An excerpt from Scavenger Hunt: a short story from the End of the World.
Chapters One and Two can be found in my e-publication, Devil's Presents Gift Wrapped volume One available at Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/814130) and may of your favorite E-book retailers. This anthology is available Free for download for an unlimited time.
Chapter Three
I can feel myself moving or rather, I can feel myself being moved. I'm flat on my back, pain screaming at me from every cell in my body. Someone is dragging me, their hands in my arm pits, pulling in short, harsh bursts. (If I wasn't half burned and wholly incapacitated, I could take them. But, my arm, ya know?) I hear the stranger grunting as they struggle to move me inch by inch.
Suddenly, my upper body is left victim to gravity as I am dropped to the ground.
I try to open my eyes, but they are swollen shut. I'm sure the darkness would prevent me from seeing my saintly kidnapper anyway.
I'm willing myself to sit up, to flee from who ever is dragging me away from Henri and safety. My aching muscles refuse.
Try to speak , but my throat is dry, painfully so. I can't rasp a syllable passed my lips. I hear my savior/captor shuffling behind me. I can make out muffled words. I don't know if they're talking to me or someone else. I do know, one asshole I can take burned and missing my dominant arm; Two, might be a challenge. As I'm wracking my pain addled mind for a way out of this mess, it occurs to me;
Who the fuck else it out here at the end of Armageddon? If the Muties had come back while I was passed out, they'd be eating me right now, but... another survivor just seems so unlikely.
My knowledge of Muties is limited though. Perhaps this one is a grunt and dragging me back to the big wigs in the den, or burrow, or where ever the ugly piss ants call home.
But another human? No way. It's impossible that I survived against all odds. Survived to watch my family slowly die in the aftermath of an apocalypse we had nothing to do with.
To be saved at the very end of the very end is ridiculous. I don't want to meet this phantom survivor. I'd rather have died in the flames of my own creation.
Maybe... Maybe that's just what happened. I'm dead or dying, and I'm just feeling the dull echoes of the muties ravaging my corpse.
Of course! It's so obvious. And now I shall be warmed in the tender embrace of oblivion.
Right.. about.. now.
Now.
Now.
Now.
Oh c'mon! My timing can't be that off.
Now!
Well, shit. I'm not dying or being eaten. That means I'm being rescued by some deus ex machina survivor.
Great. One more day in the vise grip of survival. And I lost my damn canteen. Great.
