Looking Back Through Ash

by Wade Ebeling

  Eventually, despite Daniel’s desire to postpone the search, it was time to look for what he had come for. Luckily, the memories were readily available to his sub-conscious. Daniel took a meandering path across the library. With all of the shelves toppled, leaving dusty, slippery piles of books, and because his feet were only being half as useful as usual, he tottered very carefully. Without having to think about where he was heading, Daniel made it there.

  In a dark corner that the dirty man had obviously been using for a toilet, stood three tall shelves stripped clean of the books that they once held. These shelves were anchored to the wall, thwarting whoever had toppled the others. Daniel scrambled over the books and broken chairs leading to the middle shelf. Like he had placed it there himself, Daniel reached up into the shadows, and his hand lay right onto the book. Just like everything else in the building, the book had a thick layer of dust and ash on it. Clutching his prize, Daniel walked back to the clearing that offered slightly more light, along with being less harsh on his nose.

  Sitting on the edge of the table, he meticulously brushed the remaining fine dust from the red cover. ‘Paradise Lost, A Poem in Twelve Books, By: John Milton’ branded the hard cover in faux gold-leaf text.

  Resolved to the fact that this had almost certainly been a wasted trip, Daniel opened the cover of the book. The first page was blank, and he felt his posture slouch. Still not expecting much, he licked the pad of his index finger and turned to the next page. There, on top of the title, sat a clear plastic bag with a folded piece of paper inside. Daniel touched the bag, then quickly pulled his hand away. His father had put this here, for him. The mere thought of what it might hold gave Daniel pause.

  He gently picked up the flattened plastic and paper, bringing it up to his good right eye. There were some kind of markings written inside the folded note, but just sitting pensively idle and looking curiously at the note revealed nothing, so Daniel unfolded the plastic and drew out the paper. Still convinced that this would be a cruel joke, played at his expense, he kept his emotions in check. Daniel unfolded the paper; first once, then twice.

  It was a well-drawn map.

  Having spent hours scouring over the atlas in the backpack helped Daniel identify what he was looking at. The arrow with a capitol ‘N’ at its point was a compass rose, and the ladder that ran from top to bottom on the left side of the map represented railroad tracks. The only thing to the left of the tracks were the initials ‘RV’. Daniel did not know what they meant, but the initials ‘K.A.’, and the number ‘14’ placed in the middle of the only roads shown intersecting made perfect sense. The road running North/South was obviously Klondike Avenue, and the road running East/West was 14 Mile Road. Several buildings were shown, but the only other marking was a circled ‘X’, which wasn’t near anything else on the map.

  According to the drawing, the indicated spot was somewhere south of 14 Mile and west of Klondike. This perplexed Daniel immensely. He had been by that area dozens of times, and the only thing that he knew of in that spot was an antiquated concrete crushing plant, which had been abandoned decades before the world changed. There was nothing there but towering mounds of broken concrete. At least, that was all that could be seen from the road.

  Daniel pulled the atlas out, looking for a route that would get him there without getting too close to the Warehouse. The most obvious route, to avoid most of the main roads, was back up past his old neighborhood and along the river. His only other choices were long, indirect paths that led through unfamiliar territories. He knew that it was going to be a dangerous trip, whichever way he chose to go. Familiarity with the hiding spots and hidden paths around his well-known subdivision made the choice for him.

  It was almost noon before the stunned feeling finally wore off, but Daniel felt that he should still be able to make it to the map’s destination before night fall. He packed up everything, except his paranoia, which would never be stored away again, and headed out on the next leg of his quest.

  Chapter 21

  Having something like the map to occupy his mind helped Daniel concentrate on what mattered. He moved with both purpose and attentiveness. His pace was not rushed; he planned each movement with a carefulness that only the fear of death could bring about. Avoiding homes and crossing open streets wherever possible, Daniel tuned into his surroundings.

  The tiny movements of animals in the tall grasses and lush trees caught his eye regularly. Anything suspect was glassed with the binoculars until deemed safe, being very careful to not bump the throbbing cut over his nearly-useless left eye. Each snap of a twig and rustling of the leaves reminded him that the Bob Donner wanted him dead. Anyone could be hiding anywhere, just waiting for Daniel to pass, so he moved from shadow to shadow along his route. The shadows offered him concealment and temporary relief from the sun; the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. It was something that Daniel thought he remembered from his childhood, but couldn’t quite be sure of.

  Daniel attached leafy twigs to his hat and the backpack, figuring that he passed as a reasonable facsimile to the picture labeled ‘Viet Cong’, which he had once seen in a book about camouflage. The main thing that Daniel took away from the book was that the color black was as unnatural and as visible as the color white is. The branches that he had stuck into the m.o.l.l.e. strapping of the backpack not only helped to blend him in with the surroundings, it also helped break up his human form. The dirt and mossy grime that he rubbed on his arms, face, and neck dulled the sheen of his skin, and kept the sun from burning it.

  Two hours of slow, cautious pace had moved Daniel a mile from the library. Large clumps of thick weeds and spindly trees found long-lost homes across the soon-to-be reclaimed landscape. Almost every trace of mankind was being systematically wiped away. Oak and sumac saplings, along with blankets of ivy, hid the remnants of homes behind them. Rotted street lamps and power poles expired underfoot; snares of old cables traced lines between the earthen, crumbling mounds. Daniel used every copse of trees and thicket of weeds that he could find, giving up on the idea that he would make it to the indicated spot on the map today. His mind was too slow, his depth perception was too poor, and his paranoia was too strong to speed up.

  At first, his intentions were to stay well away from his old house, but every new turn and shadow led him in that direction. It seemed like it was the only place that his body knew how to get to. Closer and closer he came, until, from between the wreckage of two colonial style homes, he saw the stalwart chimney of the burnt house standing behind where his house had stood. Skin crawling in anticipation, Daniel forced patience upon his desire to see if anything of his remained.

  The failure point for most homes was their roofs; once a small hole started leaking, the problems started quickly compounding. Ceilings would collapse, allowing walls and carpets to absorb water. Rot started and never stopped. Without basic maintenance, just a few trickles wrote a slow doom for the houses. They might look completely intact from the outside, only to be uninhabitable on the inside. When Daniel broke into all of these houses when he was a teenager, some already showed signs of their demise. A tree branch poking through a window, damp basements, and mold streaked walls all told the same story. It had only been by adding copious amounts of tar and new shingles that Daniel had kept his family in a dry place to live.

  When you added ten years to the slow decay, it meant there would be no safe haven for Daniel in this area. Even the few homes that he believed to have been recently occupied looked to be quickly deteriorating. The mold, ash, and mildew inside these homes would eventually lead to what the doctors in the Warehouse clinic called ‘brown lung’, and death was never far behind.

  “Okay, one quick peek, and then move on…” Daniel muttered under his breath.

  He spent another twenty minutes searching for the slightest of movements or the faintest of sounds; unable to take the first step. The only thing that his senses could detect was the smell of burnt memories, as it kept cruelly filling his nostri
ls. Daniel would have to get closer to see if anything of his past life had survived, and soon because the sun was dipping low. The two-storied house, next to the burnt house behind his, offered the best chance to see the area and not be seen by anyone left to watch the area.

  “Well, let’s just see if they are waiting on me,” Daniel said to no one. “This is a bad idea. You realize that, right?” he said to his shadow, as he stood up.

  Daniel crept out of his scratchy hiding spot and across the buckled street. He swung around to the side of the two-storied house that had a doorway into the garage, and slipped inside. The door leading into the house was standing open. This was something that Daniel would not have done. Every effort was made to seal houses after he broke into them. This was done for two reasons: to make it obvious if anyone came into the houses after him, and to keep items, of which he did not know what to do with at the time, from being exposed to the elements. This door being open was as obvious as it got. Someone had been, or might still be, inside the house.

  Daniel slowly cleared the main floor of the house, careful to not get too close to the windows. The wide picture window in back let him see in the direction of his old house. Where should have been the roof, with a water barrel on top, was an unhindered view of the late afternoon sky. Each time the stairs creaked on the way up to the second floor, he would pause and listen; this happened on almost every step. He quickly checked two of the bedrooms and the bathroom once he gained the landing. In the rush to get close to the window in the last bedroom, Daniel walked right past the folding metal chairs, and right over an empty can of green beans.

  It didn’t take long for Daniel to realize that there would be nothing salvageable from the house. Some of the brick walls and the chimney still partially stood, but everything else sat down in the still smoldering basement. The house was a total loss. They had even taken his truck; Corinne’s car, like the remnants of the house, sat smoldering in the driveway. It had taken a dangerous, wasted trip to get here, and the only thing that seeing the carnage did for Daniel was stoke up his anger.

  Bob Donner had come looking for him. Now, in return, Daniel was going to go looking for Bob Donner. Questions about why Bob was after him fell away; they did not matter anymore. If Daniel got the chance, he was going to kill him. There were no questions as to why about that.

  Daniel turned to depart the sad scene, kicking the empty can across the room with his first step. It was only then that he noticed the chairs, and how they were positioned. Someone had placed them where they could overlook his house, or what was left of it. He dropped down low, out of sight from anyone looking in though a different window, maybe from a house across the street. An empty can of stewed tomato sat by his hand. Daniel picked the large can up and dipped a finger inside. Tracing the inside of the can with his finger, he stopped when he felt the dampness that had settled along the bottom. The can had been recently opened. Daniel now knew for certain that Bob Donner had left someone here to see if he returned. No doubt it was one of his willful-assassins, one of his former-police goons.

  Speed, rather than discretion, seemed the best course of action to follow now. He had to gain as much distance from this damned place as he could. Without looking back, and with no thoughts of ever coming back, Daniel fled the area. Taking the long way around the L-shaped block at a full sprint, Daniel dove over the wall at the abrupt termination of the dead end street, which jutted out from the block that he used to live on. Stumbling for a few paces, trying to get his feet back under his body, which seemed to not want to wait for anything, he dashed across the back lot of where the Korean church sat. As fast as Daniel went, the sun matched his speed by dropping quickly away. The fear that had charged his body for the extreme exertion ebbed away with the sunlight, replaced by an overwhelming urge to drop to his knees and cower.

  Daniel made it to the riverbank without the amount of time it took to get there accompanying. He found that, in his haste to get away from the ruination of his life, he was on the opposite side of the river from his last trip. He had crossed right over the wide drainage without noticing, until he turned west, running into the waterway. A towering plot of twelve foot tall reeds clung to the flats on this side of the water, and the dwarfing stalks swallowed him up whole before he had taken three steps inside. The saturated ground pulled and sucked at his feet with every step within the lengthy patch, as Daniel woefully continued walking. There was no way to stop and rest his emotions here. Just stopping to rest his feet threatened to sink him permanently in the muck. He trudged onward.

  It grew dark and oppressively tight within the invasive species of reeds, and Daniel soon found himself navigating by feel to remain upright and by intuition for direction. The relief of bursting free from the suffocating confines of the phragmites was short lived. The sky had drawn into lines of deep navy under an abyss of black, and he could hardly see his feet anymore. A hulking shadow stood over him, higher up on the eroded line of the river’s ragged lip, and a steep landslide blocked him from following along the water’s edge any further.

  The shaggy outline of the shadow, under Daniel’s strained remaining eye, formed into that of an old willow tree. Each of the tree’s whip-like branches stretched low and spread across the ground. Daniel used these overgrown branches, which poured over the lip of the embankment, to pull his weighted mind and body up and over. He struggled to crawl into the dead space under the tree as its tangled branches fought to snag upon any available niche of his clothing and pack.

  It was absolutely devoid of light inside the low hollow formed around the tree trunk. This made the white beam of the flashlight seem even more effective than usual to his one good eye. Daniel cleared away some of the worm-like catkins to put the backpack and his knees down. After leaning the rifle against the trunk, he pulled out two tea candles and a lighter from a pouch on the backpack. He cleared three smaller spots within arm’s reach; two for the candles, which he lit after setting them in place, and one for the pop can stove and stand. Despite his multiple aches and deep desire for rest, Daniel crawled back out from under the tree, camping pot in hand, sliding back down to the river’s edge. After scooping some water into the stainless steel pot, Daniel found it far more difficult to climb back up without spilling any out.

  Back in the relative safety found under the willow, Daniel set the pot on the stand. A few of the interior branches were brushing the top of his head, so he pinned them up out of the way with a zip-tie. Daniel lit the fuel in the stove with one strike of a magnesium fire starter. He would let the water reach boiling before adding the rice to cook, just to be safe. The rice was almost finished when the fuel ran out. This was not a bad thing; Daniel added some small fragments of jerky to the rice and covered it back up to finish cooking in its own trapped heat. Ten minutes later, Daniel was eating voraciously.

  He rinsed and scrubbed the stuck bits from the pan in the stream and packed it away. After blowing out one of the candles, Daniel’s day caught up with him. He pulled the sleeping bag, foam pad, and fleece hoodie out to try and get some sleep. It took a while to find enough room, without an impeding root in the way, to lay the sleeping bag out flat. He balled up the fleece sweatshirt and laid his head down on it. With a feeling that Daniel could only have described as ‘full of emptiness’, he fell asleep.

  ……..

  Tuesday

  Mistakenly, Daniel believed that the kink in his neck was what had woken him. As he struggled to form the hoodie back into something that resembled a pillow, the sounds of distant music made its way through the thick canopy of the willow tree. The ‘thump…thump, thump’ of a filtered, echoing bass line took Daniel a full minute to recognize it for what it actually was; a party. It was a long way off, and just barely discernible as music, but the distance said that it was being played very loudly. There was no need to guess at which direction the out of place noises came from, it was all too obvious, they came from the Warehouse.

  The candle that he had left burning was almos
t out, and Daniel watched the tiny point of light strain to stay alive. The orange flame seemed frozen in place, stubborn against the losing odds. The obstinate glow hovered, paused, and died. Alone in the dark, Daniel tried to go back to sleep, but the disturbing music, which when first noticed could barely be heard, was now all that he could hear. It burrowed into his brain, mocking his attempts to ignore it. His eye hurt as well, pounding at a different rhythm than that of the music. The distant sounds kept him awake for the party’s entire duration. The music finally died away around 3 a.m., allowing him to get back to sleep.

  ……..

  Two squirrels, who were chasing one another, burst into Daniel’s resting spot at first light, scaring years off both parties’ lives. Shoving his hand out for the rifle, far too late to have been effective, Daniel clutched the hand grip and listened to the rodents chatter crossly at him as they ran away to the north.

  “Son of a bitch,” Daniel sighed, laying his head back down.

  His neck seemed to have made good use of the repositioned hoodie; it only ached slightly now. The gash on his eyebrow now itched with a fury, but Daniel knew that this meant it was healing, and he resisted the urge to touch it. They only thing still craving more sleep was his heavy eyelids, the rest of his body, mainly his pounding heart, had been frightened awake. Daniel sat up on the sleeping bag, the rifle held between pinned knees. He gave himself a little time to adjust to the upright position. There was a sense to hurry along, to keep going. What he was going to find at the end of the map was a mystery that begged to be solved as quickly as possible. He just had to know.