The old man had given him the name. Told him heâd looked like his oldest boy before The Virus had taken him. The old man said that the sky had torn open and bled black rain â thick, acid stuff that ate right through to the mantle of the earth â and it had taken most people with it.Â
Heâd said those of us left behind were the forsaken, and that this was hell.
âYou packinâ any artillery?â the man asked, his face pinched and red from the sun.Â
âNope,â he answered honestly, his black eyes glinting. He hadnât needed guns like the other toothless fucks heâd encountered. All he had to do was will them dead, and they dropped like a dried up husk to the ground.
âWhatâs your name?â
It still felt weird saying âMicah,â but it was better than saying he didnât remember. It was better than explaining heâd woken up in a dead meadow covered in someone elseâs blood. Riddled with IVâs, and bare-assed in a hospital gown. It was better than trying to explain the patchy memories that haunted his sleep most nights: the elephant sound of an alarm stentorian in his ears, and white-jacketed men coming at him with needles, and buckles, and straps.
âMicahâ was easier than all that.
He gritted his teeth as the stranger ran unfamiliar hands over his body, along his inner thighs, and around his waist.Â
âBe careful. I havenât had any since the world ended,â he warned with a smirk. The guy patting him down huffed a dismissal and handed over his meager satchel of possessions. âWhatever, kid. Now, look, Iâll tell you what I tell everyone else that passes through here. Youâre free to stay as long as you want. Some folks get a few hot meals, and a good nightâs rest, and they take off into the sunset. But if youâre planninâ on stickinâ around, no funny business, you hear me, boy? Iâll shoot you down like a dog without thinkinâ twice.â
Micah adjusted the straps of his backpack and lifted his eyebrow.
âIf youâre stayinâ, you gotta make yourself useful. Whatâre you good at?â
The man rolled his eyes, and sat back down. His shotgun fell back into his hands with a mechanical rattle.
âWeâll find you somethinâ to do. Now, get lost. Youâre blockinâ my view.â
Micah turned towards the town, dragging his heel on the dusty ground. He supposed there werenât many kingdoms left in this world. This one rose up out of the ruins like something from a Stephen King novel. Coated in layers of red dirt, and silhouetted by a fierce, desert sun. As good a place to die as any.
Thomas Pearson remembered it all. The world at war. The Virus that ended the war and the world as he knew it. For a backwoods boy in the mountains of  Georgia, the war wasnât something he concerned himself with in the beginning. It wasnât until the Virus started taking people that he really took notice, at first it seemed like people were just getting sick and dying. The dying didnât always stay dead though and Thomas finally was good at something.
The man wasnât extremely skilled, wasnât even really that smart but that changed after the rain.
Black, acrid tear drops fell from pregnant clouds rolling dangerously through the sky and it took his sister. Thomas had been traveling with his sister and kid nephew, she called them the three musketeers and she sang them to sleep off-key every night. That night she didnât sing, and the three musketeers became two.
What Thomas didnât realize until weeks later was that while the acid rain killed his sister, ate right through her, it had mutated something within him. The once not special man now had fire at his fingertips, and it might have been useful if it werenât so dangerous. A number of times he set fire to their camp, putting them both at risk of a number of things not limited to the fire itself.
They survived at the expense of almost losing themselves, but thatâs when their traveling landed them where they were now. Thomas wasnât particularly keen on New Hope, from the name down to the fact they let people come and go so freely. It was a different story for his nephew though, and that was his selling factor.
That was then, now after a few months this place had started to feel almost like a home.
Thomas was a hunter and a tracker, so when he showed up in New Hope they had assigned him work detail as such. Hunting for food, tracking down people to join their ranks because according to the authority types there was safety in numbers. It hadnât always been so in the manâs opinion, but what did he know? He was just the grumpy hick that knew a little about engines and a lot about keeping them fed, so they tolerated him.
He was on his way back trailing a few squirrels and a rabbit strung up on twine in one hand and his crossbow in the other, today had been a good one for hunting. For the most part, he wasnât paying attention to those around him but when he lifted cold blue eyes to an unfamiliar face he focused. âYouâre new.â Thomas grunted the obvious, shouldering his crossbow and taking in the entirety of what was seemingly a human before him.
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