Robert Freund
Creative Writing
Period 2
A Man Now
Broken
Prologue
In the perpetual loneliness of the wastes, I was my only friend. Nobody to converse with save myself, nobody to look at save the person within. Birthed to parents who didn’t care, raised in a world of destruction, I was doomed to wander the emptiness alone. Perhaps this fate, in actuality, was the human curse. We always wind up by ourselves. No one to laugh with, to cry with, to hold and cherish, no one to hate; no one but that voice in the recesses of your mind you always try to silence. In times of ultimate solitude, during the freezing nights beneath starless skies of endless black, that voice was the only thing that kept me alive.
The wastes are everything they encompass and nothing more; emptiness, nothingness. There very existence seemingly means non-existence. The wastes are an endless paradox. They will not claim one’s life, only one’s mind, and in doing so they indeed take life. Wastelands seemingly never end. At least not the ones I walked. They stretched on and on, as far as my eye could see; into the reaches of eternity. Still, despite the nothing that inhabits them, there are things to be discovered within the dreary wastelands.
Of course, those things which I found out in the abyss should be saved for my true tale; suffice to say that they were in large part objects which would normally not appear of any value.
There are always others with you out there in that endless stretch of barren land. Travelers, like myself, were here and there, scattered about the broad expanses of the infinite road we had little choice but to call home. It is a dangerous life; just because there are others out there, somewhere, does not mean you aren’t alone. We all walked our paths, confined to solitude. At times, the paths would meet. This produced the two main groups in the wastes. The strong and the dead. The latter never made it very far, though without any measure of the roads we walked it cannot truly be said. Perhaps they made it further than the rest of us could dream. All journeys come to an ultimate end, and there is none greater than death.
This world I speak of, the world of my existence, might seem to you strange. Improbable, impossible, a brew of my overactive imagination. For some of you, this is how it once was. For others, this is how it will come to be. Either way, my tale is true. I have tread long and hard through the wastelands, and I have peered into the vastness of the human soul. I have seen man reach new highs in his being; I have seen man reach new lows. I have seen mothers kill their sons. I have seen fathers rape their daughters. I have seen children giggle as their parents slowly died. And I have seen a man give another his last bit of food without request of payment.
When there is nothing around us, we have only ourselves. Unfortunately, I cannot say I have ever had another. We tend to all be alike, we who have strolled through the dust of the apocalypse. We are utterly alone in our endeavors. But now that I have pulled through, I can speak of what I saw, of what I did, of what I would have done. Listen, if you will. The truths I intend to reveal run to the very core of the human soul. Learn a bit about me, and in doing so, learn a bit about yourself.
I was born into oblivion. I suckled at the breast of the void. I grew strong on my own, I relied upon myself, and in doing so I realized a great many things. I have nearly been killed; I have killed. My name is Erich Stratholme, and I have survived the wastes.