The Old Man In The Dust

It has been weeks since I last saw Elsibeth. She was determined to go to the surface to get whatever supplies she could find. She couldn't stand the thought of us wasting the last of our rations, stuck here in this crumbling pit. I knew it was wrong to send her out alone. I could exonerate myself from my crushing guilt by saying my injury was to blame. I still knew had I not given in to my shameful cowardice I could have gone with her, instead, I let her go. Elsibeth said she would just be an hour or two, and she would be back.

Please understand, I begged her, I did not want her to go alone, nor I be left here with not another sane, real voice in the darkness to distract from the knocks and whispers that surrounds me in this perilous void of echoes and shadows. Yet, the very thought of going out there, seeing the abomination, the ruin, the ungodly things that lurk in waiting... It was too much to bear ... I couldn't do it...

I am not an evil man... But I am a pathetic one... I write this with the last bits of charcoal and parchment we have, as I've noticed my mind has begun to go… I must remember her name, or lose what remains of my humanity. I fear this is the last clemency I shall receive, and opportunity for vindication, I shall be allowed.

The day of, and days immediately after, the occurrence, have all but completely left my memory. A mass of blurred shapes and muted colors of chaos and devastation, my ears are still ticking and ringing with the noise... All that remain are the bits and fragments of what came before, and what came after....

I can remember familiar scents and sensations of comforting mundanity; coffee, a bed, the feeling of warm fresh water running down my back... The scent of an old nostalgic room, and a soft delicate hand I grasp as I hold a warm body closely to my own. Feeling the smooth cold metal of a necklace graze my palm, a locket. A gift she would never take off.

The memories are the only comfort I have now... Here in the chilling blackness I sit in with only the most meager, dwindling fire to provide some comfort. A mild sanctuary from the dark and the damp. My only other reprieve, the ticking of an old pocket watch I'd received from my father the day I was drafted… the analog trinket that had survived through his time during the great war… I still have the comforting habit of winding it… Seeing time pass reminds me that I am still sane. 10:53…. Seven more minutes.

The watch is a grounding artifact, if you think about it. To me at least, it reminds me that constructs like time still exist whether or not we're here to keep track of it. Civilization had once existed, and I had been a part of it… The countdown to judgement, to salvation, to anything at all, it's coming. You can see it approach as the seconds pass... Whether or not my dying mind is here to perceive it, nothing can change the fact that this was the watch in my fathers hand, held tightly in the trenches, counting down the seconds till the war was over… Until salvation or judgement came…. Time was passing even in his darkest hour and felt as if he was damned to float in purgatory for eternity, but the ticking of the second hand, his only reminder that this hell would pass and he would one day be free… It was a gift of knowing for sure you made it through one more hour… One more day.. A small victory in each second that passed...

I shrink... I hear something again and shudder in terror as it nears the hatch. An approaching pounding, lumbering, the crashing of rocks and of rubble... I can't look, small rocks dig into my back as I cower against this cramped, squalid, cave consisting of great, jagged boulders of concrete and rebar, cold and alone. I'm ashamed to say, I'm too scared to investigate. Even after everything that has happened... What if the creatures and mutants or skeletal wraiths I heard tell of were true…? I am a coward...

I just heard something else. Flinching and testing the reflexes of my withered sinew as I hear a loud, reverberating creeeak- BANG! Then a clink from just above, holding my breath as eons seemed to fly by as I cower all the way back away from the hatch, not daring to move a muscle, petrified in an agonizing silence, I feel my fragile thumping heart is about to give out.

I think it's gone now.... Cold, foul smelling wind seeping through the rusted hackneyed hatch that drips with a black revolting ooze that separates me from what nightmares must await me up above. I tremble in the darkness....

She was always braver than I was... Elsibeth… Fearless and calm in the face of anything... I'd say more but the throbbing in my skull and churning of my stomach are flaring up again... Hungry, was a couple days ago... Now it's just coping with the pains of deprivation... I like to think saving the last ration of pitiful, dirty, dried meat was my only act of penitence, that as if saving it for her, would be the key to the forgiveness required to validate my cowardice when judgement is passed at the ethereal gates, if they too, had not also gone up in the blast…

I can feel it. Any moment now she was going to knock on the hatch, we would eat together, and everything would be right again… Perhaps I'd even wake up from this nightmare...

There were more of us, once. Seven in all, I think. A doddering old woman kept repeating how it was only a matter of time until the army showed up to save us, how she heard on the radio, "11 O'clock, 11 O'clock! We'll all be saved! Just a few more minutes until salvation!"… A paranoid man who accused everyone of conspiracy, and grandiose delusions, quoting verses in a murmur accusing the tired old man in the corner of being an enemy of the state, warning of monsters and mutants born from the fallout that must be lurking up above. A young couple who didn't say much but to ask for the time and some food.

One by one, they stopped coming back after leaving for supplies. We knew they were not coming back… The paranoid man went after the couple had left... The woman insisted she could hear the tanks approaching, the troops had come to save her, safety was at hand, but there was nothing but the hollow sound of the wind. Still, we couldn't stop her... One day the old man in the corner just didn't wake up. Then it was just Elsibeth and I.

Even now I can't bring myself to look at what remains of the old man, in the corner… I can hardly bear to look at my own hands, decaying alarmingly fast. I find myself awakening in piles of my own hair and vomit. Would my wife even recognize me if she did return?

Radiation, I think they called it... It can blight a man beyond what words can say... I can hear the timbre of that old crackling radio uttering that hideous word even now.... I can remember the phrase, something about mutually assured destruction, bunkers, this side, that side, both unwilling to back down due to the dissent of a handful of prideful old men. Honor, supremacy, threat, fear…. It’s humorous. Even my own name escapes me now… I can't even remember what side I was on… Yet those voices still echo in my head... We had no idea…. How could we have known what would become of us…?

I know it is suicide to dare venture to the surface. Even still, without my Elsibeth, what is the use....? Whatever humanity remains within my decrepit, gaunt, poc and corpuscle-ridden skeletal form, is drawn from that name... Perhaps my state has weathered down my better judgement... But I must be with her... My last hope is that she's hiding elsewhere... Couldn't make it back... She could be alive waiting for me... That's the only reason I've persisted these 14 long days.... I only can tell by the compulsive winding of my cracked watch….10:53… seven more minutes… It's 10:53….

So... I'm going to open the hatch... May whatever god remains that would allow this, give me the strength....

As I have just looked up now I can see something dangling, caught in the light... My paper thin cheeks now sting as if my tears are acid.... It's a tarnished heart shaped locket... Once beveled and embossed with a gilded sheen.... It dangles there twirling.... It's open... And as it rotates I can see two faces.... Embracing.... It was Elsie in a wedding veil.... Being held.... By a young man in a private’s uniform … A man I think I used to be... Years ago, before all this, we were young and happy…

Before I know it more of that putrid rancid slop is dripping down the chain from the slightest opening in the hatch and I whimper not yet processing what's to come, I pull on it to save it from being sullied further, but it won't come loose, without thinking I use the last of my strength to push open the hatch with grueling shriek and a crash onto some rubble. A cloud of dust erupts from the motion, showering me in a beam of unrelenting light piercing through the darkness, as my sallow, atrophied form falls backward and I heave heavily, recovering from the exertion.

As soon as I am able, I slowly pull my head up through the ragged hatch opening, I finally bore witness to the full devastation. Chunks of buildings littering a full, smoggy grey wasteland. There were no monsters… there was no fires or chaos or fighting... even worse was the horrific silence… The emptiness of a world that once was, but is not anymore. The unnerving stillness… The implications of the silence, too great, too insidious to speak…

Spattered upon what remained of buildings I saw shadows… grim silhouettes of people, who had not endured the blast. The memory of their existence is forever stained upon the desecrated slab that was once their homes, their schools, their offices… The grim footprints of hundreds of thousands of millions of lives- there’s so many…! It just goes on as far as the horizon and beyond…! Living, breathing, dreaming, human beings….! Men, women, children, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, people slaughtered, and for what…..? Somebody tell me what was ever gained…?!

Here I stand. Surveying the wake. Bearing witness to the cost. The unending devastation, clutching in my tremulous palm, that tiny, sentimental hunk of metal. Not a bird in the sky… Not a leaf of green at all… The only man in the world… Not a sound can be heard... The sky, a uniform grey. The land, a dead horizon motionless… no life… no life anywhere... Flecks of ash falling from above, marring and burning my skin, but I can't feel it… There's nothing for me now…

Amidst this cruelest silence, I stop. I no longer hear the ticking of my father’s watch.

It's 11 O'clock....

It's 11 O'clock.

As I try to move, I feel a tug of weight on the locket chain. I glance down to investigate what it has caught on.

I gave my wife Elsibeth a golden, heart shaped locket as a gift on our wedding night...

She never took it off.