Through the Living Hope

Excerpt:

Dear reader, I wish I could tell you that it ends well. I really do. But this isn’t one of those happy-ended stories you’ve been spoiled by. Not in the slightest.

Where was I going with this? Ugh, I hate when this happens. Unfortunately, forgetfulness is a common side affect to an immunity to blue radiation.

I was raised in a… well, let’s say it was a strange society. If you can’t already tell, it was post-apocalyptic at best, dystopian at worst. Fun fact about the word dystopia - it has practically the same meaning as utopia. But this definitely isn’t a utopia.

The group I was in was called the Abandoned. Bunch of young people with no families. No one has respect for anyone but themself. And maybe a friend or two.

I was always told that you couldn’t show weakness of any kind. You can have at most three close friends. Any more than that, you’re labeled weak and are exiled from the Abandoned. I didn’t have any, though, so people knew I wasn’t weak.

But I was loyal. Ask me to blackmail the Abandoned, the people who took me in, for a spot in a more powerful group, like the Mob? Nope. Leave a message at the beep.

We were all the same in the sense that we had and longed for no one and only survival. We were separated by the fact that some of us were immune to different types of radiation.

Radiation barriered what you could do. Blue Immunes could go anywhere that blue radiation was emitted. Green Immunes could do likewise, but with green radiation. Pure Red Immunes couldn’t go anywhere that had blue or green radiation. Blue and Green Immunes couldn’t go places where the other’s kind of radiation was emitted. Everyone was immune to red radiation. Rarely, you’d find someone who was immune to blue or green radiation.

But you didn’t want to be immune to any radiation other than red.

Blue and Green Immunes could go places that Reds couldn’t, yes. But once someone in the Mob or other powerful groups caught wind that you were immune to blue or green radiation, they took you.

From what little I had been able to pick up, my mother was a Blue Immune, my father a Green Immune. After rumors went around that my mother was immune to something that wasn’t red, someone from the Mob came and held a knife to my father’s throat, threatening to cut it unless she said she was immune to either blue or green radiation. She broke and admitted. They took her away, and later, my father revealed to everyone that he was a Green Immune. They took him too. I was a year old.

When they took you, they took you to the Apocalypse Building. Then, you played the Game. The Game was broadcasted to everyone. And if you survived the Game with your team, you had two options. You either joined the Staff, a subgroup of the Mob that oversaw the Game, or you disappeared. Most chose to disappear.