The Attainment of Despair

A heart-shaped locket lay on the crumbling asphalt amid the long-decayed remains of the child who had been wearing it when the end of her kind came. The thin chain which had held the pendant around her neck was still intact – her bones were not.

The burned-out and twisted frame of the vehicle that had carried the little girl to this place was not far away. Containing what was left of the members of her family not thrown clear of the fiery wreck, it also held other small relics of their lives. No one had ever come to inspect the wreckage however, or to collect the trinkets which had survived the flames that burned on the day when far-away schemers had - in their thirst for power - taken the entire house of man into the bowels of annihilation. No one ever would.

She had come to rest on the highway’s surface and could not move any part of her shattered body. Her life was seeping away through her injuries. A flash more powerful than lightning filled her vision and left her blinded for a moment. As the heat arrived - being pushed ahead of the pressure-wave of a weaponized nuclear reaction that had been unleashed by madmen who considered themselves righteous in destroying her young life rather than allowing her to grow old under the ideology of other madmen – as that heat began to melt away her flesh, the child’s last sight was the burning death of her parents and siblings trapped inside their family car.

A chilled and dry breeze crept through the quiet, chaotic carnage. The nuclear winter that followed those last futile gasps of human vanity so long ago had brought a new ice-age to the ravaged planet and the air rarely held substantial moisture at this latitude - not that there was anyone to keep record of such things. Scattered dust-devils slowly meandered across the ground marking time in the bleakness.

The scene was much larger than this microcosm of loss, of course. The road - stretching across the landscape to the horizon in either direction - remained littered with similar examples of the urgency in the panicked flight desperate people had taken, all of them trying to get somewhere - anywhere - that might give refuge from the inconceivable horror they realized had slipped its bonds and was unstoppably coming to break forth upon them.

The overgrown remains of charred towns and the canopies of new-growth forests could be considered beautiful to a consciousness able to appreciate such things, but there was no such entity to take in the view. The Earth remained filled with the sounds of the kinetic energy of natural processes such as wind, moving water, and falling things - but nowhere were the voices of humans, cattle, or other higher life forms found. No wolf howled; no lion roared. Mankind’s final achievement had also been its most thorough.

The oceans teamed with plankton again. All kinds of sea life were rebounding from the low populations that survived the time when men had hunted them to the edge of extinction. One day birds would return to the skies. An infection had ironically used the resources of its host to burn itself out. Now, given time, nature would restore balance to the biosphere.

The moon, as it had throughout the ages, remained in its orbit - unaffected by the creatures that emerged and eventually disappeared below it.

On the ground - concerned only with its quest for food - a small cockroach crawled across the heart shaped locket and quickly moved on.