The Life Union

OUTSIDE:

Tyler flinched at the muffled cries coming from inside the tent only a few yards behind him. He hugged his heavy winter coat close around his body to push out the cold and keep out the screams, but he was still vulnerable to the night-cries. He knew all too well what was happening inside that tent, too well indeed.

On many occasions he had been in that situation, watching the butchery as the doctors moved around and the nurses prepped horrid looking devices. Always there was a need for a second, an on-looker to watch and make sure things went proper, and Tyler had been it more times they he’d liked.

He had been forced to watch the surgery over and over, each time a new face, a new body, but always it was the same torture and the same screams. He’d never felt much grief for those who had to wait but now he was forced to wait outside because this time was different, this time it was Tyler’s wife, Haley, who was the one having her legs cut off.

The amputation was a daily routine in the encampment outside the Complex for those not rich enough, not important enough to be accommodated. Years ago, at the time of the war, they had been left outside to die and ever since they had been outside and the rest of the world had stayed inside. Inside everything was handed to you on a silver platter but outside you had to learn to survive. Survival was simple: be in the Bunker before nightfall.. If you weren’t in the Bunker you would indefinitely suffer from horrible frostbite as Haley had.

She had been helping one of the other women look for a child who was reported missing and had she had not heard the warning alarm to get into the Bunker. She’d only been outside five minuets after sundown and she was being forced to have both legs removed. Both legs! That’s a concept that those bastards in the Complex couldn’t even comprehend. They didn’t care what happened outside their little world. All they needed was inside, food, water, shelter, and warmth, while there were those like Tyler and Haley stuck in the cold, feeding off their wastes.

The screams were getting worse; a torture unlike anything Tyler had ever felt in his life. The walk that Reeves, the doctor in charge of Haley, had suggested was starting to look like a good idea now. He had wanted to be there by her side, but they didn’t allow any family to watch the operation so he had decided to wait outside and be as close as he could, but now her cries were too much for him and he wanted an escape.

Down he walked across the frozen ground overshadowed by the menacing Complex. He tried to remember the last time he’d felt warm, truly warm, from the inside out. He remembered a day, long ago, long before the war, before the endless winter that plagued the land had come to be. It was a distant memory, or maybe a stored fantasy, waiting for a day to be retold. A child he was at the time, playing under the sun in pants with short legs that cut off above his knees and a thin shirt that had no sleeves. Strange now it seemed to him, to be clad in such soft and cooling attire.

He remembered a time when there were large pools of unfrozen water that he had once splashed in. Now there was nothing but crevices of ice that were melted down to drink. There were no more pools and no more ponds to swim and sail in, if there were ever really any at all. Maybe it had been real or maybe it had been a dream he’d had long ago, he no longer could remember.