For the Love of Money

Chapter 1

I realized I had made my greatest mistake about two days ago, in the evening, right as the earth devoured the sun. I had forced myself to salvage one of the hundreds from the wad just to go eat something. I'd realized, like an idiot, that even after I was out of range from the boy, I had still not gone out to eat something, and now I was having hunger cramps. Major hunger cramps. Now that they were becoming unbearable, I knew that I'd have to get some food in me very soon, and that I would start getting sick if I didn't. Even though I was starving, I still had an almost internal desire to leave the money as it was. For hours I just stared at it, as if it were foreign to me. For hours I wondered how I could be so lucky to find this wad, why it was me and no one else. What would happen to me now that I'd finally gotten rich?

In truth, I wasn't like I didn't want to eat anything. It wasn't that I was scared to leave my corner. It was more...physiological.

I have been poor all my life. I've been at the bare minimum since the day I was born, since the evening that my parents left me and never came back. I have been raised on these streets, under the philosophy that money was what kept you alive, and whenever you got your hands on any kind of dough, it was your responsibility, your life's goal to make sure you made the best out of what you had. Now, if you have only five dollars, the decisions you make aren't so serious because you could always go out and find five more dollars if you were stupid with it.

But when you had thousands...

There would be no opportunity like this, never again. If I was dumb with this load, I deserved nothing but the most torturous death imaginable. I didn't touch the money for two days, not because I was scared of someone finding me, but because I felt that just the impure act of touching it, meddling with it, would ruin everything. It was as if the money were some intricate and fragile glass sculpture, and just nudging it would shatter everything.

Only when I started to have trouble sleeping from the hunger cramps did I decide that I needed to eat something. It was then that I feverishly plucked a bill from the wallet, then placed the wad back in its hiding place, stuffing the bill deep in my pockets. I didn't want anybody seeing my riches, and I sure as hell didn't want to get jumped.

The city was about a mile walk away, half that if you went through my shortcut. It was large, vast, and extremely easy to get lost in if you weren't careful. If you weren't careful, you'd either end up lost, missing, raped, or robbed. The place was an aerial plain of buildings, apartments, lights, and the sounds, my god the sounds. So loud over there, it could make someone go insane. People who went there tended to leave as soon as possible. People who were rich, on the other hand, loved the place. If you were rich, you could access the theaters, clubs, and malls there, probably have a good time. And you didn't have to worry about us bums coming to rob you, because you usually had some body guards protecting you. There were certain areas we kept away from, because those rich pigs would mercilessly attack anyone they thought as a threat. Even if you weren't doing anything.

Lord knows how many old friends I'd seen die in the cities.

Either way, that place was where we got all our food, our provisions, even houses if you could afford it. There were stores there, sources. It was a useful area to go, but a mile was a long walk. A lot of energy to expel.

Unless you were me of course.

I had a shortcut to the city that got me there in about half the time as it did through the normal way. It was quiet, fast, simple, and easy to navigate. There were no bums there. There were no rich pigs in sheep's clothing. There was only you and the path. The reason why the shortcut was so desolate was simple enough.

They were ruins.

Apparently, about ten years ago there was a giant accident in one of the nearer smaller cities. The city hosted an auto company, incredibly powerful, the drive for the country for a long time. Everything was good. People had jobs. Families were tight and provided for. Kids were skipping. And right at the company's prime, something went wrong and the place blew up. Thousands died, not only from the fire and the chemicals, but from something completely different: turns out, the government had been storing chemical weapons at the place, specifically a compound called diatrine. Diatrine is one of the deadliest chemicals ever manufactured, causing body spasms, hallucinations, foaming at the mouth, and melting. That's right, melting. It's so bad for you, you can become a human milkshake. People were outraged at the government, and it got so bad that even the president was impeached. Because of its history and the myth that diatrine still lingered in the area, everyone, even rich pigs, steered clear from there. No one had set foot in the old city for years, expecting the ground to open up beneath their feet or something.