The Days After

The streets steamed after the rain, but some stains were harder to wash away and the council workers could be found with stiff brooms, running back and forth through the streets. They were trying to eradicate the evidence, but no amount of scrubbing could erase it from the minds of those that witnessed the brutality of the government at first-hand.

The nightmare continued for weeks afterwards; sleep eluded only those that didn’t succumb to the rivers of drugs that flooded the area following the massacre. Wherever you looked there would be small crowds of people huddled in a corner of the town square. On occasions, small pockets of fighting would break out, but no one seemed bothered. Corpses in the street were a daily occurrence now. It was something we all had to get used to.

Those of us wanting to go back to the old ways could be found hiding in the old municipal bank, a sturdy edifice that we believed would protect us from our new enemies. We would go out at night foraging for food, anything that could sustain us. We often found only meagre scraps of rotting meat, so we stripped the bodies of the dead. Sometimes they would move, perhaps cry out and one of us would have to use our shovel to silence them. Being discovered was a bigger nightmare than the images that haunted our dreams.

Within hours all the council workers had disappeared from the streets and an eerie silence descended. The sizzle of the rain against the asphalt was the only sound that could be heard, but that soon became a solitary drip from the corrugated roofs of the shacks that lined the main highway, their owners long gone now. The wares that would usually be found stacked neatly within these shady lean-tos now looted by scores of blank-eyed rioters. There was nothing left, not even birds seemed to be in song.

I clung to my doll throughout the ordeal, my eyes tightly shut and my hands clamped over my ears. Blotting it out seemed to save me. I remember being slung over a broad shoulder, my chest bouncing against the taut muscle so that, even now, it’s tender to the touch. Among the twenty of us left in our group, I am the only one without some wound that requires me to rest. Some are worse than others.

If you watched people lying around, you could read their thoughts in their eyes, those pools of liquid ready to give up secrets normally buried deep: no one wanted to be the first to die, to think that perhaps they might be eaten by those that currently took care of them. It made martyrs of many, my father included. It’s not something he’d be proud of, if he was still here.

In the weeks that followed, we dug below the foundations of the bank, carving out a new world beneath the surface of our old one. We did without sun, our eyes now useless in light. We daren’t venture out now, for surely we would be killed almost instantly. We are biding our time. We know that soon what is left of the human race will have obliterated the resources of the planet and darkness will swoop upon us. How we can’t wait for that day to arrive. For then, we can retake what is rightfully ours.