darkluna | post-apocalyptic fairy tale

Prologue

Valor can't run much further.

He pounds down the hill, hard sidewalk hurting his feet, making his teeth feel like they're about to rattle out. He doesn't dare look back but he hears the scavs panting close behind.

He can barely keep his footing, is all but falling down the hill toward the old highway. Fallen road in one direction, fence in the other and no time to think.

He gets to the bottom and swings right, running as hard as he can toward the fence and the dark part of town.

If they catch him...

He won't think about what will happen if they catch him.

His lungs feel about to burst. Every breath of cold air he gasps in burns like fire. He can see the fence standing across the old road.

He runs, and sweat chills on his face and creeps down his back. Runs past the rusting hulks of cars down the yellow line where the cracks are fewest and there are no fallen branches to trip him. White and cream and brown flash past at the edges of his vision: the few walls still standing amid the trees.

He pants out a last burst of speed and crashes against the fence.

He barely thinks. He just climbs.

They'll kill him if they catch him.

The barbed wire at the top takes some care to get over. Valor rips his pants anyway and scrapes one hand bloody.

He stops to haul a breath past the frozen tightness in his chest and looks down at them through the wet hair plastered to his face.

One split second—they stare up at him, faces distorted by anger. The bigger one plants his hands on the other's back and shoves him into the fence.

Valor lands on the other side before the scav starts climbing and runs again, sending a hopeless prayer to a god he doesn't believe in: Just let me rest. Let them give up.

No one alive knows anything about the dark part of town.

He manages a limping run toward the Tower, over the shattered pavement into the shadow of a curving concrete rail high above.

A shout behind him—a scream, really—more panic in it than anger.

He spins.

The scav who followed him falls, convulsing, and hits the asphalt with a sickening, lifeless thud. And stays there, not moving at all. A thin curl of smoke wafts up from somewhere near the body. Valor sees one pale hand outflung, resting in a pool of stagnant water.

He feels like he'll be sick but it passes. He can't stop staring.

After what feels like a long time but isn't actually even long enough for his heartbeat to stop crashing in his ears, he walks slowly toward the scav.

He has to know what happened. He doesn’t know any other way out.

The answer's clear enough.

Several wires dangle down from the curve of concrete overhead that's too narrow to be a road. The ends of bare metal reach to the water where the scav lies.

Those wires are live.

(6/9: Cleaned up the formatting, finally. 7/13/07: web site go bye bye. Stuck it in here.)

I'm dissatisfied with this piece, though, because the reader really ought to know right off the bat that my main character is eleven years old, but I couldn't gracefully fit it into this.

One of the kittens has gotten on top of the bookshelves, and I think she forgot how to get down. They do that sometimes. :-)