The Flare

The City

       Gerard holstered his machete for a moment to pull his collar closer to his throat. According to the thermostat outside the lab, the temperature was at a biting -27 degrees and no matter how hard they tried, Mikey and Gerard couldn't seem to stop their teeth from chattering. It didn't help that the soot blackened snow had soaked their pant legs to the knee.

       The journey into the derelict city was long and arduous but otherwise pretty mundane. If you considered fighting off two separate groups of deformed and babbling Mutes mundane, that is. Gerard had been forced to cut the head off of a particularly nasty Mute that had managed to get Mikey on the ground and was trying to rip his mask off. He was still trying to shake off the glazed stare of it’s three eyes. Brendon and Billie had raised them to believe that the Mutes weren't people but sometimes Gerard couldn't help but wonder if they, too, were just doing what they had to, to survive.

       After that fight, he couldn't help but keep sneaking glances at his younger brother. It was a closer call than Gerard was comfortable with and he secretly scolded himself for not doing a better job protecting him. He'd lost his mother and father before he was old enough to do anything about it and he vowed to himself, each and everyday, that so long as he had breath in his body, no harm would come to Mikey.

       Gerard had been humming under his breath in attempt to distract himself from the way the wind battered at the back of his neck, like searing hot needles but as they entered the remnants of the city, he fell quiet, listening. The outskirts, in which they lived, were dangerous but the ravaged cityscape was an entirely different breed of animal.

       Jagged, broken beams surrounded them ominously, like the teeth of a savage beast waiting to close it's jaws around them. One might think that a huge of populous like the former Utopia might be filled with Mutes and once upon a time, you'd have been correct. Gerard was only thirteen when the Mute/Raider war broke out in the city fifteen years earlier.

         No one knew quite how it began, but for six long months, a series of bloody battles waged on between human and Mute. More blood was spilt on each side than anyone could count and the howling wind seemed to carry the blood curdling screams for miles. Many nights during those months did Gerard lay, curled into a ball, his palms pressed to his ears and Mikey shivering at his side.

        Brendon, who had ventured out during the war and seen the sheer carnage of it all, put the lab into lockdown. Gerard would never forget the fear in his eyes when he returned that night. Brendon never told him of the atrocities that he'd witnessed that day but staunchly insisted, after, that it was time that he and Mikey learn to fight. Billie and Brendon had many a heated fight about it, late in the night when they thought the brothers to be asleep.

       Billie insisted vehemently that they were too young and that their innocence should be preserved as long as possible but with Brendon's argument that they no longer lived in a world where the innocent could survive, Billie caved. So during those six months, Gerard and Mikey learned not only how to fight with both machetes and clubs, but also how to set traps and evade capture. Brendon no longer withheld his knowledge of the horrors of the outside world but pointedly told them of some of the tragedies that he'd seen unfold on his expeditions.

       When, at last, the war ended what Mutes were left alive were forced out of the city and the brothers, despite having seen little of the real world, were already more battle hardened than any thirteen and ten year old had the right to be. When Brendon lifted the lockdown, he began to take the brothers with him on his journeys, putting their newly learned skills to the test. Gerard still sometimes had nightmares of the mangled corpses he'd witnessed piled in the streets from the aftermath.