A Savage Life

Chapter 16

It's been two weeks now since Sabine died, and I haven't seen nothing of civilization yet, and when you're away from it for so long, you start to grow crazy.

I haven't eaten anything green in a while, but I have had plenty of red. Nothing but red. I couldn't make a fire because it rained for two weeks after Sabine died, so I started to eat raw flesh of weird shaped creatures that look like frogs covered in fur and clay sand filled with oyster-like pill bugs because I was so hungry. I had resorted to drinking out of mud puddles due to thirst, and do you know where that got me? On a mat, in a makeshift shelter of the Hooded Woman's, getting nursed back to health. I had caught some kind of parasite, and now she's here, giving me medication for it. I haven't felt good for days now, and here she is again, taking care of me when I'm near death, again.

Come to think of it, why does she show up when I'm about to die? It doesn't make sense. When we got far enough for safety from Junktown, she abandoned me. I followed her into some forest, and poof, she was gone. Like a ghost. There is nowhere to run off too, and when you're in the forest, being quiet could never happen. Each step was noisier than a boom box, and when she disappeared like that, that kinda freaked me out. But still, she still showed up when I needed her most. And it's better then than never. Not to mention, she even gave me a new set of clothes, and let me bathe myself in fresh water collected from the rain.

I liked the new clothes too, they were a pair of blue jeans with a quarter sleeve shirt and a brown jacket. No new shoes though, but the soles were repaired. I wore the comfortable clothes and felt like a regular guy again and not like I had just escaped from a laboratory.

I did try to talk to the Hooded Woman though, but she basically ignored me. I did discover she can actually speak, but it was always about something else, and she ignored all my questions or answered them rather vaguely.

All I can say is that she's a quiet one. And she's very mysterious, so without verification of a name, I'll just note her as, The Mysterious Woman. I know what you're thinking, "What is she a superhero?" Well, no, but she might as well be. She's there when you need her most, then she's gone. Much like now, how I woke up to find myself laying on the mat, the rain stopped, and a warm fire with a hot pan of soup nearby. To be quick about things, I rubbed my hair, ate, washed up, and left after kicking out the fire. I took the last two pills she left me, and then I started to move out.

I walked for hours through the wild, and then I found myself onto an old, paved road. It was very big, like the remnants of an old 4-Way, but without paint or signs. And based on the cracks, and broken pieces of the road, as well as the old foundations of buildings that once stood there, you could tell that some disaster had taken place here long ago and wiped out whatever was standing in it's path. The place smelled of dust and death, and the skeletons strewn about here and there, frozen in mummified terror, even verified that.

Mutated cockroach flies and mosquitoes buzzed around me as I walked by a mini mart or gas station that once stood there, (Joy, supplies!) but as my shadow loomed closer, I could see dead bodies, old and new ones, pressed up against the door, as if they were trying to get away from something terrifying. I did not want to visit what was in there.

"Let's face it Josh, this place is dead." I tell myself; mind you that that was an understatement.

This place was desolate, so I had no one else to talk to but myself. And if you're not convinced, I had even walked through what looked like times square and threw a rock into every window I came across and no alarm was set off, nor did people come. Maybe there were a few huge spiders with unicorn-like horns that scurried away as fast as they could, letting out screeches of terror, and ignoring me. If you're not sold yet, you will be by all the dead skeletons I was wading through. I need a snowmobile to get through all of this...or a sandmobile really.