(Junkies XL — "Cities in Dust")
It was hot as hell and twice as gritty, and he hated it. Hated every last bit of it with a hatred that made his stomach sour when he let himself think about it — which is why he did his best to turn a willful blindess to the truth of things as often as he possibly could. Who wanted to dwell on the fact that the entire world was essentially one slow-moving trainwreck these days, and had been long enough that there were children running about that had known nothing else (thin on the ground, these children; a generation like a handful of sand in the wind instead of grains of sand on the shores, and best not to think about that, either).
Athos did his best not to think about the world as something other than a problem to be solved — and god knew there were enough problems that needing solving in any given day to distract the mind if you let yourself worry at them instead of remembering when it was easy to get enough water and sleep and food, and when you could laugh at movies like Mad Max and The Postman instead of doing your best to survive them. It was easier to make the hard choices when you kept the wall between you and your memories as tall and as wide and as thick as possible, and fuck if those choices, the truly fucked-up kind, didn’t turn up a lot more frequently than you’d think they might. Even for a world like this one, where men had killed each other over the last can of spoiled potted ham on a gas station shelf right in front of Athos’ very eyes.
If there was something this brave new world wasn’t short on, like it was short on water, good, gasoline, kindness, and safety, it was fucked-up choices. Fucked up choices and swirling, choking winds of dirt and dust that rolled in without warning off the decimated plains and from the drying-up riverbeds and the broken-down, bitten-up sides of mountains, howling across the world in capricously swirling eddies and whirlpools as they chased the remnants of humanity further and further away from anything that could be even laughingly referred to as “civilization”. Sometimes it might be weeks or even months between the Winds, sometimes merely days or even, at their worst, hours; sometimes your radios picked up the warning in enough time to get some shit together and fortify where you were and wait them out in relative comfort, and sometimes all you had to warn your ass was a fast-darkening smudge on the horizon and a certain staticky, crackling feeling creeping up over your skin as your unconscious, lizard brain did its damndest to get your damn fool super ego paying attention and under cover.
Think about the past, and the way the world had turned out instead of the way it could have been? Might as well put a slug in your right temple and save someone else the water as do anything like that, was how Athos thought about such things.
Which is what made this whole idea even more fucked up.
"The hell is wrong with you anyway, wanting to come all the fuck the way out here?" Athos grumbled as he glanced over at his traveling companion, the man’s eyes — like his own — hidden behind dark, sturdy sunglasses they’d lifted from an abandoned military supply store about thirty miles back. It never hurt to upgrade your gear whenever you could — it wasn’t like anybody was making any more of it these days, and besides, the definition of "theft" was something of a moving target socio-culturally, if you wanted to get moral on it (and if the shit they’d swept off grimy shelves and into their packs had sat unmolested for five whole god damn years, any possible statute of possession had to have been long passed, anyway).
"It’s not like you’re going to find anything, not this long after the sell-by-date." It was a familiar complaint, one that he’d been repeating for the record at least once a day since starting on this little wilderness trek with Oberyn. "Hell, mon ami — you know it was well as I do. All your cities lie in dust — what else do you need to know?”
