Snippet #1139055

Jasper traversed the streets of Exodar without much direction. The young man was searching, that much was clear, but he had absolutely no idea where to begin his search. Derris could be anywhere by now. He certainly wasn't back in their crappy apartment, where his elder brother had woken some days ago. This had been the pattern every day since. Wake up, dress, search for Derris, eat, sleep. There was nothing else to his life, and there would not be, not until he found his younger sibling.

The hard days with little sustenance were starting to wear on Jasper. Gray eyes typically alight with a dangerous mischief were dull and glassy, his clothes disheveled and his hair not too much better. His mother would have wept to see him, perhaps, but for the first time, Jasper was glad that car accident had claimed her before the disease could. At least then she had received a proper burial, with people to mourn her as she should be mourned. Not so for the bodies that lay strewn about the street like so much garbage, simply refuse to be avoided in the aftermath of the worst disaster the world had ever seen.

In truth, the likelihood was that his brother was long dead as well. What was the chance that the both of them had survived the disease the news reports told him had killed ninety percent of the Earth's population? Somewhere inside him, anger stirred, that someone could simply release such a virus into the world, but it was quickly suppressed under the urge to find his brother, or what remained of the small child, anyway.

At least a body would be resolution. If Derris had indeed died, Jasper would be able to say with certainty that there was nothing that made the world worth living in anymore. What he would do then, he couldn't say, but a part of him refused to believe that his little brother was truly gone. Ever since his birth, Derris had been the single most important thing in Jasper's life. When the two had lost their parents, this bond had only intensified. They had needed each other to survive, then. Jasper had raised Derris, and Derris had supplied the hope that one day there would be something worth living for.

So the nineteen-year-old forced his battered body onwards, unceasing in his search.