A raven screeched as Gale plucked the wildberry out of the ground.
The scavenger looked up in the direction of the screech, but it was merely the birds cry as other ravens began to descend over the corpses of the battleground. Gale afixed his goggles over his head and wiped some dust off of them and off his forehead. Like many orphans left over from the war, his eyes had a cybernetic green lens over them.
The boy tossed the wildberry into his backpack and struggled up the muddy hill. Here, next to the harsh sunlight, the corpses of fallen soldiers had led to more flowers springing up from their bodies.
After a few more arduous minutes of scouring on that hill, Gale decided to sit down and rest. He removed his goggles and tossed them by the ferns, then unwrapped his scarves and hood. Here it was high enough that he didnt need face protection from the smog. He could, instead, see unobstructed, the entire swath of miasmic, dark green smog covering the land like a restless ocean. Above, the sky was an organic mess of bruises, stretching all the way to the horizon.
"What a view!" said the scavenger.
Shorn of his goggles and scarf, the orphan appeared no more than a boy just on the brink of manhood, with dark, uncut hair framing a slightly malnourished face that still retained the glow of youth. Only the cybernetic emerald eyes and the roman numerals XII tattooed on his neck betrayed his war-smote birth. He had gun implants in his wrists and bionic steel fibres in his skinny arms and legs. Every now and then when Gale walked close to a working radio station, his brain would buzz with old transmitted orders, obselete now that the war was over, echoing a melody of repetivite orders, coordinates, a refrain to times gone past.
Gale would guess that if he had an age, he'd be around 15 or 16. He knew that before the war, 16 year olds would be just entering something called highschool, and things like love and destiny and grades would be on their minds. He liked to watch old prewar movies on his spare time if he found any in abandoned malls. He sometimes would stare at his own reflection in the dark smoggy glass, trying to fit his image in the lives on the screen. Not that he cared, but Gale would have liked to undergo those movie adventurs, to meet someone his age, to worry about calculus and not survival.
Another raven screech broke the boy from his reverie. Gale bundled his goggles, scarves and hood back together, gave the scenery one last look, and trundled down the hill. The ravens would, eventually, bring other scavengers, raiders, and even warlords to this fresh battlefield. Everyone knew that war orphans were opportune kidnap targets and fetched a hefty price on tbe black market. Gale was strong enough to fight off most raiders but too many would overwhelm him. The boy descended the hill, back into the smoke, and back into the dark gloomy world.
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