Introduction
Still
Caleb Barney
Introduction
As Aaron exhaled, his breath rose in front of him, white and misty. The inhale that followed filled his lungs with a cold air that nearly felt like solid ice. A few years ago, this would have bothered him, but it didn’t anymore. The pain told him that he was alive.
However, the grumbling in his stomach told him that it had been too long since his last decent meal. This pain told him, “If I don’t go hunting soon, starvation will kill me before anything else does.” As he sat in the darkness of the cave, Aaron weighed all of his options.
Hunting was a poor way to gather food since most of the animals had died in The Halt, as did most people. His best bet was to makes a run for Canaan, which definitely had enough food to keep him fed for as long as he needed. However, there were Breakers in between him and Canaan, and Breakers were dangerous and heavily armed. Trying to brute force his way past them was a gamble with life and death in the balance. But what choice did he have? Die of starvation or die fighting. Aaron chose the latter and opened up his bag to take inventory of all of the ammunition he had with him.
What he saw disheartened him. He had no ammo for his Glock and only five rounds for his hunting rifle. The odds were not in his favor, and as far as he knew, Canaan may have been overrun by Breakers, and he knew there was no way he could beat them by himself. So again he sat in the cave pondering what he should do next. If he went out and fought, he would have to hope there were only five of them, but they rarely traveled in numbers that low.
Aaron took a deep breath and dug deeper into his bag again, searching every crevasse, nook, and cranny. There had to be more ammunition in there somewhere. As he dug deeper and deeper into the bag, his finger found a hole near the bottom. Thinking that the hole went all the way through the bag, Aaron instinctually put his fingers inside. However, his fingers did not reach out into the cold air of the cave but instead rested upon a small piece of paper. Aaron was confused. He thought he had turned all the paper in his bag into tinder, but more tinder wouldn’t hurt.
He pulled the piece of paper out of the bag and squinted his eyes to look at it. His heart dropped when he saw the all-too-familiar markings that danced across its surface.
To My Little Brother
From Eli
Part 1
My Brother’s Keeper
