Fight or Flight or Freeze

The rations line was started to get restless. People had been lined up for hours waiting for their daily allotment of bread and cheese. Maggie looked across to the well. Drawn haggard faces looked back at her. Cheek and rib bones visible on the barely clothed children. Emaciated adults swaying in place, the dehydration and desperation their last tethers to the earth.

Every morning the wait for scraps of food and water was longer. Diseases that once were eradicated reemerged with a vengeance. Maggie watched as a woman collapsed, her jaundice skin cracking like tissue paper. A cloud of dust rose from the ground where her body landed. Billowing up in a dusty swirl. No one moved to help her. No one even noticed. Not with the weight of their own misery a constant distraction.

Maggie would wonder when it got so bad if it would make a difference. When and why no longer mattered. Survival was merely a side effect of the living.

Maggie shifted the infant in her arms. The baby wasn’t hers. She knew nothing about him. Only that not long ago, the man holding the small boy had collapsed in front of her. Her body reacted before her brain realized what happened, snatching the child as he flew toward the dirt. The man was dead as Maggie blinked. No one would take the baby from her. No one wanted the burden of another mouth to feed when they couldn’t even feed themselves.

She didn’t know why she kept the baby. Not when she too had walked past so many helpless children and left them behind. Perhaps it was because when the father fell a small heart shaped locket landed beside him. Its face cracked. Inside holding a small hand drawn picture of a woman smiling down at the baby.

Or maybe the boy’s gaunt face drew on maternal instincts she didn’t even knew she had. She had pitied mothers for so long. Had watched from a distance as they sacrificed for their children. Felt that anyone who attempted love and family in such a hopeless place was the worst kind of fool.

Maggie glanced down at the child again. He stared at the world around them through judgeless eyes. It struck her, then, realizing this baby would never know the world before. Would never hold a cellphone or eat a slice of brick oven pizza. The boy would only know life after the Wasting.

If Maggie was honest, much of that life she barely remembered. She used to lie awake at night forcing herself to picture things from before. The scent of lilacs or the feel of her dog’s fur. It was ironic, the things she most wanted to remember were the hardest. The mundane day to day things taken for granted. She didn’t care to remember electronics or social media. It wasn’t the constant barrage of information or television she missed. Though those things so often plagued her dreams.

But it was trying to remember her father’s favorite song or the look on her mother’s face when she made the perfect pot of macaroni. The taste of saltwater taffy and her sisters laugh. She would grasp at the edges of her memory trying with a desperation to hold onto the fragments.

Maggie no longer tried to remember. She tried now to forget.

What the world had valued helped destroy them. It was believing the “influencers” on their cellphones. Trusting the government was right when it said the nuclear war would only affect the enemy. But then the Wasting happened, and the world bled. Earth would never be a place humans could prosper again. Now it was just a place to exist, and life was an attempt- not of getting by day to day- but rather minute by minute.

A life of misery. Hopelessness.

Maybe having let the baby die would have been true mercy. But there was no going back now. Maggie was addicted to the company. To being needed. To having some semblance of purpose. She had been 7 when the war began and 11 when the world turned to ash. By her 12th birthday she was alone in what was left of this world.

At 16 or so Maggie believed it was, she had given up completely keeping track of time. It was one of the few things people would discuss when conversation had any meaning at all. What was the year? 2060? Or had it finally hit 2070? Maggie still pictured herself as the young girl who lost her family. But recently she had found a puddle left from one of the dust rains. The storm pounding down with hail and rain; not quenching the earth, rather causing a surge of dust and smog to sweep the land. She peered into the milky tan puddle of grit and the woman staring back at her was a stranger. Lines danced across her skeletal features. Grey sunbursts flittered through her hair.

Maggie chose not to think about that. Especially as she was distracted with the people ahead of her in line. Sweat poured off bodies, the scent mixing with that of human decay. There was no shade or cover to avoid the blazing rays. Summer was endless, fall and winter only a memory now.

They were to line up for rations every morning at daybreak to avoid the hottest part of the day. But now the sun had crested in the sky and still no one had shown up with that day’s food supply.

The well had run dry the day before, but they had been promised a solution was coming. Maggie’s commune was like all the rest. Barracks lining up one end of the open desert plain. The world here was a sepia rainbow of tans and browns. Everything from their rags of clothing to the haze over the sky was a variant of dust. Craggy remnants of mountains stood far off in the distance; its face covered with the debris from the wars. Steel and concrete had melded together forming their own peaks and valleys.

The ration trucks came from the mountains every day. Easily spotted in the distance if the dust was minimal. Like it was today. And there was nothing but emptiness in that horizon line.

Maggie had a small store of food and water tucked away in her bunk in the barracks. She would be okay, but had hoped to add today’s rations to her stock pile.

In her bones she knew no one was coming.

They had heard about this in the past. That small communes were left behind as the ration trucks moved on. Once an area was beyond helping, those in charge would pack up and move out. And it didn’t take long for the people to destroy each other. The rest starving to death, waiting with desperation for another truck to come. They hadn’t believed those stories any more than believing there was a garden beyond the mountains. A place untouched by war, where there was still vegetation; still hope.

Maggie stepped out of line.

She was not going to sit here and wait to die.

Not anymore.