I feel strongly compelled to tell you, reader, of the events of the past few days, not for any reason I may have given before, but because of the pure irregularity of it. I live in a world of which many would consider strange, impossible, even. There is few people, even scarcer food and monsters straight out of a b-grade movie roaming the land. It was in this nightmarish setting that I first encountered Esther. A beautiful girl, it seemed, the hellish environment having little effect on her. Her medium length hair was tied back into a ponytail, coming to rest between her delicate shoulders and her long, lean body with legs that seemed to stretch on and on, as an endless road would. And her eyes, oh, I could talk all day about her eyes. They never seemed like eyes at all, more like a mirror surfaced lake. Deeper than you could ever imagine, but allowing no hint whatsoever as to what was within. You could see yourself in them, your fear, your exhaustion but those eyes seemed to promise release from all of your sufferings, an escape, even if for a moment. It seemed highly unlikely that any girl, of any size and shape would have survived up till now; let alone such an amazing beauty like her. When I first caught a glimpse of her in the far distance, she seemed as an angel, descending to carry my withered soul out of my crippled body and up to the stars. Lust stirred in me, for release of my pain. I had not been hydrated for days now, and had gone even longer without anything solid and filling in my poor, shrunken excuse for a gut.
My mind was spinning with the heat of the sun bearing down upon my frail existence and pain, oh the pain! I felt it in every corner of my being, deep inside of me, in my organs up to my limbs. A part of the pain could be attributed to my tiredness, my endless days of walking and running. Another was due to a bad sprain which I had presumed healed two days before. Yet, with all of this before me, I could not but help but feel of such a desire within me that it gave me renewed strength. Little, though it was as my body could spare at that time but it was enough for me to shout loud enough to capture her attention. Now the monsters around me, they do not shout, they only make low guttural noises as one would assume a dying animal might. And so, as she realized there was another human in that seemingly empty thicket, she paused. A good idea too, since there weren’t many like me who would have practiced self control. But even I, disciplined as I was in my life before the Fall found it hard to resist my animalistic thoughts. She stood there, her weapon at the ready for any sign of aggression, considering whether to abandon me to my obvious fate or play the role of a Good Samaritan and assist in my recovery. Fear gripped me, most would have simply walked away from the trouble and complication helping me would bring to them, but instead, after seemingly endless minutes of pondering she appeared to have made up her mind.
I do not know what guided her thoughts that day as any logical being would have simply walked away, and a girl like that would have had her fair share of experience in brutish men, if men they could be called. These were the sort of people who roamed the land along with the monsters, former humans who had given up their humanity to fall back on their survivalist instinct and their baser needs. They would kill another for food, supplies and sex. Women were tortured, raped and left for dead. I suspect that if I ever survive long enough I would eventually turn into one of them, something with the intelligence and cunning only a human would posses but without morals, and thinking only of myself and my needs. Still, she walked to me, slowly, with the business end of her crossbow pointed at me, her, for the lack of better words, mysterious and strangely comforting eyes searching me for any kind of threat. My fear in being abandoned receded, quickly to be replaced by another. What if the method of her survival was by being like those other men? I had no food with me, but my flesh would have sustained her for several days. I have heard stories about such horrors, whispered in my now desolate village, of people who eat their own. They are similar to the monsters that surround us but with a beating heart and mist from their mouths on a cold morning. My fingers curled around a rock, desperate and worthless. As she walked into shooting range, she noticed the feeble movements of my hands in an attempted defense of myself and a smirk tore through her face. Her beauty now brought not comfort, but fear. She walked much more slowly towards me, suspecting a trap and possibly doubting her decision to approach this seemingly helpless wanderer.
It was then, when she was standing roughly six feet away from me, and after what seemed like days of anxious silence that she finally opened her mouth. “Speak, and I might not shoot you”. Something in me told me to rejoice, for help had arrived but another told me not to trust her. There was an encounter, a few days before that I had with a group of men, three, though I suspect there were more behind the trees. Weaponless, I was forced to run for my life when threatened, barely escaping and I was not eager to repeat my previous mistake, resulting now in my injured foot. Yet, it was her eyes that drew me in, seducing me, and with so I replied her, my voice scratching against my dry, papered throat making my words seem more like whispered growls. “I won’t eat you, if that is what you mean” a slight smile creeping unexpected onto my ridiculously sun burnt face. With that, I gave myself to the cherished oblivion of slumber, passing out as I had never done in the past weeks.
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