-Dad’s POV-
I wake up and roll over and take a look at my sleeping son besides me. God he was so thin. We’ve been out of food for two weeks now and it was starting to show in his frail frame. His chest is still rising and falling so he’s still alive, thank God. I reach over and gently rouse him.
“John, John, son, we have to go.”
“Mmmf dad,” he says rolling over towards me with his eyes still closed, “five more minutes, please?”
“No son, I’m sorry son but we have to go, it isn’t safe. Besides, we might actually find food today.” He opens his eyes and looks at me with small, round, hope filled eyes. He sits up and puts his glasses on.
“Dad…” he says, his eyes starting to swim with tears, “are we… Are we going to die?” My heart sinks to the bottom of my stomach. My son, my ten year old son is scared of dying. He should only be scared of his first day of school and learning to ride a bike; not of the fact that he could die at any moment, whether it be from the bandits or malnutrition.
“No,” I say, now fighting back my own tears, “no son, we aren’t going to die.”
“Okay,” is all he is able choke out. I can see the few tears slide down his dirty, grimy cheek. I take our sleeping bags and roll them up and put them in our cart. This cart has every last thing that we own, besides the clothes on our backs and the shoes on our feet. We have one flashlight, two sleeping bags, a large, blue tarp, a couple of John’s favorite toys and one, nearly empty, canteen of water.
Nothing has been the same since the day that the war started. At first it was the same as any war, guns, tanks, and the occasional bomb here and there. But after a couple years with absolutely no change, the enemy decided to launch the nukes. Fearing this day would come, I built a bomb shelter capable of withstanding such a blast. The day the nukes were deployed I hid my wife and son with me down below. When we surfaced, only a few scattered buildings remained. They were just shattered remnants of shop owners who were paranoid of things like this that built bomb resistant buildings.
The first few months were okay. We managed as mother, father and son. Then, my wife started talking crazy.
“Sweetheart,” she would tell me, “we have nothing left for us here. We either die now before the agony sets in or we watch each other die, slowly and painfully.”
I found her a few days after that, laying face down with a gun just a few inches from her hand, a single hole in the forehead. John was barely six, too young to understand what happened to his mom. So the next four years until now it was just me and my boy.
