NOTE: The end of WASTELAND. All good things must come to an end, and I thank you all for staying to the very end. Please let me know what you thought of the story because I feed off of your criticism or, in what has been the case before, praise. Again, thank you all. I bid you Adieu for now.
It was only much later that I looked back to the city ruins: a sprawling mecca lost to the vast desert known as the Wasteland. I wept along this lonely stretch of road, waiting for the masked man to emerge safely from his battle and join me once again so that we may travel the wastes together and, as I had hoped before, to live happily ever after.
But he never did.
Happy endings no longer existed in this world.
Only hardships and pain.
I held up the man's revolver, the magnum he had given me to defend myself. It's tempered steel glistened in the waning sunlight. I aimed the weapon at myself and placed my mouth over the tip of the barrel, my small finger resting tentatively on the trigger. There was nothing left for me in this cruel world. It was better to just die, to end my suffering now.
For several minutes I remained like this, the weapon in my mouth, my finger on the trigger.
Then I lowered my arm.
I packed the revolver into the man's rucksack – another gift from him to me – and turned my back to the city, never again looking back.
The man with no face had made the ultimate sacrifice so that I may live on: an urchin who survived by the kindness of his heart. I was forever in his debt, a debt I would not let go unpaid. I would live on, both for him and for me, facing whatever hardships came my way as the man had once done before me.
I took my first steps into this new world.
It was the least that I could do.
-To Be Continued-