Day R

Chapter One - The Return from the Hunt

Shorty was returning from the hunt. Gloomy, tired, and without any catch. Despite the new filter in his gas mask, which he had replaced with pre-war medicine, he could still smell the unpleasant odor of toxic swamps. When he left home at the beginning of the week, he believed that the gas mask would allow him to penetrate deeper into the heart of the frog marshes and that his catch would be worth it. He hunted mutated frogs for fat, which his family used to make soap. After the war, there was a considerable shortage of fat, and Shorty's family was not doing well. Soap was a great commodity, but not anymore. To make it, salt was needed, which the town's inhabitants used to mine from the mines outside the town. The council decided to close the mining shafts. Mining was not safe in itself, but the main reason was the increasingly frequent attacks of bandits on the miners. The council decided unanimously. The supplies were stored in the cellars under the town, and although there was still enough of it, its distribution was severely limited. Shorty's soap business collapsed. Nevertheless, he continued to hunt for mutated frogs. Frog caviar was a delicacy of the wealthy bourgeoisie, but there was desperately little of it. Therefore, the hunter needed to go deeper into the swamps, so he sacrificed his valuable medicine for a military filter for his old mask. But he found nothing in the heart of the swamp. The frogs seemed to be driven away by something stronger and more insidious than a mutant toad, which could tear a piece of flesh from the body with its tongue. That terrified Shorty to death.

He came to the river where he hid his boat in the ferns, with a makeshift motor made from an old chainsaw. He threw his only catch of the day, a small snake, into a caviar box. Before the war, it was probably just an ordinary grass snake, but due to radiation and toxic gases over the years, it had turned into a deadly venomous creature. All the swamp hunters were afraid of snakes, except for Shorty, who had managed to haggle a leather suit sewn with metal plates from a wandering merchant. It's hard to say where the merchant got it from. He had seen similar suits worn by raiders as war loot, which some miners brought home occasionally and then boasted about their heroic stories in the pub in the evening. However, the suit was useless for swamp hunting. The heavy metal plates on the hard, inflexible skin limited movement in the marshes, and it did not offer much protection against the frogs. Shorty also got a pair of sturdy leather boots that the snake fangs could not pierce. When he accidentally stepped on a snake, it would just harmlessly bite into the boot, and the hunter would quickly separate its head from the body with his steel knife. The city doctor boiled some sort of ointment from the snake venom, which accelerated healing. Normally, Shorty did not care about it, but now it was his only means of earning a living. It should be enough for a week's food ration. He took off his mask, took a deep breath of fresh air, and started the motor. It's time to go to the city and meet with the council, he thought.

From a distance, an old acquaintance waved at him. Shorty's long-time friend Deny stood at the city water gate and, as almost always, waited for him to bring in his catch and sell it at the market. Then they would go and get drunk on cheap homemade spirits that would make their heads ache like they had been hit with a hammer. Deny belonged to the city's underworld and made a living as a scavenger, part of the lowest layer of the population, scavenging for old things in the deserts and ruins of cities. Old iron scrap for city blacksmiths, bones from carcasses for making glue, and pebbles from which skilled hands could make primitive knives. Civilization had vanished with the first bomb that fell on the earth, and the remnants of humanity had been thrown back thousands of years. A simple pebble was again more valuable than gold. Shorty liked Deny. In the pub, he had to sit with him in the corner of the poor, even though he himself belonged to the richer class. But the city soap merchant didn't care about the division of people in the city and valued his friend for his intelligence and sense of humor. Deny could survive in the desert better than any other townsman. He understood animals and often brought his hunting dog Grace with him, who always brought her beloved master something to eat. In addition, he was able to tame a clever raven that occasionally brought some rare trinkets from the old world, a well-sellable souvenir for the haughty wives of councilors.

"What are you thinking about, Shorty? You look like a frog licked your face," Deny laughed from ear to ear. But when Shorty approached the shore, he became serious. "You're hauling shit, aren't you? What happened?" Shorty turned off the motor and started tying the boat to the dock. "Yeah, I'm not carrying anything worth it. I need to talk to Scarecrow and maybe visit old Jack. Something's gone wrong in the swamps, Deny. I'm scared about it. Forget about drinking today." Deny didn't ask any more questions. He knew it wasn't a joke and came up with a plan in a second. "Scarecrow will be at home. He came back from patrol yesterday morning and he surely has the day off today. We can go there right away. But Jack will be out of town. I haven't seen him for about a week. I'll send Grace with a message, then you have to tell me what you want to write." Shorty tightened the boat knot, nodded to Deny that he understood, and grabbed the backpack with the equipment from the boat. He was fishing with a shotgun made by someone from an old military repeater. It was enough for the frogs, but certainly not for what took hold in the swamps. "Let's go, Deny. I need Scarecrow as soon as possible." They both passed through the city gate and headed towards the town hall.