Apocalypse Dreams

Apocalypse Dreams: The New World

The grass was so green outside that it felt artificial and the white picket fences outside each house made the neighborhood feel more comforting and inviting. The vehicles that drove by constantly gave this neighborhood life and instead of the noise being overly irritating, it almost felt like sounds of instruments playing. The bright sun lit up the place and burned the people under it. People looked forward to the mornings as they made their tea and got ready. Even in the midst of all of this, here we were, arguing about who was better at operating a gun and surviving for a longer period of time.

Jack was seemingly the most innocent person that I had ever met. He would always tell me that I should be more optimistic; however, he knew it would not change. We were neighbors ever since we were kids and it was crazy to think that he would go ahead and choose Red Miller over me, who was the wild card of the group.

Jack's innocence blinded him so much that he didn't realize that we didn't know much about Miller beside the fact that his family died in a house fire when he was little. He moved to our neighborhood with his aunt after that. For all we knew, Red probably caused the fire.

Jack invited Red over to his house almost every single day and after many years, they practically lived together and considered each other, "brothers". That probably didn't annoy me, but after about two-something decades, Red was still closed off. I was almost certain at this point that he lacked empathy. He was interested in writing, though. That might've been the only concrete thing I knew about him.

Jack's story wasn't anything special. He was just an underachiever spending much of his time on video games and television. He had still been in school for a while, but he was optimistic about it. His clean-shaven face and positive attitude increased his charm. Brannigan had a bit of a beer belly that he refused to get rid of. Over the years, he was the one person who never changed, no matter what the circumstance was. I always wondered to myself how people reacted or changed when they were put in a highly stressful environment.

Jack never got me to trust Red even with his uninteresting speeches about working together and friendship and so on.

"All I'm saying is that I can be valuable and after a little bit more practice, I could be even better than Red," I continued while still staring outside the window.

There were these dark green bushes around everyone's driveway, which was a beautiful background to people communicating with each other outside, rather than arguing. On the right side of Fletcher's house, an old man wearing a gray suit and blue striped tie greeted an older lady and a woman. Fletcher's dog had his eyes focused on the two subjects.

As they all shook hands with each other, the man brought the women inside the house, which had the words, "open house" written on the door. The same sign with a burgundy background and white letters was also placed by the white picket fence near the driveway. The burgundy color matched the color of the house and the old man's suit. Everyone in this neighborhood always carried a smile on their faces as they greeted each other on the sidewalks. The incredible view outside this house always gave me hope and joy.

"Don't you see what's going on here?" Miller finally spoke up. "He is letting the timer run out on this one, Jack."

"No, he would never do that," Jack said as he backed me up on this one while munching on some potato chips. It was the last one we had. He had crumbs all over his lips and upper body region. "Continue."

"Well, that's all I got so far," I replied, turning towards them even though I could not stop imagining the outside area of the house.

Red wore a plain white T-shirt and some cargo pants. His face always had a five o' clock shadow, which he really liked. It matched his pseudo-confident look on his face which came with a tiny smirk that he carried at all times.