Chapter 1
I’ve only actually been to the Raidlands once.
I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, and it hadn’t even been a full month since Dean had adopted me into his family alongside his daughter Lee. The three of us were still trying to figure things out at the time, it’s never really easy to adapt to a whole new lifestyle or having a whole new family to call your own. Dean didn’t want Lee or myself staying home alone, he said there were dangers outside of the Raidlands too, and if I’m being honest I didn’t want to stay at the house alone anyways because I was already afraid of so much that the world had to offer. Being around Dean made me feel safe, and I needed safe, if only just for a little while. I was still afraid that my biological father would try to come after me again, even though...
Well, anyways, Dean had always done a lot of trading with the Raidlands for as long as I remember knowing him. He said there were always people in the Raidlands that needed to stock up on weapons, armor, and whatever else Dean sold to them --- I don’t actually know the full list of things he carried with him. If half of the stories I’d heard from the other villagers were true, it sounded to me like Dean could’ve made a fortune selling off his stuff in that wasteland.
He had sat us both down in my room, which was actually just a broom closet in the hallway until Dean could build me an actual room of my own, and he explained that he wanted us to go with him. He warned us about all of the things that could happen to us, and all of the things that had happened to him before; All of the dangerous monsters in the wilds, and the people who were oftentimes way worse than any of the monsters. Lee and I both told him the same thing, that it didn’t matter.
“You’ve done a pretty good job of keeping us safe so far,” I replied with a naive smile, “I know you’ll protect us no matter where we are.”
Dean was an emotional person, he’d always been an emotional person and it only got worse after he started calling me his own kid. I swear, as soon as that discussion was over and my bedroom door was closed, he’d burst into tears of joy. During that conversation, though, he managed to keep his cool. You could see the small shimmering in the corner of one eye, though, no doubt about that.
“Ehhh, you’re a strong kid,” Dean replied, ruffling my hair a little and chuckling, “It won’t be long before you guys end up being stronger than me.”
I don’t think he realized how depressing that message actually turned out to be for me. I’d seen my fair share of fucked up shit already by that age, just about every other kid my age had seen something too, that was the world we lived in. The end of the world didn’t leave much room for propriety or political correctness or whatever you want to call it --- people did awful things, things that they wouldn’t have been able to get away with before the end of the old world.
Dean had unintentionally instilled it into my head that someday I’d have to carry his ass around, that there would come a day where the Dean I saw now would cease to exist, replaced by a Dean who wouldn’t even be able to walk down the hall to the bathroom without me half-carrying him there. But I was a ten year old kid with a brand new dad, a dad who genuinely seemed to give a shit, so I pushed aside any thoughts of him getting old or getting sick that I had, and chose instead to enjoy the time I had for now. Death was the least of my worries.
He told us to pack our bags, we’d be gone for maybe a week. I reminded him that I didn’t have a bag, let alone any personal belongings to put into said bag. He laughed, cocking his thumb in the direction of the wall behind him as he looked down at me.
“Then you’d better hope we get some good sales out there, kiddo.”
“Why don’t we just look for clothes n’ stuff while we’re out there?” I asked, “You said there’s lots of empty houses, there’s gots to be clothes there too, right?”
He didn’t answer right away, I could see he was mulling the question over as he pinched the hairs of his beard and glided his hand down to the ends of each strand. He did that often, stroked his beard and took way too long trying to find the right answer. Truth be told, it got annoying pretty fast.
“We could,” he started, his tone filling his statement with contrast already, “but they’d probably all be heavily irradiated, and they’d smell pretty nasty after steeping in that stew for the past seven-ish years.”
“What is e-ray-dated mean?” I asked, and I could see that Lee shared my sentiment. Dean oftentimes forgot that he was talking to children, and that we were children in an uneducated village where any word bigger than ‘house’ was considered a fancy word. Even when he answered in a simpler way my dumbass still didn’t understand, but I didn’t bother telling him that.
“A few years ago, Alex, some really dumb people did some really bad things to the world, and a lot of people died. The people who didn’t die were either protected underground, or they weren’t safe at all. If they weren’t safe, they got very sick, and that sickness hurts the actual world, too. So the people and the planet are both sick. That’s what irradiated means.”
“Ohh,” I had said, picturing in my head an image of snot and green goo all over the ground and the trees, “Is that why they call it Raidlands? Because it’s raid-ated?”
He got a good chuckle out of that one, and then explained that there were probably a lot of different reasons for the name, that I wouldn’t be able to understand yet because I’d never been there, never learned about the way that the Raidlands was.
The time came for us to go, so we packed our shit and piled up in Dean’s van surrounded by crates and duffel bags and little wooden boxes with hay inside of them. There was also a bunch of canned food, and canned water --- which I didn’t know was a thing, I always drank from the stream near the village. When I told Dean this, he looked like he was going to puke.
Our village was at the ass end of North America, a small post-war village established on the Raidlands side of the Panama Canal. When the bombs dropped, Canada and the U.S. united to form the Canadian-American Coalition, who transported all of their people and supplies across the bridge into South America, and then blew the bridge sky high like fireworks on Remembrance Day.
The only way across the water now is by boat, and the boat rides are reserved for the rich, the military, or C.A.C. government officials. Basically, everyone in our village was fucked because we were broke and unimportant, and ‘supposedly’ our village was too heavily radiated to let anyone cross. I asked Dean why people didn’t just swim across, I could see the other side from the shore. He told me that anyone who tried swimming across would get shot and thrown back into the water.
When my biological parents first brought us to the village, I had seen dozens of bodies floating along the water one morning after hearing tons of loud noises the night before. I didn’t understand what had happened, I didn’t even remember that day, until Dean explained that to me. I wish I could erase that image from my head, but that wouldn’t be the last time I’d bear witness to a sea of corpses in an early morning.
Dean told me that before he’d adopted me, he was traveling through the Raidlands and selling gear so that he could send Lee across the water on a boat before he was too old to be useful. A noble goal, looking out for one’s daughter, but adopting me put a dent in his plans. He knew there was no way he’d be able to afford sending two kids across the canal. It was a complicated situation, but deep down I don’t think Lee really wanted to cross the water anyways. Home was wherever you chose to make it, civilization or not.
I think she saw me being adopted as a blessing rather than a curse, now she had a sibling she could share her life with. I guess I made things a lot less boring or a lot less difficult for her, I dunno. All I know is that Dean and Lee were the two greatest things that had ever happened to me before.
