In The End

It had become an unspoken rule that whoever you’d been back then – before the black steel tendrils of their ships had dropped beneath the surface of the clouds to change our world forever – it didn’t matter anymore. We were all scavengers now, desperately ransacking the burned husk of what remained and scurrying between sanctuaries like drowning rats on a sinking ship.

Move with the light, hide in the night. That was the mantra for the pitiful few of us who remained, screaming and clawing to hold on to life in spite of the bleak reality of what it had become. We each had our reasons, I suppose. Something from before that kept us moving forward, throwing one leg in front of the other and holding on to hope.

For me, it wasn’t a hope that the world would ever be the same. You only had to look around to know that everything we’d ever known was gone forever. You could see the permanence of our new normal in the shells of the vehicles that lay empty and abandoned along every street and in the planes that had fallen from the sky to crash into the earth when the electromagnetic winds had risen to herald the inevitable end. You could see it in the skeletons of the mothers who’d thrown themselves over the bodies of their children to protect them from the lightning. You could see it in the sun that faded more with every passing day as it disappeared behind dust clouds that rose in the wake of the maelstroms they generated to slowly kill the light.

What we were was gone, but it was what we had become that I hated the most. I’d seen men kill one another over a molded piece of bread. We’d had two hundred thousand years to evolve but catastrophe had a tendency to escalate our base nature. We were wild and primitive beings at our cores, willing to fight to survive at any cost until the pain of living outweighed even our most intrinsic urges. True despair could be deadlier than any corporeal adversary. If you felt it taking root and growing inside, you needed to find that one thing, the thing that drove you, and brandish it like a ward against the encroaching darkness and the helplessness that threatened to consume that last remaining sliver of your hope. If you let that light extinguish you’d be lost in the night with no beacon to guide you home.

After everything I’d seen and done my hope wasn’t that the world would go back to how it once was. It was that out here, in the dust and the grime where every stranger was an enemy, I wouldn’t completely lose sight of my own humanity. After so many months, my own memories of who I’d once been were becoming fractured and granular, like a handful of sand, and every day I felt them slipping through my fingers.

I’d done terrible things. I’d killed men, in defense of myself or those I loved. It brings me shame, but I’ll admit that at times, I did it just to take something I wanted. That’s the world we live in now. It grabs you by the throat and restricts your air, chokes you near to death with its demands until it’s taken what it wants from you. At some point you just get tired of always being the victim.

They’d camped just outside the city and had been bold enough to use an open fire. I’d followed the smoke and found them exhausted on the road, turning a hare over a fire on a spit. I was half starved and delirious and they hadn’t liked the look of me when I’d walked from the darkness into their camp. There were two of them – one in his middling years and one that looked a younger version of the same man. They’d shouted unkind words and threatened me with a rifle, so I’d retreated in fear. As I’d stumbled into the night my hunger had whispered for me to return and take what I needed. I’d ignored the voice at first, but it had been compelling and made greater sense the more I recalled the scent of the hare turning on the spit or the sizzle of the juices leaking from it as they fell into the flames below.

I crept back to their fire and watched from the brush, waiting for the right moment. When the older man walked away to empty his bladder, I closed in behind the other and snapped his head to the side with a sickening crack that would haunt me forever once my lucidity returned. When the older one returned and saw what I’d done, he’d been so overcome by grief that he’d fallen to his knees. I recall now that I’d smiled since it had made it simpler for me to end his life with the rifle that the younger one had carried. I'd feasted on that rabbit by their fire with the two of them dead beside me.

When my hunger had been sated, I was devastated by what I’d done and became lost in my own suffering. It’s ironic, I know – but when we inflict pain or violence on others it can feel nearly as damaging to ourselves. I felt that darkness pressing in against the edges of my soul and knew I had to go back for her before I lost myself completely to the bestial savagery that threatened to overwhelm what little compassion and empathy I had left.

The journey was long and made more difficult by the feeling of futility that grew more poignant with every passing sun. Until then, I’d been moving westward, toward where the storms were less powerful and came less frequently. In the west there’d been a semblance of our old civilization that had yet remained. The trees had been covered in dust and ash but you could still see the green that remained underneath. Street signs and billboards had been barely legible, but still stood as solemn sentinels – reminders that we’d once been the masters of our domain and painted every nook and corner to stake the claims we thought would last forever. The further I returned to the east, the more unrecognizable those things had become.

The trees were dead and bare and those signs that hadn’t been toppled by the fierce winds had been stripped and were unreadable. Here, where the storms had begun to terraform our green and vibrant earth into a grey and unrecognizable world, I could see that despite our confidence and the surety of the claims we’d staked, they had been fleeting and ephemeral. We were nothing more than ghosts now, roaming a desolate graveyard out of stubborn unwillingness to be forever forgotten.

Despite an inner voice that screamed for me to turn back, to leave the storm and return to fighting for my survival with the remaining survivors on the outskirts, I pressed on. A looming darkness consistently besieged my fragile defenses with an onslaught of doubt but I focused all my effort into shutting it out and continued moving forward, one foot in front of the last. The precious water in my skins diminished with every sip I took to wet my mouth and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to fill them here where the dust had claimed everything. There wasn’t much time remaining, but I continued eastward.

When the storms came, they brooked no weakness. I had come to recognize the signs to allow myself the time I needed to find suitable shelter, but there were times I’d come close to death from being exposed to their wrath. In the city, the basement of a ravaged apartment building or the cellar of an empty house would suffice if its foundation was secure. On the highways that traversed vast stretches of wilderness my best hope was to find the trailer of a large truck to hide within, but it was by no means guaranteed that such a vehicle would always be within reach.

Once, I was forced to search the surrounding forest for anything that would protect me from the oncoming tempest. The dead trees seemed to reach for me as I ran among them, tearing at my clothes and ripping at my sanity with their laughter and their taunts that soon I would be as they were, dry and empty husks with nothing left to hope for. I spotted a collection of granite boulders in the distance and huddled into a nook beneath the overhang of the massive rocks. The wind howled around me with furious intensity and the sky was torn asunder with lightning that exploded from the heavens with peels of booming thunder. Its power was such that it would have felt unnatural even had it been accompanied by the rain that should have fallen but never came.

I cowered there, never having been so aware of my own mortality or filled with such pressing need to reclaim the memories I sought before my time here came to an end. Once I saw her face, I’d remember. She would remind me.

The days went on and I walked, dragging myself through the ashes of everything I’d once held dear and drawing on my strength of will to keep from falling to the ground before finding what I needed. As I neared the place I knew she’d be, my strength of spirit rose. My body, on the other hand, was failing. I’d eaten the last of the food days before and depleted my water that morning. Even so, I was determined to close the final distance to her and knew that she would save me.

But even so far to the east, I was not the only denizen of this untamed land. Somehow, despite all odds against them, a pack of starving dogs had survived, and they’d caught my scent. Their howls came to me on the wind and I hurried to reach her, just ahead, at the end of the street. The house was discolored and grey. Its windows were broken and the grass out front was long dead.

I could hear the animals behind me, snarling as they spotted the first food they’d likely laid eyes on for days. They chased after me as fast as their weakened bodies would allow. They saw what they wanted and they would take it from me to survive. This was the way of the world and the natural order of things that fought for their survival, regardless of the cost to their prey.

I passed through the front door and fell onto the stairs nearby. Too weak to stand, I crawled the remaining distance to our bedroom, where ransacked drawers had been pulled from the dresser and thrown onto the floor. I searched frantically through the dust covered clothing for the box it was in. I needed to see her face to remember the best version of me, not the shameful thing I’d become. With a cry of relief, I found the box and opened it. It was empty.

A mournful sob escaped my lungs as I lay there. The howling was nearly deafening as the animals neared. I lifted the worn and stained goggles from my eyes to allow my tears to escape – and saw it. It had been discarded and slid under the bed. I reached for it – the heart shaped locket we’d left behind in our panic, before she’d been taken from me. As the dogs reached the top of the stairs and padded, ravenous, into the room, I flipped the locket open.

It had become an unspoken rule that whoever you’d been back then, it didn’t matter anymore. But gazing into her eyes, I was reminded of the man I’d once been, and as it turned out, it meant everything in the end.