After the Bombs
Nikkita panted and wiped the sweat from her forehead, grinning widely. She had just succeeded in prying open the doors to what was once a grocery store, the firmly shut doors promising that no other scavengers had accessed the potential bounty of food inside. As the sliding door finally cracked open, a wave of putrid air washed over her. She gagged and coughed as a year's worth of fermentation greeted her sensitive nostrils, causing her to instinctively retreat a few feet. "Ugh..I think the milk went bad." she said to the empty, dry air around her. She wore salvaged scraps of leather, sewn together to form crude pants and a vest. It had chafed at first, but she got used to the lack of a bra after a few weeks. When it was particularly hot, she went topless, if not nude when she wasn't salvaging supplies. She had a very nice body, having had to excercise and diet unwillingly, but it wasn't like anyone would see her anyway. She wore thick boots on her feet at all times, and a pair or scratched goggles on her forehead.
She sat back and let the rancid store air out, thinking back to the day everything went to hell. She remembered...she was working in her bar when the bombs fell. She had gone to the basement for a bottle of wine, and an earth-shaking wall of energy shook the cement walls of the cellar, the shaking earth throwing the feline off her feet, smashing her head into the wall, knocking her out. When she came to, she felt blood dripping down her nose and a fine sheen of dust coating her fur...as she ascended the cracked cement stairs, she came out of the cellar into...open air. She didn't find out till later that it was the shockwave of the first bomb that had torn down half the city, including her bar...everyone had gotten it wrong. The bombs didn't make everything colder. It was at least a hundred degrees in the winter, and nobody had been able to measure summer temperatures without being cooked like a turkey in a microwave in a few minutes. The heat had dried out the earth, leaving everything dry and dusty.
She shook her head, coming back to the present. The bombs fell a little over a year ago, and she was one of the 1% that survived. She didn't know who dropped the nukes, and, frankly, she didn't care anymore. She slung her rifle over her shoulder and picked up her backpack, wrapping a tattered scarf over her scarred muzzle in a feeble attempt to block out the awful smell as she plunged into the store. She padded across the tile, her toughened boots crushing the broken glass littering the floor as she made her way to the canned goods. There were skeletons here and there, some with decomposing flesh still on them...that explained the smell as she walked through the deserted aisles, producing a dusty flashlight to help her see into the gloom. One of the shelves was tilting dangerously and, as she walked by it, she inadvertently pushed it with her wandering tail, causing the metal shelves to come crashing down with a tremendous noise, scaring the daylights out of the leopard, the sound echoing through the adjacent buildings.
Cursing, she reached back and pulled her rifle around under her arm, the weapon much more readily accessible in that position. She wasn't worried about zombies or whatnot...radiation killed, it didn't make you eat flesh or become violent....she had no idea why people were convinced that there would be some mutations or whatnot...the whole idea was ridiculous. As she reached the canned goods, the set her rifle down, opening her backpack and sliding armfuls of canned food into her pack. As the cans fell into the bag, a different noise made her ears perk up, the left one half gone from an incident involving a caved in safehouse.
"Shit." she said quietly, the sound of footsteps over crackling glass causing her to set her pack down silently, picking up her rifle and thumbing the safety off. It was a .257 Weatherby magnum, lifted months ago from a dying fox's paws. He didn't need it anymore, and she had no weaponry at the time. It had served her well in situations like this, the powerful round making short work of any would-be assailants trying to steal from her. She crept around the shelf, bringing her eye to the scope and catching a view of a rat with a pretty big handgun moving her way. "Hey! Stop where you are!" she called out. His reaction would tell her if she had to pull the trigger, ending the would-be thief's life. She was saddened as he fired a round almost immediately in her direction. Her eyes hardened as she squeezed the trigger, the hunting rifle bucking in her hands, a huge round penetrating the rat's skull, killing him instantly.
The leopardess hated killing, but it was a way of life nowadays. Society had collapsed, leaving everyone to fend for themselves. A few colonies had started here and there, but supplies were hard to come by, and feeding more than three people at a time without moving from place to place was nigh impossible. This made settlements about as common as a friendly fur. It other words...you just didn't see them anymore. She was lonely. Terribly lonely. She had been a social creature before the bombs fell, and that hadn't changed. She had found a boyfriend a few months ago...that was the fox who gave her the rifle. He had been shot in the leg by a would-be bandit, the resulting infection killing him and breaking her heart in the process.
Nikkita padded over toward the rat's corpse, intending on taking the roden't handgun. It had put a huge hole in the metal shelves next to her...promising a large round. Likely a revolver, unless it was a deagle. Guns were her hobby before, and that pastime had served her well, knowing more about firearms than most, an invaluable skill in this violent new world. As she approached the dead rodent, her breath caught. Not only was it a powerful handgun, but a model 500 Raging Bull. Easily one of the nastiest revolvers made. She stole the revolver, sticking it in a pouch strapped to her frayed belt along with a box of rounds she found on the corpse.
She was mildly disappointed he didn't have anything else worth looting, but she was happy with her prize, trotting over to her backpack and picking it up, intending on setting up a makeshift camp in the store. The glass was a good early warning system, and, judging by the dark, fairly clean interior, there weren't any holes in the roof that would let sand in if a storm hit. Sandstorms had been a deadly problem in the last month or so. Anyone caught in one would likely have their lungs filled with sand or, if their mouth was covered, get lost in the thick brown clouds and never be seen again.
Finding a nice dark corner to curl up in, she set her rifle within easy reach and used her lumpy backpack as a pillow, deciding to catch some sleep. Rest was hard to come by, and you had to grab what you could, when you could. She was going to take advantage of the cool, dark store to soothe her tired muscles, her lusterless, tired eyes closing for the fist time in two days. In the morning, she would fill her other bags with food, taking it back to her little hideout in the city. But all that would come in the morning...or night. Whenever she woke up.
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Thus ends my first chapter. Criticism is definitely encouraged. ^^