by Unknown
10.
SACRIFICE
G. L. Lathain
The cries of an animal tore at Tim’s sleep-ridden conscious. He stirred, trying to discern dream from reality. Careful not to expose too much skin to the frigid air, he unzipped his sleeping bag and peered out of the cave at the still, white landscape. It was the pale grey of predawn and for once, it wasn’t snowing.
Smouldering fires sat either side of where Tim lay and he thanked their warmth for seeing him through another night. For the first time since the Great Freeze, he didn’t have his wife, Christine beside him, nor their son Jake tucked between their embrace. At times, body warmth was all that had kept the family alive.
The bawling came again and Tim scrambled from his bed, ignoring the biting air. Fear of the cold was easily suppressed by the hunger of a man who knew starvation. The snares worked, they damn well worked, Tim thought as he hurriedly strapped snowshoes to the boots he had kept on through the night.
Tim gathered his backpack that had been a makeshift pillow and shouldered his quiver of arrows. No two were alike, collected over the months of travel, but all would suffice when it came time to kill.
Again, Tim heard the distressed animal and he frantically slung the pack over his shoulders and rushed to the mouth of the cave. With bow in hand and an arrow nocked, he moved eastward, upwind, to where he had set snares the previous night as the snow had eased. Fear, excitement and anticipation roiled inside of him. It was one thing to survive the ice, but in this world, a lack of food was just as deadly. A week had passed since Tim or his family had eaten more than scraps.
Tim slowed as he approached the tree line that held his snares. He could hear the laboured breathing of something hidden from view. Something large. Tim hesitated. He had set his traps in the hope of catching a rabbit or maybe a fox. This was neither. Peering through the dense birch branches, he saw his family’s saviour. A moose six feet tall and weighing at least a thousand pounds was struggling to free its leg from a snare fixed to the base of a tree.
Twenty yards away was an animal that would keep them fed for months. Tim stayed behind cover, knowing his presence would scare the animal into frenzy. If the thin cable broke, Tim and his family wouldn’t survive the week. He struggled to pull back the fifty pounds of pressure loaded on the compound bow; months of travelling south towards the equator had stripped the muscle from his body.
Tim felt the bowstring relax into position. He stared down the bow’s sights; the arrow’s fletching brushed his cheek. The liver or lung, either will kill it quickly. An easy shot, Tim thought. But never had the stakes been this high. He steadied his breathing and stilled his shaking hands. A second later, he loosed. The moose staggered up, frenzied with pain. Its attempts to run were hard to watch, but Tim would not feel remorse for something that would save their lives.
The animal fell to its knees again, breathing in an unsteady and laboured rhythm that sent plumes of steam into the air. Finally, it collapsed and the morning became silent once again.
Tim left the carcass and scrambled back to camp, snow sinking under his feet. The military had taught him to be prepared, and prepared he was. Back at the cave lay a timber sled, a necessity that had helped transport their supplies over a land of snow, ice and little else. With a rope tied around his waist, he could haul hundreds of pounds of meat and the entire hide; a prize he’d almost forgotten compared to the hunger that wrenched his stomach.
With sled in tow, Tim hurried back and set about skinning and gutting the animal. The dripping blood was forming an icicle beneath the arrow wound. He would have to be quick to beat the hardening skin.
The work helped keep Tim’s mind off the cold and his thoughts turned to his wife and son. Christine and Jake were both malnourished and exhausted. The journey south—fleeing from the relentless expansion of the Arctic Circle— had almost killed them. Tim had lost at least sixty pounds himself, although the layers of clothing hid it well.
The sun crept over the horizon to the east and the expanse of snow and untouched wilderness, sparkled in its warm light. For more than a year there had been nothing but snow, heavy clouds and thunderous storms. Tim smiled for the first time in months as he looked at the endless, empty blue above. The retired marine began to laugh, uncontrolled and unbridled, fuelled by the relief of knowing he had provided for his family. Their goal of reaching Mexico by the month’s end was becoming a reality. Even the weather looked upon them kindly.
Once the moose’s hide was removed and rolled, Tim used a wood-saw to quarter the animal. The steel blade hewed through large bones and cartilage as easily as it did firewood. The sun was four fingers into the sky by the time Tim had the rear quarters and hide secured to his sled. Almost half the moose would have to be left behind. He simply did not have the strength to drag so much. What remained, he buried, hopefully deep enough to be out of reach of any scavengers.
After a final check over the area, Tim fastened the lead ropes around his waist and started west. The load soon had him sweating beneath his many layers, but he cleared his mind of the discomfort and focused on controlling his breathing.
Tim felt the flint in his jacket pocket as he trekked on; the stone was wearing down from constant use. Lighters and matches where a thing of the past. After the first month of the Great Freeze, it was common to see people killed for the simple tools needed to create fire. There was one rule that any survivor had to adopt. Never let the flames die down.
Everything had changed so quickly. The veil of humanity had been ripped away, revealing an animal’s greatest inherent characteristic: the will to live. Survivors became scavengers and then murderers. Tim was forced to become a part of this new constitution or fall victim to it, alongside his loved ones.
He remembered a time when life’s decisions were trivial things. What should he have for dinner? What gifts to buy his children for Christmas? Should he go to the range for afternoon shooting practice? Now, the wrong choice would send his family to the heavens. But, he had hope. As quickly as the world had turned to shit, they had survived, when most were dead.
Tim made his way across a patch of ice. The steady scrape of the trailing sled played with his weary mind. As he trudged on, his mind took him to a distant memory. Tim smiled as he remembered his daughter’s voice.
“Daddy, show me how to do it,” Lilly called. “Jake wont show me.” Her small arms protruded from a pile of blankets where she sat on the kitchen bench in front of a large fire.
Jake was beside his younger sister, eating fruit from a small tin. He wore a proud smile for having learnt how to use the flint already. Jasper, their four-year-old Alaskan malamute was wedged between the children. A long day of helping tow the sled had exhausted the dog and under the children’s constant patting and scratching, he’d fallen asleep.
Tim was several feet away, tending to Christine’s badly sprained ankle. She had fallen as they had raced for shelter ahead of the storm. They were hiding in the kitchen of an abandoned high school, three hundred miles south of Denver, as far as Tim could tell. He avoided civilisation as much as possible, but need had brought them here. Today, the risk had paid off. For once, they all had full stomachs.
“Go on, I’ll be fine,” Christine said with weak smile.
Tim looked up from bandaging her ankle. The injury worried him. “I’ll get Mom something to help her pain, then I’ll show you how, OK?”
“OK,” Lilly replied, her voice rich with excitement.
Christine will have to ride with the children now, Tim thought as he rummaged through their packs. Jasper and me will just have to work a bit harder.
Their first aid supplies consisted of a sewing kit, some bandages, creams and the few painkillers they had been saving. Tim gave Christine two aspirin and a water canteen, before going to his daughter. He stood behind Lilly and took her small hands in his own. Her blonde hair brushed against his cheek as he looked over her shoulder. Tim turned her wrist, tilting the steel striker across the flint.
“Now push down and forwards,” Tim said, guiding Lilly through the action. “Move your feet or the sparks will land on them,” he smiled.
Lilly’s brow furrowed with concentration and she pushed down with enough strength to make her arms shake. Steel scraped over stone and white-hot sparks shot from the flint, like tiny signal flares, disappearing as they fell towards the floor.
“I did it,” Lilly squealed. She struck the flint again, giggling as the sparks appeared momentarily.
Jasper stirred and looked towards the kitchen door. A moment later, a man burst into the room. Tim caught a glimpse of the pistol in his hand before Jasper attacked, snarling and growling as he leapt at the intruder. The man screamed in pain, trying to shake the dog’s hold.
Tim dropped into a roll, pulling a knife from his sock as he went. A gunshot deafened the room. Tim came to his feet with the sound of Christine’s screams filling his ears, and drove his blade and weight into the man’s chest. The gun fired again as the intruder stumbled backwards. Tim and Jasper went with him, stabbing and biting until the man went limp.
Tim heard movement behind him and turned to find Christine, cradling Lilly in her arms. Like an opening rose, a bloodstain spread across their daughter’s shirt. Tim scrambled to the bandages stashed on the sled, glancing out the kitchen door to make sure their attacker had been alone. He ran back to Lilly, stepping over Jasper who hadn’t moved from beside the body. Tim’s mind struggled to absorb what was happening.
“It’s OK, baby,” Christine soothed, tears spilling down her cheeks as she kissed the top of Lilly’s head.
Tim removed her shirt and thermals as memories of wounded soldiers on the battlefield flickered through his mind. His daughter gasped for breath, staring down at the blood pouring from a hole above her naval. Tim pushed a handful of gauze over the wound and looked up to meet Christine’s pleading stare…
The memory left Tim as quickly as it had come and he knew it would meet him again in his dreams, as it did every night.
As the hours went by, icicles began forming on Tim’s beard. His lungs burned with each gulp of frozen air. He laboured on, checking his compass to make sure of his bearing. Navigating in a world of deep winter was like searching a dark room for the light switch; only here everything was white rather than black.
Tim stopped and looked up. The sky was untouched blue, when smoke should have tarnished it. The easterly breeze had turned to the west and he sniffed the air as it passed. Nothing. Realisation slammed into him. Please no, he recited in his head as he began untying the sled with a fear-filled drive. Once free, he leapt forwards and ran.
Over the next rise, he saw the house’s chimney, jutting from a mound of snow; no smoke came from it. This can’t be happening, he thought desperately.
Before leaving, Tim had spent an afternoon sawing up the house’s furniture to be sure Jake and Christine had ample firewood. He’d left enough for three days by his calculations.
“Christine! Jake!” he yelled, reaching the snow sunken door.
No response came.
He dropped to his knees and began to dig with a fury that he’d never known before. Gone were the weak arms of a man who hadn’t seen food for days. Within minutes he could see the brass handle glinting in the afternoon sun.
“Christine! Jake!” he screamed again, shovelling a path to the door.
Tim lay on his stomach, stretching to the handle. It released and the door swung inwards. Tim slid feet first into the room. He stood in the shaft of light that spilled through the doorway, eyes adjusting to the darkness that surrounded him.
They must be asleep, Tim hoped.
The bed was in the living room, next to the hearth; a necessity that had helped them through the freezing nights. No movement came from the thick blankets, despite the sound of Tim’s snowshoes clapping against the wooden floor as he moved frantically across the room.
I’ve lost a child once, please, please not again.
He slowed his final few paces, almost too scared to find out what lay beneath the duvets. He had faced bullets in war, but that was nothing compared to the terror that burned inside his veins.
“Jake…Christine….” Tim said, bending over the bed.
He found his son hidden amongst the blankets, but his eyes were closed. “Jake…” he whispered, so quietly the words barely reached his own ears. Tim shook his son gently, as if moving him too harshly could break him. Lightning bolts of hope shot through Tim as his son’s eyes opened.
“Daddy…I” Jake croaked through chattering teeth. “I’m cold.”
“I’m here, Jake,” Tim said, whipping off his backpack and jacket.
He pulled back the thick duvets to find Jake wrapped in one of Christine’s jacket. Where is she? he thought, tucking his son’s bony body under another layer as he scanned the room.
Tim’s gaze almost slid past the form of Christine, leant over the fireplace, arms outstretched but unmoving. No, he pleaded, scrambling around the bed as fear and denial pierced his chest like a hot knife.
Tim slumped down beside his wife and reached out to touch her ice-blue face. His sobbing soon replaced the silence. In her frozen hands, she held a lighter, long since out of gas. She had tried to start the fire again, but he had the only flint.
Minutes went by before Tim could scrounge together his courage and think about the situation. Christine had sacrificed her life for Jake. He forced himself to remember that… but it would be so easy to let his son drift off to join his mother. Maybe that was better, not just for Jake but for him as well. Maybe this world wasn’t worth living in anymore.
He shook the thoughts from his mind. Self-pity had long been ripped away from him.
Wiping his tears away, Tim got to his feet, retrieved his backpack and checked on Jake. He removed a small piece of steel wool and newspaper, then made his way back to the fireplace and knelt beside his wife.
He took the flint from his pocket and placed the tinder amongst the kindling that Christine had already prepared. As he had shown Lilly six months earlier, Tim pushed the steel down and forwards, sending tiny pieces of molten metal into the steel wool. It caught a spark and began to glow orange. Tim bent over and blew gently, trying to breath life into something that would save his son.
R. F. DICKSON
Empty Nest
R. F. Dickson was born, a condition which persists to this day. One of the thirty-seven remaining native Floridians in the wild, he spends his non-cubicle time writing, gaming, watching movies, and standing by helplessly as yet another Tampa Bay Buccaneers season goes down in flames. He is also the author of The Daily Rich, a blog about stuff.
Empty Nest sprang from the idea that if the world was going to be destroyed, it should at least get a say in the matter. It’s only polite. Besides, just because it’s the end of everything we’ve ever known doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a little fun along the way.
11.
EMPTY NEST
R. F. Dickson
For decades, accepted tectonic science stated that the East African Rift marked where the great African Tectonic Plate had been slowly splitting into two smaller plates over the last few million years, creating a valley that ran for some 4,000 miles down the eastern side of the continent. The two plates would continue racing apart, at least, racing on a geological scale, until the sea came flooding in, turning the East African coast into a brand new island and making the western side of the rift beachfront property. Of course, this would take millions more years, far beyond the time when it would be a problem for anyone currently alive. So said accepted tectonic science.
The seismographic station in Kilima Mbogo in southern Kenya detected it first, its needle beginning to scratch away shortly before midnight GMT. Minutes later, the Mt. Furi station in Ethiopia chimed in, followed by Ar Rayn in the Saudi peninsula and Mbarara in Uganda. Madagascar’s Ambohimpanompo station burst to life, Lusaka piped up in Zambia, and even Boshof perked up and brought South Africa to the party. Weake
r activity was detected in Ankara, in Kabul, in Masuku. Across the globe, bleary-eyed seismologists roused from their beds and conferred with colleagues who’d been up all night monitoring the outbursts. They hurriedly examined the data pouring in from Africa, and determined Mother Earth was quite possibly gathering up for something big.
Actually, she was just clearing her throat.
“Hello?” her voice boomed from the East African Rift, shattering windows as far away as the East Coast of the United States, and sending tsunamis hurtling through the Indian Ocean to mercilessly pound the western end of Australia. “Oh my goodness,” she said somewhat more quietly, like an old grandmother who’d just spilled her tea. “It’s been so long, I’d forgotten what I sound like.” Despite her restraint, this utterance triggered avalanches in the Alps and the Himalayas. “Dear me, I guess I’ll have to whisper,” she said, this time with far less catastrophic results, only a few minor landslides up and down the length of the Rift. “Is there someone in charge I might possibly speak with?”
Those words snapped the world’s various powers from their collective shock and got them back to doing what they did best: bickering with one another. An emergency session of the United Nations Security Council nearly erupted into violence when each member claimed the planet was speaking in their language, and that therefore their representative should be the one to engage her in discussion. In the main assembly, delegates from Kenya and Tanzania rattled their sabers at one another, both sides laying claim to authority due to the Rift running directly through their respective countries. From Rome to Jerusalem to Mecca, clerics and scholars shouted and argued and prayed over how to reconcile this turn of events with everything their scriptures had told them. The American and Russian militaries escalated to the highest alerts seen since the Cold War, and the Arabian Sea and the Mozambique Channel became so crowded with ships, one could nearly walk from Madagascar to Oman without getting wet. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set their Doomsday Clock 11:59pm, its closest approach to midnight ever. As the day of Mother Earth’s awakening slowly slipped into night, many went to bed wondering if humanity would blow her up before they’d even said hello back.