Chapter Two: Acid

After minutes, I stopped.

Her arm!

(when am I going to finish this, so hungry so hungry, oh I'm so hungry)

Her arm is bare, the bullet hole bleeding, her life escaping from the hole. I had been shot before, I can keep her life in her. Pulling the bandage sack from my bag I began to dress the wound with my linen bandages, made from scraps of clothes. She stared and grimaced at me while I worked. Her deep blue pools of eye gazing into me, screaming "Why!?" and "Thank you, thank you" simultaneously.

A person! I shot her (but she'll live) and I found a person. A woman my age, a Scavenger dressed in rags, with black hair and deep dark pools for eyes and a gun-shot wound. After I finished, my eyes drifted to her face. Hello, I thought. Speech! To think in words and not images was so new, such a delight! "Hello", I said. My cracked voice barely can choke out the words. Her voice was flowing, pure water, not polluted, dead puddles but a running stream. Blackness came from my eyes, inky darkness filling everywhere, the world spinning...

Light! Pain and light in my mind, a tugging rope of light and sting yanking me from the void.

Rain! She is looking at me, stinging painful droplets of rain hitting her. "Get up! Please get up!!" Her voice is a cascading waterfall, angry and powerful. Her hand pulls me to my feet, and we begin to run, into the alley, turning a corner into a dark hole in the wall.

Her hand is so... warm! Not the cold, apathetic rock and concrete, but a hand, to lead me to safety. To die in the the acid rain - to burn in the storm, to melt in the mid-afternoon showers, She would not let it be my way. No, I would die somewhere else, from something else. For now, I am here. The hole is filled with inky blackness, the ground's dry, and I am safe in this shelter.

Squatting in the darkness, the rain sizzles furiously outside. She was here. I could feel her eyes staring at me and the pain in her arm. Hunger! Oh, I am so hungry! The voracious emptiness, I could feel it, twisting my stomach, trying to kill me, to leave my body. The rain suddenly and abruptly stopped.