It isn't clean, hasn't been for a long time. I suspect it never will be again. It's riddled with everything I despise, everything that makes moving forward more arduous and pointless. There's the wind so cold in the dark winters that it burns you through your clothes, the wind so hot in the summers that every inhalation feels like you're swallowing fire, and the wind that carries the smell.
My God, the smell.
The wind is rotten now, disease and decay and death having poisoned every molecule of it. It's the Dead with their decomposed skin and their decomposed innards as they mindlessly drag their decomposed feet across the asphalt, the grass, the broken glass and debris. It's the dust and smoke from the Living's bonfires at night in dilapidated buildings. And it's blood. It's blood, metallic and strong, pouring out of the Living's mouths, out of their flesh, as they scream and cry and writhe on the ground. It's been years, but my nose has never ignored it, my mouth never too dry to taste it all, and my stomach never ceasing its unsettling churning.
Gritting my teeth and blinking away cold sweat, I lengthen my strides, my lungs, on the verge of bursting, finally able to decompress when I reach the top of the hill laden with dead grass and patches of snow. The wind is strong here, the nauseating stench of fallen Living swirling in the air, punching my brain and chewing my tongue. Through the pounding of my heart in my ears I can hear their moans and groans, their uneven steps in the soggy earth. They're close, and by the sound of it there are a lot of them.
Panting, I let my shoulders sag, my pack slipping off my body and hitting the ground beside me. I've been walking since sundown yesterday, trekking these mountain-like hills for a good portion of the day. I'm tired, exhausted even, the thought of establishing a safe shelter until tomorrow almost too sweet to pass up... but I can't. I can't stop. Not when I'm so close, not when the knife in my belt is still clean of their blood.
Work first, play after.
I take in the scene in front of me: disheveled buildings, abandoned cars crashed into one another or sitting idly on the sides of the roads, newspapers and baby strollers and blood stains staining the concrete. Yeah, Seattle isn't what it used to be, but neither is anything else. Nothing else...
It's only when I look at the main road, in the gap between two tall buildings, that I notice it: Living, one of them, walking backwards with something in their hand. And just a few feet in front of them...
A horde. A horde of the Dead.
And, slinging my pack back on my back with an energy like a phoenix having risen, I charge down the hill and towards the city.
When I was younger, my parents used to tell me that I was a light in a world full of darkness, that the unselfish compassion I had for others would be the thing that preserved a certain future. I want to believe that that's the thing propelling me down this snowy hill now, the thing that's making the exhaustion disintegrate from my aching limbs and strained eyes as I double my speed, but I'd be kidding myself. It's curiosity. It's curiosity and hope that's moving me, that's guiding each heavy step marking the mud as I go. It's an anxious wish that whoever I saw alive and stepping back from the horde is who I've been looking for with furious desperation.
