Infralapsus

Adult: noun; a person who is fully grown or developed.

Adult: verb; to behave in a way characteristic of a responsible adult, especially by accomplishing mundane but necessary tasks.

I became an adult in the traditional sense when I reached eighteen.

I had to adult when I turned ten.

It was two years after the eruption that no one saw coming. Without warning, the super volcano in the Yellowstone Caldera blew. I was only 8 at the time, in February of 2030, so I don’t know how many people died in the initial explosion.

I do know that by the time I reached New Jersey in 2035, at least 5 billion people were dead. Many were killed instantly from being too close to the Northwest corner of Wyoming when the volcano erupted. More were killed in the months after from breathing in the razor-sharp ash, which cut their nostrils and tracheas to bits and settled like cement in their lungs. And even more died during the wide-reaching famines and droughts that came when the sun disappeared.

Of the few survivors, though, many died at the hands of Ordo Salutis.

It began somewhere on the coast of California. A man who called himself Lex Dei owned a compound of specialized greenhouses fitted with air filters that somehow kept the ash out. He managed to stockpile food and claimed he had the supplies to continue to grow more. Word got out that his greenhouses were some kind of safe haven, and survivors flocked to beg for rations and shelter.

Lex Dei regarded himself as the son of a deity he called Actus Purus. He preached that the eruption wasn’t a disaster but a Cleansing, and gained a following of desperate survivors searching for meaning in the madness. It didn’t help that all methods of communication and trade with other countries were cut off when volcanic ash filled the stratosphere and destroyed all components of modern infrastructure. Lex Dei used this disconnection from the rest of the world to his advantage. He preached that Actus Purus was speaking to him and only him; instructing him on how to move forward through The Cleansing so we could come together as a better, more evolved race of enlightened humans.

From this following, Lex Dei formed the Ordo Salutis; a group of selected individuals chosen to travel what remained of the United States with the purpose of spreading The Message and enforcing a new religious regime. This included shooting survivors that did not pledge their allegiance to Lex Dei and Actus Purus.

My father called it a theocracy. As a former politician, he still believed in democracy and refused to bow to what he called “an insane religious cult designed to brainwash the broken and the desperate.” Again, I was 8 and had no idea what any of this meant. I just nodded my head and ate my rations.

My family and I had lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, so we escaped the more horrific effects of the eruption. We weren’t instantly incinerated by the explosion and our home wasn’t destroyed by the rivers of lava that flowed from the earth. Our eyes and ears didn’t explode from the deafening boom, but we did wake up to about two feet of ash on our front lawn and no power or running water. The eruption had taken place during winter. All of our windows were shut and we didn’t have a chimney, very little ash made its way into our house. It had been a particularly nasty winter and my father had sealed the windows with plastic in an effort to cut down on our energy bill. We were lucky.

But that day, everything just stopped. We had no idea what had happened until the National Guard rolled through three days later in gas masks and full hazard gear. They shouldered scary weapons and broadcasted a public service announcement through battery powered speakers attached to their Humvees:

“YELLOWSTONE SUPERVOLCANO EXPLOSION. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR HOUSE. PLACE GREEN FLAG IN FRONT WINDOW IF SAFE. PLACE RED FLAG IF WOUNDED. PLACE BLACK FLAG FOR CASUALTIES. PLACE YELLOW FLAG IF IN NEED OF FOOD OR WATER.”

The military patrolled the city night and day for weeks, handing out food and water and providing medical attention if necessary. Sometimes I saw them take big black bags out of houses, placing them on the flatbed of a military vehicle. But slowly we saw less of them, especially as more yellow flags started showing up in windows.

After a few months, we never saw them again. That’s when Ordo Salutis showed up.

By my ninth birthday, the yellow swatches of fabric that had been present in my neighbors’ windows had disappeared, either replaced by black (they had remembered the message from the soldiers) or exchanged for the Ordo Salutis flag, a purple banner with gold stars. It signified they had committed to following Lex Dei and his teachings. This also meant that the Ordo Salutis provided them with extra provisions and other specialty items, like gas masks and clothing that protected them from the ash that still sprinkled down from the grey clouds in the sky.

Every time Ordo Salutis knocked on our door, we were instructed by my father to stay low and stay hidden. The fact that my family wouldn’t display the purple flag in the window had put an omnipresent target on our backs. But I was confused. I remember looking out the one window in my house that wasn’t boarded up and saw my neighborhood friends playing outside. They were riding their bikes down the street or throwing a football back and forth with the Ordo Salutis members that had taken up residence in the houses of Followers. I saw them get sacks of oranges and tomatoes, or bags of chips and chocolate bars. That existence seemed so much better than the rations of peanuts I received and the endless boardgames with which my parents tried to occupy me.

I don’t know how my family and I survived another year without the help of Ordo Salutis, especially with how firmly my father denounced them. But all of a sudden it was my tenth birthday and my parents presented me with a small box wrapped in newspaper, tied with a shoelace bow. I remember picking it up, eyes wide, speechless that I was getting a present on my birthday.

I opened it wordlessly and lifted out a heavy, heart shaped locket. It was big and gaudy, not something a ten year old would typically wear. But I knew what it was. Though it was tarnished and ugly, I put it around my neck as silent tears streamed down my face. I looked at my parents, my beautiful parents, who had spent the better part of two years keeping me safe at the expense of their own lives. I saw the gauntness of their faces, their small, starved frames. I was still only a child, but I knew it took enormous risk or sacrifice to get this locket.

The lockets were what the Ordo Salutis gave the people they deemed Safe to Roam: the survivors who weren’t a threat to Lex Dei and had pledged their allegiance to serving and honoring Actus Purus.

This locket was my ticket out.

“There are rumors, Jordan, that there are ships on the East coast that will take kids to Europe,” my father whispered.

My mother handed me the one gas mask we had, intertwining her hands with mine. Pressing her forehead against mine, I felt the gravity of what this meant for me. What this meant for us as a family. And my childhood slipped away.

I knew they couldn’t come with me. I knew this was a journey I was going to have to take on my own. And I also knew that I didn’t have a choice. There were only two ways to get one of these lockets. One was to pledge eternal servitude to Lex Dei. The other was to steal it. I didn’t know how my parents had managed to acquire one and I didn’t ask, but either way they were giving their lives to save mine.

I left that night, avoiding the Ordo Salutis who were living in our town. They would know the locket didn’t belong around my neck and shoot me on the spot. I traveled by night for a week before I trusted the locket enough to guide me safely through towns that did not know me.

The farther East I traveled, the more normal the world seemed. There was still ash everywhere but by the time I reached Pennsylvania, no one was wearing gas masks and there were barely any black flags in the windows. I moved as fast as I could, but a lone child traveling a desolate world attracted attention. I needed to remain as innocuous as possible to survive.

After a few close calls with Ordo Salutis, I learned that my best chance was to put down temporary roots in communities to avoid suspicion. I would claim to be an orphan looking for refuge, my parents having been killed at the hands of Traitors (the term used to describe people like my father who vilified Lex Dei and his regime). I made sure to find houses with purple flags in their windows or made friends with kids wearing lockets like mine. I would stay with families for weeks to months at a time, before disappearing in the night and moving onto the next town.

I got to New Jersey in 2035, five years after the explosion and three years after my parents gave me the locket. I knew by this point the rumored ships taking children across the ocean to European safety were no longer running, if they had been running at all. But I kept walking anyway, toward the shore.

When I got there I found a family who, I determined, only followed Lex Dei for the purposes of safety and hadn’t actually resigned themselves to his regime. My parents sent me to find somewhere I could have a life. Somewhere to survive. That’s what I found. And I knew that if I waited long enough, I might see the world return to the one into which I was born.

I was right.

It’s now 2045 and the sun is shining on my face as I’m sitting here telling this story. There are patches of green grass peeking through the new soil the Environmental Commission spread across the country after people were finally able to re-organize and take down Lex Dei and the Ordo Salutis.

During his trial (led by the vigilante group of ex-FBI agents, former police officers and lawyers that had formed a makeshift governmental body), Lex Dei had explained his entitlement to power through what he called Infralapsus. He was convinced that his god, Actus Purus, had ordained The Fall of humanity and elected him to rule the living world by eternal decree.

Psychologists deemed him insane and locked him away. It was messier than that, but the details don’t matter. His regime crumbled when he wasn’t around to brainwash and command his followers. That’s what matters.

It came to be known that his real name was Mike Burns. A man from San Diego, California. He died by his own hand three weeks later, leaving a letter claiming himself as the Messiah and pledging his inevitable return.

He did not return. But the world did. The natural order of life took its time, but eventually began to restore itself and society followed suit. Tentatively and with great caution, humans slowly began to organize and band together productively. Democracy was re-established and a military reformed, systematically rounding up the remaining active Ordo Salutis, prosecuting them similarly to the Nazis of World War II.

When all else fails, humanity prevails.