A New Life - Part Three

[Quinn23]

If we were supposed to dream during the Long Night, I don’t know, nor do I remember any dreams I might have had. But the week thawing out gave me plenty of time to dream, to consider my past and to consider the future. Considering the present didn’t matter. We were all human popsicles thawing in the freezer.

 

My life was neither blessed nor privileged. And I didn’t live the best of lives. Gambling and speculation left me needing cash too often and the banks had standards I couldn’t live up to. They called me a high risk. My mother died my first year of university. My father followed a couple of years later. The money left from their life savings and life insurance paid off my last year of school and set me up for a meager living. Work would supply my livelihood.

 

I didn’t enjoy university. The deaths of my parents left me in a depression and although my then girlfriend tried, but I pushed her away. By the time I realized, it was too late.

 

I had studied mechanical engineering at university, minoring in electrical. I had always been good at taking thing apart. Sometimes I could put them back together. That was the unfortunate part. I had great theory, but I couldn’t make them work. There was something missing. No one keeps you long if you can’t fix what you broke. And my side jobs couldn’t keep up with my growing gambling debts.

 

Banks wouldn’t talk to me. My savings were more than gone. I owed money to all the wrong people and they were coming to collect, only their type of collections didn’t always require money. With hell raining down on us any minute, people still worried about getting what they were owed. They weren’t going on an ark. Why did they care? That’s when I ran across Winston. For all I knew, it could have been the collectors that left him there. I wasn’t going to be Winston. I wouldn’t be a nameless victim. A little blood. An eye. A chip. I would go where they couldn’t find me.