"The world ended with a bright white flash. Everything fell silent, no engines, no singing birds and no muttering. Then, the screams erupted."
It has been years since the earth burned to ashes and humanity fled into the last place inhabitable: The S...
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Vulture didn't come back.
After I went to Kenny and apologized, we traveled to 164th street station. While we were travelling, my mentor didn't talk to me. The air in the tunnels was stale and the awkward silence between us didn't make that fact any better. It seemed like he wanted me to know how much I had misbehaved and kept silent to punish me for my wrongdoing. And he was right about doing it. The things I had said and some things even worse in my mind had been wrong towards him. He was the reason why I wasn't a rotting corpse in some side tunnel or a prostitute working in some rat-infested brothel at the end of the line. Kenny had done too much for me to be called useless.
All the time I couldn't stop thinking about everything. My mind skulked on the thoughts I had had against Kenny and on what had been happening in the last days. It hadn't been the first time I had been injured; it hadn't been the first death in my family. But the wounds that had been cut deep into the flesh of my soul hadn't healed enough yet. I couldn't stop holding a grudge against myself. I was the one who caused all of this destruction, it was my fault that my friends had perished under the worst circumstances.
The more I thought about it, the more the raging fire of hatred in my guts intensified. I wanted to find that dark creature and let it pay. It had tricked me into thinking it was trying to help me or at least that it didn't want any harm to me or anyone else. Yesterday had proven me wrong. Trusting an irradiated beast had been a stupid idea from the start on. One bullet would have been enough back on the hunt, it had been so vulnerable and I could have prevented all this death from happening.
The travel was nothing far from being boring as hell. No noises indicated an incoming attack, no interesting talks with my father, not even a tiny rat scurrying over the rusty rails. Normally it was extremely dangerous to get from one station to another, but it seemed like we had some luck. We were left in peace for the whole day and reached 164th pretty quickly. It felt like my feet were about to fall off when we spotted the first perimeter guard in the distance. The soft light in front of us looked inviting, signalizing the close proximity to humanity, warmth and safety.
"Get your passport ready," Kenny murmured next to me, giving me the first words since hours. I could hear he was still pissed but not as much as in the start. And even though I had done him wrong, he still cared about me.
"Yeah, I've got it." I knelt down and took off my small battered up backpack. The soft cloth scraped over my shoulders as the weight was taken off them. With a loud thump, my luggage fell to the ground and my hands roamed one of the small front pockets. I stopped when I felt the warm edges of paper touch the back of my hand. The small booklet looked just as run-down as my backpack looked but it was just as handy. Getting into a station without one of these could become quite challenging how I had to experience for myself once already.
