Everything was dark. Cold.
Before, Peter might have said that the sky was beautiful. Before, he might have appreciated the way the stars gleamed against the dark tapestry of the night.
Now, all he worried about was freezing to death. About being found by Others. About the way MJ had started coughing two days ago, and about the way it was only getting worse.
Now, all seeing the stars meant was that there was no cloud cover, which meant it was cold. On the flip side, it also meant no rain, which now came in two varieties: stinging slushy hail, or acidic. And when he said acidic, he meant acidic.
No one went out during the rain. Not anymore.
Not even the Others, the rabid animals that now wandered the land, bodies twisted by radiation and crippled by the bombs that fell Before.
Everyone hid during the rain and the night.
The night, when the wind whistled through the burnt out valleys and the craggy mountains, when there wasn't enough light to see your hand in front of your face, when you were in real danger of freezing to death if you weren't careful. The nights, Peter and MJ spent huddled in front of whatever scrap of a fire they had managed to scrape together.
Today it was an abandoned mall, posters and sheet music curling into flame in front of them. Yesterday it had been a crashed semi, and they'd burnt the driver's magazine collection. The day before that the underpass of a bridge, and it had been their last bits of money and whatever paper cards or receipts they had in their wallets, the last remnants of a world now destroyed.
MJ didn't speak much, anymore. Neither did Peter, but it still hurt him to see her like this, dark hair hanging tangled and lank around her face, her eyes animal and scared. Her hands twitching, jumping at every movement.
It hurt him to see her broken.
What was he supposed to do without her? Peter couldn't imagine a world in which she wasn't their. They were each other's magnets. They held each other together in a world that fallen apart long ago.
Peter couldn't remember what it was like to drink a can of soda, or ride the school bus. He couldn't remember what it was like to go through a day where he wasn't scared, or tired, or hungry, or cold.
He couldn't remember what it was like to be safe.
But he had MJ.
In the Before, things burned. Peter remembered this. He remembered the screaming. He remembered the bombs.
He remembered watching people die.
He had had to see it all fall apart. Watch everything get worse and worse and worse until their was nothing left, just a burnt out shell.
There wasn't such a thing as government anymore. Or money. Or help.
Or people.
Peter couldn't remember the last time MJ and him had seen someone else.
At the start, the roads were full of them. Refugees. Fleeing one place or another, chasing rumours of a better life. None of them true, of course.
The whole world had burned. Maybe there was a place out there that was better off - Peter though that anywhere had been better than here - but there was no where that was the same.
How could there be? After what they had done to each other - because in the end, of course, humanity had killed themselves, picked themselves off until the bones were clean. No meat.
In the end, they had fallen farther than angels. The bottom was hard, and it was cold, and there was no climbing back up.
They lived in a world of darkness and pain, and the only thing the stars did was hang in the sky and watch them die.
They ate a dinner of old granola bars and a single, stale bun that Peter had found behind one of the shelves in the bakery. MJ refused most food, these days. Peter had to make her eat.
It was hard to not give up.
He watched the flames flicker and stretched his hands towards the meager warmth. Musty blankets from the time before - when refugees where still being handed supplies - were wrapped around their shoulders. They had a gallon of water wrapped carefully in a bag. These were the things Peter counted now, as precious to him as gold.
These were the currency of the new world. And they couldn't be bought with money.
He took a careful gulp of water, washing away the dust and foul taste that came from breathing the air, even with the masks they wore nearly constantly. He offered some to MJ, but she just shook her head, face pale and wan.
Peter didn't know what to do.
As each day went by, their chances of survival went down. The world had been torched - and their own insistence in the early days not to follow the rumours of safe places had left them wandering a deadland alone. With no goal in mind and no hope.
They couldn't just give up, but Peter didn't know what else to do. He could feel MJ slipping away. He could feel himself losing her.
And if he lost MJ, he would lose himself.
They had left the city with the remnants of the rising sun, weak beams barely filtering through the smoke that blanketed the sky.
The bare bones of trees long dead rustled and moaned, joining the scrape of their feet along the pavement and the screeches of demonic birds in the sky.
The road wound along a river, once glittering and pure, now polluted and choked with ash. Grey and lifeless, just like everything else in the landscape. Nothing was there. Nothing was left.
Sometimes, Peter wasn't even sure what they were fighting for.
They moved when they had to. Somewhere, in the back of his head, he was aware that he was unconsciously guiding them north, towards Canada. Somewhere, in the back of his head, he had stored the rumors and stories that had told of stories of new life, of communities banding together.
Surely it couldn't be worse than here.
Beside him, MJ hummed, a barely there wisp of a tune that dragged it's way out into the world, traced across the decaying horizon and joined the birds in the sky.
He reached out and grabbed her hand, tried to ignore how cold it felt in his, how lifeless.
Way back, at the Beginning, when Before was just becoming Now, they had still been fighting. There had been more of them: Peter remembered their faces with a sort of bitter pain reserved for those who had gone through war.
Ned. Lost to them in the Plague that swept the land, buried in an small grave, a rock serving as a headstone.
May. Taken down in a fight with one of the violent cults that had sprung up, shot and taken. Peter tried not to think about what they had probably done with her body. Cannabilism was not uncommon.
There were others, fighters they'd met along the way, refugees who wanted the same as them. People who had fought and died and lived and loved along side them.
And Peter tried not to think about the day it all went wrong, the day everything fell apart.
The truth came through in his dreams, and he would wake up shaking and screaming, calling out her name.
MJ.
Peter had lost things. Peter had lost everything.
As he crouched, head down, sheltering under the husk of a blown - out semi, a wind swept over him, grabbing the ash and dead leaves from the pavement and swirling them up, up into the sky.
Up over the dead highway, the craggy landscape, the ash-choked sky; up over the acid sea, the twisted animals, the empty world.
Up over Peter, hidden in the wreck of his mind, muttering to himself.
Up over Peter, who was alone.
Hi.
I know I don't usually write sad stuff.
I hope this made sense.
Please remember to vote and comment if you liked.
-Viwrit3r