway? Other than the slow motions of their chests as they took in air and let it out, they were totally still. They wouldn’t try to eat, or move, or do anything that could mean another day of life. They had given up; they were broken, like the world.
Enough sidetracking for now. There is reason for brining up the trader, Jack, and it’s simple enough. The particular morning I have mentioned is a day Jack’s caravan rode in, the old jeep that pulled his trailer of goods dustier and more beat up than I could recall it having been prior to then. It was instinct by then; for me to go and browse Jack’s wares. I knew him by that time, I was one of his favorite customers. He’d traded me my first gun for a pair of shoes and some old magazines I had dug up in the rubble. I knew that I had gotten an excellent deal, and I know that Jack was quite intelligent enough to have seen it as well. But he was a relatively nice guy, and I was a kid trying to live on my own in a shithole town where nobody gave a damn about anybody else.
I learned to shoot it fast, and Jack kept me supplied with ammunition. It was my only form of protection, and in all honesty it worked. Nobody tried anything on me after I got it. Prior to owning that rifle, I had been beaten and robbed on several occasions. Afterwards, not a soul touched me. In our lives, guns meant survival in the face of our worst enemies. Other people. There were only a handful of people who would have hesitated to shoot another human being. If they let that be known, they were as good as dead. I wasn’t one of them, so I never had to worry. I might have been born before the war, but I was a product of the post-war society. I was always ready to pull that trigger. He who hesitates was never lost; he was found. By a bullet. Perhaps several, depending on who shot him and with what. Some folks enjoyed pumping ammo into another person, it let them relieve stress.
Back to Jack once more. Most people in our town didn’t own firearms, so whenever a merchant as well off as Jack strolled in, they knew they couldn’t try anything on him. His usual team consisted of twelve fully armed guards who would stroll into town alongside his makeshift wagon toting assault rifles in full view. The message they sent was clear. To us, it meant “Stay the fuck away if you’re looking for trouble, because we’ve got plenty of bullets to send your way.”
My
rifle was ancient. A
But as usual, my story drifts.
That morning, I had gone out to meet Jack and his caravan. I noticed right off that several of the normal guards were missing; I knew some of them by name, but all of them by face. The same guys had been working for him going on about five years, so it was odd to see a few new faces amongst them. All of the guards I recognized, however, looked exhausted. They were dirty, their clothes tattered, and some of them were even patched up from what looked to have been some kind of fight. Somehow I shrugged it off. I made my way to their boss, the merchant. Jack Halder.
“Got anything new for me, Jack?” I inquired.
He lifted his head to look at me, his eyes dead. Jack’s features were grim, a far cry from his normal, fairly cheery demeanor. Connections were being made in my head upon seeing him. “Sorry Erich,” he said in a shaky voice. “We can’t afford to trade any of our weapons or ammunition…gonna need ‘em.”
“What happened to you guys?” was my next question. I honestly hadn’t thought to ask it, it simply spilled from my mouth. They had be attacked by something or someone, and it looked like they’d be going back for a second round.
“We tried…tried to go through the wasteland, to the to the other side in search of more trade,” he explained. My eyes widened. They had dared the infinite wasteland, and they had lost. Even then I had heard tale of that dreadful place. “Wasn’t even three days in before they hit us, harder n’ faster n’ anything I’ve seen in all my years.”
“Who?”
Jack looked as though he were about to cry, eyes pleading with me to revoke the question. I was young; I was more stubborn back then. I didn’t waver.
“Raiders, I s’pose…they came outta nowhere, out of the god-damned ground. I lost five good men before we even knew what the hell was going on, dammit!”
The news was all at once a shock, a fright, and a rush of excitement. People looked tough in the town, but I doubted many of them had ever fought for their very lives. Even in a world where society had only three classes (merchants, gun owners, and the dying), most people were superficial. I can’t blame them though; man is in no hurry to die. Perhaps I was, perhaps I wanted a way out of that bleak past I once called a bleak present. Perhaps I was just naďve. In any case, my desire was growing. I was young, depressed, and without a purpose.
As my mind tried to form an image of wasteland raiders rising from the gray dust to assault a caravan, the merchant was looking me over, face hard in contemplation.
“I
managed to get four replacements, he muttered, eyes not drifting from me for
even a moment. “Good men are hard to
find…trustworthy men…” He’d trailed off;
our eyes locked. There was more for me
to see in the world, more for me to do.
I could have sworn a tear was going to role down his face as he spoke
his next words. “I’d hate to lose a good
customer…but what do you say?”