Below is the prologue to a novel I'm in the process of writing.
The rotted wood of the door broke easily under his boot; he pushed his way into the house, grateful for his mask because otherwise the scent would have been terrible. He looked dispassionately at the half-decomposed bodies scattering the room, some curled up and others with jaws hanging open in permanent screams and all totally frightened. At one point he might have felt bad for those poor souls who didn't escape like he did, but that time was long gone.
As he expected, there was nothing of note; everything that might have once be useful – blankets, metal fixtures, carpet – had been looted or was decaying like those who died there. Still, he was required to do a full-house scan – he could be executed for failing to fulfill his duty to the country if he didn't – so he pushed through the rubble to make his way down the main hallway, barely noticing when the bones of a corpse's arm crunched underneath his boot.
All of the bedrooms were in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the house, even down to the cowering dead people in them. With a sigh, he pulled his head out of the master and was just about to exit when he noticed a door on the left side of the hallway that he had originally missed. Opening it revealed not a closet, as he had expected, but stairs down to a basement. Now, any other Excavator might have balked at the idea of going underground with a structurally unstable house waiting to collapse on top of them, but he wasn't just any Excavator.
The Inspectors on his team liked to brag about his luck, but it wasn't luck at all; being the oldest Excavator in the country, he had the best eye for which houses were truly unstable and which would still stand. That was why he insisted examining his assignments beforehand so there would be time to file transfer-of-assignment papers before he was due to go into a dangerous house. Of course, transfer-of-assignment papers just conscripted another Excavator to do the job, but he had long since stopped caring about whether the guy chosen to do his job lived or died while doing so.
“Captain Smith reporting to Lieutenant Marsh,” he murmured into the microphone built into his mask, and immediately Marsh, in his voice so full of excitement and adoration even when made gravelly by his microphone, responded, “Sir?”
“I'm going down into the basement, Marsh.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now that he had notified his team – as was required, if only so the government could keep track of who died where – he turned the light on his helmet on and picked his way down the stairs, which were surprisingly intact. About halfway down, he came across a skeleton so tiny it could have only been a child's, and he pushed it aside without a second glance.
The actual basement area was relatively small but in amazingly good condition; there were spots where you could actually see carpet still clinging to the floor, instead of just mold and ash. However, it was totally empty, and he was just turning away when a small mound in a corner caught his eye.
Crossing over to what appeared to be a pile of rags, he pulled the first scrap of cloth off the top to, instead of revealing more shreds of material, uncover a book, miraculously still existent with binding that wasn't even falling apart.
With a gloved hand, he gently scraped the ash off the book to reveal the title: Holy Bible, King James Version. The letters that spelled out the title were golden, just like the edges of the thin pages and the cover seemed to be genuine leather, something he hadn't seen since before The War.
There was something so interminably old and alien about the book, something that cried out about times long gone and people long dead and emotions long forgotten and a world long vanished, that reminded him of his grandmother. He didn't have very many memories of her, just a recollection of the senses; his ears remembered her warm, rich, soft voice in the same way that his nose recalled how her house always smelled like some sort of fruit pie. It was odd; he didn't have any memories of his parents at all, but for some reason his grandmother had stuck with him all these years.
The government insisted that The War was good, was necessary, but he didn't believe that. And that was the problem with Captain John Smith, Chief Excavator for the Northwest Region: he didn't truly believe. He went through the motions, he acted like a good citizen, but he didn't think like a good citizen. He thought like those rebels rotting in cages in the numerous prisons across the country, and maybe that was because he had memories of a time when things were actually good and when warm and soft and rich actually meant what they were supposed to and weren't just empty words to describe things people had long forgotten.
He knew that all books were contraband and therefore property of the government, to be turned in as soon as they were found, but, as he stood staring down at the Bible and remembered his grandmother, a comforting voice and fruit pies and warm sunlight, he found that he couldn't give such a thing to people who would undoubtedly destroy it.
“Is everything alright down there, sir?” Marsh's voice crackled in his ear, making him jump slightly, and he quickly responded, “Yes. I'm coming up now.”
Fully aware of the fate that awaited him if he were caught, he carefully tucked the book into one of the many pockets in his bulky protection suit, the one that pressed up right against his heart. Then, with one last look around, he made his way up the stairs again, sparing a glance for the child skeleton curled up on the steps this time before picking his way out of the house.
His team of Inspectors greeted him joyously, buzzing about how that was the fifty-third house he had Excavated successfully and mentioning that he still owed them drinks for his fiftieth and speculating about whether or not he would ever unsuccessfully Excavate a house and saying a lot of words about nothing. As they made their way back to the government-issue gray Jeeps, no one noticed the slight bulge in his right breast pocket.
As soon as he got home, he very carefully extracted the book from his suit and set it on his bed, reveling in the feeling of genuine leather underneath his fingertips. There was an uncharacteristic smile on his face as he showered and ate, both of which were mechanical actions that he actually sped up, in order to have more time to examine the book before sleep curfew. He had just settled down on his bed, cradling the book in his lap like one might a small child, when there was a knock at his door, which he promptly ignored when he realized that it had to be Sally Johnson, a very pretty woman who lived two houses down from him and who liked him very much and who he couldn't stand because she was totally and completely mindless.
She knocked once more before giving up and going home – he watched her retreat through his bedroom window – and he smiled again at the fact that he was finally alone with the book.
His fingers, known countrywide for being permanently steady after he defused a few old mines he uncovered in houses, trembled as he opened the Bible, and his skin greedily absorbed the feeling of the smooth, thin paper. With the utmost care, he flipped through the first few pages to find them a table of contents of names of books that he recalled vaguely with the same feeling accompanying his memories of his grandmother, and his breath caught when he got to the first real book, with a title at the top of the page declaring, “The first book of Moses, called Genesis.”
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” he began to read, and, as he continued, he could imagine his grandmother's voice saying the words.
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I have been looking for a place to connect with more advanced writers for quite some time now, and I'm very happy to have finally found one; thank you for providing me the opportunity to join this community.
And if it's that big a competition, and you've made it to the final rounds? That's fantastic.
