Toy Soldier {ManxManxMan}

CHAPTER 50

Nora was incredibly accurate with her guess on how long it would take to drive to her stash of weapons, two days exactly, and that was including stops for bathroom breaks. It didn't take us long to prepare for the trip either, taking two cars and piling into them with supplies we may need, most notably food. It turned out that we were even lower on ammunition that I thought, because when I went into the armory to grab us a few boxes of bullets, I had to stop and stare at just how few we had left.

I only took a few, leaving the majority for the rebellion just in case, but there were barely fifty boxes left. Part of me wanted to ask how it got so bad, and how the supplies had run so low without us noticing, but that would have been a pretty pointless question, really. Ever since escaping from the Con Rồng four months ago, I'd been completely distracted by my own life, and I'd been neglecting my duties as a member of this military, of course I hadn't noticed.

Meeting Beckett and Orion so long ago, although really it hadn't been that long, reuniting with Maggie only to lose her, Lailani returning with Josie, uncovering the fact that she and Dmitri knew Vinet Ivanov on a personal level; the painful discovery that Lailani was indirectly the cause of her own son being kidnapped and tortured for eleven damn years.

So much had happened in just four months, and I felt... somehow much older than I actually was. I felt like I'd grown in maturity as well as literal age, and it was overwhelming to say the least. Even if we were getting low on supplies, though, that wouldn't stop me from fighting back, and I knew for a fact it wouldn't stop any of us. This rebellion existed for one thing, to take down the new government and free this god forsaken world from its clutches.

Sitting in the back of one of the cars, my arms folded over the door so my chin could sit on my forearms and my eyes could follow the landscape as it rushed by, my mind wandered back to Diego Manuela, and the things he'd said in answer to my questions. Saying it out loud would make me sound as crazy as he was, but... he did have a point...

The world before the war was just as bad as it was now. Hell, it was worse. I remembered how uneasy my father always seemed when watching political newscasts, with the American President giving a speech that people actually cheered for. The man was driving the country into the ground, and even my father said it, that war was inevitable, we were just steers awaiting slaughter.

I remembered... when the President died, was assassinated, by Demi it turns out, my father cried tears of joy. He thought everything would be okay, that with the tyrant good and dead, then maybe we could heal from his influence, but God was he wrong. The world back then was chaotic, and maybe it was chaotic now as well, but at least this chaos was predictable and equal.

It was a double-edged knife. Had the world not ended, I never would have met Beckett and Orion, but Ronnie would also be alive. If I was getting technical about it, I probably would have met Beckett eventually, he was Ronnie's cousin after all, but I wouldn't have met Orion. Or, hell, maybe I would have. With my love of the sky, I probably would have eventually found my way to that museum where Orion had literally been raised.

Yea. Somehow, I knew that even if the world hadn't of ended, we would have found each other regardless, and maybe we wouldn't have been lovers, Beckett would have married Shiloh, I would have stayed with Ronnie, we all could have been friends. It was... such a melancholy feeling.

This world was in ruins, but it really didn't look much different than it used to. Diego was right. The world was better this way, it needed to be taught this lesson, but I would never forgive it for taking my family from me. Even my mother. Especially Ronnie. I wouldn't let it take anything else from me.

The little town we cruised into was entirely abandoned, which made for easy and safe access I admit, but it was so quiet it made my nerves flutter in discomfort, staying close to Beckett and Orion as we followed Nora towards one building in particular. It seemed to be even more bombed out than the rest, but when Nora threw aside a few planks of wood and sheet metal, she revealed a chained up and padlocked door leading down into a cellar.