I woke up and knew something was off. It was the eerie silence surrounding me, enveloping me, that made me afraid. The last time it was this quiet, my neighborhood was flattened and I only survived by huddling in the keep and waited for the screaming and crashing to end. Then it was silent. Dark. Consuming.
“Oh hell. Not again,” I thought to myself, and tried to sit up. My left arm seemed frozen in place, and with every attempt to move it I felt searing pain in the center of my hand. Using my right hand, I reached across my body to feel what was causing the pain and felt the large wooden splinter that had my left hand impaled to the ground. I couldn’t see anything so I turned to face the left and my damaged hand, and using my right hand, I grasped the spike and pulled it out.
There had been a time when something like facing this pain would have been emotionally and physically crippling, but it had been close to three years since the Gop had started their destruction across the land. No one knew how far reaching the devastation was, but rumors about people trying to move ahead of it indicated that it just couldn’t be done.
I was bleeding based on the sticky feel my hand had. I wrapped it in my shirt tail, keeping the shirt on. There was no telling where I was, but avoiding the PGs was critical to my safety. The PGs had some harmless fools who just talked about their alleged exploits, but some were way more than talk and took pleasure in violating the sanctity of a woman’s body. It had happened once before, when the Gops began their rampage. I was a fool and never thought that what was happening could actually be allowed to continue. I spoke out at town meetings, imploring others to open their eyes to see the madness. I marched during protests. I got into heated deputes with men who were mostly white, wore ball caps or red, white and blue head wraps, and who were usually carrying a weapon in plain sight. One of my disputes resulted in what started out as an assault, but quickly became a rape. It was about violence and his ability to scare me quiet. It told me that I would never be safe as long as I had an opinion that was different from his and all of the Gops. His neck tattoo was an ornate cross, telling me that his religion also approved his behavior.
I must’ve fallen asleep or passed out because I knew I started to see some shapes in the predawn light. I was outdoors, behind ancient hedges that marked property lines in almost every neighborhood. Most were flattened, but the hedge I was behind saved me from attacks, but also had sharp branches that sliced through my hand. I was still wearing clothes, but my shoes were gone and my hair was a tangled, greasy mess. I could smell my body odor, mixed with blood from my hand, and flop sweat that was my new normal. My lips were dry and split, my mascara long gone.
I missed showers. Even the cold showers that we had before the tyranny took hold would be welcome now. I missed water. I could not remember the last time I drank a cup of water. I’ve had some vodka, but mostly I’ve had the boiled water from the river that ran through the city. I tried not to think of what else was in that water, and boiling it was the only way I could think to kill the bacteria I knew was in that river... that and using vodka as an antibacterial method. Keeping the vodka from the flames was made obvious to me when I inadvertently created an explosion that melted my eyebrows. I didn’t even want to think about how that changed my appearance. That no longer mattered.
I could see more as the sun’s light started to spread across my part of the world. I hadn’t heard anything, so I carefully looked through the branches to verify that no one was waiting to terrorize me. When I confirmed that, I slowly started to stand and surveyed the land that had once been thick with trees and homes. No more. I could see no landmarks. I could’ve been on the moon.
