Hunter lived in a dying city. She knew this it was something no one had to tell her.
Everywhere she looked she saw decay, shadows, and she could hear death approaching from all corners on soft feet. The city once so bright was nothing but twisted metal, reaching for the blackened sky---the landscape looked like a tragic forest. Bits of glass were strewn across it's forest floor and smoke was rising in thick black clouds. In order to survive this place she now found herself in she'd had to remake herself completely. She changed her name from Zoe to Hunter. Of course, there was no longer anyone around she knew that cared. It seemed only the strongest and strangest had survived the once pristine city's descent into madness. Long ago, the people had made a bargain---one hundred years of happiness, for one hundered years of brutality and uninterupted decay. Deals were struck between corporations and chemical laboratories, between housewives and retailers, between grandmothers and grandsons---everyone agreed that one hundred years of peace would be worth it, no matter what the cost. No one who had originally struck the deal was left to witness the results of their decision. When they were warned that the darkness was approaching, they began killing themselves slowly but surely. Most of the young people followed suit, leaving only the strongest and most resigned. People who could never before show their corupt and strange faces now felt free to roam, where once they had remained quietly tucked in the margins.
Despite the horror of it all--Hunter did find what you might call happiness. She found it in her head. There was a freedom that came with total anarchy---no government, no economy to speak of, no social strata---just trade and barter, theft and deceit. It was shocking how fast those that remained adpated to this new system of things. The only unwritten rule was that you could not or at least should not take what ever possesions a person had strapped to their back. Anything left out, or in the rubble of an apartment building or house was fair game. Most people slept with their goods on their backs.
Hunter also wrote poetry. Sitting with a ruined gargoyle at the top of a bombed out bank, she brushed her unruly brown hair out of her eyes, opened her journal and wrote, she wrote about how she felt---how this city was like a jungle, how she felt like a hurt animal:
I can't find my way out of this forbidden woodland
Everything is waiting to hurt me.
I am good at taking
I get what I want, clever like a crow.
Last night someone tracked me
some withered old hag with the strength of wild horses
she wanted her ring back,
she slashed at me as I was walking
slowly toward home
I felt a sharp pain in my left leg as I made a feeble attempt at hobbling towards safety.
It was unbearable and I soon fell to the ground in surrender.
She closed the book and put it in her trench coat pocket and climbed down. God she wanted nothing more that day then sleep and the drug. The drug that they all made and sold. The one that made you forget what you'd lost. It had no name, it was chemical or drug or simply it. But she was trying to stop. If she wanted to survive and see something better she had to resist. She had found a small group of seven people who felt the same---together they met as often as they could to discuss things, to write, to dream, to try to keep their sanity. She could tell them anything. There was one girl in particular who reminded her of a sister she'd lost when the darkness came with it's soildiers and its poisons and its bombs. Her name was Miranda and she was one of the few pure souls that remained in the city. It was Miranda that had kept Hunter from drowning, from falling into the arms of the drug.
With a spring in her heavy step, she made her way towards the chemical sludge lake where Miranda liked to sit and think. She nearly tripped and fell over piles of refuse and the bodies of birds and woodland creatures being eaten slowly by bugs as she made her way through the thicket that seperated the heart of the city from the river. Hunter quickly spotted Miranda lying on the bank next to the river, peaceful and still. She went over to her and put her hands over her eyes. Not hearing anything, she tossled her red hair playfully, "Wake up girly! Time to go hunting! Then we meet with the others." No reply. With a sickening jolt Hunter realized why Miranda wasn't moving. Miranda was no longer alive. She saw that her lips where blue and the eyes she'd just put her hands over were bulging out of their sockets. Miranda's pale white arm was tied with a crude tourniquet and her legs were bruised----Miranda had either taken the drug or it had been shot into her by some cruel dealer looking for a piece of flesh.
There was no time to grieve. Hunter would shed no tears. She would go to the meeting, inform the others of the death----and then she'd kill anyone involved! Someone would pay. Little did Hunter know that the people she wished to kill, were those she held the most dear for the last year. She remembered the work of some philosopher---keep your friends close, your enimies closer. She had been keeping them awfully close, they'd ended up being one in the same.
Hunter tossed the body of Miranda into the putrid river and braced herself to lose everything---one more time.
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