Beneath A Dying Sky

Chapter 3 - Friend

On her long walk, she started trying to pick out the old familiar places. Maybe it was her mind's way of trying to find a sense of normalcy in the chaos.

There was the diner, in ruins now, but she could just barely make out the name on their sign. She'd gone there maybe once with her girlfriend, Lillian. The food was shit, and so was the service, but nobody went there for any of that. They went because it was the oldest diner in town.

That's where she found herself now, sitting in a broken booth in the broken diner. Her backpack felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. It probably didn't weigh more than ten. But that's what she got for always skipping gym in high school. She was starting to regret that now, there were a lot of things she was beginning to regret.

Here, in the aftermath, everything she'd been so worried about before felt so inconsequential now. There were some parts she liked: no rent for one, no grades, no stressful exams. But that's about where the list ended. She could make a mile-long list of the things she hated, and at the top of that list, it would be the isolation.

She needed a friend desperately. It tugged on her mind, seeming to try and rip her consciousness in half. The loneliness got to her, more than she cared to admit, but humans were inherently social creatures. She'd had friends before, plenty of them, but that was the last thing she wanted to think about.

Edith sighed and shrugged off her backpack, standing up and stretching, her muscles ached and groaned with the strain of suddenly walking more than her small bunker had allowed.

It was like her body had been shoved in a box and violently shaken up. Or hit by a truck. Her feet burned and throbbed in her boots, which were admittedly a bit too big. She could feel it causing blisters on her heels.

She would need to do something about that if she didn't want an infection, but she wasn't exactly swimming in first aid supplies, and neither was the demolished town. Everything was likely irradiated anyway and likely to give her radiation sickness again; she'd barely survived it the first time, and she wasn't willing to risk it again. She'd been lucky, but she certainly wasn't that lucky.

She did wonder how long it would be before her body developed some kind of cancer. She'd never thought about having children before, but she'd heard stories. Survivors of the Hiroshima bomb had children, and those children died of cancer or were born with abnormalities.

Radiation was a bastard, and so were the people who designed such horrific weapons. She'd never understood it; nukes were a losing weapon. One person uses them, then everyone else does, and the world becomes like it is now: cold and desolate.

She sat back down in the booth, wiping ash and grime from the mask before taking a deep breath and lifting the mask enough to drink water. She wasn't going to risk breathing in the air, not if she could help it.

She had no idea what was dangerous to ingest out here, the air, the dirt, the plants, so she wasn't going to risk it. Even as her stomach twisted and growled with hunger, she'd have to wait; there were more bunkers out there, and she was sure of it. After the war started, everyone could have one built; the only issue was being near your bunker when the bombs dropped, which most people weren't lucky enough to have been.

She fixed the mask and put her water bottle away; she'd read somewhere that in a survival scenario, you weren't supposed to ration your water. So she wasn't going to. Whether or not that would completely screw her over was another story. But she preferred only having one issue to deal with at a time, and for now, that was hunger. She sat for a while before deciding to get up and look around what was left of the diner, while the town hadn't been directly hit by the bombs, they got the shockwave and then the fires. That's what had destroyed everything. So she wasn't surprised when her search amounted to nothing more than charcoal.

Edith was about to sit back down when she heard something, a rustling of sorts or more of a walking sound. It wasn't human. The distinct noise of four feet pattering along followed my sniffing told her that much. But what animal would be left out here? She paused, glancing at her bag before putting it on and leaving the diner.

Animals had survived, but it wasn't exactly a good thing for her, depending on the animal. Her gaze drifted to the crows overhead, their cries were choked, like the air itself would squeeze the life from their beaks.

Edith shook her head, turning away from the birds and moving forward towards the sound of the animal. She'd seen plenty of horror movies in her life and knew this was a bad idea, but she couldn't help it. Her body was drawn to the sound of her desperate need for company in this desolate world.

At first, she didn't see anything, and then a gray head popped up from the rubble: the head of a pitbull, its ears perked up, and she froze. Shit. Maybe it was friendly? The dog looked at her a moment before bounding over, she knew running would just back it chase her.

Edith squeezed her eyes shut, prepared to feel the sting of teeth digging into her skin, but instead, she felt two paws smack into her stomach and knock her over before a wet tongue licked at her mask.

She grinned, reaching up and petting the dog, and she sat up to look at him. He was a skinny thing, dusty but miraculously unhurt. Maybe he'd wandered here from a less destroyed place. She pushed him off of her and stood, noticing a collar around his neck and a tag that read 'Sampson.'

"Hi, Sampson." Her voice was a whisper, raspy and faint. She was shocked she could speak at all. After so long just sitting in silence, she thought she'd forgotten how to. "You're a mess, aren't you, boy?" The dog's eyes looked up at her, his tail slapping the ground happily as she petted his head. Maybe he was just as lonely as she was.

She could always use a guard dog, though, from the looks of it, Sampson was far too friendly to hurt anyone. But that didn't matter, he seemed like a good boy, and what she needed was a friend, "You want to come with me, boy?" She crouched, rubbing his ears as he licked the mask happily, "Yeah? Okay, come on, let's find us both some food."

Edith stood and began walking again, Sampson following close at her heel, stopping periodically to sniff the ground but never straying too far. Maybe he was scared she would vanish like everyone else. Worried if he left her side for too long, she'd evaporate into the ash. Maybe that's what happened to his owners; they became charcoal statues left to crumble in the wake of man's self-destruction.

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Authors Note-

Chapter 3! Now we're getting somewhere; I hope you are all starting to realize this is not a happy story.