"How do you know, when you’re ready to run?" asked the boy with a dirty face full of scars.
"You listen to the shot, and then you run — right to that van over there" Michael took a sip from his bottle.
He didn’t like to talk much, because he was a doer, not a thinker. That thing came in handy when the war had broken out in the small city somewhere in California. Well, it actually painted all the States black, but the first shots were heard there, in Oakland. Michael had never been to anywhere except Washington, when his class attended the White House on a summer excursion but that was it.
The boy watched the 27-old scavenger carefully, he wanted to learn something. It was not his curiosity really — no one wanted to die those days, so you had to be a good student to survive. Michael, a young office manager, never expected his peaceful life to turn into something like this. Fortunately, he had started jogging a few months before that to prepare for the Boston Marathon, so he was fast enough not to have a bullet.
"Bang!"
Michael knew that someone was shot — those military guys never missed.
He got to the van in three seconds. Nice and smooth. Then he took a crossbar out of his bag, pulled out the drain cover and disappeared in the darkness of the sewer tunnel. Michael was lucky to have a torch — even rats couldn’t see a damn thing in those halls.
Michael kept in mind the instructions: “The second turn to the right, and then go until you see lights.”
"Hey you!"
Michael rose his hands, showing that he had no firearms or something.
"Password!"
(“And here you tell him: “Karachi” or they will shoot you down")
"Karachi!"
The light went down and Michael felt so much better. He nearly thought The Old Jerry had sent him to a trap. You never know.
Michael entered the room with two pink spotlights, very bright, maybe even too bright. A man was standing in front him, he looked like an hiring recruiter on his previous work. “It was like…three years ago?”
"Michael, is that you?"
"Yes, but…sorry, I can’t remember your name"
"Sam, we weren’t friends much, you know."
Michael had never been friends with anyone except his camera. He was a good photographer though.
"I’m here to trade. Pills and everything. Here’s the list."
He gave a piece of paper, the last chance for the Old Jerry’s daughter. Sometimes even a flu can kill.
"What you got?"
Michael came to the table and took two huge boxes with “MRE” logos on them.
"Food. Nice. I miss cheeseburgers."
They both laughed. The joke was pretty bad but the whole situation in the country made it impossible to laugh much.
Each of them started to pack the things to return to the “new homes”. And then suddenly Sam said:
"Do you think this will ever end?"
"I have high hopes."
That night one of them was stabbed during the fight for a can of peaches. The other one died much later, on the last day of war. It had lasted for two years but the whole mess was never to be cleaned up.