Majila was fifteen this year. His birthday was next month, but he doubted he would live to adulthood.
"Rust Earth Street's gang is finished too. Next, it might be our turn again. Should we run? But outside this area, it's even more dangerous. There's fighting everywhere."
Ordinary people during wartime were like rabbits in a blazing forest.
With fires burning on every side, running meant death, and staying meant death.
Majila had even less of a choice.
Their rations—or rather, the expired canned food they had painstakingly obtained before—were running low.
The collapse of an entire nation was not merely the collapse of its administration. Without organized agricultural or industrial production, and with war raging everywhere, everyone could only rely on stores from the old era for food. But the war had dragged on for so many years that no one had any surplus left.
"We have to leave. The way Lao Ruan next door looks at my sister is wrong."
Don't misunderstand. These days, surviving was already a blessing. And after fleeing disaster and starving until she was nothing but skin and bones, his sister had no beauty to speak of. What the neighbor wanted was those few pounds of flesh.
Majila knew the atmosphere around them was becoming increasingly wrong. He had witnessed more than once how the strong plundered or hunted the weak.
He still had a pistol he had picked up. Though it only had a few bullets left, he was probably not among the weakest. But he also had a mother and sister who could not move.
Three people with no ability to resist made for a very cost-effective target, especially with women among them, however few remained.
"If they..."
Every night, boys and men guarded their doors with extreme caution, terrified that hunger and