No Time For Dreams

I sat up out of breath feeling my body to make sure I was still alive. I looked around to see myself still sitting in the hole I had dug. The map was still in my hands, and the rifle was still beside me. Thank goodness I wasn't dead. The thought brought a little laugh out of me.

I peaked out of my hole to see that night had fallen over me. I took down my tarp before starting off following the brightest star in the sky. I looked at it and walked hoping for some sort of progress. I am tired of being in the desert. I've been in the desert for a month. Finding that water tower was two weeks into me walking around the desert. It was the first time that I had access to water in a few days. It was the first time I had seen buildings in tact in two and a half weeks at the time.

It was the first time I had seen rain in two months at all. That wasn't because it didn't rain. It was because I spent two months underground trying to survive the worst of the fighting in my home city. It took two months to work myself into living sober without any drugs or alcohol. This was also the most exercise I have ever done in my whole life. It is the strangest silver lining of this war, but it is something. I don't know why these thoughts are what they are, but it is helping me focus on something else besides my surroundings.

That's something else that took forever to come to terms with, being alone with my thoughts. Being alone in general now. I didn't used to be alone like this at first. When my city fell in the start of the fifth year of the war I had friends that moved out with me. We thought it would be better to move as one group so that we could always be on guard. It was a group of seven of us I think?

It is hard for me to remember the exact details right now, but its not important. We had started off into the woods looking for our old club house. We felt like it was a safe place for us to go. That was until the forest caught fire during the night. The smell of smoke was so thick that we didn't wake us from the smell. It woke us up from choking us to the point of almost passing out. Gunfire flew over our heads on almost all sides.

It was the human military fighting these monsters with us caught in the middle. We didn't know what to do so we started to run. We didn't care which way we went or where it took us as long as it wasn't in that fight. By the time we got away two of us had been killed by the gunfire. Days passed without issue until we made it to an urban area. We took cover in an abandoned house for I think a week by the time we got attacked again. This time it was us fighting against these monsters with guns we had picked up along the way.

The fighting was heavy as my friends started screaming and artillery shook the house around us. It was hard to fight with the drywall cracking around us. The dust stung my eyes along with the sweat getting into my eyes mixed with my blood. It hurt and nothing but hurt. When all but two of us had died I decided to grab my friend and pull them out of the back door.

"You keep running. I'm too injured to do it. Please survive." With the words my friend gave a smile before shoving me down a hill behind me.

That was all I could remember. I landed on a rock at the bottom of the hill causing me to black out for two days from what I could tell. That was when I got up and started walking to end up where I am now. Walking in this fucking desert with no sight of it ending anywhere. Even the damn animals don't want to live in this fucking wasteland. I hope that this star will guide me to some sort of salvation from this place.

I walked for three days and three nights when I finally found life around me again. I collapsed on the grass feeling the nice cool feeling against my skin. I shook from the relief I felt as my body cooled down from the desert. Around me I could finally hear birds and other life waking up for the night. I stood up shaking from the temperature change.

I found a place to set up my tent, but I don't think I would be able to sleep that night. The amount of sound around me was way too much for what I was used to. Along with the air around me was too cold. The only thing I could think of was how good it felt to be out of that desert.