​Rustland

Marching bootheels thundered in near-unison over the crumbling debris littering the street outside, the vibration palpable in the silence of the small, darkened apartment. Tina shook within her mother’s clammy embrace, but the whispers about how it would soon all be over consoled her, and Tina knew it to be true. The patrols hardly ever entered derelicts like the kind she and her family squatted in. Now just the three of them. Her father had been gone longer than usual, out collecting more water. It was a task he’d set to work on every day, multiple times. Often as many as six or seven, as tainted as it all was. The moisture traps sporadically covering nearby rooftops stretched to a roughly square mile radius of the former metropolis around them, now just an ashen-brown waste of barely breathable air and water so dirty that the distillation process to make up a few consumable gallons could cost a parent their child. Tina had lost friends like that before, not too long after the world changed forever. Almost immediately, in fact, in some cases.

Tina’s mother tightened her grip around her daughter as the marching abruptly stopped, and for a single, uniquely terrifying moment, the silence was utterly complete. Until it wasn’t. The screams tore through the night in echoes befitting Hell. And then the yelling, covering the screams with thuds so clearly the result of merciless violence. It was Tina’s father. She found herself about to cry out for him, but, detecting this, and acting quickly in the way only a desperate mother could, she clamped her hand over Tina’s mouth as her father’s moans intensified in the street with the smacks now audibly crunching bone in their ferocity.

Tina could only make out a few words through the chaos. The increasingly garbled pleas from her father as he begged. The patrol guards, gruff and near-unintelligible in their degradation; barking, demanding. They wanted him to give up where he had been hiding. Where his family was hiding. Her father continued to beg, and cry, and scream, and then beg even louder as the patrol’s methods of torture became increasingly barbarous until, finally, he could vocalize his pain no longer. Tina’s mother had begun to weep, holding a hand over her own mouth in an attempt to silence herself, but as a guardsman pulled his weathered rust-flecked sidearm from his slackened waistband and pulled the trigger, she could stifle herself no longer. Only a squeal escaped her lips, barely louder than a cough, but the quiet that followed filled her with a dread which she knew signaled their end. After an impossible eternity of insufferable silence that choked the air from Tina’s mother’s lungs and grasped her final semblance of hope within its deathly grip, she heard the outside door to the street crash open; everything good in her life withering in a single, horrendous instant. Her weeps became panicked, inconsolable sobs as she grabbed the old sewing scissors on the nightstand by their side and proceeded to jam the blades into her daughter’s rising chest. Just as quickly, after muttering her purest, most sincere apologies, she inflicted herself with a similar treatment. Her embrace never faltered. Even when they both lay there on the dusty wooden boards, fading away forever. Together. The girl’s mother’s grip tightened harder as the door to the apartment flew open against its frame, their flimsy obstructions doing little to stop the entry. A squad of masked men filled the room, turning the family’s meager possessions upside down. Tina’s mother felt her daughter whimper her last and go limp in her arms. She no longer had the will to cry. It was all so close now. As her vision began to flicker and fade, she felt a presence kneel before them; felt him breathing, heavy, as he said: “Take the little one. She’s still so fresh…”