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Dystopian

a story by : Stephen Koons

By Stephen K KoonsPublished 3 years ago 3 min read
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Dystopian by: Stephen Koons

There is a woman breathing heavily, leaning over a garish red heart shaped locket. The time and place, Philadelphia in a harsh future, 2451. Her heart is beating quickly. There is little time to think about stress. Instead of whining and cursing her fortune there would be bullets to dodge and a man to find, one with a suitcase full of cash, and the only safe haven, a well funded night club run by Token Ellish.

Grina Stexley had known the man growing up. She had a list of people to try to contact since the bomb had been detonated, since society and civilization had been reduced in general to ruin. Luckily Grina had a few things to put in her luggage container, some toiletries, an ID card, and cold water. Oh lord the water, she would need more.

Tonight would be frightening, without interruption from the Shadow Walkers. Shadow Walkers were remnants of fallout, dissident people who had secretly been engineered to walk haplessly deformed, hungry. Grina had seen them kill, but could escape them, she was quick, they were dead.

An alarm was going off, the littered messy streets seldom these days hosted any cars. Mostly outside one could plot a way to pilfer something, to collect goods where things weren’t totally inaccessible. So Grina was taking a chance today, packing heat in case Shadow Walkers would try to make her into a snack. The 7-11 had been raided, yet there could even be packages among the rubble, perhaps the outing would be pointless, but with boredom, danger, and hunger, outings could take on importance for the young woman.

Just then after toweling off in the shower, groans, a hideous sound from outside….She spots three men with burnt or flaking off skin, wearing gray and black, moaning and groaning. They desired food, a person to devour, Grina quickly grabs her pistol and takes careful aim out of the house window. She had taken precaution to protect her house, but when the manufactured beasts of night came, she could expect anything.

Three well placed shots and a heinous yelling….three more and the dying Shadow Walkers fell to the ground. Grina dresses and examines the invader’s corpses.

In one of their pockets she discovers an access card, with a name on it, she surmises it is that of the genetic engineer, Jack Teesdale. He had been mentioned before this terrible destruction on the news, and our heroine remembers. It will someday become important to find him, and to stop his atrocious cloning and post-war, experiments.

The nearest neighbor’s, people of good will, were about a half mile down the street. The children survived with a mother to tell stories. Thoughts of Armageddon, Ragnarok, End Times….

There were government owned weapons. There was war impending, and a dystopian world to be rocked, perhaps to be rebuilt, but by whom? Finding new people was a rarity, a boon. Today Grina dares take a walk in the direction of the inner suburb.

Smiling because there is water, a functioning plumbing system. She is grateful because the air is not biting her flesh like falling sulfur, poison. There would be no school, still….religious worship, canceled. The life of the city was put on hold.

The nuclear bomb had done its job. Now in the night, the crawl of cars, when luck smiled, cleaners of rubble…

The actual blast killed most. Fallen and twisted metal about the city, and remembrance….

Now after international war, when nature should be taking over, genetic tamperer’s. In dim basements, a cult of mad men trying to dominate the remnants of the dystopia.

humanity
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