The Mountain and The City: A Post-Apocalyptic Tale Read Online Free Page A
Author: Brian Martinez
into the City. It's safer to go around, not follow the small Munie's trail which smells like foot blood to the others, and it wouldn't be smart to walk where they wander, excited, looking for food, sniffing in the dirt. They should all be asleep now, yes, curled in their nests of rock and rotted fur, but I don't live by what Munies should or shouldn't do. Munies are Beasts and Beasts can't be understood.
Stay low. Stay quiet. Learn from the Munies, they get some things right.
I cross into the City for the first time in two years one month seventeen days. The last time I risked this danger was to find Supplies, and I got hurt trying to travel further from the City, got attacked for it. It was a mistake to enter or escape the City then, it's a mistake now.
The City is dark and quiet, green under Night Eyes, but green without them with all the plants growing in the streets, pushing out from cracks and snaking up walls and crawling in windows. Trees have burst from their dirt boxes and attacked cars. Tree Beasts too stupid to leave the City hide up in the leaves, peaking out now, knowing like me the nights are the safest, safest but never safe, and they watch me, watch one stupider than them, and I don't need Tree Beasts to tell me that.
Walk around the bones. Don't look at them. Don't try to read them, figure out what they used to be.
It's very different looking at the City through the Long Eye and walking through it. First is the smell, the smell that enters even through the Mask Mouth, and I trust the Mask Mouth to stop the Bastard Air but I still try to breathe lighter, don't take in too much of it. After the smell is the size. The tall buildings, the very tall ones, they stand like Beasts of sharp angles, feels like they look down and watch, the way the Trees in the Wood feel, and it's worse that they hold Munies in their dead bellies.
A sound of danger explodes behind my head and I panic and my chest feels like it will burst, and I turn and find a group of Leatherwings flying out of a big, long car and away, a bus is the name, I think. They flap-flap away into the night, hunting smaller Winged Beasts. I scared them, and they scared me, and I feel better that it wasn't a Munie but I fear the sound may have woken some up.
Relax. Listen. Move. Study the buildings and find your way through.
I find the nest I'm looking for.
**
Back in the Real Times I had a mother. This isn't a surprise because everything has a mother, that's what life is, but I don't think of her now, not because I can't remember her or because I don't like her, but because I do remember her and I do like her, and to think of those things, the Real Times, makes everything worse. My mother is why I'm alive now. Not just the birth but after that, too, when the Bastard Air came, and what she did, and I don't like to think about that, what she had to do.
My mother, I think of her now because she said something. She said, “Remember what you're lucky to have, always. But remember them especially on the bad days, the days when they're all you have.”
I'm thankful for this Axe. I'm thankful for this Mask and this Suit. I'm thankful that Munies don't close doors, they ignore them, so that I could walk in here quiet and not wake them, let them stay Inside their noisy sleep.
I stand by the door and I listen to the nest. Breathing from all the walls. Long chairs fill the middle of the room, long enough for ten people to sit on but most of them have been knocked over and pushed in and broken up to make a circle on the ground. All the way at the other side there's a higher part of the room and a window behind it, a very large window made of all the colors I've ever seen, and out of those colors a picture, a picture of the God, I think, but I'm not sure because I've never seen it.
Walk. Stay quiet. Keep the Axe up. Breathe like you're not breathing.
Munies sleep in the corners. I count three, huddled in piles of garbage and kill. I think they
Stay low. Stay quiet. Learn from the Munies, they get some things right.
I cross into the City for the first time in two years one month seventeen days. The last time I risked this danger was to find Supplies, and I got hurt trying to travel further from the City, got attacked for it. It was a mistake to enter or escape the City then, it's a mistake now.
The City is dark and quiet, green under Night Eyes, but green without them with all the plants growing in the streets, pushing out from cracks and snaking up walls and crawling in windows. Trees have burst from their dirt boxes and attacked cars. Tree Beasts too stupid to leave the City hide up in the leaves, peaking out now, knowing like me the nights are the safest, safest but never safe, and they watch me, watch one stupider than them, and I don't need Tree Beasts to tell me that.
Walk around the bones. Don't look at them. Don't try to read them, figure out what they used to be.
It's very different looking at the City through the Long Eye and walking through it. First is the smell, the smell that enters even through the Mask Mouth, and I trust the Mask Mouth to stop the Bastard Air but I still try to breathe lighter, don't take in too much of it. After the smell is the size. The tall buildings, the very tall ones, they stand like Beasts of sharp angles, feels like they look down and watch, the way the Trees in the Wood feel, and it's worse that they hold Munies in their dead bellies.
A sound of danger explodes behind my head and I panic and my chest feels like it will burst, and I turn and find a group of Leatherwings flying out of a big, long car and away, a bus is the name, I think. They flap-flap away into the night, hunting smaller Winged Beasts. I scared them, and they scared me, and I feel better that it wasn't a Munie but I fear the sound may have woken some up.
Relax. Listen. Move. Study the buildings and find your way through.
I find the nest I'm looking for.
**
Back in the Real Times I had a mother. This isn't a surprise because everything has a mother, that's what life is, but I don't think of her now, not because I can't remember her or because I don't like her, but because I do remember her and I do like her, and to think of those things, the Real Times, makes everything worse. My mother is why I'm alive now. Not just the birth but after that, too, when the Bastard Air came, and what she did, and I don't like to think about that, what she had to do.
My mother, I think of her now because she said something. She said, “Remember what you're lucky to have, always. But remember them especially on the bad days, the days when they're all you have.”
I'm thankful for this Axe. I'm thankful for this Mask and this Suit. I'm thankful that Munies don't close doors, they ignore them, so that I could walk in here quiet and not wake them, let them stay Inside their noisy sleep.
I stand by the door and I listen to the nest. Breathing from all the walls. Long chairs fill the middle of the room, long enough for ten people to sit on but most of them have been knocked over and pushed in and broken up to make a circle on the ground. All the way at the other side there's a higher part of the room and a window behind it, a very large window made of all the colors I've ever seen, and out of those colors a picture, a picture of the God, I think, but I'm not sure because I've never seen it.
Walk. Stay quiet. Keep the Axe up. Breathe like you're not breathing.
Munies sleep in the corners. I count three, huddled in piles of garbage and kill. I think they
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