Forgive me; the broken minded are not the best of storytellers.
Broken men tell odd tales.
My tale is of a world that scared itself into hunkering underground, spent centuries there under machine-cultivated artificial selection, and then resurfaced...
Scavvies gazed out over his ruined world. He was slightly proud of it; he'd helped ruin it.
This abandoned metropolitan section was his home. And he'd done his best to make his whole section whisper, growl and groan.
He could hear it, and he knew others could hear it too.
Scavengers of the city would glance at his section and shiver. That's when he imagined his shadows whispering to them that it was unsafe, his traps growling at them to keep moving, the scattered body parts groaning for them to not make the same mistake.
Either they'd get the message, or they'd become the message.
Or perhaps not; he always went back and forth on that decision. Body parts already decorated his borders, so did he really need more?
He never used whole bodies to decorate... Garnishes were better when smaller, right?
Smaller body parts meant more materials for his morbid recycled artwork. And more artwork meant more of his sector's borders had the effective "keep out" signs.
Scavvies grinned and mumbled to himself, "Yes, yes... Dramatic and traumatic... 'Do not disturb the disturbed' signs."
Using body parts made it harder for other survivors to count his kills -they'd always assume the count was higher this way.
If he were honest, he'd only killed a few people; he'd just found the rest of the dead bodies and accessorized his border with them. He'd taken precautions of course... He'd skinned, broken and beaten out everything recognizable to prevent other survivors from catching on to his methods, and to avoid vengeance from the bodies' familiars.
He briefly looked over the other lines of defenses... barriers, deterrents, traps... so many defenses... for a decoy.
His ruined section was a diversion, of course. He lived in a bordering part of his own section that was much less conspicuous; one he'd made almost entirely unnoticeable. Though he didn't feel nearly as much pride in his discrete domain as in his gaudy and degraded deception.
Scavvies sighed in satisfaction. There was a certain beauty to ruined things; to the battered and broken, the crooked and unhinged.
Things like him.
The crazed survivor... That was the part he decided to play, to survive. Some survivors played tough, others played valuable, but Scavvies played crazed.
While the tough were busy challenging each other, and the valuable were getting abducted, the crazed were largely left alone and not paid much attention... which is exactly what he wanted.
It's exactly what let him enjoy moments like these, in other people's territories. This high rise across the street from his own section was one of his favorites.
He always ended his day up here with the sunset.He used to watch sunrises before the great ruin. Not anymore. Sunsets were more fitting to watch in this world than sunrises. Sunrises were too hopeful. But sunsets... sunsets were beautifully tragic... Beautiful endings to ruined days in a battered and broken world.
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