This Blog Has Moved

This blog has moved to:  http://www.davidhadleyauthor.co.uk/

Sorry, but this version of the blog has now closed. 

However, I have not given up blogging - you don't get rid of me that easily.

From Monday (16/06/2014) my blog will continue at my David Hadley- Author website more or less as it has done here. 

New site RSS feed.

I hope you will join me at the new place, but if you find a better way of wasting your time, thanks for stopping by.

Bye (for now).

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[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

The Coming Apocalypse

When it began, we – of course – were ready.

Nearly.

As is the way of these things, popular culture had prepared us well for the threat. Everyone who’d watched a film or some TV, played a computer game or read any genre fiction was well-prepared for the immanent zombie apocalypse.

So, when word of the apocalypse spread, building rumour upon rumour, everyone was ready. We all expected the streets to be thronged with legions of the undead, thirsting for the fresh brains of the living.

Ah… if only it had been that easy.

Everyone had been wondering, well, quite a few people anyway, just why the world need quite so many celebrities. Of course, if is a well-known tenet of media theory that the world’s tabloids need a constant fresh supply of young ladies falling out of their dresses at various high-profile celebrity events. But that alone could not explain just why there were now so many so-called reality TV programmes churning out a constant stream of these new celebrities, most with the media half-life of a fatally-irradiated gnat.

But, as some conspiracy theorists pointed out, every army needs its infantry, its cannon-fodder.

Then everyone laughed at the paranoid imaginings of the conspiracy loonies.

Until it was too late.

No-one is laughing now.

Not now the brain-destroying celebrity hordes are on the rampage down all our High Streets. There they surround innocent people going about their own business. The celebrities then force the ordinary people to engage in mass inane conversations about trivia and banal minutia until their brains explode. Then the ravening celebrity zombie hordes can feed and gorge until it is time to seek out the next victim.

And people used to laugh when some warned of the dangers of celebrity culture for our precarious civilisation.

Who is laughing now?

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[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

More or Less

I don’t know.

There was a time back long ago when I thought I did know. I looked out on the world, out there, and I thought I understood it. I thought it made sense to me. I knew – at least, enough to get by – how the world worked. I understood, as much as anyone can, why people did what they did.

More or less… of course.

None of us really knows enough about the world, or about other people. But – somehow – we get by. That’s what I knew: enough to get by and that’s what I did – I just got by.

I had no great theory of the world, or the people in it. I just thought it more or less made sense, and the people – more or less – did sensible things. Although, any glance at the Evening News programme will bring some doubt about the latter.

Mostly though, even those people on the News in faraway places – more or less – lived lives like mine. They got up, went to work, looked after who they needed to look after and tried to do the right thing. Most of them did, anyway. They seemed just as bewildered to be on the News because of some catastrophe or cock-up as I would if I were in their place.

Then, though, she – Jeanette - came into my life. Then everything changed and things no longer made sense. I wasn’t even sure if those people I saw each day were human, not any more.

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One from Shelter 15

Everyone said those from shelter 15 were the best. I’d worked hard, got my promotions and saved every single penny from working as many extra shifts as I could. I knew I deserved the best, so only one from Shelter 15 would be good enough for me.

A lot of those on my shift, first when I was just another worker, and then as I rose up the supervisor ranks said I was a fool waiting so long. Others though, those who knew, said I was doing the right thing and one from Shelter 15 would be ideal for me.

Then I heard market day had been put back for a month. Even when I had the money and I could afford – finally – one from Shelter 15, it seemed the fates conspired against me.

I thought maybe those who prayed to the old gods were right and maybe I should learn how to pray too. But they didn’t seem to have better, or worse luck, than those of us who never prayed. Anyway, I’m not sure if their god would approve me praying for one from Shelter 15. From what I can see that god doesn’t approve of much and wouldn’t approve of anyone trying to buy some happiness.

Anyway, eventually the storms cleared and the word came down from the administrators that the Shelters had all agreed the next market day.

So, a week before the market day, I withdrew all my money from the bank, to smiles all around and people wishing me luck, I set off for the market green.

It took a few days for me to get there across the Nowheres.

It still amazed me to see all the stalls from all the shelters spread out across the valley under the bright purple sky.

Once in the market itself, I took a deep breath, took a tight grip on my money belt and strode straight over to Shelter 15’s stall.

‘Yes?’ the stallholder said, smiling because he knew why I was there.

‘I’d like to buy a wife please.’ I dropped my moneybag onto the table.

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It was Nowhere

There was nothing there. At first it was just wasteland stretching as far as I could see. Stubby trees, brambles, weeds and grass, little more and all overgrown. There was something familiar about it though, even though I couldn’t place it. As I walked on, looking for anything that would tell me where I was, I realised it reminded me of the waste ground around where I’d grown up. Back then, there were many places where demolished houses and factories had been, with the site just left to grow wild. Great places if you were a kid back in those days when you were just let out in the morning to roam and explore.

This, though, looked bigger than those places, as though a whole area, the whole area, as far as I could see had gone wild. Then, looking around up on a small rise I had the feeling I was home.

There were none of the houses, shops, factories and all that. No roads, street lights and pavements. But looking around I realised that this was where I lived. There was something there, the place behind the buildings under the roads and pavements. It was where I lived, but everything human removed from it. 

Half-closing my eyes I could imagine all the human habitation given a place and a name. Eyes half-closed, I could see it all how it was only yesterday, back when everything was normal. Not like it was now, when I’d woken up and found myself here, either long before humans came to inhabit this place… or long after they’d all died and gone.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Torn and Frayed

How it began?

No-one remembers now. Now, it is as though it has always been this way. Now it seems there could be no other way.

Back then, though, it was different.

It was, at first, dismissed as an anomaly, a fluke, a mere oddity in the results. The scientists dismissed it as a mere statistical quirk, probably an error in one of the machines.

At least, until it happened again.

And again.

Then it kept on happening, and it got worse.

What had begun as a mere wobble in the data grew and grew until the whole edifice of sub-atomic physics teetered on the edge and then collapsed. Especially when the unicorn appeared at CERN.

Apparently the scientists were there in the meeting room discussing the latest aberrations in the data and how it contradicted everything.

Then one of them glanced up at the screen showing the live feed from the collider and pointed, mouth open, speechless.

One by one the rest of the gathering noticed what was amiss and all turned to see the unicorn wandering around inside the torus.

Most thought it was a practical joke, some white horse with a glued-on horn... at least until they found it wasn't.

After someone revised the equations, they discovered if they didn't shut down the collider after repairing the rip in the fabric of space time they had less than a week before the dragons came... more likely than not, breathing fire.

Their spokesman explained the urgency to the politicians.

Twice.

Then a committee of the leading scientists tried explaining it to the politicians, this time with diagrams.

Eventually, with only a day to go the scientist got the permission to stitch up the rip in the continuum. However, by then it was too late as the elves and the faeries poured through the tear into our universe, and the orcs and dwarves following behind.

All fleeing from the dragons and all terrified of whatever it was the dragons themselves were fleeing from.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

To Touch These Clouds

 

To Touch These Clouds

Down on the ground the grass will grow
while birds reach out to touch the clouds.
We could have once expected such
small portents shaping all our dreaming

as we so often ask for some
acceptance of so much we want.
Even though there are shadows here
amongst us as we make our way

between these rocks that fill these paths
towards the summits of our hills.
Up where we hope to emulate
the birds and reach out, touch these clouds

which darkened all our promised skies
and turned us from our green-soft valleys.
To climb these hillsides in the hope
of finding something here to point

towards. A promise offered here
of something better than we know.
Before we turn back from the sky
returning to our valley lives
to live in clouded shadows again.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

Wildlife Documentaries of the Future

Well, as you know if you are a devotee of nature and wildlife programmes on the TV, these days it is rare to see the Attenborough in the wild. At least in his native habitat downwind from any rutting wild animals. Some even claim the TV naturalist is becoming an endangered species, especially with the possibilities of miniaturisation and remote operation of today's camera technology.

There are some, indeed, who believe the whole business of going out into the back of beyond, just to film various animals either having it off or eating one-another, and sometimes both, is no longer a viable business model. Especially in these days of reduced budgets, receding hairlines and the relative paucity of camera-ready totty in the field. Let alone the expense of getting some out of work former top-flight actor to do the voice-over when all else fails.

Critics point to the increasing success of CGI films featuring cartoon animals with far more endearing personalities than their natural wild analogues. As well as the merchandising prospects of some of the more engaging artificial creatures.

So, in future, it looks as though computer-generated virtual animals will replace today's wildlife documentaries. Programmes where the animals can go beyond the mere rutting and devouring with, and of, one-another and go on to do more adventurous activities, up to and including saving the world from mankind in cute and endearing ways. This will leave both the possibilities of numerous sequels to each programme and the very real possibility of significant merchandising sales as the creatures grow into popular characters.

All in all then, a much more rewarding televisual experience. Much better than watching, yet again, some old bloke crouching behind a bush, muttering on about how exciting it is to be this close to a pair of wild creatures either copulating with, or eating, one-another.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

The Wedding Party

Each morning she would wake before the rest of the company, just to see the world around her. Until this journey, her father’s tower confined and defined her whole world.

Once they arrived at their destination, the walls of her husband’s tower would confine and define her life. Her whole world would end at the thick stone wall, rising on the high ground above her new Lord and Master’s lands.

No doubt, she would have a window to look through. As wife of the Lord she would – Hella presumed – have a window of her own she could look through. She would no longer have to share everything with her sisters. She would have servants too and guards of her own.

These early mornings, though, on the journey, her servants and her guards were sleeping. Several – she assumed from the noises in the darkness around her carriage in the night – with one another.

It made Hella wonder what her own wedding night would be like. She wondered too, what her husband would be like. She had not met him since the formal betrothal ten years before on his tenth birthday. She had been four at the time and more interested in her new kitten, Bojo, than in the strange boy in his formal clothing watching her from the other side of her father’s great hall.

Now she wished she’d paid more attention. She wished she’d realised at the time that the boy in the rich clothes was to be her Lord and Master for the rest of her days.

She sighed as she looked out at the strange world outside her carriage – the strange lands that lay between her father’s lands and those of her new husband. Her husband’s family had paid enough for her; she hoped they would all treat her as the expensive prize she was.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

The Purl

Kretz looked up at me from where she’d been sleeping, head on my chest. She blinked slowly. Her pink tongue darted out and licked the side of her hand; she brushed the hand over the side of her face a few times, purring as she did it.

Sometimes, just sometimes, it can be more than a little disconcerting, but in a universe the size of this one, it is – almost - bound to happen.

For such a long time, we humans had wondered if we were alone in the universe. We’d wondered whether there was life out there, somewhere amongst all those stars. Then we discovered those stars had planets, that ours was not the only one. Then, a little later we’d discovered that some of those planets were in the goldilocks zone like ours.

Then, we found we were not alone.

The Purl were one of the first races from beyond our solar system to contact us. Then when we discovered what the Purl were, then it was inevitable we’d find so much in common, considering humanity’s long association with cats. Discovered by the Purl, and brought into the association of intelligent species by them had a certain rightness about it. A race of intelligent cats – well, it was a love affair waiting to happen.

Kretz wrapped her tail around us as we lay there. She was purring again. I took a deep breath. I was going to have to tell her it was over, that I had to go back to Earth.

I looked down at those hands… paws, with their razor-sharp claws retracted. I thought about her sharp pointed teeth and about what a cat could do to a mouse. Then I thought about my pink helpless body and I decided, instead, to put off telling her… at least, for a while.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

They Came From Outer Space

Of course, the odds were overwhelming. Never in human history had this planet faced such odds.

The alien ships appeared on the edge of the solar system in ever-increasing numbers. There were thousands of them, all approaching Earth orbit and there was nothing we could do to stop them.

Soon the night sky filled with the orbiting ships, like hundreds, thousands, of new stars in the sky. Then, in addition, the daytime sky filled, with the ships grown massive in the sky like solid metal storm clouds. They hung there over every point of human habitation on the planet. From the largest cities right down to the humblest nomadic tents. Each and all had at least one of the massive starships hovering in the sky above it, all casting huge shadows across the ground.

We learnt to live in perpetual shadow, learnt not to look up to see something impossibly huge just hanging there over our heads.

All we could do was wait, wait and tremble. Everyone was scared, too scared to mention the fearsome objects filling our skies. Soon we knew they would turn their attentions on us and we would be doomed.

The voice came from everywhere, from every speaker in the world, from every resonating surface that could vibrate at those frequencies and in every language spoken by those beneath the ships.

‘We want your cheese!’

The world’s leaders, hastily prepared to face impossible demands contacted one another. The world’s armies all ready for inevitable defeat and death at the hands (or whatever) of the overwhelming alien horde all dared breathe again.

‘What?’ said the leader of the free world, when she could find her voice – and get the American president to stop praying long enough for her to get a word in.

‘Your cheese. We want it now…. Or there will be war. War you puny humans can never win!’

‘But…well, cheese?’

Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has the precious cheese.’ The voice was calm, almost reasonable. ‘We must have your Stilton. The future of the universe depends upon it.’

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

Something for the Weekend: Free Short Story – Twisting the Night Away

[Twisting the Night Away - Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)]

Twisting the Night Away

(Short story – 5,000 words approx.)

If you want to get an ex-girlfriend back, what could be a better way of impressing her than a magic carpet ride through the night to a romantic evening together in some alternate dimension?

[Twisting the Night Away - Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)]

[…]

I looked at my hands, they didn’t look that powerful. I had trouble opening a new jam jar with them, let alone creating a world out of nothing.

Morgan took my right hand in his, holding it just below the wrist. ‘Relax,’ he said.

I tried to relax as he manoeuvred my arm around, outlining some weird shape in the cold night air.

I felt something in the air change, as though the air around us had grown thick and heavy, then an instant later the feeling was gone. He jerked my hand back with a short sharp tug and let my arm drop.

‘Ah…’ he said.

The duck quacked.

Up until then there had been only the two of us standing up on the cold damp roof.

Now there was the two of us… and a duck.

The weather may have been suitable for ducks, but the duck itself seemed far from happy. It quacked and stared up at us.

‘That….’ Morgan said. ‘That doesn’t usually happen.’

I was staring at my hand. It had done a lot of things that hand, sometimes some very strange things, but this was the first time it had produced a duck out of thin air. I didn’t know how I expected my hand to look different, just that I was disappointed it didn’t.

Meanwhile, Morgan was walking around the duck with the cautious air of someone half-expecting the waterfowl to explode. He glanced up at me, keeping half an eye on the duck ‘It’s definitely a duck,’ he said.

I raised my eyebrows….

‘Sometimes a duck is not a duck,’ Morgan said with a tone to his voice that suggested his caution about the possibility of the duck exploding was based on some personal experience.

I took a step back. ‘What are we going to do with it?’ I said, watching the duck carefully. ‘Can’t we send it back?’

Morgan looked at me. ‘Back where?’

‘Back where it came from?’

‘Do you know where it came from?’

‘No… I thought….’

Morgan raised a hand, while he stroked his chin with the other. ‘Tony,’ he said in a universe-weary sounding voice. ‘It is not that simple.’

‘Oh….’ I said, knowing it wouldn’t be…. Nothing ever is.

Morgan stepped back from the duck and moved his hand in a gesture that seemed to slip sideways out of this universe and into some other place.

The duck looked at him. ‘Quack?’

‘Bugger…,’ Morgan said. ‘I thought that might be it.’

[…]

[Twisting the Night Away -

Free for the next five days - here (UK) or here (US)]

The New Alien Overlords

That was, of course, the way it happened, even though – at the time – there were those who pooh-poohed the whole idea. Many of them disbelieving something like that could happen nowadays without at least some activity on one or another of the now-ubiquitous social media.

However, a spokesbeing for the alien’s PR Company insisted that it was not so much an alien invasion, certainly not in the traditional sense, as more of an acquisition of a failing planet.

The alien’s PR company spokesbeing then went on to outline various schemes and ideas they’d come up with to get Earth, as they put it, ‘back on the road to civilisation’. Then going on to suggest that until humanity carried out significant improvements in the so-far woeful attempts at human civilisation then the Earth would continue its exclusion from the Galactic Federation. Thus forgoing all the benefits that entailed, up to and including some very tempting Special Offer vouchers redeemable in some of the finest HyperMegaMarkets in the known universe.

Of course, as soon as they realised the Earth was under possible threat from potential alien invaders, the Earth’s politicians leapt into action and demanded to know what was in it for them.

However, after a few of the less significant politicians (mostly MEPs as it turned out) were ‘accidentally’ caught in the beam of an alien disintegration ray, the remaining politicians suddenly became much less vocal. Especially so when the new alien overlords revealed the new Whole Earth Senate the aliens set up for the politicians on one of the smaller moons of Jupiter. The aliens also promised the politicians could take as many of their more nubile ‘research assistants’ with them to the new facility.

Then the alien overlords announced everyone on Earth could take the next week off work on full pay. Thus was their mastery of Earth and its inhabitants made complete.

 

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US)]

No Paradise

The stories we told were all the old stories that spoke of the world before this one. The stories of the paradise we'd lost. The Story Priests tell us tales of that old life we died and left behind, that place of paradise where life was long, easy and free. Stories of a time long before this one.

The Story Priests say that we are born into this life when we die in that paradise. Some ask: why – if it is a paradise – then why do we die? The priests respond that we must have done something wrong there, and so we are reborn here in this dark, grey, land as a punishment for all we did wrong in that old life.

The Story Priests then point to the ruins, now almost lost under the growing grass and heaping earth that almost buries them. They tell us the story of the Great Devil that arose in the Distant East. How it sundered this land from the paradise we once lived in and that now all those of us who failed in that paradise are reborn here.

Some, if not most of us, do not believe these stories, even though we learn of them from when we are young enough to listen. I look around the fires at night-time, watching the faces of the people as the Story Priests go through the rituals of the Telling. Each time I see eyes that do not believe, eyes that see this world and those ruins and wonder what kind of paradise this used to be. We sit, shivering in the rain and the cold, hoping the fire will last the night. We know – deep down – this, or any life before this, was never any paradise.

[Books by David Hadley are available here (UK) or here (US).]

When the Revolution Came

When the revolution came – in the end – more than a few of us were ready for it. For years, almost beyond recall, so many of us had suffered under the brutal tyranny of the regime. We had longed for the day when we would break free and out into a bright new dawn of freedom.

Still, when the day came it was a surprise. None of us had ever dared hope that it would happen, not within our lifetime. Perhaps, some of us dared hope; our children would have children born free of the dread heavy hand holding us down. Little did we think, though, that we would be the ones that would be thee first to taste the sweet air of freedom and liberty from the oppressors.

It began as just another ordinary day, a day much like any other. There was little feeling, little awareness, no taste of revolution in the air. Even then we knew that all revolutions end in failure and the aftermath of a revolution is almost invariably worse than all the revolution meant to overthrow. We were ready, though, willing to suffer all manner of hardships if only we could be free.

Then it came, the longed-for announcement we waited so long for. It was the sign that not all our suffering had been in vain and the time had come for us to reclaim our humanity, our dignity, our freedom.

The thing was, though, that none of us really had any real idea what to do with it when we – at long last – got it.

Lying Like Dust

Lying Like Dust

What can become of us, out here
where time goes on around us all?
What can we do, what can we say?

when there is time and there is stillness
right at its heart. The single point
where every second lasts forever,

if only we knew how to hold
on tight to it, so it does not
just slip away into the past

unnoticed and unused, then gone.
There's nothing else to say, not now
the words have all been used and lost.

Each spoken and then left to die
on breezes dancing dust around
the air between us. Every word

a mote that floats on through the light
until it's lost in silent shadows.
Lying like the heaping dust
on all forgotten memories.

When the Aliens Came

So, anyway, as it turned out, it was not what everyone had expected after all.

When the starships first appeared on the long-range detectors and orbiting telescopes, of course there was some initial panic about the alien invaders. Soon the first few score ships were in orbit around most of the outer planets of the solar system, with hundreds more on the way. There was a great deal of discussion between various governments about what would happen when the obviously superior aliens knocked them off the gravy trai… invaded. The governments did not know whether the aliens would kill, farm or eradicate the Earth’s population, or if we were all just in for a planet-wide intimate probing.

However, once the ships had begun parking in orbit around Mars and Earth, with a few smaller ships around the various moons, it became increasingly obvious that this was no alien invasion whatsoever.

In fact, the conspiracy theorists were all rather disappointed. The various world politicians and government officials were relieved that their cushy perks and privileges were safe. Apparently, the aliens had no interest in the Earth, or its human population, whatsoever.

However, a month the alien ships disappeared as suddenly as they arrived. Subsequently an amateur astronomer who’d intercepted some of the alien inter-ship communications released those communications onto the web. Further analysis revealed the aliens used our entire solar system merely as an overspill ship parking space for an important galactic wedding ceremony in a nearby galaxy. So it appeared the so-called alien invasion had nothing to do with Earth at all.

Good news for everyone, people thought. However, for a good many people on Earth it was almost unbearable to discover that – despite what their enormous friend count on social media implied - they were not the centre of the universe after all.

The Glorious Revolution

So there we were, or at least most of us were. The rest of them had become bored and wandered off to watch a repeat of Downton Abbey. The one where the servants begin a revolution and storm the sitting room, gaining control of the cucumber sandwiches and the strategically vital posh frocks, just before the advert break.

Anyway, those of us left manning the barricades decided too that we great heroes of the proletariat all deserved at least a two-week break in the sun once the revolution had been established. So the steering committee began at once to outline plans for a people’s travel agency in readiness for the next revolutionary council meeting. Someone suggested ‘something should be done about her from number 22,’ which, after a show of hands of the cadre present, was also added to the agenda.

That night we were expecting a counter-strike by the reactionary anti-revolutionary army. As usual they would – we assumed – commence their attack under cover of the peak-time viewing schedule when most of our forces would be settling down in front of something with heavy audience engagement.

Sure enough, just as the first dance-off began, the counter-revolutionaries began their artillery barrage. Unfortunately for them, they were relying on the renationalised Post Office to deliver their artillery shells to the guns at the front. Therefore, they only had two shells, one of which was a dud and the other caused only minor damage to a public urinal down at the far end of the High Street.

Consequently, their attack was desultory at best, only managing to take one of the town’s less strategically important takeaways, before our gallant comrades, all eager for a late-night curry, beat them back.

The glorious revolution continues and we fight on for another day!

Around the Centre of a Moment

The slow turning of a day around the centre of a moment holds us close to each other, never wanting to let go. We want; we need, time to stop here. Here and now enclosing us and enfolding us in this time that should never end. Here is perfect peace, perfect safety and perfect comfort wrapped around each other as our arms wrap around each other too.

Time should stop now, and not carry on with its seconds falling over one another and stumbling into the minutes, hours, days. All taking us on into that hazy and uncertain future, where we know that times like this must end for us.

It is the mortality though that makes these special times precious, if we had nothing to fear from the future, then these times would not have the importance or the intensity we feel when wrapped inside them. It is only because we know we do not have long, and there will - one day – be an end to all this, we feel this urgency of stasis; this need for the now to become eternal.

If it did become eternal, though, we would soon grow tired of it. We would then long for movement and freedom with the uncertainty the undefined and unknowable future would bring. It is only the knowledge that these times must end, so we can carry on, which makes us want to stay here holding each other close forever.

Out of Distance and Circumstance

Possibility grew out of distance and circumstance. We moved away from all we knew into strange lands and strange times, looking for a place that could become a home. We had all lost so much, only memory remained, and memory, like the seasons fades away into loss... eventually. But these were still raw times; the memories of our loss burned and were sore.

There were some amongst us who had lost everything, except themselves. Lone survivors of families and the last of their name now, trudging through the winds and the blizzards. Alongside them, were those who still had remnants of family left, thinking they were the lucky ones, only to see those relatives fall and die by the wayside as we trudged on.

We were a weak and defeated people, making our stumbling way through hostile lands. Predators can smell fear, taste weakness on the wind. Not only animals: mountain lions, bears, wolves, but the wild humanity that prowls these thick forests too, the outlaws... they could sense we were easy pickings. Many of us died: taken in the night by animals, attacked at dawn by renegades, outlaws and slave traders. All eager for the easy pickings we – the weak – gave them.

It was a hard land and we too – eventually – learnt to be hard back, offering no mercy, no quarter. We became just as ruthless, just as savage as those that would prey upon us, but each day trudging ever onward, looking for that elusive place we could, one day, call home.