If you wear something long enough you forget it's even there. That's why we weren't surprised when we saw how the gas masks had fused to their skin, blurring the lines between human and other and leaving them known simply as Homebodies.
We didn't know what else to call them, the ones that chose to stay in place while the bombs fell and the world around them collapsed into radioactive silence. The birds stopped singing that day... they started gurgling and muttering a week later and now they taunt us from their nests.
They can see so much further than us, further than even the Homebodies who spent so many days up in watch towers that their binoculars fused to their eyes. They look so normal from a distance until you see their lenses blink at you with thick, fleshy lids the same grey as the rest of their dying skin.
We don't talk to them, none of them, no matter how they yell or how many notes we find pinned to our shoes when we wake up. It's not that we don't want to, its that we can't. While they remained and had each other for company, always talking and laughing together, the rest of us split up and traveled the world in silence.
How could we talk after all that we've seen? I turned silent when I first met the walking mountains of pulsating flesh that used to be entire families, each begging for death with a dozen voices while absorbing any organic thing that strayed too close. I froze in fear while a thin tendril with a wedding ring on it gently tapped my throat.
I had to take a knife to my neck to free myself and in the process of cauterizing the wound, I damaged my vocal chords beyond repair and I'm one of the lucky ones. Others are too afraid or too mutated to speak but all of us keep moving onwards and westwards and ever onwards in the hopes that we'll find somewhere that the bombs didn't touch.
At some point we'll have to admit that no such place exits but that's tomorrow's problem.
We didn't know what else to call them, the ones that chose to stay in place while the bombs fell and the world around them collapsed into radioactive silence. The birds stopped singing that day... they started gurgling and muttering a week later and now they taunt us from their nests.
They can see so much further than us, further than even the Homebodies who spent so many days up in watch towers that their binoculars fused to their eyes. They look so normal from a distance until you see their lenses blink at you with thick, fleshy lids the same grey as the rest of their dying skin.
We don't talk to them, none of them, no matter how they yell or how many notes we find pinned to our shoes when we wake up. It's not that we don't want to, its that we can't. While they remained and had each other for company, always talking and laughing together, the rest of us split up and traveled the world in silence.
How could we talk after all that we've seen? I turned silent when I first met the walking mountains of pulsating flesh that used to be entire families, each begging for death with a dozen voices while absorbing any organic thing that strayed too close. I froze in fear while a thin tendril with a wedding ring on it gently tapped my throat.
I had to take a knife to my neck to free myself and in the process of cauterizing the wound, I damaged my vocal chords beyond repair and I'm one of the lucky ones. Others are too afraid or too mutated to speak but all of us keep moving onwards and westwards and ever onwards in the hopes that we'll find somewhere that the bombs didn't touch.
At some point we'll have to admit that no such place exits but that's tomorrow's problem.
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