The 9th Minute

Every so often I would see the bird fly into view over the tops of the trees before it would disappear. I kept tracking it in the same direction, over rocky terrain which only served to provide cover and safety as I hiked through the mountainous area.

I followed those birds because it was the best bet to find food, something that was becoming harder and harder to locate in this area.

When I crested the hill and looked down on the land beneath me I spotted 2 more of those birds, circling and diving into a clearing below. I shrugged the bag from my shoulder and dug blindly as my eyes followed the birds ahead. My fingers fished and finally hooked onto the plastic barrel of my binoculars. I pulled them from the bag and brought them up to my face, letting my eyes focus on the birds of prey circling menacingly over a small break in the trees.

I strained trying to see what it was in the clearing, but the trees seemed to be just tall enough to conceal whatever it was that the buzzards had spotted.

I sighed, dropping the binoculars to my knee and running my hand over my face to wipe sweat from my dirt muddled cheeks and forehead. I stuffed the binoculars back into the bag and groaned as I stood, then began trekking down the rocks back into the woody area, trudging into a dark patch of trees which covered the buzzard's interests.

It was quiet in the woods, quieter than I had ever enjoyed. Not the type of calm and peaceful quiet that you would be familiar with in a forest, But the deafening, terrifying silence of nothingness. The only noise was the whistle of the wind and ripple of leaves on trees as it whipped through them. I begged some nights for even just the sound of birds chirping in the mornings when I woke up, or even the howl of a coyote somewhere off in the distance. But such luxuries were now few and far in between.

Scientists had said that resources could last for 60 years, that we could make it work. But they hadn’t accounted for farmers dying, for truckers to stop driving, for grocery store workers to disappear… when the sun released a record breaking solar flare, the readily available resources were almost immediately sucked in by hoarders, shelves were emptied, bakeries cleared out, even butchers and convenience stores wiped out only hours after it hit.

Before that there was an emergency broadcast that lasted only 8 minutes, every siren blared through the city, every TV flashed to a colourful warning screen before flipping to the news where panicked news reporters sat, biting their nails as the world collectively waited for the unpredictable solar storm to slam into our tiny, unprotected planet.

8 minutes…

For 8 long minutes, 10 billion people collectively held their breaths.

For 8 short minutes families hugged each other and lovers kissed one another for the last time in the civilized world.

For 8 minutes the world was, for one final time, united as a people…

At the 9th Minute the world went silent for the first time.

Then, it all went dark. Every single light, TV, and microwave clock display went black. Phone calls were dropped into silence, and try as we might, no new call would go through. The symphony of notifications, tweets, whistles, and ringing went silent, no one spoke, no one moved, no one could even think.

That's when chaos ensued, everyone who could went rushing into stores, rampaging as they quickly filled carts with the diminishing resources, Emptying out every single retailer of every usable item.

As the resources depleted the rioting started, after the rioting was the pillaging, after that, the moral that the human population had once collectively agreed upon to keep our civilization equal and respectful finally died.

Humans as a whole became primal once more, surging into barbaric tactics of siege and destruction to get what was needed. Homes were raided, people murdered, families torn to pieces in a few short weeks. Buildings lit ablaze in protest while people burned, trapped inside where they had been left to die with no mercy.

Hospitals became overwhelmed with injury and disease, left with only basic treatments to care for those in need. With that, the last decent and kind human beings left on this quickly dying planet began to become a scarce commodity as they too escaped the cities, died of quickly spreading disease, or were themselves killed by gangs and irate patients.

That's where I came from… from a city left in ruin, forced to flee from the job I tried so hard to excel at. The hospital was desolate, destroyed, the smell of decay lingering in the air, even seeming to seep into my clothing as the death toll rose with no place to put the bodies which piled up into the greens of the hospital. Then in the rooms of one side of the building, quickly spreading to each room like a virus infecting a community until it had overtaken nearly every available room in the spanning halls of the medical campus.

Now I found myself here, slowly making my way to a clearing that may or may not have some sort of digestible food, working only off the clue of circling buzzards, one of the only animals I had actually laid eyes on in weeks.

My stomach grumbled at the thought. I hadn’t eaten meat in months now, and the idea of some sort of meat roasted over a small fire made me salivate, licking my lips and swallowing the feeling of a wet lump in my throat as my salivary glands over reacted to the fleeting notion of a decent meal for once.

When I neared the clearing I listened to the low, guttural growl of turkey buzzards through the trees, hissing and calling out evil sounding squeaks and chirps as they fought one another. A noise I had become accustomed to after months of following them for meals. The noise they make when they fight for the best spot on a carcass, establishing dominance over one another just as mother nature intended only animals to do.

The scene in the clearing brought my heart into an anxious flutter, my stomach lurching as nausea overtook me, making me want to vomit. I felt the acidic taste welling in my throat as my already slim stomach contents threatened to void themselves onto the tan hiking boots strapped onto my sore feet.

My eyes panned over a dead body, a woman whose baby bangs were plastered to her forehead in a sludgy amalgamation of clotting blood, sweat, and dirt. Beneath her was a pool of blood, disturbed by what looked to be big boot prints. The vulture picked at her opened rib cage, tearing sinuous strands from the sternum while keeping a cautious eye at the other two buzzards carefully trying to sneak nips of skin from her limbs before being scolded by the bigger bird.

I neared slowly, and could see that she hadn’t been dead long, the blood around her hadn’t even dried yet. Deep, red pools around her head and limbs and a bigger pool beneath her abdomen. On the side of her head was a wound that looked like it had shattered her skull, bashing in the ironically fragile area where her temple met her forehead. The item used had been sharp enough to break through the skin, but blunt enough to cause visible sinkage where the bone fractured inward to her brain. I assumed it was an axe....

The buzzards took off as I got too close. I leaned down to her, looking over her terrified face which was covered in the blood and dirt mixture. Her clothing was dirty, covered in substances that made colours that seemed impossibly dirty. Her legs had been nearly cleared of the flesh, not by buzzards, but by clean, calculated cuts which appeared to have been made by a calm hand. The fleshy and fatty areas of her thighs were cut almost completely to the bone. No tearing like where the buzzards had picked, but instead, cleanly cut by the hands of a skillful predator.

Then my eyes floated to her chest, her dark flannel shirt covered a thin tank top and a silver chain lead into her shirt. I tentatively reached a finger out, catching a long nail on the thin chain while peering back at her face, afraid her eyes would open as I inspected her.

I pulled on the chain and felt it resist, as if it had stuck to her bra inside the shirt. I gave a harder tug and watched as a silver locket slid from her shirt and down her clavicle, resting in the hollow of her neck where the chain bunched around it. I slowly picked up the locket and turned the silver, heart shaped pendant in my fingers, marveling over the craftsmanship of flower details on the front.

I wedged my nail into the edges of the locket until it radiated a tiny click and the sides popped open. One side had a tiny picture of her and a man, whose face was squished against her cheek with jovial smiles, bright white teeth, and blue eyes. On the other side was an inscription that read “Jan and David Est. 2030.” Which was only 4 years ago.

I spent longer than needed examining the picture in the locket, wondering how awful it would have been to give up that life, wondering if she suffered, dying slowly of the bloodloss, or if the attack had been quick enough to save her from having to live her final moments in pain.

I heard the cracking of twigs behind me, and swiveled on my feet to see a man standing only yards away. He gave me a calm smile, tilting his head and giving me a look as if to say “Are you lost?” I heard him clear his throat and watched him roll his neck, a pouch was hooked to his bag and dangling from the side of him, blood leaking from the canvas.

He had on a dark camo jacket, black boots, bloody jeans which still seemed wet. I looked down and saw an axe strapped onto a utility belt on his side and around his neck was a familiar heart shaped locket dangling over a damp grey shirt.

There was a long pause as he watched me stand, my eyes scanning down to the woman and back up to him as the terrifying realization slowly captured me.

I shifted quickly on my feet and leapt over the woman's body, sprinting through the woods behind me as I heard his heavy boots begin following me through the woods.

A new food chain had been established, and currently… I was low on that totem pole