The Traveler

“Oblivion, pure oblivion.”

The words scratch across the weathered pages of a small, black, leather bound book.

The plastic shell of a flimsy ballpoint pen lifts from the page, and up to the emaciated lips of a tired eyed man.

Pondering, the man stares out at the ruined landscape of what once was a metropolis of madness and mayhem.

On a typical day that madness was championed and the mayhem, controlled.

It’s what a city as old as New York understands on a deeper level than most of us understand each other.

But on that day, that infamous day, the madness boiled over and the mayhem spread like an oil slick over a great sea.

The man’s pen falls back to the page.

“After all these years, It stills feels like pure oblivion with every new town or city I pass through. New York, though my place of birth, feels more alien than any of the other cities along this journey.”

“I swore to myself to never return to a place of such tainted memories, but the numbers have led me here against my own good judgement.”

“40.7084•N, 74.0087•W”

“Initially, the radio frequency was weak, but as I got closer to the source, the numbers became more clear. Once I corresponded with my map, it was obvious that these folks had found refuge deep within the heart of the city. The looping message spoke of survivors and hope, but both are rare commodities of now.”

“My nerves become more and more shot with each step closer, but why? Trust issues? Survivor’s guilt? What am I afraid of? The next 6 blocks will give me enough time to calm myself bef-“

The cheap pen’s stilted ink runs dry as colorless indents carve themselves, in the shape of letters, deep into the page’s fibers.

The man wildly scribbles in the margins of the notebook, as if hoping to resuscitate an old friend. The pen though, has reached it’s final destination.

The weary man tosses the tool to the rubble beneath his toes. Frustrated, he begins to walk forward into the broken city, as the dryness of the pen evokes the painful sensation of an even dryer tongue.

So dry, all of it. A land once rotated through seasons, has now but one. This new season, unfamiliar to those before the reckoning. No heat, no water, no ice or bloom...just fine particulate and violent winds. The sound of thunder sometimes seeps between the quilted clouds, but never a drop of relief.

The traveler drags what’s left of himself over piles of plank and broken brick.

Through thickets of switchgrass and ragged weeds.

Between rusted wrecks and shattered shields.

Block after block, the city persists. Small details change, like the occasional vendor stand or lone bicycle, but the ruins remain as a constant.

As the last block approaches, the traveler stops. The muscles tremble, but not from exhaustion. The heart pumps, but not from fright. The mind races, but not from confusion. It’s all familiar, like the moments right before you tell someone “I love you” for the first time. A fear that is filled with hope.

As the final step falls, a building, a familiar building, stands formidable in front of the traveler. Raising his gaze the words, “Federal Reserve Bank”, appear etched in stone beneath a thin veil of draping plant life.

A mat of shattered glass welcomes the traveler into the blown out shell of a bank. The slow, meticulous, roll of the traveler’s step cautiously creeps over fallen facade and into the quiet hall.

Slinking deeper into the maw of the structure, the traveler feverishly grips the worn wooden handle of his reliable hatchet, hanging from his hip.

The recently rustled dust hangs in the sunbeams seeping through the shattered skylights, illuminating the travler’s path, but not his mind.

His mind remains skeptical, as the silence that surrounds him greases his grip on the handle of the slight axe.

Out of his peripherals he notices a pen gently swinging from a chain anchored to a table. The man faintly smiles as he caresses the pen in his palm and testing its value on his skin. In just a thin line of blue, the pen states it’s worth. With a quick yank the pen disconnects from the table and into the pocket of the traveler.

Moving deeper inside he scans the dinged marble floors and ransacked interior for any signs of life, when suddenly, he stops.

No more that thirty paces ahead, a lying man, or what’s left of a man. The traveler approaches the body, head on a swivel, but as he get’s closer it’s clear to see, the man’s been here for a while.

The body lies on the floor, face down, appendages splayed. A gun rests on the floor on a pile of bony appendages. On top of the skeletal figure, a backpack. The traveler, reaching down, grips the zipper on the satchel, gently gliding the contraption along its teeth.

As the zipper reaches its end point, suddenly, a stack of cash peeks out from its the sack. The traveler furrows his brow as he reaches down, grabbing the thick stack of bills. A yellow, one thousand dollar, bill strap is wrapped snugly around a stack of twenty dollar bills.

The man, curiously, lifts the open of the backpack revealing 19 or more similar stack inside the pack. Reaching in he grabs another to inspect, but when the stack is revealed he stops once again.

Lodged in the bill strap, a bullet. Crumpled and pressed, the bullet, once free, has now been imprisoned within a thick stack of paper bills. The dark hole in the back of the ivory skull is now much more telling of the events that once took place here.

Dropping the stack of bills, the traveler leaves the money and pile of bones behind, to discover the identity of the bullet’s master.

Deeper into the dark bank the traveler walks, snaking blind corners and scaling rubble. A flare emerges in the his hand and with a rip of the hand, the flare ignites, bathing the black room in a red glow.

As the traveler’s eyes adjust to the light, In front of him, thick iron bars are revealed. The heavy iron wall expands across the entire side of the room, separating the two halves. The man scans the metal barrier, immediately noticing a door in the center. It’s already open.

As the traveler steps through the iron curtain, he realized the reasons for its construction. On the other side, a magnificent golden vault, swung ajar. The locking mechanisms inside the enormous door sparkle under the red tint flame of the flare. The traveler is awestruck and dumbfounded by the sheer enormity of such a mechanical marvel, but once the wonder has worn, he sees it.

Stepping over the vault’s doorframe, the traveler finds himself inside the once secure vault. As the man sweeps the room with his glowing flare, a body is revealed. The glowing wand continues along the room as body after body reveals itself in the light of the crackling flame.

All dead, all of them.

Each of the bodies, a dark hole in the center of the skull. An injury only dealt by someone with no humanity left.

As the man scans the room, the dark holes appear one after another, until it doesn’t. One of the skeletons remains, what seems to be, intact with its skull. The traveler peers into the skeleton’s dark ocular pits, trying to understand what has happened. The confusion and anxiety begins to overwhelm the traveler, as more questions than answer begin to plague his mind. As the traveler stands, he notices something. In the hand of the skeleton, another pistol. Just like the body in the lobby, the boney hand is holding a pistol.

Grabbing the gun from the dead hand, the traveler stand back up examining the weapon. He slides the clip out, but it’s empty. Sliding the clips back in he gazes past the gun and at the body once more, and that’s when the revelation sinks in. The missing bullet hole was in fact there the entire time. Instead of the forehead, the hole sits protruding, out the top of the skull.

The man collapses to the floor in realization of the situation. This entire trip was a waste, over before it ever started. These people died months, maybe years ago.

The traveler holsters his axe and places the slowly dying flare on the floor in front of him. Into his pack, his hands go, brandishing his black, leather notebook in seconds. As his other hand flies to his pocket, the chained pen emerges as well. He begins to write in the light of the diminishing flare.

“Before I didn’t know what I was truly afraid of, but now it seems so clear. I’m afraid of hope. Hope has kept me alive this entire time, and that’s a fact, but while hope has kept me alive, it has ended the lives of others.”

“These people believed that whatever this world is now, would pass and that paper money would actually be used for anything other than burning. That kind of hope, that got them killed.”

“This money, all this money, it mean’s nothing. To survive you must adapt. I don’t think most of us know how to adapt though, because adapting means leaving something else behind. A lifestyle, an ideology, a comfortable existence, and we mentally can’t handle that.”

“I realize now that I am afraid of hope. Not hope for the future, but hope of grasping onto the past and never letting go. I will not let the old ways control my actions, I will adapt. These poor souls fell victim to the wrong kind of hope, but not me.”

“It’s not the money I crave, but the comfort of companionship once more before I leave this earth.”

The traveler’s flare sputters and fades as the glowing red tint fades into darkness.