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Member
Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: candyland
Gender: Female
Posts: 10
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Candles in the Dark-unfinished, unedited
before i continue, i thought i should post this piece.
its most of the story, but without a proper ending to it.
i could use some advice, i think.
I looked down both ends of the street and could see no one. I looked to the sky as well, to see how much time before the sun rose. Dark still, with enough dirty clouds to blot out the moonlight. There wasn’t a hint of morning turquoise on the horizon. I made it home in good time. Ever since the war had moved to the west side of the country, the skies were black with smoke and red with fire, and the land matched its bloody tone. The city was dead, and the breath of electric movement seemed to be held in its lungs, waiting for the people to come back and start anew, to clear the rubble and build up broken towers. I waited for them as well, but I knew better than to be overly optimistic. I am happy that I still survived. I am happy for the love I found, and I am happy for the life I have.
I kneeled and dug around in the gutter, looking for the key we hid earlier that night. I found it there, hidden in an old coffee can, covered with muck and ash. The streets outside Rockfield Medical Hospital were still filthy from the last raid, and there was no one to pile the bodies and douse the flames. A sick greenish mist rose from the sewers and seemed to curl around the charred corpses, dancing around them like a lost soul searching for a vessel. I gagged at the smell that drifted with it, and jammed the key into the lock of a small electrical service door near the emergency room entrance. As I turned the key, the resounding click made me wince and duck around. It was better to be safe than sorry, and if the Allied Army figured out where we were hiding, they would kill us no doubt. I slipped inside and dragged my heavy bag behind me.
The hospital was our home, and in the cover of night Jack and I would sneak in to the Allied camps stationed at Points Harbor five miles away, and we did our best to sabotage their supplies and steal as much as we could carry. Poisoning water and rigging bombs was vicious work, but it’s cowardly compared to actual combat. I was no soldier, only a woman who wanted revenge for the fallen. After each nightly incursion we would sneak back to the hospital and hide through the day, resting until the sun fell from the sky and we repeat the hunt.
Inside the emergency room corridors, I felt around the edge of the door for the flashlight I left earlier. I clicked it on, and the narrow beam of light shone on the blood-streaked and broken tile, the crumbling walls, and the broken equipment. Empty wheelchairs and beds decked with body bags were scattered everywhere, and various medical supplies littered the floor. These halls were once clean and white with sanitation; this was a place of healing and life. All that was left here was death, and the loneliness of living in an abandoned city. In the large medical center, Jack and I only inhabit one room. From the entrance point, it was straight down the service hall to the maternity ward, and up the second flight of stairs and off to the left. Room 227 was the room where Jack and I eat, sleep, and wait out the war. He was home already, and I found him reading a book on his stretcher by the light of an oil-burning lantern. The light cast a stern shadow across his face, and I could see that he was upset.
“You missed it.” He said, not looking up from his book. He was reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Vern, and I noticed that he was nearly finished after starting only yesterday. He was the only person who loved books as much as me and could read twice as fast.
“Hmmm? Missed what?” I tapped the rail at the foot of his bed, letting my bag drop to the floor.
“My birthday started three hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. You missed it. I didn’t know if you’d forgotten, or were captured, or if you were just leaving me.” He didn’t seem serious, but I could never tell. He could fake it so well, and he knew how to make me feel guilty.
“I know I missed it, but I didn’t forget.” He looked up. “ I even got you a present.” He grinned at me, and I knew that he had been waiting for me since twelve and anticipating his gift. I rummaged through my bag and tossed him several books, classic horrors but his favorite authors. “ That’s not what I wanted to give you. Here, close your eyes.” He did so unwillingly, and I pressed a small object into his hand. It was a Zippo lighter, plain polished steel with an engraving on the face.
“ We carry candles in the darkness.” He read. It was a well-remembered quote by the late President Jonah Kingsley, a beloved leader and a wise man. The war began in 2015, the year he was assassinated by the terrorist group known as the Prophets, and his death was the final straw for America. We walked into a deathtrap, set for us by the Allied Five countries. This was a war we could not win, a battle that we lost even before the first shot was fired. Historians would examine WWIII later, dismiss the causes, write it in their books, and move on. For the ones like us, the ones who lived through the pain, the death, and the torture, there was no hope of survival or any way to go back to the lives we had before. We were the ones that history forgot, those refugees and soldiers off the battlefield. We are the ones who hid in sewers, we fled in the darkness, and we clung to life like insects.
Jack turned the lighter over and over in his strong hands, and rubbed the letters with scarred fingers. He held it up to the firelight, and let it glow and gleam and cast spangles of light into the shadows of the room.
“Damn it Laura, I don’t know what to say.” He ran a hand through dark, messy hair. “Thank you. I…I don’t think I’ve ever gotten anything this nice before.” He looked me in the eyes, and I knew he meant it.
UNFINISHED!
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When Renoir spoke of light and dark, he meant the translucent images that pattern themselves into night and day and good and evil. When I speak of light and dark, I mean toast.
- Howard Johnson
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