Curfew

Chapter One

I put the pale purple roots in my sack after handing Jeremiah, a kind old man with darker skin and a white receding hairline, the green roots I had traded him. Shaking his hand I started heading back to my home just beyond the Crumbles. The Crumbles are a network of what used to be skyscrapers, but now are just vast piles of rubble.

I sling my sack around my neck and shoulder, and start climbing up the stack of cars. Since I know you're wondering how the stack of cars got there, I'll tell you. After the Bombs, the NCS (Nation Cleaning Society) tried to clean up what was left by pushing the rubble into piles, stacking smashed cars into towering tiers, and other useless crap. But one day they never showed and that's the last we ever saw of them. What little they did actually helped some people though. For example, me. I have claimed one of their car towers, and have made a shelter at the top. It's not very big, just enough for me to store my food and water supply, sleep completely stretched out, and it even has a little leftover space for me to work on random projects, such as making little toys out of random stuff I find in rubble.

My home isn't what you'd call a castle, in more ways than just size. It wouldn't stand very well against a strong storm, rain, wind, etc. but it's not like we get any weather here anyway. We get temperature not weather. Hot days, cold nights. Most water we get comes from the icicles that we get from the icy nights. Every once in a while we'll get a drizzle, and people would line up buckets on their roof and at the corners of their house. Food consists on roots we find growing everywhere. The edible ones include pale purple, green, bright pink, and a bluish green. The poisonous ones include bright purple, red, pale pink, and dark blue. You learn from others mistakes. Because if you make a mistake in the After, you'll most likely be dead before you realize your mistake.

Houses here are not made as a shelter from the weather. No, not at all. Houses are shelters from Beasties. The higher the house, the safer you are after curfew. Beasties are most of the animals in the After. There are a few chickens, a few goats, and maybe even a dog or two sometimes. But the Beasties are the savage, wild animals. No one knows why they only come out after eight at night and disappear at eight in the morning, but everyone knows not to be outside after curfew. And especially not at ground level. If you want to live until day, you need to be at least ten feet high. Even higher to be extra safe. The only people to see a Beastie don't live to tell the tale.

There are few families in the After. Most of the time your family died in the Bombs. But every once in a then while there are some Before families. But most of the time they're After families-families made during the After. But even those are unlikely, as many choose to be alone, based on the feeling that our real family, or even just part of it, is alive somewhere, in some other Rubble City.

As for me? I have no hope my family is alive somewhere. Unless I have some long lost relative I don't know about...which is like 99.9% NOT going to happen. I was the only one in my family to make it to the bomb cellar in time.

Okay! Enough emotional stuff about my life. It's not important.

When I climb on top op the stack of cars, I open my makeshift door and walk into my shack. Once inside, I dump my root onto the floor. I gather up all my roots and count them.

7 pale purple
18 green
3 bright pink
12 blue green
~~~
5 bright purple
9 red
4 pale pink
11 dark blue

I know you're probably asking why might I have poisonous roots? I use them to make weapons. If I dry them out really well during the day, then at night I can grind them into a powder. The dark blue is toxic if you breathe the powder in, even just a little, so I put it in a small pocket that I can easily reach into to throw powder at my attacker(s). The other three I make into a powder and mix them with a bit of water, which I then coat onto my darts. I have to be careful making my poisons because I myself am not immune to it, so it can kill me too.