I’d dealt with my fair share of people out here, but city people? They were a legend or, much more accurately, a ghost story.

As a kid, my mother would rant and rave all the time about how highly esteemed they must think of themselves, sitting comfortably behind their fortified walls, leaving everyone else out here to wither away and die when they could help.

“They are the key to salvation,” she would say, but from what I overheard, they don’t know the first thing about the outside, and they haven’t gotten far enough from home to see the actual state of the world.

I could only imagine how easy things must be inside the walls, not having to hunt or clean your water, not having to sleep in a makeshift bed every night, but rather sterile mattresses with sheets that aren’t decrepit.

I had to admit I was a little jealous. Why couldn’t I have been one of the lucky few protected and cared for by the city? Instead, I was born and raised out here under a low-hanging shadow of death. I learned to hunt at four, raise vegetables and herbs at five, fruits at six, and make medicines at eight. Scavenging didn’t come until later; I think I was almost twelve when I learned how to do that properly. My mother didn’t teach me that; my mentor, Geneva, did.

After age eight, I began to see my mother less and less. At first, she would leave me behind, tell me she had some business and she’d be back, but days would go by, and she wouldn’t return home. Until one day, she did; for nine months exactly, she was home, and so was her new husband, Jack. He was a man I had never met, a stranger, but to her, he was her whole world. I could see it in the stars in her eyes; she was in love, so I didn’t put up a fight.

That was a big mistake on my part because after my little sister was born, everything changed. I was a burden to him all of a sudden; four mouths to feed was a lot, and with the way Jack ate, we’d have been out of our two-year preserves before the end of the first year. He hated our tiny house, he hated the area we were in, he wanted out, and he didn’t want to bring me with them because I would 'cause more trouble than help' and I don’t know if my mom believed him; I don’t know if she was afraid of him, but she eventually listened. In the cover of the night, she, my little sister, and Jack picked up and left without me.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

There was no note, no recording, nothing left behind for me except her memory and her house.

I still go back to it, live in it for most of the year but spend much of my time scavenging. There’s so much to discover in the wastes; even in the devastation, there’s beauty and abundance, and the many people you come across are a toss-up. They would either try to kill you and rob you of your stuff, or you could have the most enlightening experience of your life by talking, eating, even spending a night together, and then never seeing them again. I do have to say that was one of the benefits of being a traveler; I never had to stay in one place, not for you, not for me, not for anybody.

How I met Geneva was a whole other story. She was scavenging herself, looking for food, and I caught her in my garden, munching on my berries. I had a 20 gauge pointed at her, or what I tried to call pointing at her, afraid as she was the first person to stumble across my house in years, and usually, Mother or Jack handled stragglers. Hence, this was scary, but she talked me down, sawed off the barrel of my shotgun for me so I could actually hold it up correctly, and from there, we became fast friends.

I thought my mother was a resourceful woman, but nobody was like Geneva. She was intelligent, beautiful, strong, and, most of all, caring.

The amount of knowledge she had of the wasteland was insurmountable. Everything I could ever possibly know was because of her. Not only did she expand on my skills, she perfected them. I could track just about anything for at least two hundred miles; I could set up a makeshift garden anywhere I am, no matter the kind of soil I have around me. I bake, I cook, I could knit myself a new outfit of all things! Swinging an axe and cutting wood was part of my everyday routine when I was twelve; Geneva taught me how to survive.

And now all I have left of her is her journal. She documented every place, settlement, thing, or secret she discovered out there, and I intended to explore all of them, find these things, and add more knowledge on these pages to pass on to whoever gets this book next.

It’s what she would want.