Leaving the City: Episode 1 Read online

  Chapter 2

  Travelling is never easy. We travel on foot, just the two of us, although there have been times when we’ve worked alongside groups, always for payment, because we both have experience with guns. Guns are one of the things that are desperately needed out here. Between the two of us we have eight, three knives, and a sword. Alex ‘won’ it when we were set upon by a gang of mercenaries who thought two people couldn’t possibly be dangerous. Sometimes I can’t help laughing when I think back to that, because of the look the leader gave me when he realized he had bitten off way more than he could chew. Yet I know the day may come when we don’t win, when Alex’s sword is won by someone else, so I keep myself ready for whatever may happen. Out here I have to.

  Like everyone else there are two other things we have to be on the lookout for: mutants and ghouls. Mutants are creatures that were originally created when the nukes first fell. I don’t know how they still exist, although I guess they reproduce the same way that we do, and they travel in packs. Unlike ghouls, mutants do actually have brains that they can use, which makes them more dangerous. We’ve come across two packs of mutants in the time we’ve been traveling, both of which we’ve fled from instead of getting into a battle because it’s the safest option. Fleeing, unfortunately, isn’t always an option though, as they will follow you if they think you truly are a danger to them. I remember coming across what was left of a group of mercenaries and it wasn’t nice.

  Ghouls are… well, I get the feeling they were once people like Alex, people who felt the need to wander, but they came unstuck. They lost themselves during their journeys, so now that wander alone. Although they’re nowhere near as dangerous as the mutants physically they exude this… I don’t know how to describe it really, but Alex calls it the ‘urge to follow’. He thinks the ghouls create others like themselves by getting lonely people to follow them out into the lost areas of the wasteland, where they will fade and become ghouls themselves. I think he feels it more than I do, but I know he’ll never leave me, not if he has any other choice. Of course that could be nothing more that something we’ve made up together to explain why the ghouls exist, because no one truly knows where they came from or what they want.

  Alex always likes to stay behind me. He thinks it’s safer if we get accosted from behind and he also knows that if that happens I can move a lot faster than he does. I’m not sure why. There was a time when Alex was the faster runner of the two of us, but out here we seemed to have found ourselves changing more than we thought we would. Before we came out here I knew how to fire a gun - I’d just never had to use one to kill someone before. Now, even though we don’t count, I know that I must have killed at least twenty people, if not more, to protect myself, to protect Alex, and to protect anyone else who needed it. Our lives out here are dangerous, which was something we could never truly have prepared ourselves for, no matter how hard we tried.

  Reading about this wasteland, as I did, is one thing. Actually living in it is another thing entirely, and one I know that I can never truly describe. That doesn’t mean I won’t try as I believe there will always be people who choose to leave the cities behind. It does help that the longer I’m out here the more I learn about what this world has become, what I can find growing wild as even a wasteland has some plants within it, and how we can survive all of the dangers that we encounter. I do believe that you can only understand this world if you come out here to live in it yourself. That isn’t something I would suggest to most people because it takes a very special person to be able to cope out here. Until I found myself here I didn’t think I was one of them, but obviously I was wrong about that. I'm sure everyone who has lived through a situation like this has discovered strength within themselves that they never knew they had. You either find strength or you die.

  Together the two of us have survived, even though there have been days when I didn’t think we would. One of those days was the day we came across our first pack of mutants. We had heard about them before, but we had never seen them, so they were little more than a story to us then. Honestly, I would have preferred they stayed a story. Although we’d been careful we weren’t careful enough and we’d stumbled across them feeding on what appeared to be a couple of city-folk, as the people who live in the wasteland called us. From the look in their eyes it was obvious they wouldn’t mind nibbling on us too. If we hadn’t been quick enough they might just have done that, but the one thing I’ve always made sure we have is a map of whatever new area we’re going to.

  None of the maps are complete. That’s impossible to find out here. Luckily we hadn’t gone too far out then, so we could use one of the hiding spots I’d scoped out prior to us starting our journey and that I make certain I look for if we go outside the area we have a map for. As that happens often Alex has started to think of me as the planner, but that’s only because I have no other option. If it hadn’t been for my planning we would have ended up being eaten by mutants, which was not how I wanted to die.