Project SF: Chapter 1
OK SO I KNOW IT’S SHORT MY CHAPTERS ARE ALWAYS SHORT PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT THIS IS A ROUGH DRAFT SO SUGGESTIONS ARE ENCOURAGED!
Chapter 1: Happy Birthday
It was a stormy night in the wasteland, a once prosperous city now in ruins, rusting and rotting after 200 years of radiation and scavengers. Despite the city, and the world, being in ruins, we prosper. “Rapid City Rises” was spray painted on almost every wall that was still standing, and even some that weren’t. Some of the paint was pre-war, and survived 200 years of torment. Other paint was new, just one day old, and still dripping. The particular wall that Madison was looking at was painted by what should have been herself and the rest of the town. In the small, scavenging town of Racy, once you turned 14, you had a job to do. Before that, you crawled into tight spaces in order to get the best of scrap, from old power cells to a lead pipe or two. She remembered back on that day, where she turned 14 and did the unthinkable.
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“June 14th, 2074,” she wrote, “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday happy birthday. Happy birthday to me.” She closed her diary and put down the old pen and ink. She was almost out of ink, and would have to go to get some from the market. Ink was a rare commodity, even more rare than actual, clean paper and books, but unlike most items, ink had only one buyer. Madison sighed and sat up on her mattress. Her mattress was where all of the thinking happened, and there was many thinking to be had. What job was she going to be assigned? She smiled, hoping that she would get a job in the markets as security.
Madison got off of her mattress and got up, walking to her table and setting the black diary, pen, and ink in it’s drawer. She leaves her small shack and walks out into the street. The sun is still rising, so the rest of the town isn’t up yet. Racy is surrounded by junk walls, that are about 8 feet high and made out of whatever they could find, from tires to wood, to even some chain link. If you wanted to go outside of the walls, usually you would have to go through the gate, with a guard, that would never let you leave unless you had official business. Madison though, she knew another way out. She started walking, taking the back roads of Racy to the wall, and walking along side it until she reached a chain link portion. She lifted up a board that was leaning against it to reveal a gap in the fence, which she squeezed through, pulling the board back behind her.
The girl walks, picking up a metal pipe she left at the hole a day earlier, to a small store right outside of the walls. She opens the door and hears the scurrying of radroaches. She scans the room and finds the source, a medium sized roach, about the length of her arm and the width of three of her arms put together, side by side. She readies the pipe. On a usual day, she would have just squished the roach with her foot, but this one was larger than the usual, small radroaches that were about the size of her hand that she encounters. She walks over to the roach and bashes the creature’s head with the pipe, the creature twitching slightly. Madison picks up the roach and heads to the back room. The back room is filled with old phone books and scrap wood from previous days, and countless ashes from the small fires she’s made. She picks up a few pieces of scrap wood and rips out some paper from the books, pulling out some matches she’s kept in her pocket. She piles the burnable materials together and lights them ablaze, using a small, metal wire shelf to cook the radroach. The smoke rises through a hole in the roof, as the fire pops. Madison sits back against a wall, feeling the cool cement against her back. This store used to sell pretty much everything back before the war, but now all of the food was gone, and the only things left are radroaches and burnables.
After about half an hour, breakfast was ready. Madison uses her pipe to push the radroach onto the floor and break open the shell. She scoops the meat out of the radroach with her hands and eats. She gags but continues eating, for the greyish brown meat doesn’t exactly taste good, but she needed breakfast. Madison stands up and walks out of the store and stops right outside the door, to see a gun pointed at her face. She freezes up, closes her eyes, and drops the pipe out of fear, as the guard with the gun smirks. The gun is a simple 10mm pistol, 10 rounds per magazine. She knew enough about guns to know this was bad news.
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“Madison, why were you outside of the walls?” Asks the mayor, with a stern look on her face. Madison was in the mayor’s office, the nicest room in town. It’s walls were wood, and only smelt slightly of mildew and rot. The mayor herself was a tall, skinny woman of about 50, wearing a grey and black striped business suit.
Madison remained silent, looking at the ground.
“You realize this is a serious offense, you could have been killed or worse!” The mayor says, raising her voice. “So I’ll ask again, why were you outside of the walls?”
“I-I was..” Madison stammers,“I was hungry, mamm.”
“Could you not have gone to the market, Miss Kilroy?!”
“N-none of them were open si- mamm…”
“Gomez, you know the drill.” The mayor sighs, and looks at the tall guard.
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That was the day that Madison left her home 7 years ago today, with nothing but the pipe and the clothes on her back. Madison begged and begged to let her back in, but they never did. Now Madison was back, with a much darker objective. Madison looked away from the wall and layed down in bed, closing her eyes and going to sleep.
