The Day We Left Earth

You Never Know How Good Water Tastes Until You Need It

No one wants to keep secrets, especially from your family. For some, it is easy. They can lie freely, and they don't even worry about how much trouble they could get into. Others, like me, are more or less fortunate. The guilt eats away like a parasite in your stomach. It just keeps and keeps eating until there is nothing left. Stomach's gone, just like your conscience.

But the bottom line is, no one wants to lie and no one wants to be lied to.

After the day that Sandrayik died, I had to keep my mouth shut. I knew that there wasn't any video, photograph, or memory chip evidence of me. Usually the military have memory chips, but not if they're out of battle. Then it's not useful. The soldiers had seen me, but their cameras hadn't.

I knew they didn't know who I was, but I also knew they were looking for me. Looking for someone to be running around the streets with some big, fancy holograph that was following them around that said, 'The End is Near'. Except I'm smart, so I kept my mouth shut.

I usually don't keep secrets from anyone, especially my family. We don't live like that. We tell each other everything. Like when my brother broke my dad's hover craft, he told him and took the blame instantly. Or when I developed feelings for Sandrayik. Dad wasn't too keen, no dad ever is, but he accepted it. After a while, of course.

The day after I fell asleep under the branches of the mechanical tree, I noticed tire tracks a few metres from the tree from where the military's motorcycles went. Motorcycles weren't faster than a hover board, but they were better if you needed to shoot a target. Steadier aim, more time to pull the trigger, travel further distances.

I had Sandrayik's hover board beside me, and I started to cry. I was like a storm cloud, my tears never stopping. That was until I heard a motorcycle nearing me. I heard the low hum of the engine become louder by the second and resided to the middle of the tree where I wouldn't be seen by any angle. My back was touching the iron beam that held all the branches and I held my breath while I saw the motorcycle just meters away. The big hunk of grey metal zoomed past me and I exhaled, thanking the universe that they didn't find me. After a few minutes of gathering my thoughts and planning what to do, I got on the hover board, and did what I had to. I left.

I tried retracing my path, but I couldn't. The hover board did nothing except make the remaining grass sway side to side. It didn't leave any tracks like the ginormous military vehicles, fortunately. That was the only good thing about that day.

I kept moving, even though the sun was blazingly hot. I thought I would die from heat. I had read about it, people dying in the middle of nowhere. That didn't happen much nowadays, but I loved the past. No one liked leaving the safety of the city nowadays, anyways. Nothing bad could happen to you in the city. You were completely safe, with 24 hour a day surveillance catching your every move without you even realizing. They don't have that out here. Why would anyone waste money on putting cameras in the middle of nowhere?

Through all the mirages I had because of the heat, I managed to find Sandrayik's body. His real body. Not just an image of my imagination. I found the switch behind his ear and switched it off. It was what controlled a memory chip, and it was still on.

He worked in the military, not for something important, just for something important enough that he needed to get a memory chip implant. He decided to leave it on since, so he could capture every moment. Like one of those things people used to use, that made a shuttering noise every time you pressed the button to take a photograph. A... camera. It worked like a camera. Except, when a camera runs out of battery, it dies. When a memory chip runs out of life, it keeps going. Keeps recording. On his memory chip would be his murderers. It would show what really happened, how he really died, and everything after that.

I pressed a button that was on the back of Sandrayik's neck. I needed to push his black hair out of the way to reach it. A small chip came out, and I put it in my shoe. I mentally named it 'The Truth' and continued on my way.

The heat was starting to get to me. After a few miles, I started to see the outline of the city, but I did not know if I would make it.

I could feel my lips chapping up. I could feel how rough my skin was around my lips, so much so that I couldn't close my mouth. What I couldn't feel, though, was my tongue. I kept gliding over my teeth with it so that I knew it was still there.

After about an hour, I saw my house. The short, white building gleamed in the sunlight and I questioned whether it was a mirage or not.

The easy part when I got into the house was explaining why I was home a day late. I got lost. The hard part was making up an excuse for Sandrayik's death. I told them an animal had gotten him, and they believed me. They have never been out in the middle of nowhere to know that there were no animals left.

For the next few months after, I had to keep quiet. I didn't want to, but I had to lie. I was forced to watch five year old news while eating my breakfast, knowing I was the only one that actually had a clue to what was happening.

I remember, a few years before Sandrayik's death, I found a really old book. It was from the nineteenth century, but I forget the author's name. It was about a detective, and what I got from it was that one clue was enough to figure out everything. I'm the only person that found the clue. Well, the only person that's still alive.