Aimee Lupo

The Forgotten One

Ellie quickened her pace, the sun beating down on her back, already drenched in sweat. She glanced down at the NavCom strapped to her wrist to double check her coordinates. She was almost to her destination. Six months of careful planning was finally going to pay off. At least, she hoped it would. To be honest, she had no idea what she would actually find when she arrived. She just knew that she had to satiate her curiosity. That someone wouldn’t have kept and hidden the information she discovered if it wasn’t important. She scanned the horizon’s surface for anything that would indicate that she was close. She was running out of daylight, and she didn’t want to be caught out in the open after sunset. Even in a remote location such as this. Raiders were everywhere. The world had gone to Hell in a handbasket long before she was even a thought. The Great War, they called it. From what she could see, there was nothing great about it. There was nothing but struggle, pain, and dust. Everywhere was dust. She had read old articles on how things were before the war. Green, lush. More than enough for everyone, yet the people were filled with greed and selfishness. They didn’t know what they had. How blessed they truly were. Or maybe they did, and they just stopped caring and took it all for granted. In the end, it didn’t matter. Not when bombs were raining from the sky and the whole world was burning. Not when bodies were piled high in the street and the stench of death hung in the air like a miasmic cloud. Ellie thought it was all such a waste. Yeah, they killed their enemies, but they killed the earth as well. It was years before the fires stopped raging, and all that was left was ash. And the dust. Even after the war ended, the death count didn’t. The number of deaths after the war were more than triple the amount during, as people died of radiation poisoning, disease, and famine. What was left of civilization fled to more remote locations in search of water and land that was nontoxic. Large metropolises became too radiated to venture into, as they were hit the hardest with the nukes, and new ones sprang up in their place as viable lands were discovered. Over eighty years have passed, and the effects of the war were still apparent in the ruins that littered the landscapes of this once thriving nation. And yet, the memory of those that remained was short and before long greed returned out of necessity. Everyone was just out for themselves as food and water became scarce. Only the strong survived. It seemed some things never changed.