Young Writers Society

You are fourteen, and you sit, huddled with cold-sweating goons twice your age in a clearing in a junk yard, piled high with cars from the last century. Your pal Cody slips a tourniquet band around your arm and slaps the inside of your elbow to find a vein.

"You hardly feel a thing, Shin."

He slaps you harder, and a vein, dark blue even in this blinding darkness, rises up from your skin and throbs. You think of the throbbing feel of a headache, of a hose when you siphoned gas from twenty-nine cars for your initiation, of a dude's throat when you're finally strong enough to ring him up against a cement building.

"You gotta relax your shit, man." Cody rolls his hands over your shoulders and your head bobs. "Think about shit like the beach. Yeah, calming shit like that."

You think about the beach in Southern Cali and remember all the latinas playing volleyball, bouncing like nothing would fall out. Cody shoves the needle into your arm and in seconds the feel of a blood-change hits the back of your neck.

The women on the beach were so goddamn beautiful...

.

"I don't remember telling anyone to play with my food."

Shinji slid a hand along his beltline and pulled two knives from their sheathes. He took one into each hand and imagined light gleaming off of them like in all the movies.

"What kind of sick puta lives through the apocalypse and kills humans?"

"Baby boy, you might wanna look at who's holding the knives here."

Shinji flipped one from slicing stance into a stab-hold.

"Don't mind these, baby; I'm just tryin'a look tough for you and your nice little sword."

The woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other as a breeze rolled through the neighborhood streets. She had this waist-long hair the color of drying blood, and it was all blowing in the wind. Shinji had seen enough action movies to know that only one of them would walk out of the street; it was only polite that they knew one another's names.

"With us squaring off like this, it's kinda romantic. Yeah? The twilight, the breeze, old fatass bleeding out in the ditch." Shinji loosened his muscles and grinned. "You call me Shin...and when I'm telling this story to other survivors, I can call you...?"

"You're a cocky little shit, aren't you? You haven't seen me move, and you already think you're going to walk from this street with my weapon." She laughed in an endearing way that unnerved Shinji. "You can tell all the other little boys in hell that Kari sent you. Maybe you'll get a discount at the bar." She laughed again. "Frequent fliers and all that."

The wind stopped blowing; Shinji drew a third knife from his belt and flung it. Kari shirked to the left and swept across the street to him with only a mild cut on her right arm. She swung her katana down towards his head, but he blocked with the hilts of both knives. He sidestepped and kicked her in the gut. Her sword slid off the hilts of his knives and sliced a quarter-inch into his knuckles. He grunted under his breath as he engaged Kari again with his smaller off-hand knife, but faked out at the last second, dropping the knife to the ground in sacrifice of dodging her swing. Before she could retaliate, Shinji grabbed her by the roots of her hair and jerked down until her head cracked against his knee.

Kari's eyes went wide as she swung back, but Shinji swept his butcher's knife down into her throat before she could slice more than a half-inch into his arm. At first, he didn't realize how deep the cut was, but then she fell out of his hands with the sword, and he shook, feeling muscles torn apart.

Minutes later, he'd cut a long strip of leather from Kari's bloody coat and wrapped it around his arm tourniquet style. He had nothing to alleviate the pain, but he'd seen the addict in Kari's eyes--she'd used in the past few hours.

And that was probably what saved Shinji's life.

Still, he thought about the pain relief and distance from the decaying world, and he suddenly felt his fourteen year-old self craving for just a hit. If he took her bike into the city, he'd be able to find her other gang members. He'd find their weapons and supplies...and whatever bricks they had left.

As he gripped the handles of his new motorcycle, he sorted through the pros and cons.

♥ Food and water. Medical supplies...and needles.
♦ Gasoline and whatever transport he could need.
♣ More cannibals like Kari--probably sharper on their game, too.
♠ A possible den of raiders, all waiting to sign Shinji's death certificate.

He didn't need to roll a quarter down his fingers. He couldn't handle it alone, and that meant he needed a fifth element:

♥² Backup.

With all of his gear strapped to his belt and back, Shinji revved the engine of the bike and fled into town, keeping his eyes peeled for any signs of life.

Napoleon|With Bel at the chemist's

Napoleon was happy he had found someone to team up with, and not just because his fighting skills were on the wrong side of terrible. For a start it meant that he would actually have someone to talk to, which was far better than sitting in a cab all day saying nothing. But also it meant that they were stronger together, and teaming up was the start of rebuilding civilisation. Napoleon new that it wasn't top on his list of important things right now, that was dominated with staying alive, but the rebirth of civilisation was always niggling at the back of his mind. Also, if Napoleon had a hand in it, he hoped he might do a bit better than the human race did last time...
The job of finding the crystals was harder than they had anticipated. It looked like the chemist had already been ransacked once, because all the painkillers were missing. Druggies, thought Napoleon. Luckily for him, they hadn't taken anything really important, and Napoleon pocketed things as he found them. Antiseptic. Antibiotics. Sterile bandages. Napoleon's pockets were almost full before Bel said "I've found them!"
He was pointing at a glass case, which had been broken into. glass lay in shards across the floor, and the cabnet presented a window of blades and spikes. Bel span his gun on his finger and grabbed the barrel, and proceeded to knock out the protruding daggers of glass that presented hazard.
"I'll start looking for those tablets you mentioned." said Napoleon, and started pushing through the assortment of coloured cardboard boxes and serious looking small pill bottles. After ten minutes more Napoleon had found them, and Bel had retrieved the purification tablets.
The next bit of raiding this town was harder. Petrol, and food. Napoleon new that the supermarket, if there was one in a town this size, would be totally ransacked by now, so their only hope now would be in the houses. That meant raiding. And that meant the possibility of trapped zombies. And that meant fighting.
But first, petrol.
"We need to look for a gas station." Napoleon told Bel.
"I think I saw one just as I was coming into town, from the other side."
"Perfect."