- Joined
- Oct 17, 2024
- Messages
- 33
- Reaction score
- 55
- Points
- 18
804 kilometers. A little under five hundred miles.
The winds keep the clouds sailing overhead like passerbys, glancing down at Pripyat with a misty gaze that the lone man cannot discern is judgment, or understanding.
The post-soviet van that he used to drive the cracked highways and mudded paths all the way from Warsaw broke down in Korosten, turning the journey from ten hours to three days.
He thought about taking a few extra spark plugs for the ride, but he felt that he had taken enough already. Luck was not on his side.
It was as though God himself was making this difficult on purpose. To make him reconsider this. What if he stayed? Do they need him after all? He tried not to think about it. This wasn't about the politics of the group, or the mission.
Whenever Chance thought about why he left, he remembered their faces. The furrowed brows, the squeezed grips on rifles, the eyes over their shoulders, looking back at him like he was not a friend anymore. All the conversations he narrowly evaded.
When people think of a vacation, do they think of radioactive ruins abandoned years ago? To live out the end of humanity, sitting with a rifle in his lap, overlooking a ghost town...
Chance certainly found his kingdom. And for the first time in his thirty-eight years of living... The loneliness bit deep.
He reached over the arm of his rocking chair, brushing fingers over the battered, scratched metal of his radio backpack. Hesitant, at first. He turned the dial to something with silence, picked up his journal, and wrote down the frequency he had randomly chose.
