Neon Moss

I knelt at the edge of the water tower, tightening the laces of her combat boots, as the seventh alarm for the failed gas mask filter pierced the air. The sound dragged me back to the subway station three years ago, where crowds kissed beneath rusted ventilation pipes, swapping the last traces of oxygen through saliva. Her bootlaces were still the same nylon ropes from that day, their dark red bloodstains long dried into scab-brown patches.

Neon moss flickered in the cracks of the rooftop, mimicking the glow of old-century bar signs. She pressed the tip of her left boot against my collarbone: "Your breathing's off." The gritty sole ground against my throat, her tactical pants shimmering with engine oil in the dusk. I synced my breaths to the moss's pulsing rhythm--its fluorescent spores were a new mutation from last month, capable of conjuring hallucinations of embracing radioactive clouds if inhaled. When the boot shifted to my lips, the bite of its metal rivets against my gums snapped me back to clarity.

She snatched the UV flashlight from my belt, its beam sweeping over sweat-stained cotton socks. "Today's ration." As she peeled off the left boot, the sticky sound of synthetic fibers separating from skin tightened the nape of my neck. It echoed those rainy seasons in the bunker, where mold spores coupled on concrete walls, and she'd sliced open the festering wound on my calf with a scalpel. Her foot, perpetually swaddled in combat boots, gleamed pearl-white, the pressure sock's crimson indentations around her ankle resembling a secret totem. It reminded me of the first time she injected me with anti-radiation serum, the needle's cold glide beneath my veins.

When my tongue met the salt crusted in her arch, a stifled sigh spilled from above. Leaning against a fractured concrete pillar, she kept her right boot hovering over my carotid. Moonlight caught the barcode branded into her collarbone--a mark of failed genetic modification. "The stockings we scavenged last month," she said, tilting my chin up with her boot-tip, the nylon still reeking of underground bunker mildew, "were wasted on the water purifier's filter."

I muffled my pleas around her twitching toes, my teeth mangling excuses. Under the nuclear winter's moon, the blue veins on her foot mapped like rivers--the same blood that once saved me, when mutant hounds sank their fangs into my shoulder and she slit her wrist to pour gene-modified serum down my throat. Suddenly, her toes clamped my tongue: "Better gag your mouth than strain a filter." The crescent scar at the base of her toe was my doing--a frenzied bite during our fight over the last antibiotic vial.

From the water tower's depths came the howl of a variant, its cry shaking calcified cobwebs from the walls. Yet she withdrew her foot with the grace of a curtain call. Beneath the tarp lay our final prize--the diuretic vial dug from the clinic ruins, now casting an eerie blue in her grip. Memories of that clinic flooded back: formaldehyde jars bobbing with infant specimens, her combat boot crushing three of my ribs as she climbed my back to reach the top shelf.

"Open." The glass tube cracked under her boot heel, amber liquid trickling down her foot into my trembling mouth. She pressed another vial to her lower abdomen, the zipper of her combat suit startling radiation moths from the moss. Their phosphorescent wings reminded me of our wedding night, when emergency lights lured mutated moths into the bunker. She'd collected their wing dust, vowing to brew poison smoke for patrol squads.

As I crawled to catch the first sacred drop, her heel dug into my shoulder socket: "This is worth more than purified water." The stream with her body temperature burst across my tongue, her foot arching in a shuddering curve--just like the tap dance she'd performed on steam pipes the night we raided the incinerator for protein blocks. Condensation fogged my mask's respirator, its filter still holding our first photo together: her without the eyepatch, her right iris still amber, untouched by fallout.

When the last tremor dripped from my jaw, she yanked my hair. A dented can rolled at our feet, sloshing with murky fluid: "Tomorrow's water ration." Her sweat-damp sock brushed my lips. "Purify it with your body heat." The musk threw me back to nights in the underground greenhouse, curled in transgenic potato vines as she fed me chewed sedative leaves.

Night wind carried spores through shattered neon tubes. She slid her boots back on like loading weapons, moonlight revealing tally marks carved into the leather--each for a patrol soldier we'd killed. Cradling the still-warm can, I heard her hum an old-century waltz to the ruins. The pressure marks on her ankles flickered like our bunker wedding candles--cast from mutant beeswax and machine-gun shells, now holding half-rusted fuses, waiting for a dawn when we might burn together.

(End)

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This is the first time I try to share my story on this forum, hope you would like it ^_^