You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive

Part 1

It was eerily quiet when I returned from my hunt. Nobody seemed to be here, except for me and the stag I was carrying over my shoulders. I dropped the stag off outside my house and went straight to Jess'. She wasn't in. Someone appeared to have broken in. The door was off one hinge, the table knocked over, and there was glass on the floor. There was a stain on an upturned chair – blood.

I panicked. Somebody had hurt Jess. I quickly assumed it was Myles. I've never trusted him. I ran to his house to find his door on the floor. Someone must have heard Jess' cries and come to help her. Blood stains were plentiful here. I hoped they were his and not hers. Then I noticed a bullet casing on the floor, and a bullet hole in the wall. That was very odd; nobody here in Bayton owned a gun.

I went outside and called for help. No answer came. It was as if the whole village had vanished. I looked around, going from house to house and noticing the same things – doors and windows were smashed and broken, blood stains and bullet casings lay splattered and scattered on virtually every floor. Every building was void of life – the houses were all empty, there was nobody in the grain store, the smithy was abandoned. No one was hiding in the barn. There weren't even any animals in there. Someone had come to Bayton and taken everybody away. It can't have been Myles. It could only have been the city.

There were plenty of tracks in the soft, damp earth. There were a lot of footprints, and it appeared some people had been dragged away. They all led out of town in the same direction – eastwards. Harlan lay to the east; they must have been taken there. I cursed under my breath and stood there for a minute trying to decide what to do next. I'd only been hunting for a couple of hours, so they can't have been too far away. If I ran I could catch them up. They were escorting ninety-seven prisoners, so they can't have been moving too fast. But what could I do, one man on my own?

It suddenly didn't matter. I could only think of Jessica. There had been blood in her house, she might be hurt. Jess was in trouble, and I was the only person who had any chance of helping her. Before I realized I was doing it, I was running east, following the tracks away from Bayton and towards Harlan.

The words my grandpa used to tell me began echoing in my head – "You'll never leave Harlan alive," he used to say. He was probably right, he had always been right about everything else. Harlan was an evil place, the birthplace of the evil that nearly destroyed the whole world. If there was any chance of saving Jess, I had to get to her before they got her to Harlan. I didn't know how I would rescue her, or even if I could rescue her. All I knew is that my life meant nothing without her, and I would give my life to try to save hers.

*

It took me three and a half weeks to get to Harlan. The road was long and hard, and the weather was almost unbearable as soon as I left the forest. I tried to imagine what life was like two-hundred years ago when the air was still breathable, when temperatures weren't so hot. Those must have been beautiful days. They even had snow in winter. No one had seen snow since the war. It was too hot. There were no winters. The air was so thick with pollution and radiation that the air never cooled down enough for wintry weather. Large parts of the world remained uninhabitable.

Bayton was just about livable. The forest provided protection from the heat, to some extent. The soil was fertile enough to grow some crops. It even rained in Bayton, which I learned on the road was not something that happened everywhere.

Harlan, of course, was fine. They'd spent millions of dollars and hours researching and developing technologies to filter and cool the air, and to protect the city and its citizens from the effects of the war they started. They even had artificial rain that fell a little bit every day.