After Curfew

Walking around Wellington Wells has been easy in the past. People were always smiling, playing in puddles, couples were cuddling on benches, everyone was doing everything they're ought to be doing, constables were making their rounds keeping everyone safe from harm. Doctors were there to sniff out potential downers or to remind citizens to take their dose of the happy drug.

Ever since you've stopped taking your joy it's been more than difficult. Through an old newspaper article you remembered your family and despite all the panic and depression coming back to you, you decided to stop forgetting through taking joy. And as expected, living as a downer was almost suicidal. In the garden district the only eatable thing you would find would always be rotten. If you wanted to get some actual food you had to look for it in the village. There was no way around those streets you used to walk along so carelessly before.

You'd greet the citizens now and then, waving at them and giving them a forced smile. You didn't want to seem suspicious if you wanted to keep your head on your shoulders. You saw wellies beating a downer to death before and you definitely didn't want to follow the same fate.

Back when you still took your joy you felt safe with the doctors around even if they seemed a little weird to you. Nowadays those men terrified you to no end. Their low and calm voices made shivers run down your spine. You witnessed downers beeing sniffed out by them already, and their methods of dealing with them involved a bone saw in worst case cenarios. You tried to avoid walking down streets with those creeps in them or walk on the other side of the road at least. The further away from them the better.

Even worse were the bobbies who were scattered all across town every hour of the day. You used to trust those police officers, used to feel so secure when looking at the taller men, after all, every good citizen knew that they would protect the wellies from any harm. Constables would always be there to help anyone out. One of the many lies you used to believe in for way too long. You'd even hand constables a bottle of scotch or rum sometimes, you knew they had a thirst on them, and definitely not for water. Maybe it was the joy in your body that made you do that or maybe it was because you had a thing for men in uniform. You honestly couldn't tell.

Sadly, if you wanted to act natural you had to greet one of them every now and then. Until now none of them were able to tell that nothing was „right as rain" with you at all. And you wanted to keep it that way.

Until one faithful day came along. You hadn't eaten anything in at least 72hrs and your body was running very low on energy. Sleeping away the hunger wouldn't help forever either, so you decided to wait until one hour before curfew was due to go out of your shelter to rob a local house of it's food sources. You were able to find a cold stew on a stove and some half eaten apples. On the way out you grabbed a sandwich as well. You didn't know when the next opportunity for gathering supplies would be after all.

When you were back on the streets you decided to take a break in a small alleyway to eagerly dig into the food you've stolen. To be honest, you felt bad taking from the wellies who were running low on it themselves, but they were too high on drugs to notice anyways. Plus you would never take all their supplies to possibly starve them.

While you were digging into your small snack you didn't notice how it had turned dark around you. The bobbies were patrolling the streets with gas masks and headlights by now, whistling their random songs they couldn't fully remember while they were marching through the town.

Your heart sunk and your already pale face lost even more of its natural color. The shelter you slept in was in the park, which was very far away from where you were at the time beeing. How were you supposed to get back without beeing chased or possibly killed?