A Question of Survival
by Joshua Goudreau

    The rain pours in massive droplets, cold and unwelcoming.  It soaks your collar and runs in rivulets between your shoulder blades.  But you barely notice.

    The thing foremost in your mind is the hammer.  According to the manufacturer’s stamp on the head it weighs a mere three pounds.  However, to your tired arm it feels like three hundred.  The strength drifts from you and your legs feel like they will buckle at a moment’s notice.

    You sit down heavily on the cracked linoleum.  The empty shelves beside you stretch high into the air and above the night sky, thick with clouds, is a thing of swirling inky blackness through the massive hole in the roof.

    The rainwater pools and runs down the length of the shelves to drip and puddle in the deeper darkness of the place you think must have once been a store of some kind.  In the back vaults stand open and are filled with the refuse of generations of wandering animals making their lair in those deep recesses.

    The hammer hits the floor with a muffled thud.  The puddle it lands in is turning a brackish mixture of water and blood.  In the darkness it looks merely black, not the bright red you always thought it would be.

    Mere feet away from your soggy sitting place you see the crumpled remains of your first kill.  Before the group had designated hunters.  Individuals, selected for their skills of tracking and stealth were the ones who went out with bow and arrow to bring down the beasts that roamed the forests.  After the barbarians came with their roaring engines and roaring guns they destroyed everything you knew.

    Though it seemed a lifetime it had been only five days.

    The rain had provided all the water you needed but the growling in your stomach proved you needed more.  Then the crumbling road turned into the remains of a small town.  All that remained were half a dozen buildings that had not been completely taken over by nature.  The store was one such building.

    Inside you saw quickly that the place had been picked clean by scavengers years ago and nothing of real value remained.  Hungry and determined you began a search anyway and as the sunlight faded and the rains began you found, jammed under a shelf and streaked with rust, a can.  It’s label had long since fallen away so you had no way to identify what lie inside but you knew that it held precious food.

    That was when he found you.

    He crept up quietly from behind but a shift in the patter of the rain alerted you to his presence.  Spinning you saw his hunched figure, a predator, ready to pounce.  He lunged at you with a steak knife in his outstretched hand but you were able to swing fast and hard, relying on instinct and blind fear to send your hammer into is forehead, caving his skull and killing him instantly.

    Your heart feels like it will burst from your chest as it palpitates madly.  Your sudden recollection of the events sends you reeling.  Your vision blurs and the world begins to fade.  You fight to stay awake and soon the grim and bitter reality comes back to you and you look upon your first kill.

    He was merely a man.  Hungry and desperate, just like you.  Now he is nothing more then a pile of meat before you.  You have taken a life and he will never again draw breath or impact the happenings of the world around him.  In seconds you decided the fate of a man merely interested in his own survival.

    You stagger back out of the rain and collapse back to the floor again.  Before your face all you see is a single linoleum tile.  The pattern that was once there is worn and faded.  Years of weathering have worn a new, flowing pattern into the cracks.  The outer edges of the tile are crumbled to pieces and cracks run all the way to the center.  Even at its heart the tile is destroyed, unable to perform its intended function and soon will crumble away to nothing.

    You stand back up and look to the dead man.  The rain has pooled around him and in the middle of the blood soaked puddle lies the rust streaked can.  Your stomach grumbles at the sight.  You need your sustenance and what you need lies before you.

    You stagger back into the rain and pick up your hammer.  You replace the weapon in your belt where you have carried it for days now and scoop up the can.  You pause as your stomach grumbles again.  The can will not be all you need and you know it.

    With a finality you stoop to pick up the steak knife.  The blade has been beat several times and banged back into place.  You hope the edge is still good as you crouch down and prepare to flay yourself some red meat.