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the west, far enough away that I didn’t have to see people if I didn’t want too, but near enough that I didn’t have to sleep with one eye open.
    Scanning the square, my eyes fell from the boarded up store fronts, and the alleyways filled with debris, back to the fountain in the middle of the square. This was the main hub of Aras, Melpin’s bar was here, and Reno’s uncle Carson had a shop and we had some other stores too.
    The fountain centered the square. It was as big as a car in length but was circular, it was made out of a smooth marble type material that had a smaller circular slab on top of it. It used to have a third smaller slab stacked on the second one, but it had been removed a long time ago. The reason behind it was because long before I was born, when our people’s grandparents were looking for a place to settle down, they found a large pipe going deep into the earth, eventually to water.
    With some digging and some knowledge of earth, or water finding, or whatever, they managed to make the fountain into a well. This was our only water source, and we guarded it with our lives, me especially. If any diseased rat escaped from the cellar and tried to drink from the well, it could poison all of us, heck I’ve even had to shoot a couple of our own people who tried to get a drink after they had come down with the disease. Didn’t sweat it though, they were as good as dead anyways, I just spared them the agony.
I continued to watched the square fill up with the various residence of Aras. The music on the radio had started up again, and was now mixed in with the low murmuring noise that comes when a bunch of people are talking all at once. They trickled in, chatting amongst themselves over whatever mundane unimportant things waster idiots talk about, all clustered around the fountain.
    This sort of action, clustering around the water source, always reminded me of a group of heard animals; grouping around the waterhole reinforcing their social bonds because to them there was strength in numbers. And keeping everyone happy with you was a good survival strategy. Anyone who knew me for more than several minutes would be able to tell that this was not my strategy. I was a solitary predator, not a heard animal, and reinforcing social bonds was about as important to me as drinking arsenic.
    I heard a loud thud and a shifting of metal and looked behind me to see Greyson. The shed was only a couple feet from the second story of the old apartment buildings a lot of the others lived in. The easy way to get on top of it was to climb onto the balcony’s railing and jump. I looked past him just in time to see Leo hop from the railing onto the tin roof.
“Looks like everyone’s here,” Greyson said, he looked over at me and grabbed one of the crates from the stack I had been resting on. He placed it on the edge of the roof, and stood on top of it. He cleared his throat and addressed the residence.
“Thank you for your attendance,” he started. I rolled my eyes.
    Stop the polite bullshit and get to the point , I thought to myself, but that was Greyson for you, our polite and considerate leader. Though we all knew that that wasn’t all he was, the polite bit was just a perk he had that made dealing with the masses a bit easier. Greyson was a leader in everyway about him, tough and menacing with a stern no bullshit face, and a strong muscular build. He was Aras’s leader before I came here, and before him was his father and then his grand father who helped settle us down here. He was literally a born leader, and everyone followed him without question.
A lot of leaders you come across here, seem to have some sense of entitlement, and they usually end up being murderous tyrants, no better then our bullshit king, but not Greyson. He he had a good heart and was always treating the residence with respect, though no one ever mistook that for weakness. He wouldn’t hesitate to kill one of our own if they became diseased, and