Post by Archagon on Nov 27, 2003 23:23:16 GMT -5
CHAPTER 1:
I was walking down the street with a package in my arm. Not much of a street, really, when you think about it. Streets are supposed to be clean and full of people. Streets are supposed to lead somewhere.
This street was a street without a destination, just like the others in the vicinity. Their square cement tiles have long since cracked and lost their grey tone. Some have been removed altogether, and often only partially. How did that saying go again? Ah, yes, “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”…needless to say, if my mother were still alive, her spine would be fractured and crumpled and separated into tiny bony cubes. I walked on.
My feet knew where to go, and I just followed them. To my right was a pathetic and sad building. It looked like the remnants of a majestic corporate clothing store. But, like a corpse left out in the sun, it was barely recognizable to be a store at all. The letters “SEARS”, once attracting many night-dwellers like mosquitos with its glow, now was cracked and splintered from too many years of blood and bullets. The walls were cut and bruised and morbidly bleak when compared to the dim grey sky above. In some areas you could see the construction beams, peeking out like fractured bones out of your skin, straining to hold the wreck of the building up.
Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, you will always find buildings like this. They might not look like much on the outside, but, for soldiers, they’re heaven. Inside, along the aisles of moth-eaten clothes and bent metal fixtures, one can find warmth and relaxation, which doesn’t come cheap nowadays. The rags are used as blankets. If the men get lucky, there is sometimes a bit of food left over in the fridges and cupboards. But the rule of thumb is to never count on there being any. Many a soldier’s life has been crushed by hope, the deadliest of poisons.
There is a voice inside of me, a tiny, yet annoying voice, that tells me, this scene is tearful, this scene is grisly, this scene is wrong. But I never listen. That is, I hear the words, I see the scenery, but they just don’t come together in my mind. To me, this is my life. This is the Ordinary, and anything in the past, no matter how long ago, is Out of the Ordinary. I know for a fact that these skeleton buildings were once magnificent towering stores servicing thousands a day. I also know that Jesus once walked upon the Earth. Besides, I don’t even remember those times, although I was already teenager. The only things I remember from the past are feelings of elation and happiness.
I also remember faces.
People had faces back then. Real, human faces. They smiled, they frowned, they expressed regret. The smiles weren’t strained. The frowns weren’t defaulted. The regret was real. The world was not bleak. Everything was saturated in emotion. Only the old had white hair.
Sometimes I wonder if it was all a petty daydream.
It doesn’t matter anymore. If there’s anything I learned over time, is that you only have the moment…there is no time to dwell anywhere far from this bubble in time, past or future. I walked on.
An abandoned parking lot greeted me. There were no cars between the numerous sets of two crackled and pale white lines, but then again, I wasn’t expecting any. Not a single human being in sight. Not a movement anywhere. The road that led from the parking lot into the street that divided the town into two distinct parts was also empty as far as the eye could see. The smell of smoke was in the air. A cold wind washed my ears and froze my eyes. Gunshots resounded from somewhere far away.
The d**n sky was still grey.
As I approached some old department store and entered the hallway underneath a segment of its rooftop extending over the sidewalk, I noticed a fire in the distance. Most likely some foolish posse burning something in a barrel to keep warm. It’s not a good idea to be noticed in the streets. The area here could only be compared to a bathroom which nobody bothers to clean up. Eventually, even the most unfavourable types will appear and thrive.
I shifted my gaze from the bleak environment to my package. It was a square case, no more than 5 inches to a side, labeled “MARTIN”. Martin, of course, was TROUPPE-B’s acclaimed leader. He gathered the group together shortly after the Third Defensive Strike of the War. We’re a freelance group, just like most of the other ones in the neighborhood, intent on surviving by sticking together. Our secondary goals include setting up alliances with other groups and creating solid supply and trade routes with them. It’s a difficult task, given that there’s usually heavy fighting almost anywhere. We’d expand our goals to stopping the War, or at least helping to stop it, but, despite all the crap people give you (or at least used to give you) about how an individual can make a difference, nobody can really make as much as a dent in this insane struggle.
We hate the soldiers with an almost animalistic rage. If we see one, we don’t ask any questions – we just shoot them. A long time ago, we used to help them with supplies and strategic planning and such. We thought we were right back then. We had God on our side, did we not? Heh. Little did we realize then that we were just leashed dogs working for them. One cold October ago we were forced to quit because we were didn’t have enough food and weapons left for us.
They shot us. They shot us like dogs. Nobody was spared.
The remenants of our group had to run for it. We moved out of the neighborhood a few miles down. Tough does not begin to describe our migration. Many of us died on the way. And when we got there, it wasn’t any better – we had no contacts and no supplies. Fortunately, Martin survived. His leadership skills are unparalleled…if it were not for him, we would have never survived those dreadful days.
So why don’t we just revolt and put a stop to this War? It’s all very simple – nobody knows who’s fighting who anymore, or even why. Ever lit magnesium on fire? It’s unstoppable as it burns to ash. After a few years, nobody cared what the war was about. And how are you to get a message to the millions of soldiers out there to stop? Not like they’ll listen anyways…
The package looked to be a C2D. Amazing marvel of technology, really…50 gigabytes of data on a tiny little disk, ready for easy reading. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty much the only high technology available to us. No matter, though. We do fine with what we have, for we have no other standards to judge our lives by – nearly everyone else lives on the streets of poverty and death. One should actually call us lucky. But I couldn’t help wondering what Martin would need with such a disk. Information is not hard to come by nowadays, and, generally, most things are known and accessible. And disks store information, right? I couldn’t think of a single thing that could not be discovered by other means than verging down a dangerous road into an Underground neighborhood to retrieve a disk.
My thoughts distracted me from my journey. I found myself on yet another sidewalk, but this time in a part of town that had houses. They were in very bad shape. Many rooftops have collapsed and left much rubble inside the 2-story buildings. Doors were missing altogether. Broken glass littered the streets and crunched under your feet. Shreds of old newspapers kept it company. The once emerald green lawns were now nothing but dirt and garbage. I suppose you could call them very unique gardens – gardens full of liquor bottles, old magazines, and syringes. Despite the threatening exterior of the area, though, it was the homeliest place in the entire town. Many groups functioned inside the delapiated carcasses of the lightless. Tinges of laughter intertwined with the odor of smoke, more so detectable than out in the open. I approached house number 146. The door was half-blown away at the bottom, but I suppose we were lucky to have a door at all. I knocked.
“Whossit?” a raspy voice croaked.
I mentioned my name.
“Ah, back from yer little journey? Well, come in then!”
And as the voice opened the door, warmth from the fire and the dark shadows on the half-illuminated faces all touched my face at once.
END
The most important thing for me is this - did the story convey well the feel of a hopeless, collapsed, poor, and empty world? You see, I have this image in my mind already, so I can't tell whether the story contains it. What can I fix?
PS Every line break is a new paragraph...stupid tab doesn't work on the forum.
I was walking down the street with a package in my arm. Not much of a street, really, when you think about it. Streets are supposed to be clean and full of people. Streets are supposed to lead somewhere.
This street was a street without a destination, just like the others in the vicinity. Their square cement tiles have long since cracked and lost their grey tone. Some have been removed altogether, and often only partially. How did that saying go again? Ah, yes, “step on a crack, break your mother’s back”…needless to say, if my mother were still alive, her spine would be fractured and crumpled and separated into tiny bony cubes. I walked on.
My feet knew where to go, and I just followed them. To my right was a pathetic and sad building. It looked like the remnants of a majestic corporate clothing store. But, like a corpse left out in the sun, it was barely recognizable to be a store at all. The letters “SEARS”, once attracting many night-dwellers like mosquitos with its glow, now was cracked and splintered from too many years of blood and bullets. The walls were cut and bruised and morbidly bleak when compared to the dim grey sky above. In some areas you could see the construction beams, peeking out like fractured bones out of your skin, straining to hold the wreck of the building up.
Everywhere you go, everywhere you look, you will always find buildings like this. They might not look like much on the outside, but, for soldiers, they’re heaven. Inside, along the aisles of moth-eaten clothes and bent metal fixtures, one can find warmth and relaxation, which doesn’t come cheap nowadays. The rags are used as blankets. If the men get lucky, there is sometimes a bit of food left over in the fridges and cupboards. But the rule of thumb is to never count on there being any. Many a soldier’s life has been crushed by hope, the deadliest of poisons.
There is a voice inside of me, a tiny, yet annoying voice, that tells me, this scene is tearful, this scene is grisly, this scene is wrong. But I never listen. That is, I hear the words, I see the scenery, but they just don’t come together in my mind. To me, this is my life. This is the Ordinary, and anything in the past, no matter how long ago, is Out of the Ordinary. I know for a fact that these skeleton buildings were once magnificent towering stores servicing thousands a day. I also know that Jesus once walked upon the Earth. Besides, I don’t even remember those times, although I was already teenager. The only things I remember from the past are feelings of elation and happiness.
I also remember faces.
People had faces back then. Real, human faces. They smiled, they frowned, they expressed regret. The smiles weren’t strained. The frowns weren’t defaulted. The regret was real. The world was not bleak. Everything was saturated in emotion. Only the old had white hair.
Sometimes I wonder if it was all a petty daydream.
It doesn’t matter anymore. If there’s anything I learned over time, is that you only have the moment…there is no time to dwell anywhere far from this bubble in time, past or future. I walked on.
An abandoned parking lot greeted me. There were no cars between the numerous sets of two crackled and pale white lines, but then again, I wasn’t expecting any. Not a single human being in sight. Not a movement anywhere. The road that led from the parking lot into the street that divided the town into two distinct parts was also empty as far as the eye could see. The smell of smoke was in the air. A cold wind washed my ears and froze my eyes. Gunshots resounded from somewhere far away.
The d**n sky was still grey.
As I approached some old department store and entered the hallway underneath a segment of its rooftop extending over the sidewalk, I noticed a fire in the distance. Most likely some foolish posse burning something in a barrel to keep warm. It’s not a good idea to be noticed in the streets. The area here could only be compared to a bathroom which nobody bothers to clean up. Eventually, even the most unfavourable types will appear and thrive.
I shifted my gaze from the bleak environment to my package. It was a square case, no more than 5 inches to a side, labeled “MARTIN”. Martin, of course, was TROUPPE-B’s acclaimed leader. He gathered the group together shortly after the Third Defensive Strike of the War. We’re a freelance group, just like most of the other ones in the neighborhood, intent on surviving by sticking together. Our secondary goals include setting up alliances with other groups and creating solid supply and trade routes with them. It’s a difficult task, given that there’s usually heavy fighting almost anywhere. We’d expand our goals to stopping the War, or at least helping to stop it, but, despite all the crap people give you (or at least used to give you) about how an individual can make a difference, nobody can really make as much as a dent in this insane struggle.
We hate the soldiers with an almost animalistic rage. If we see one, we don’t ask any questions – we just shoot them. A long time ago, we used to help them with supplies and strategic planning and such. We thought we were right back then. We had God on our side, did we not? Heh. Little did we realize then that we were just leashed dogs working for them. One cold October ago we were forced to quit because we were didn’t have enough food and weapons left for us.
They shot us. They shot us like dogs. Nobody was spared.
The remenants of our group had to run for it. We moved out of the neighborhood a few miles down. Tough does not begin to describe our migration. Many of us died on the way. And when we got there, it wasn’t any better – we had no contacts and no supplies. Fortunately, Martin survived. His leadership skills are unparalleled…if it were not for him, we would have never survived those dreadful days.
So why don’t we just revolt and put a stop to this War? It’s all very simple – nobody knows who’s fighting who anymore, or even why. Ever lit magnesium on fire? It’s unstoppable as it burns to ash. After a few years, nobody cared what the war was about. And how are you to get a message to the millions of soldiers out there to stop? Not like they’ll listen anyways…
The package looked to be a C2D. Amazing marvel of technology, really…50 gigabytes of data on a tiny little disk, ready for easy reading. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty much the only high technology available to us. No matter, though. We do fine with what we have, for we have no other standards to judge our lives by – nearly everyone else lives on the streets of poverty and death. One should actually call us lucky. But I couldn’t help wondering what Martin would need with such a disk. Information is not hard to come by nowadays, and, generally, most things are known and accessible. And disks store information, right? I couldn’t think of a single thing that could not be discovered by other means than verging down a dangerous road into an Underground neighborhood to retrieve a disk.
My thoughts distracted me from my journey. I found myself on yet another sidewalk, but this time in a part of town that had houses. They were in very bad shape. Many rooftops have collapsed and left much rubble inside the 2-story buildings. Doors were missing altogether. Broken glass littered the streets and crunched under your feet. Shreds of old newspapers kept it company. The once emerald green lawns were now nothing but dirt and garbage. I suppose you could call them very unique gardens – gardens full of liquor bottles, old magazines, and syringes. Despite the threatening exterior of the area, though, it was the homeliest place in the entire town. Many groups functioned inside the delapiated carcasses of the lightless. Tinges of laughter intertwined with the odor of smoke, more so detectable than out in the open. I approached house number 146. The door was half-blown away at the bottom, but I suppose we were lucky to have a door at all. I knocked.
“Whossit?” a raspy voice croaked.
I mentioned my name.
“Ah, back from yer little journey? Well, come in then!”
And as the voice opened the door, warmth from the fire and the dark shadows on the half-illuminated faces all touched my face at once.
END
The most important thing for me is this - did the story convey well the feel of a hopeless, collapsed, poor, and empty world? You see, I have this image in my mind already, so I can't tell whether the story contains it. What can I fix?
PS Every line break is a new paragraph...stupid tab doesn't work on the forum.