We walked along the dying river, Sam and I. The moon was creeping up the night sky, and with its scintillating light, I could clearly see the wrinkles that drew across Sam's weary face, his eyes now darting about the scenery. The daunting mountains echoed from afar, tiny glimmers in the water near blinding me if I looked directly.
"So tell me about the old society," I finally asked, eagerly watching him think the question over. I was much too young to have any knowledge, but with his many years, he explained, he could recall bits and pieces about their life.
"What is there you want to know?" he gazed back at me, my frozen look opposing him.
"Well, I-I don't know. I suppose we could start with why they're gone."
"Much too complicated," he exclaimed, rushing his hands across his face in an effort to rid himself of the pools of sweat that clustered along his pale cheeks and forehead.
"And why is that?" from miles away I could hear the crickets chirping coupled with the incessant roar of the yellow ocean. We both stood there, silently, letting the grace of the summer wind befall our skin.
"Their lives," he began, "were very different from the ones you and I lead."
"In what ways?" I asked poising uncertain glances back at his darkening face.
"Say, when was the last time you felt pressured into doing something?"
"Oh, well... I don't know," you could almost head the trembling of uncertainty in my voice, "I don't recall anything of the sort." We stopped, now, at a lifeless pile of scattered bricks embraced in the grass invested floors.
"This," he started, "was an old food supply shelter. 'Grocery Stores' they would call them."
"And what happened?" my voice grew hoarse and I could feel the dryness slowly spreading across my throat.
"Fear. Fear of an outage, or a spontaneous war diminishing the food supply," he hopped over piles of stone into the wreckage that remained.
"But what caused that?" I asked, but alas, he was already too far in the ruins to hear.
"A frenzy of food hoarding ensued," I could barely hear him call out, seeing him sift through the mountains of black clump, "All these buildings soon lost their food."
"And what about those who didn't come in time?"
"They starved."
We trekked, now, past valleys of red sand and swarms of vegetation at our feet. The ground seemed to be booming, all of the environment prospering around us. Had it always been like this? We arrived into heaps of mud and a fowl expression grew on my face.
"What is that smell?" I shrieked, covering my nose with my hands.
"These are the slums."
"The what?"
"The worst place you could live. As you can see, the uninhabitable living conditions still prevail to this day."
"Why would anyone want to live here?"
"Is a man naïve if he simply is uneducated?" This question floated in the air for some time before penetrating its into me. I turned sharply toward him, but he was off, once more. My feet were growing tired, my lungs weak, and as I finally reached Sam, I tried to explain my dissatisfaction with this entire endeavor, but his face was as nonchalant as ever.
