Day 419 is one of the first story series from our new affiliates at World of Depleted, the Gothic post-apocalyptic series that allows you to participate and share in profits off your creations in this amazing and dark world!
Jenna Whitmore bent to her task meticulously, her long blonde hair falling around her neck as she carefully compared her forgery to the original source materials she had. She had to give Fitch credit, his clout in the area allowed him to acquire more elements to make her job more convincing. She probably could’ve done the work by the early afternoon sunlight, but the dust caked windows rendered the daylight strangely watery, so it was a plausible excuse for using the flickering candle and kerosene lantern, which she found comforting. Certainly Fitch could afford the cost of her quirks for what he was able to get for her work.
In the United States, traditional forgery was a dying art before the Fall, with more and more people using complex computer algorythms and high tech holographic techniques to stop counterfeits. However, for people going to less advanced countries, forgery was still a viable and lucrative profession.
Granted, she hadn’t truly learned to hate people until later…
* * * *
She’d determined to do some thing positive in the world, so a graduate degree in journalism had seemed logical to her. Of course, the fact that this enraged her mother nearly as much as her being a model hadn’t hurt matters as far as Jenna was concerned. The problem with being a prodigy, regardless of her condition, is that people—especially her mother–expected her to do something worthy of winning nobel prizes for science, not journalism! Of course, neither career had effected her father.
He couldn’t be bothered…
In the more than 200 days that she’d wandered alone after the Fall, before she found Maysbridge, she’d thanked God that she’d learned to use the handgun, since she now didn’t have a source of income to keep mercenaries by her side. Of course, most mercs had killed off one another, become the rapists and bandits that prowled the roads, or, for greater profit, become reapers.
If he’d been a sociopath, her current bodyguard, Andre Flanagan, probably would’ve become a reaper. However, he’d been raised in the world of organized crime, always protecting some higher up, so, even if he hadn’t had any moral grounding, becoming a hired death dealer hadn’t really occurred to him. From the few conversations she’d had with the quiet, blonde man, after the Fall, having lost his employer in the riots, he too had wandered aimlessly. Eventually, like Jenna, he’d made his way to Maysbridge because of Fitch’s reputation. Modern mobster or misunderstood merchant, few were able to convert from backwoods moonshiner to wealthy broker of anything you might need as successfully as Nash Fitch had. The abandonment of two small towns in Central Kentucky in the chaos after the Fall had allowed him to seize them both and rename the place, “Maysbridge.” Between the alcohol he already had for fuel and a successful seizure of a load of solar panels, he quickly made a reputation for being a pre-Fall purveyor of post-Fall needs.
As she passed her razor sharp blade through the candle to heat it up so that it would cut the photo more cleanly, she found herself mesmerized by the flame. As a kid, for obvious reasons, her mother hadn’t permitted her to play with blades, but flames were the seductive sirens that could hurt without cutting. Before long, she’d used her unshoreable hunger for knowledge to learn all about flames and fire, finding little ways to explore an ever blossoming flower of pyromania in her bosom. She’d always been careful with her private explorations, although, secretly, she harbored the desire to burn her house down and her mother along with it. In the Fall, however, when she found her house a burnt wreck, she felt no pleasure. It was all hollow, even more so since she hadn’t been the one to do the deed.
Just another time where men took something from her that should’ve been hers alone…
Glimpses of dark cloaked forms like wraiths as they marched over the hills, sweeping through Maysbridge like an army of the damned. Their black uniforms bore a trimarked symbol in white, looking like a bizarre broken cross of some sort. Even as she saw them, she knew who they were. They were the things people told their children about late at night to get them prepared for the atrocities that awaited them. If you somehow made an army of reapers, you couldn’t have a more chilling group that the Neo-Palidins. They’d stored up hatred like a fine wine in their souls and refined their loathing of technology until it’s possession was a killing offense. They’d made a religion of their beliefs and everyone had heard rumors that they were on a crusade to slaughter heretics, but no one ever suspected that they’d come to the backwoods state of Kentucky.
However, if Jenna’s visions were to be believed, they would indeed come here and no one would survive…
Ash edged cuts would never do…
As she took more conscious attention to what her hands had been meticulously doing, relying on muscle memory as much as cerebral knowledge, she saw that she had only a few more lines and then she would be ready to dry the document, seal it, and put it in the old padded yellow envelope that was yet another remnant from the time before the Fall.
Before the Fall seemed like a lifetime ago…
When it went to hell was when they had brought in the next man in line to be Executive in Chief in the United States. To this day, she didn’t know his name, only that he’d been a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat that had no experience with emergencies. Perhaps, with that understanding, his choices could be forgiven, but it was hard when his reaction had been the spark in a saturated flour mill.
For a moment as she finished the papers, she thought on all she had endured, of the horrifying visage of a man leaving his own child on a garbage heap, because the squalling, starving child was slowing down the older man. What did it say about her that she hadn’t tried to save the child? She’d just walked by and tried to tune it out. She’d had so much happen to her, that she couldn’t even be bothered to stop for a child.
The screaming of the child brought other visions to her mind, of the woods of Virginia, trying to keep warm around a campfire, listening to a baby screaming in the distance, inconsolable. Then there was the sound of a gunshot. After that, there was no more screaming. That night the screams had haunted her dreams as she clutched her gun to her chest and prayed for death.
No matter how horrifying the world had become, it was easier to think about the agony she’d seen in others than it was to recall what had been done to her…and what she’d done in turn.
As she put the documents in the letter, she was reminded of the philosopher, Friedrich Nietsche. Nietsche had believed that modern man was the “Ubermenshe”–“super man.” He had evolved beyond a need for gods or deities and was made more perfect due to his evolution. Hitler had used his beliefs to state that some were more evolved than others and exterminate those he hated.
After World War II, Americans had believed themselves better than the Germans because they would never condone such cruelty. Perhaps they were more evolved. They too had evolved beyond a need for belief. Yet, when you took away that which they took for granted, when you made life hard, they were the most brutal of all. If this was man evolved, Jenna wondered what monsters looked like?
Sliding the now finished documents into the envelope and into her touch up bag, Jenna picked up her Glock and slid it in into her hidden holster. That more bad things hadn’t happened to her after the Fall was a testament to how fast she could get the gun into her hands when she needed it.
Of course, who was to say that the atrocities she’d committed were any better than those that were done to her…
She could’ve had electric light if she would’ve lived inside Maysbridge, but that would’ve required her to trust Nash and to trust the people around her. Neither would happen, so, by default, she chose to live in a battered old house that was likely beaten up long before the Fall. And besides, she reasoned, if she was going to have a light on, she’d rather it be a flame, it pretended to be less innocent that electricity.
Fatalistically, there was a secret part of her that hoped it might get knocked over and burn down the entire house.
Maybe while she was asleep inside…
Check out later this week for the next chapter in the Day 419
saga of the Gothic Post-Apocalyptic series, World of Depleted!
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