MAYBE WE COULD GET THROUGH IT

[DeJaVu]

24 January 3073 FSN is pleased to publish this fifteen-part excerpt of a journal recently unearthed on Kentares, dating from the Kentares Massacre itself. In these dark times, the knowledge that we have always fought against the darkness is comforting as we fight against the encroaching zealotry of the Word of Blake.
It was the water that killed most of them.
Old Man Fuller had the watch when we finally got back to the mine. He was leaning against a boulder a few meters back from the entrance, a rifle just like mine cradled across his lap. He looked like he’d lost about five kilos since we’d left.
Dysentery hit the kids the hardest, once the water purification stuff ran out and the machines clogged. Boiling the water didn’t always work, and there wasn’t any way to vent the smoke from cookfires anyway. Half of them, more or less, had shit themselves to death.
Dysentery. In this day and age.
We spread out what food we had and starting telling what we’d seen. Old Man Fuller’s face just closed up when we got to Gould—he had a daughter there, with her husband and their kids, I remembered—but everyone else just sort of numbly absorbed it. Fuller started planning another trip back, to get more food. We’d proved it was possible to get out, after all.
Maybe we could get through it.