It had been awhile since Flora fled the town. There was no one else with her. There was no one else she could find to join her. Since then, Flora eked out a solitary life as a subsistence gardener and scavenger, sheltering in a repurposed cargo container left camouflaged in the wooded hills overlooking the dead municipality that once was her place of residence.
What happened? Politics happened—the zero-sum variety. War happened. A fight for victory to the death happened. People got fed up with each other. There was no one anyone wanted to listen to, other than those who shared the exact same thoughts, and there was nothing left to listen to but orders. Diplomacy wasn’t of any interest to anyone. Two dominant sides emerged, mortal enemies thoroughly convinced their survival hinged on all others’ annihilation—and this included anyone not on one’s own side, regardless of potential usefulness. No one else could be trusted. The two major sides were so hated by those refusing to take sides that no cooperation could be gotten from them, either, whether by persuasion or coercion. Death was preferable to subjugation, regardless of who’d wind up running things. No one could understand each other. There was nothing left to do but fight or die.
Flora’s weathering this debacle of murderous madness was due to her peculiar benefit of having an eccentric survivalist for a father. He was a widower whose wife left him with the one daughter, and he built and stocked a bunker for two, deep beneath his property. He’d anticipated a time of insanity yet succumbed to a heart attack long before his bunker would be put to its intended use. Flora would consider that a lucky turn of events for her old man. She locked herself in the bunker at conflict’s outbreak and remained there for an indeterminate amount of time, as the social storm raged overhead. She didn’t bother with tuning into any news on the radio stored among the supplies. She didn’t trust broadcasts to be anything but one side’s or the other’s propaganda.
When the thunder above died down to where it was no longer felt, Flora took a deep breath and exited the bunker, heading upstairs to ground level. She found a ruined community littered with corpses, bullet-riddled, blown to pieces or charred beyond recognition. It was the same everywhere Flora looked, and there was no sentient human activity detected—but for a sound of shots fired some distance from her. Curiosity was too insatiable for her not to move in the shots’ direction. She came to where she could see was happening, hiding from view, while watching the scene before her.
There were two combatants, one on each of the opposing sides, facing each other in the open among the bodies and rubble around them. They stared at each other, haggard and exhausted, each with pistols drawn but limply lowered. One of the combatants looked around at the carnage of his surroundings, and, turned away from the other combatant in mournful resignation, letting his gun drop from his grip, the fight finally gone from him. The other combatant kept staring at his enemy, gathering enough strength to lift his weapon and discharge a fatal round. His task complete, the remaining combatant whispered one word, “Victory.” Flora stayed hidden, keeping her eyes on the combatant. A smile attempted to form on his face, but it was faint and brief. After a fruitless effort to find anyone with whom to celebrate his side’s triumph, the combatant slumped down onto a nearby bench. Whispering, “Victory,” one more time, the combatant put the pistol to his head and sent a bullet to his brains. And that’s how war ended in this town. With a bang.
Flora waited a long time to make sure there was no further movement from this individual before quitting her cover. Finding no other living person around, Flora located the largest operational vehicle she could find and hotwire, an old pickup truck. She loaded it up with as much supplies as she could gather and fit, then hightailed out of town to the remote location where she resides to this day. Every night before she goes to sleep, she whispers, “Victory.”
