I'll give you a couple bottles of water for the wheel and, hmpf, some fruit for the pipe and that's all, boy.
Fuck, I had busted my ass lugging that tire from a rope and that pipe nearly choked me out on more than one low doorway. All that for this. A part of me wanted to deny the man and walk my way to the nearest encampment, another part wanted to unload a round in the man's leg and ask him if that was really all. I went with the realistic option. I took the trade. From there I went to my favorite rock in town. It overlooked the entire encampment and even gave me a vantage point on who was leaving into the Wild and who was coming in, marking them as off limits. I cracked open a bottle and bit hard into the apple. It didn't make that satisfying crunch that a good apple did, it was more applesauce than apple, but that crunch had died along with the old world. Buried in the earth, only alive in the minds of men, but with time, that was being buried as well.
As I will one day be.
A new group of survivors or should I say, stragglers; as they mucked around, dragged their feet and carried on them what little they owned in this horrid afterlife of ours. There stood a taller man in front, as most groups tend to do, an older smaller woman in the back, with a young girl and a boy that couldn’t be older than ten and be more work than he’s worth. This world of ours was beginning to come to the collective realization that children were not worth the hassle, and many were beginning to sell children off, or bury them, some see this as mercy. A few years sooner and I could have been sold off to the chain of children that are hauled off into the mountain tops and never heard from or seen again.
The rumors of what happens go as follows- They are either killed and chopped up, then sold right back to as pig meat that’s gone bad. Shipped out to settlements farther south, in areas in which the children would bear no relations, trafficked as slaves, what help a child could bring as a slave is obvious, heart lurching, but a truth just as ugly as our new world.
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Something about the way this new group carried themselves reminded me of some people I've seen before. It must have been the way they walked slumped and defeated, like everyone else in this spinning hell we call our planet.
Planet. That word sounds so funny, when was the last time I've heard someone speak of this place as that, a planet, a floating ball in the ever expanding cosmos of ours. Before, the world was like it is now, we talked of things like that. Of exploring the unknown reaches of the universe. To set out and sail across the stars, just as man once did with ships across the nefarious, dark waters, we will do with the great oceans of the Galaxy. And now, well now we are like that solemn group that is not only carrying the weight of their lives on their backs, but from the way it seems to crush them, the world as well.
Have the rest realized it yet?
That the world is truly on our shoulders. It may very well end with us. And if that sorry group is of any indication, it just might.
The group had scurried it's way to the very same peddler that I had the bad luck of meeting first, if I cared anymore I may have shown them towards another vendor. One who wouldn't rob them in broad daylight. I heard the exasperated voices of a man arguing with an experienced haggler. Like most arguments, they lasted only until the smaller man gave away what little position he had, and just then, when the smell of defeat lingered it's way up into my secluded vantage point, the winds shifted and brought something else instead. The peddler began to sway his arms, the older man gathered his items, motioning his family to move on with him, the peddler reached for the man, the man caught his wrist, the air stilled, time stopped, and then, the battle of wares was decided then and there.
The older man had done it. He had won over the same man that had rinsed me over.
Maybe humanity still had some fight left in it.