Ashleigh Woolf ’19
The Lucky Ones The sharp twig snagged the skin close to her left eye, jolting Cai Deluce sharply back to reality. She winced, rubbed at the stinging pain, and wiped her now bloody fingertips on her pants. The smudges added little impact to the Pollock-like pattern documenting who-knows-how-many scrapes and bruises this journey had inflicted. Cai had forgotten how, in a world that seemed so very distant now, her only injuries had been from falling off the play structure at the park where the cool green grass outlined the brightly painted wooden benches. That past was long gone, but not forgotten. Cai shook her head, dazed, and her skull collided with a small tree that she was shocked to discover just beside her. Startled, she quickly surveyed the tumble-down village, attempting to make up for allowing her thoughts to take control. She was relieved to detect no lurking threats, which tended to make their unwelcome presence known in some unpredictable manner. She took stock though, in that moment, conscious of the odd note: she had noticed there was nothing. Not simply no immediate threats, but nothing. No sounds. No movement. No colors. Nothingness. Cai felt the jolt of sudden comprehension radiate electrically through her body. She stared back toward the beginning of the village; it had seemed moderately intact from the slight rise they had forged, but here, looking down, the eerily silent scene before them was anything but. Almost all the houses were blackened. Carcasses in the harsh sun, their roof beams charred, twisted, and exposed like the ribs on ancient, giant mammals caught in a sudden conflagration and too settled to be able to flee. Extinct. “This was a village of Immunies,” Blake gasped in realization. His face had drained, life-color and emotion rushing out like a flash flood, leaving him looking like a little boy, bewildered, in its muddy destruction. His hand shook as he raked his matted, curly hair and knelt down to finger the charcoal dust. Cai and Morgan exchanged a look, eyebrows raised. At some point, he looked up at them. His eyes mirrored their pain. “They must have come through here and burnt it to a wasteland.” He left the obvious, unasked, unanswerable question that everyone had already buried floating in the still air between them like some untouchable, winged escapee of Pandora’s box. What had happened to everyone who lived here? The Immunies who sheltered here, had anyone survived? 50
