The Masked War

Chapter 1

Bridges and roads. The only thing left standing from the Before.

Grandmothers and grandfathers speak of the wonders of the Before, about the buildings that touched the sky, and trains that ran underground. Whenever Grandma began her talk of the Before, I shut off my ears, letting none of the nonsense reach my brain.

The Before doesn't matter now. There's already too much happening in the After to even spare a moment's thought to thinking of the Before. Cause while the Before was a shit show, the After is a fucking death match.

Figuratively. I guess.

In the After, the problems never seem to end, despite how hard you might try to shove them away.

No.

They'll just keep piling up, one on top of the other, slowly building up over time.

I sigh as I walk home, my feet avoiding the deep cracks and holes by memory, leaving me free to look around as I wish, though there isn't much to see. The streets are broken and cracked as always, splitting to reveal ravines. Beside the roads, scattered houses stood, some rickety and old, and some with fresh paint on their walls, trying to cover the mess that it was. The old power lines leaned over the road, looking as though if a light breeze passed through the neighborhood, they'd fall. 

Electricity used to flow through them, Grandmother says, but that's unimaginable. Why would they use wood to conduct electricity? 

No, our way nowadays, with electricity transmitting through the air to each house, was much better. It didn't need such rickety old blocks of wood. 

Behind me, I knew, laid a long road that made its way to school, though that wasn't a pleasant sight either. Though renovations had always been promised, they had never been done. Lies, just like everything else.

The only beautiful thing in the After was the sky.

The sky stretched forever, always maintaining it's clear color, unless clouds threatened to take away the blue and replace it with it's dark, gray. But even then, the clouds were beautiful. They brought the rain, pitter pattering on the road in it's very own melody. 

Grandmother said that flakes of white used to fall from the sky, cold and soft. It was when she said things like that, that I almost figured that the Before had been some magical wonderland instead of history.

The road dips, and I glance back down, staring at the rundown white house before me.

Home. 

Can such a word describe this place? This place isn't home. It's only temporary, like everything else. But, then what is really home? Family. My family is my home.

"I'm home!" I call out, as I step onto the sinking porch, the ajar front door beside me.

I step into the house, my eyes skimming over my "home". The kitchen lies to the left of the door, though it can barely be called a kitchen. It's simply a couple cabinets and a sink along with a heating pad. Though we really don't need the cabinets, since we store nothing in the houses we stay in. The sink is rarely used, since the bathroom was closer to the dining room than the kitchen was, but the heating pad we used thrice a day, usually to heat up our food. It was like an oven and microwave stored into a single stove-like object. Our living room laid just past the kitchen, just a lonely green couch in a small, open room. A figure sat on the small couch, her eyes focused on the transparent phone in her hand. The latest model, the kids at school say, is implanted in your eye so that only you can see it and no one else can.

"Bryony!" Mom yelled from where she sat on the couch, her light brown hair falling over her shoulders.

"Yes?" I ask, trudging over as I set my bag on the ground.