Here is the next part of my Sci-Fi novel and i have decided to name it "Wasteland" please see my previous chapter for the beginning, but to be fair i'm not letting alot about this world slip just yet.
ARCAUS
The dust had settled, and the sun was high into the sky, casting an orange haze on the landscape. The bushes and gnarled trees basked in the sunlight, smiling and the warm fuzzy glow. The hill overlooking Trench was rocky, hundreds of tiny shadows lounged in and amongst the rocks and brush. The rocky hills smoothed out to meet the wide open expanse of orange sand, warm underfoot, and filled with specs of slate and chipped boulders.
The town, made up of derelict houses and halls, alleys filled with debris and flaking plaster. The town hall slouched over, forlorn and lethargic, looking lazily into the squat houses.
Something rustled inside on of the houses, a mouse maybe, a rat; a rabbit or a coyote…a man.
He reached up and over the musty sheets that hung to his musty mattress and his musty clothes. He stretched and little flakes of ash and dust fell from his ill-shaven face like flecks of snow. He yawned and the lazy afternoon air was sucked in as well as some dust, he coughed. He bent forward and stroked his face, looked at his watch, and started to get up.
Afternoon was late morning now for him, nothing ever came out in the day, and the night cloaked his approach. The sun was almost about to set, perfect time to get ready. He pulled his shirt further down himself, adjusted his jeans, and tied his boots harder. He reached over and kissed the Polaroid of his wife, his wife.
He paused. It was almost second nature, get ready, kiss his wife, never really stopped to think or reminisce, he never tried. He reached into his pack and grabbed a bottle of cola, prying the tab open and hearing the crackle of bubbles, feeling the tingling sensation as the warm drink trickled down his throat. It was warm, he hated warm cola.
He tossed the can away and wiped his mouth, he reached again into his pack and this time brought out his gun. The walnut stock was smooth against his weathered hands and the trigger dull and hard, the rest of it, the barrel, slid out like a well oiled blade; it was almost just as beautiful, if it was not such an ugly tool. He rested it in his hands and checked it, he slid a bullet, a copper coloured nugget into the chamber, and he sighed as he cocked it and set it aside.
He was a good marksman; everyone always told him that, he was sick of it, why could he not be a painter, a craftsman. His father gave him no pens or paper, hammers or anything constructive. His first real present was a rifle, when he was small he played with bullets, hell, he made his own bullets when he was ten, he shot his first deer when he was thirteen, and he shot a man when he was twenty-five.
He joined the army, they made him better, they made him ugly, they turned his talent into his profession, they gave him medals, and he didn’t want them, they gave him medals for getting shot as well as killing people, when he shot a man they did not like they gave him another medal. He shot a man he had never met, who killed people who he had never met, in a country he had never heard of before, fighting a war he had never heard of before. He shot him, and they gave him a fucking medal.
When he got home, he melted his medals and turned them into bullets, his medals were sitting in his pack, never again to be brought out to show off to anyone. Ever. He gazed out on the orange clouds and the warm sun, he felt that just maybe he could sit and enjoy the sunset, just this once. But he couldn’t he had work to do; he always had work to do. He slung his pack over his shoulder and made his way down the dilapidated building and onto the soft sands of Trench, and into the sinful world of The White Sea.
The sun was crawling into the horizon as he trekked onward into the never-ending sand, past the town, past the hills, past everything. He walked and walked until his feet sprouted painful sores under his hard leather boots. He thought he maybe saw a sand-mouse, but he knew nothing could survive this far out, it was only thanks to the little green pills in his pack that made sure that he did not sub come to a bout of what everything for miles around had caught.
He walked onward and up onto a large dune, his thighs burned as he clawed his way upward onto it, he slumped in relief at the summit, wiping the sweat from his brow. He gazed on what lay on the other side of the dune, a mound of what, to the naked eye was scrap metal, a mangled mass of iron and rusted steel, bitten by the sandstorms. But on closer inspection it seemed that it was in fact a haphazard array of shacks and shanties, grouped together into a crude settlement. He could notice that there were already people walking about, a few broken down cars, but everything seemed to be silent.
He reached into his pack, and pulled out his binoculars, he was at least a good three hundred metres from the settlement and had to use them sparingly, or else the sun would reflect off of the lenses and he would be spotted. He watched the people, dressed in dirty desert clothing, head scarves, long coats and other such clothing. He had no use for desert wear, he had the covering of Trench to shield him from the sand storms, and also because he could not afford them, yet.
. He watched for a good thirty minutes, the sun had made its way down and the white expanse curled into darkness, only the huge, luminescent disk of the moon lit the wastes. His pack started to make muffled noises, he open the flap and pulled out his crude radio, with his own antenna made from an old children’s novelty spring. The radio crackled and hissed until he turned the dials, and adjusted himself on the dune, the radio spurted into speech.
“Hello?” enquired a hearty, but crackling voice, it was low and had a drunken quality.
“Yes” he replied, his voice on the other hand was smooth and quiet, and with not a hint of drunkenness at all, almost sombre.
“Ha-Ha! Hello Hendrix, how are things going with you?” the voice cheerfully poured out of the radio, and Hendrix could practically smell the vodka. In the background he could hear the giggling of young women, the clinking of glasses and subdued conversation.
“Very good, sir.” He struggled to get that last part out, he hated calling anyone sir.
“Well…do you have the target” the voice on the end of the phone enquired playfully, Hendrix wished that he would call him when he was sober. It was so very cold in the desert after dark, he could feel his bones freezing and shivering under his skin, he was cold and fed up and wanted to go back to his warm camp in Trench.
“No…no I don’t” Hendrix said with a thick layer of annoyance in his voice, luckily his boss was too drunk to notice.
“Well you know who he is don’t you? Did you reeeeeeead the file?” the voice said whimsically and took a large swig of something; he was a very loud drinker.
Hendrix sighed heavily, yes he had read the file, and he had read it at least a dozen times. Isaac Smithson, twenty three years old, graduate of Oxford University in two thousand and thirteen, put into stasis till two thousand and thirty nine, three masters in physics, Nobel Prize winner in physics, and with a bounty of eight thousand United Nations dollars.
Not that that kind of money was worth anything down in this backwater hell, he would ask for the money in gold, and a new house in Wasteland central. But thankfully he was not the man he would have to kill. We waited for the drunken mess to dismiss him from the embarrassing phone call.
“Well good luck, and remember to stop by afterwards for something to drink, eh?”
Hendrix knew that he would defiantly not be “stopping by” he would have rather eaten nails than spend a second with that filthy scumbag Chazwick.
“No thank you sir” Hendrix replied as daintily as possible and hung up. He lay on the dune and waited for his target.
While he was waiting he thought long and hard about what he would do with his reward, to actually never have to work for the world’s scumbags and gangsters, he had thought that after the almost total destruction of the human race people have some better morals.
But he didn’t care about the ranting G.R.I; the Wasters could do what they want. All he really wanted has to hang up his gun and settle down in the middle of no-where and never have to speak or deal with anyone again, a place to have his own thoughts to himself, without the loud opinionated garbage of the politics, the wars, the chaos.
It was a small dream, but it was his dream to share with his wife. He could hardly imagine if she would recognise him now, his tanned face and his weathered body, could she look at him the same way, knowing what he had done, the things that he had seen.
He wanted Anna back, and every day spent away from her was a day he became less and less like the man she knew.
He often lay in his house in Trench, staring at his gun, sitting in the corner…watching. He had gotten as far as having it in his hands, looking down on it and thinking how much easier it would be if he killed the real monster, the monster he saw every time he saw his ugly, murdering eyes. It laughed and grinned when he fired every shot. Whispering blood-thirsty lies into his ears, making him do the things he did.
In his dreams he saw Anna and she asked “Why” he wanted to tell her that he was the same man he always was, that he was sorry, ashamed. But Anna always said to him “Why” again, and then she cried, she cried and cried, she asked “Why” but he could never tell her, he wanted to hold her and tell her why, to make her love him again, but he always woke up.
wanted to go to sleep and stay asleep, but then he will have changed forever, the monster would have won.
Hendrix looked out on the white sand, the smooth black sky, and the twinkling stars, he wished he could never leave this beautiful black sky, but the next ugly deed he had to commit launched itself into his head and he saw the last man he had to kill.
NOTES
Okay just a few things before anyone starts to reveiw, Mars i remeber you said you had little empathy for Isaac, do you have any for Hendrix?
Sakura, you know my writing best and would like you to grammar check as rigorusly as you wish, but i would like also some feedback on characters and the overall feel of the piece.
And yes i am going to reveiw two more things.
all alone in the wastes with nothing but nightmares of his dead wife and being a tool of destruction and hating himself for it... 
