Part 3

Yael tells about life after the tent city.

We had scavenged before, but this time there was a lot less to find. We traveled further out of zone, hoping to come across anything at all to help us out. Food, water, even people who were able to hang on. But all we found were ghost towns stripped of everything that wasn’t nailed down. When we did come across others we were either turned away at gunpoint, or found nothing but emaciated bodies. There were a few rare occasions when we came across someone we were able to talk to and trade with.

We kept wandering, scavenging, we had to if we wanted to survive. As months turned to years we hardly saw anyone anymore. We were barely hanging on, and our dog was getting too weak to travel. We came across an abandoned suburb that my dad said would be a good place to stay for a while. He found the house with the least holes in it and we moved in.

We took whatever we needed to fix it from the surrounding houses. We stayed there for almost a year scavenging every building around for whatever we could find. We were lucky enough to come across a basement full of canned food. It wasn’t the best tasting stuff, but it was way better than what we had been eating. Sadly, our dog died. We buried it in the backyard of that house. It wasn’t long after that when we started running out of food. The neighborhood had run dry and it was time to move.

We packed our things, this time the bags had much better supplies, and we left. We wandered for another month or so before coming across a shipping warehouse. There wasn’t much in the way of food, but there was more water than I had seen in my life. My dad said we were able to bathe like kings and still have plenty to drink. We stayed there, trapping rats that were living around the warehouse. It was gross, but we were fed.

 

Despite this, it didn't take long for us to get tired of eating them. We loaded what was left of the water onto a cart and started walking again.

Author's Note

It's supposed to be a first person narrative. I want to flesh it out as much as it needs. Let me know what you think needs changed, dropped, or expanded on. Be critical.

Note from Part 1: Yael's age at this point is somewhere in the early teens(13-15)

Reviews

[joyinchrist]

It's really good so far but it needs to have more what I like to call scenes in it. You do a lot of describing but if you could take some of those paragraphs and turn it into like a movie scene with more dialog. I dropped when I heard the gun shot in the air.
"Run dad!" shouted.
I heard my mother scream my name.
I turned and looked.
If you take your descriptions and turn them into movie scenes you'll have a fantastic book that is gripping and engaging.

[Jordan]

I'll be sure to work on that. I'm still working on the revision. It's much more...more. This version I typed on my phone and uploaded between classes so it DEFINITELY needed work.

The revision is at least twice as long(I think I estimated my final product to be three times as long) and will have much better storytelling. I was having trouble finding good examples of first person, but I found a style I really like and I'm using it to improve on mine.

There will also be less of a gap in the revision. Here it jumps forwards by something like 5-7 years. The part that's holding me back is all the ideas I'm playing with. I have a lot of characters, locations, and sub-plots I'm playing around with. With any luck, I'll find something I'm happy with by the end of the summer and make some actual progress on the Dust series.