Image Credit: @muelli from the LIL Gallery of Images
The bridge shuddered as she ran across and struggled to keep her balance. The hounds were closing in, but her parachute was so near! She reached out, grabbed its harness, fastened the straps around her shoulders, and jumped.
A resplendent green meadow opened up beneath her. Brimming fruit trees beckoned. Apples. Pears. Oranges. Berries carpeted the ground.
She landed softly, freed herself from the harness and began to eat hungrily of the sweet bounty. But the pain! Berries seemed to explode in her belly.
She opened her eyes. Hail was cutting into her flesh. She hadn't been able to find shelter the night before and had taken rest out in the open. Welts covered her body where the hail struck.
Hunger was the driving motivation for everything she did. But she couldn't move on in search of sustenance until the hail abated. She could fool her head with a reverie, could disappear momentarily in her dream, but her body, millions of malnourished cells, would continue to deteriorate if she did not provide fuel.
Food. Focus on where she might find anything. A partly consumed soda bottle. Rancid vegetables.
The hail stopped. She scanned the horizon in search of danger, gangs that regarded her as fodder.
Cannibalism had become common. Edibles, even the most disgusting refuse, were brutally scarce. Desperation created monsters of people who once considered themselves moral members of society. That was before society disappeared.
Now there was just survival. Loners represented opportunity to predatory gangs that prowled not only cities, but the countryside.
The outline of a farmstead beckoned. She knew this place. It was a risky undertaking, because gangs chose the location to hole up before moving on. They might be there now, but if they weren't and had left recently, they might have left behind some crumbs, something consumable that in their careless, drugged state they lost track of.
Drugs were the tools of survival for many now. They helped to ease the pain, to gloss over reality. The dream was her drug. But, when she was awake her mind was crystal clear, unclouded by illusion or delusion.
She crouched low to the ground. No cats, dogs, or livestock in sight. They'd all been butchered.
The place seemed uninhabited. As she expected, garbage was strewn about the yard. It was in the refuse that hope existed. Anything she could eat. Anything, that is, that wasn't clearly human remains.
Nothing in the yard. The barn offered greatest promise. That crumbling wood cavern had become a staging ground for some of the gangs' most gruesome deeds, and some of their most depraved drug fests.
Fear almost paralyzed her in the no man's zone of the barnyard. Hunger drove her forward to the pitted side of the barn where she found a crack large enough to survey the dim interior.
Empty. Or at least it seemed empty. She opened the door to a stench that screamed of decay. It was there on the floor that she might find a bit of nourishment.
She fought the gag reflex as she rifled through debris. Bread! Where did they get bread? Didn't matter if it was moldy and covered in dirt. She eagerly placed the morsel in her mouth and chewed slowly with the few teeth that hung onto her diseased gums.
She sat in a corner and relished the sense of fullness the bread offered. That incessant gnawing was gone.
Not long after, giddiness hit. More than giddiness, a lightness, as though her head had become ether. She guessed the bread had been poisoned, deliberately or accidentally.
Her arms grew heavy, so that flicking flies from her face was a chore. She paid no mind to leaden limbs, to foul straw and fleas. Was this the end of it, the running and hiding?
She closed her eyes and welcomed an absence of thought. She didn't have to worry about waking now. She could lose herself completely in her dream.
The hounds' howling was irrelevant. The parachute took her away, through the clouds, through time, through care until she landed softly in her Nirvana.
The story was written in response to the July fiction prompt, Parachute. It has been edited (especially the end) in order to accommodate the Inkwell culture: no gratuitous violence. I hope the story as it stands does respect community standards.