The Leader Not By Choice (Part 1)

Nathan Hock

When I woke up, it was still dark but not the deep, dense dark of true night. I likely needed to get up sooner than later to take my shift on watch. Yet, I didn't feel the usual urgency to put myself in a place of responsibility at the moment. I had always felt as if it was my burden to help as many people as I could. I suppose that was mostly my mother's doing. She was my example of what the world should have been. Even in the Underground, she had never stopped trying to make life better for the people around her.

I glanced around the camp, taking inventory of the people around me as best as I could without giving myself away. Maria and Carley both seemed to be sleeping soundly. Darian had his back to camp, likely still half alert despite his shift being over. Anthony was slumped off to the side, fiddling with something small and metallic to help him stay awake. At least he was pointed in the right direction.

Other than the occasional soft snore, the world was almost silent. There was nothing out there to make all the monotonous night noises that used to fill the air.. I couldn't say that I missed those sounds, though. I barely remembered the world of my childhood. More of my life had been lived in this dying world than the world before so the seemingly endless silence was almost a comfort to me rather than an oddity.

I closed my eyes and drifted through the quiet. It was something I did often in the early mornings but not something I told the others about. Likely as not, they wouldn't understand. We had all noticed differences over the last few years but this was beyond sharper hearing or better vision, not to mention that I had discovered it long before we left the Underground. It was as if I could walk through the camp, seeing every detail as close or as distant as I chose, with nothing more than listening to the sounds around me. I could see more in the dark with my eyes closed than I could walking in daylight. Even as a child, I had known that my gift wasn't normal. Still, I made use of it.

I could see my friends much easier this way. Anthony was messing with an old multi tool we had salvaged from a small town on the east coast, opening and closing the chipped blade with a yawn. Maria was indeed sleeping soundly but Carley was frowning in her sleep, perhaps still trying to recall the memory of what she saw. Darian was wide-eyed but resting as well as he ever did. I wondered idly what sort of life he must have lived to make him so wary of so much.

I probably could have held out a bit longer before I got up to take watch but Anthony seemed on the edge of dozing at his post. There was no use in putting us all in danger for the sake of a few more moments to myself. Instead, I rolled carefully up from the soft scrap of fabric I was laying on and gathered my usual weapon for the early morning watch. It was a long piece of metal, roughly the length of my arm. I had wrapped one end with strips of cloth for a handle. The other end had a ragged edge that came to a point where the metal folded over itself. It was heavy enough to land hard but light enough that I wasn't exhausted after only a few swings. I wasn't built for fighting, and I was more than glad for that, but this was enough to give me an advantage when I needed it.

I moved quietly enough not to wake those that were sleeping but loud enough that Anthony wouldn't be startled by my approach. In all this time, he had never seemed to settle the incessant jumpiness that he carried. It was as if he expected every shadow to hide death incarnate. Not that caution was a bad thing but Anthony seemed to take it to an extreme. I couldn't imagine living these last four years like that.

"Is it that time already?" Anthony looked up at the darkened sky as if to check the time as he spoke. "Seems like I just took over. Ah, well, times flies." He shrugged and all but jumped from where he had been lounging, making it to his bedroll in record time. I simply watched him go. There was no real reason to call out the blatant inconsistency as a lie. It didn't really matter in the moment anyway.

I settled down with my back to the camp and stared across the empty expanse between us and the remnant of civilization in the distance. I had never found the ability to quash the feelings of sorrow that consumed me each time I saw places like this. So many lives had been lost there. The very ground seemed to cry out in agony from the tragedy. We had never ventured far into the city but it seemed as though none of the plants that now shaped our world could grow there. Only the strange, off-colored moss seemed to be a permanent resident. Perhaps Maria's dubbing of "corpse moss" wasn't too far off the mark. It only seemed to grow in the absence of life.

Out here, life was everywhere you looked, if you chose to look hard enough. Even here in the desert zone, tiny animals had survived the devastation of the war. Most of the shrubs had tiny claw and teeth marks from some sort of rodent. Beetles would sometimes pop up from the fine red sand only to bury themselves back out of sight if a shadow came too near. The bigger animals were often dangerous and we certainly wanted to avoid them at all costs but they were no less present wherever we went. Humanity, of course, was another matter.

I let my mind wander in those long shadows. It conjured a suddenly endless field of tall, swaying grass. A green so bright that it even smelled like the color burned itself onto the empty charcoal gray of the world before me. Splashes of blue, red, yellow, and violet spattered the scene in more shades than I could count. Warmth filled the air, but not the scorching heat of the midday sun. This was soft and gentle, as if someone had managed to bottle the feeling of my mother's hug and poured it over the images.

For a moment, the vision was so real that I almost reached out to touch it. But, in the blink of an eye, it was gone, returned to drab shadows in the endless monochrome. It was a little disappointing but not unexpected. Much as I might dream of a world in vivid color, I had no choice but to live in the reality of my world without it.