Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  There was no answer that would satisfy me. The four of us had been on the cusp of succumbing, to what the land was hurling at us, and because of what the blight had taken. Now, three of us still faced that near inevitability.

  “It makes no sense,” I said, shaking my head.

  We sat together, huddled against the back wall of the shack, what was left of the structure trembling violently. Minute by minute the storm built. Pieces of the wall to our right began to crack. Small sections flapped in the wind and were peeled away. Our shelter was being devoured.

  “We tried,” I said.

  Neil said nothing. Neither did Elaine. We just held onto each other and, eventually, closed our eyes.

  Three

  Darkness.

  I thought I was dead. Then, sensations pricked at me. At what must be my consciousness. Pain on my lips. My skin baked and stinging. Air moving.

  But not as it had. Not a storm raging. Not the wind screaming.

  I opened my eyes.

  It was night, and I was alive. A soft, cool breeze drifted over me. I tipped my head right and saw Elaine in the shadowy drizzle of moonlight that slanted into the shack. Her head lay on my shoulder, chest rising and falling, eyes closed, a cake of dried earth soiling her dark hair.

  “Fletch...”

  It was Neil. To my left. I looked and saw my friend slouched against the back wall of the shack next to me. His eyes were mostly open and fixed ahead, looking past the half collapsed roof to the almost serene night outside.

  “It wasn’t a nightmare,” he said, as if surprised by the realization.

  “No,” I told him.

  On my shoulder, Elaine stirred. She lifted her head slowly, sitting up as she looked to Neil and me. In her eyes was the same surprise I knew was in mine. An odd acceptance that we were still alive.

  “It’s quiet,” she said, turning toward the dark stillness outside.

  We were all suffering. From shock. Dwindling food. Scarce water. Our bodies ached. Our skin was burned and split. That was our situation. But it wasn’t going to be our end.

  “We have to move,” I said.

  I planted a hand against the rickety wall and willed myself to stand. Just hours ago, after watching Burke meet his end, I’d let myself give up. That, I knew, was as much a process of feeling responsible for his demise as it was a recognition of what we faced. But dire would only equate to hopeless if we let it.

  And I would not.

  “How much water do we have?” I asked.

  Neither Elaine nor Neil needed to check. The liquid had become precious in the arid, unforgiving environment.

  “Ten, twelve ounces,” Neil said.

  “About that,” Elaine said, reaching to the pack Burke had left in the shack to retrieve his opaque water bottle. “Couple of ounces in his. Maybe a swallow.”

  I nodded. My own hard plastic canteen contained a splash at the bottom. Enough to wet my lips.

  “What’s east of us, Neil?”

  My friend looked to me, then pulled the map from his pack, kneeling over it as he clicked a flashlight on. The device burned bright for a second, then went dark.

  “I need yours,” Neil said, setting his aside as I handed him my small flashlight.

  “Extra batteries?” I asked.

  Neil shook his head as he lit up the map. I looked to Elaine.

  “I have one spare set left,” she said. “I’ll check Burke’s pack.”

  We’d expended more of everything since having to abandon our plan of flying to Cheyenne. Food. Water. Batteries for our lights. We’d been able to replenish our water supply on the way, but that was over two days ago. Since then we’d subsisted on rationed drinks. The same parceling of our stores would now have to apply to how much light we could use.

  “None in his,” Elaine reported.

  “We’re five miles or so from a place called Manila,” Neil said, clicking the light off and tucking the map away. “Just on the Utah side of the border. A couple miles past that is the Green River.”

  Water...

  That had to be our destination now. Food was important, but we had a few days’ rations left, and maybe a week beyond that before our bodies went into full rebellion from lack of nourishment. We had a couple days at most until lack of water would do far worse to us.

  “Okay,” I said, lifting and shouldering my pack and my AR. “We move now. Whoever’s in the lead is the only one to use a light.”

  Neil dragged himself up and readied his gear, a hesitance about him that I could not only see—I could feel it.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He looked to me, then to Elaine, a quiet sadness in his eyes.

  “There’s something we have to do before we leave,” Neil said.

  * * *

  Elaine made a cross from scraps of the shack’s roof structure, lashing the pieces together before using her knife to carve the words upon the bits of snapped boards. ‘Burke Stovich’ was all it said. She hammered it into the ground, no hole to accompany it, because there was no body to bury. We’d done a very quick look around the area, finding nothing. Not a single trace of Burke, of our friend. The blast had erased him from our presence, and the storm’s rage had carried the bits and pieces off, scattering the remains for burial by the wind, and the dust. At the hand of nature.

  “Anyone want to say anything?” I asked as we stood facing the marker.

  “What is there to say?” Neil wondered. “I hardly knew him.”

  There was a quiet that confirmed what my friend had said. He was in no position to speak on the man’s life. Nor was I. We’d only known Burke Stovich as protector of Bandon. Of Eagle One. He’d offered nothing more concrete about his life before the blight. Not to me, at least.

  “He was a firefighter,” Elaine said, looking from the cross she’d made to Neil and me. “In Seattle.”

  Seattle...

  His hatred of the horde, an animus that burned deep and open, like a wound that refused to scab, made sense now.

  “He watched it all fall apart,” Elaine said. “Watched people begin to starve. One night he went out to scavenge for food, and when he returned home his wife was gone.”

  “Gone?” I asked, and she nodded.

  “That’s the word he used,” Elaine said.

  “He didn’t mean missing,” Neil said.

  That was easy enough to guess. So many were gone. ‘Taken’ might be a better word. ‘Dead’ just didn’t seem to convey anything close to the loss we’d all experienced. Some more than others.

  “He hinted at losing someone,” I said, recalling the exchange between Burke and I on the bridge of the Groton Star.

  “How the hell did you get this out of him?” Neil asked.

  “I didn’t get it out of him,” Elaine said. “He just poured it out. Maybe a month before you all arrived. I couldn’t sleep and I went for a walk in town and I saw him in the park. Just sitting on one of the benches. Drinking.”

  I could picture that. Burke taking advantage of the rule that didn’t exist anymore. Drinking wherever he pleased. Whenever he pleased.

  “I just walked up to him to say hello,” Elaine said. “And he started telling me. He didn’t look at me, not once while I was standing there listening to him. It was like a spigot opened and everything came out. Some of it was just in bits and pieces. He came home, the house was trashed, she was gone. There was blood. He looked for her. And looked. And looked.”

  In a way, I was glad he hadn’t found her. That he didn’t have to face what he might have come across. Not knowing, as hard as that must have been, was infinitely better than finding her strung up in some shack, ready to be carved up for dinner. Neil and I had witnessed that. If that had been someone we knew, someone we loved, the humanity we’d managed to retain would have been shattered. What we would have turned into after that, I didn’t want to imagine.

  “He said he knew the crazies had taken her,” she continued. “Before the Horde earned its name. He gave that to the
m. Told us all about it when he arrived in Bandon.”

  “He just left?” Neil asked, puzzled. “I would have thought a guy like Burke would have brought hellfire to anyone even remotely connected to harming his wife.”

  “Who says he didn’t,” Elaine suggested.

  That was easy to picture, even if the man had shared none of it. And maybe because I’d done the same when seeking vengeance for my friend, Del. Men could snap, and then settle back into some state that approximated normalcy. Sanity in an insane world. Knowing that, accepting that, made what had happened to Burke all the more pointless.

  “He survived that,” I began, “everything at Eagle One, only to die opening a box so that we could have food.”

  “You looking for fairness, Fletch?”

  I wasn’t. It was a simple commentary on the madness of the new world. Which, in some ways, mirrored the civilization it had replaced. Bad things happened before. They happened now. They would happen again.

  “He was a survivor,” Elaine said, looking to the cross. “That’s what I can say about him. He chose to live. He chose to fight.”

  She said no more. That was the eulogy of Burke Stovich. They were words known to three people, uttered over a marker that would be ripped from the earth when the next storm rose. But at least our friend died with a name, and a story.

  I hoped we’d live to tell it.

  Four

  In the dark we felt it again. Heard it again. That sound that was half-sickening when you remembered what it was. When you remembered that you were stepping on bits and pieces of what used to be people.

  “How did they all end up here?” Elaine asked, the beam of her light catching a flash of almost painful white with nearly every step we took.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  We’d crossed the field of bones in the storm, glimpsing the lengths of femurs, and ribs, and the bulging mounds of skulls that poked from the waves of dust that had tried to bury them. Minus the wind and the baking sun, we were once again treading across the vast horror, piles of gritty earth intermingled with the skeletal remains of what had to be hundreds of people.

  “It’s too many to be just by chance,” Neil said.

  He was right. The remains of this many people would not have been gathered here, in this desolate place, simply by acts of nature. Floods dragging their lifeless bodies. Sun baking away their skin and flesh. Winds scouring what was left down to bare bone. This mass of humanity stripped to its skeletal foundation had come here as one, and had, for some reason, perished together.

  “The town’s half mile on at most,” Neil said, orienteering by the vague glow of the moon. “We should be hitting a road soon.”

  Road...

  All that might mean was a strip of cracked asphalt under six inches of blown dirt. Or half a lane of pavement left after repeated washouts. Anything constructed by man had been left without maintenance since the blight’s full wrath swept across the earth. Things had fallen apart. The monument of a humming, chugging civilization had gone quiet and begun to crumble. Roads were lines on maps now, and little more. Towns were buildings that had yet to succumb to time and the elements.

  And we were the insignificant little insects that still scurried about, searching for scraps.

  “Christ...”

  Elaine stopped. Neil and I came up behind and looked to where the beam of her flashlight was focused.

  “Not just bones,” Neil said, stating the now obvious.

  The narrow cone of brightness lay upon a body, not a separated collection of skeletal remains. The body of a man, face down upon the bones, his dark clothes dusted with gritty earth from the earlier storm. I stepped forward and crouched near the figure. Elaine and Neil approached and stood over me.

  “Look at his hand,” Elaine said, directing the light to the appendage that lay exposed atop a jumble of dust and bleached ribs.

  I looked, and I understood what had caught her interest. The hand and the fingers that extended from it bore a skim of filth, but none were thinned. There was no evidence of emaciation. This man, it appeared, had met his maker in better shape than the three of us.

  “There’s no bloating,” Neil observed. “If he’d been out here during the storm he’d be almost buried.”

  “A fresh death,” Elaine said.

  I shook my head as I looked to the man’s back, pointing to the trio of dark holes in his jacket, dust matted around each puncture.

  “A fresh kill,” I corrected.

  The man had been gunned down. Close, if not right here. Three shots spaced equally in a straight line just to the left of his spine.

  “Kill the light,” Neil said, shifting his Benelli to a ready grip as Elaine pressed the switch that brought us into darkness once again.

  We still had the thin crescent moon, its bare glow washing the landscape, brightening shadows by a degree. I reached toward the man as Neil and Elaine stepped away, taking up positions of cover. They only made it a few feet.

  The man’s screams stopped them cold.

  His guttural cry erupted as I touched his side, beginning to probe for a weapon. I half stumbled backward, startled, but recovered and grabbed the man by the shoulders, rolling him gently to one side. Neil instinctively directed his aim at the man, Elaine’s attention shifting between who we’d come across and the newly threatening darkness that surrounded us.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  The man didn’t respond. Not in any coherent way. He seemed closer to dead than alive, already slipping away. My simple touch upon him might have suspended that inevitability, but it would not for long. All about his bruised face, thick blood bubbling from his nose and mouth, told the tale.

  We were going to watch this man die.

  “Does he have anything on him?” Neil asked.

  I knew what my friend was asking. But I wasn’t about to scavenge anything useful from the man while he was still breathing. That act of necessary defilement could wait a few minutes.

  “Can you hear me?” I asked the man, raising my voice just a bit, noting no exit wounds or blood on the front of his zipped coat.

  This time, the man reacted. To my question, or to my mere proximity, I couldn’t tell. His eyes opened to barely more than slits, whatever color they might have been muted by the moon’s dead light.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  Behind, I could both hear and sense Elaine shifting position, easing closer to where I knelt next to the man.

  “This is really exposed,” she said. “If someone has night vision...”

  “We need to move,” Neil said, siding with Elaine.

  For an instant I looked away from the dying man, and to my friends. My gaze was harsh, and it answered their implicit call to abandon the stranger we’d stumble upon. To leave him to die alone.

  No...

  I turned back to the man and found that his swimming gaze had found me. Our eyes locked, and his lips moved, breathy words spilling past them in the hush of the night.

  “She rides... She rides...”

  That was all he said. That was his valediction. His eulogy. In the silence that followed his words his eyes closed. His head lolled backward and his body relaxed, settling fully to the ground where it already lay. Atop the bones of others. In due course, as the seasons came and passed, this man, this anonymous soul, would join them as little more than a skeleton parted by the forces of nature.

  Neil crouched next to me and reached past my hands where they still held the collar of the man’s coat, probing whatever pockets there might be. I let go of him, and a few seconds later my friend’s hands withdrew, empty.

  “Nothing,” Neil said.

  We’d perfected the art of scavenging. Not just the three of us. What remained of humanity. Vultures and their once relentless pursuit of carrion had nothing on us. If they, as a species, had survived, I suspect the ungainly birds would look down upon us from the high branches of dead trees in awe of our adaptation to their mode of sur
vival.

  “Can we find some cover now?” Elaine asked, pressing her concern.

  The stranger stared up at me with lifeless eyes.

  “What do you think it meant?” I asked, looking to Neil. “She rides...”

  He shook his head and stood.

  “I don’t know, Fletch.”

  “Let’s go,” Elaine prodded.

  Finally I rose and swung my AR around, gripping it. Ready.

  “I wish we could tell which direction he came from so we could not go that way,” Neil said.

  There was no way to know. The storm had erased any hint of tracks the stranger might have left. And what answers he might have shared were gone with him.

  “Ready,” I said.

  Elaine led off once again, by the faint light of the moon now, navigating by dead reckoning. Neil followed her. It was my place to bring up the rear. And I did so.

  But not before looking to the stranger once again and thinking that his journey, his struggle, was over. For an instant, just the briefest of moments, I was envious of that peace he must now know

  Then I started walking. Following my friends on our trek. Continuing our quest. With each step I imagined success. I saw that green plant. I felt the supple leaves. I tasted its bounty. We had to get there. Had to find it. Had to learn how it was even possible that a thing so simple, and so beautiful, could not just survive the blight, but could thrive amongst the grey death. We had to make it.

  Or die trying.

  Five

  In the quiet night the small town resolved before us. Mobile homes toppled. Businesses battered. Houses defiled, tattered curtains hanging outside broken windows. Every third structure had been torched, it seemed, the cold rubble piled and weathered by the elements. Vehicles rested on rims and flattened rubber. Windshields were smashed. Doors open. Devastation came in all forms.

  All but one.

  “No bodies,” Elaine said.

  Even in the ghostly light of the moon I could see that she was right. We’d left the grotesque landscape of skeletal remains behind us. Maybe a mile or so back. A dust-swept roadway had led us straight into the minor burg, avenues splitting off to the north and south, paved lane this way, a dirt one that way. Not a hint of death, real death, lay anywhere in sight. Nor any of life.