The woman smiled at Thomas and started climbing upstairs. Thomas then headed into the living room, where Simon and Steve were sitting on the couch. As soon as he got in, the two interrupted their conversation and turned their heads toward him.
“Is Julie okay, Thomas?” Simon asked.
“Yes, sir, she is just fine. She is resting.”
“Well, that’s good news.”
“Indeed it is,” Steve also said.
“Yeah, um… Steve, could you please point me to my room? I would like to lie down for a while.”
“Sure thing, buddy. Follow me!”
Steve got up from the couch and headed toward Thomas’ room, with Thomas right behind him.
“Voila,” Steve said, opening a door. “Tell me what you think.”
Thomas got inside and saw a bed in front of him and a set of drawers to his left. The floor was decorated with a red rug with grey, circular stripes. A window on the left wall completed the scenery. On the ceiling, there was a chandelier with candles on it. Other than that, the room was empty.
“Wow, that’s nice,” Thomas said.
“And it’s all yours,” Steve said. “Nobody is gonna bother you, I promise. If you wanna light the candles, the matches are in the top drawer. I can bring you a chair, if you want.”
“No, thanks. That won’t be necessary, for now.”
“Suit yourself. And if there’s anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask. Good night, Thomas!”
“Good night, Steve!”
Steve got out of the room and closed the door behind him. Thomas took his Kalashnikov from his shoulder and leaned it against the wall. Then, he took his shoes off and jumped in the bed. And he started thinking. He started wondering if there are still others like Steve and Martha out there. People who will stop at nothing to help strangers and ask for nothing in return. Sure, he met a few others back in the day, when his parents were still alive and he was wandering across the country with them, but since then, who knows how many are still alive and how many checked out. And who knows how many of those who checked out did so of natural causes and were not killed by the rebels or other kinds of thugs. Because, in this fucked-up world, when a person does something good, it usually ends badly, either fooled by the person they were helping or even killed by them for their house, food, clothes or water. What goes around comes around was rarely applied in the current world, where evil was everywhere and good had almost but vanished. The Alignment sure knew how to fuck this world up and once it did, there was no going back. Thanks to it, the rebels came in the picture. And not only them. All sorts of other thieves, murderers, rapists, cannibals and God knows what other kinds of scum were now haunting the region long and wide, searching, stalking, waiting for their next innocent victim to prey upon. How long will this last? God only knew. Maybe a few centuries. Maybe a few millennia. Maybe forever. Maybe it will all be over when the trumpets in the sky will start singing, thus signaling the inevitable second coming of our Savior. Whatever the case, Thomas had no choice but to approve Julie’s statements. He was tired too. He was tired of killing, of eating maggots, of sleeping whenever and wherever he could, of living on someone else’s mercy. He was tired of them twenty years ago and he was tired of them now. The only person he currently couldn’t wait to kill was the rebel leader. He was the only one whose blood he wanted to shed. He knew he couldn’t do that without killing a lot of his subordinates, but no matter the cost, when he saw his town burning, everyone inside it dead, with bullets in their heads, and his family crucified to the town wall, he took an oath, according to which he will not rest or die before justice is done. For everybody, not just for his family. For every innocent soul those brutes killed, mocked and raped. And for that, he had to go high. Very high. All the way to the leader, the one who commands and controls everything. He was the key to his vengeance, and once he kills him, who knows? Maybe he will find his inner peace. Or maybe, the exact opposite will happen and it will be just like Steve warned him. Maybe once he kills the bastard, he would look for another face in the crowd to kill, and then another one, then another one, until he was too old to hold a gun in his hand. Or maybe his thirst for vengeance would get him killed. Which was totally fine by him, as long as the killer of his family died before him. He had no trouble dying young, as long as he avenged his family in the process. In a way, he kind of wished it. Something was telling him that it’s not good to grow old in a world so bad as the one he was forced to live in. Oh, no. Old ages were not recommended for the days he was living. Because there will come a time when he will grow helpless, when his power will leave him and he won’t be able to fend for himself. He won’t be able to feed himself, to walk without a cane, to run, if the situation called for it, to hold a weapon in his hand, nothing. He won’t even be able to wipe his own ass. Or, even worse, maybe he will become bedridden. And if that happened, he would truly need the help of those around him to live. He will need someone to feed him, someone to wash him, and someone to change him. He will be totally helpless, unable to do anything by himself. And there were no guarantees that someone will be there to support him. Who is to say that Julie won’t die before him, thus leaving him with no one to take care of him? Or who is to say that he will start another family, to make sure that someone will be there for him? For now, he couldn’t do that. He was still mourning the last family he had. And after losing it, he started thinking seriously about not starting another one. And why should he? So that the rebels could kill another one of his wife and child? So that his potential children will live in a twisted world, where they will have to kill and eat whatever they can find in order to survive? Oh, no. That’s no way to live. That could not be called a life. That would be a living nightmare for his potential future kids, a nightmare he wants to expose no one to. So, like it or not, he wished to die before growing too old to fend for himself and defend himself against the rebels or God knows what other types of monsters were out there and couldn’t wait to kill someone in order to take what was not rightfully theirs.
But that was a thought for later. Right now, he was trying to concentrate on getting some sleep. However, no matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t fall in Morpheus’s hands. He would turn from one side to the other, lay with his face upwards, put himself in fetal position, he tried absolutely everything, to get some rest. But his eyes just wouldn’t listen to him. Even though he would close them, the sleep just refused to come.
Angry and frustrated, he got up and started walking across the room. Then, suddenly, he laid his eyes on the set of drawers.
“Just a peek. I won’t hurt anyone if I just take a peek,” he thought. So, without further hesitation, he took a few steps toward the drawers and opened the top one. The darkness in the room prevented him from seeing what was inside, so he started touching the bottom with his hand, in search of whatever it was in there. He could feel what seemed to be books or magazines at first and then he felt something like a small box. He took it in his hand and took it out. He realized it was the small box of matches that Steve told him about.
He opened it and took a match from it. He lit it and approached it to the drawer. Inside, he could see three magazines, all of them about houses and techniques about how to build one. He took one and put it on top of the drawers set. He opened it and started shuffling through it. He could see all kinds of houses inside, of all shapes and sizes, each more colorful and more sophisticated than the other. He saw a house shaped like a church, one shaped like a cube, one made almost entirely out of glass, several made out of brick and a few made out of wood. He kept shuffling the magazine, until eventually, he saw the house of his dreams. Big, white, spacious, with two floors and eight rooms, just enough for him, his wife and their children. It had a big, spacious porch and on top of it, an immense balcony, where you could fit ten people at least.
He took a candle from the chandelier and lit it. He continued to look at the house.
“Carla and Fred would have loved it,” he thought to hi
mself. Plus, it was big enough for a potential little brother for Fred. And a little sister.
But then, he suddenly remembered that Fred and Carla were dead and they couldn’t possibly love such a house. Not now, not ever. The thought about his family put a tear in his eye.
He closed the magazine and put it back in the drawer. Then, he closed the top drawer and opened the second one from the top. He put the candle closer and he saw a book in it. He took it in his hand and put the candle close to its black cover. He could see a very peculiar title written in golden letters on it.
“A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller Jr,” Thomas read out loud. “That’s a pretty strange title.”
He closed the drawer and headed toward the bed. He sat on it and opened the book. He started reading it. And, surprise, surprise, the book was a post-apocalyptic tale. More precisely, it was about a group of monks trying to protect humanity’s last cultural heritage six hundred years after a global nuclear war. In the past, humanity imagined all kinds of scenarios about how life will eventually end on Earth. All sorts of writers and philosophers imagined everything for our demise: a global nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a modern ice age, an increase in global temperature, an AI revolution, a global plague, and last but not least, Christ’s Second Coming. But none of them guessed how the civilization will collapse. None of them was capable of predicting that a galactic alignment with fifty thousand earthquakes would bring about Armageddon. Was that God’s way of mocking their intelligence? Perhaps. But why? Well, only God Himself would know the answer to that. Maybe He was trying to show them that he is smarter than them and that none of their illuminated minds could guess how He will decide to end civilization on Earth. That was one possibility. Maybe there were others. But in the end, God only knows.
As he kept on reading about the monks who were trying to preserve humanity’s heritage after the fall of the nukes, he suddenly remembered that the monks in the book had an equivalent in reality. Twenty years ago, he and his family were outnumbered and surrounded by the rebels in a house in the middle of a field. They were running out of ammo and the moment of their deaths seemed to be unavoidably approaching. But just as they were preparing to say goodbye to each-other, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, a numerous group of people appeared and started firing at the rebels, who immediately fled the scene. The unknown group saved their lives and took them to their town, where they later discovered that the adults in the community were teaching their children how to read and write and once they did that, they would give them books of all sorts to read, from philosophy, to biology, astronomy, various people’s mythology, geography, history and many books of classical fiction, like Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, etc. He never forgot about that community. How could he, since that was the place where he taught Julie how to read and write and discover the mysteries of this world?
When he asked the town leader why he was bothering to do all that, he replied that he does so because he cannot and will not let the essence of humanity disappear. It was those books and everything that was in them that made us humans, and after The Alignment, no one cared about them anymore, something he was trying to reverse by teaching the children the information that lied in them, so that they can pass it on to others. After The Alignment, the leader said, people forgot who they were and what the essence of humanity was. And he was hoping that he could reverse that, in an effort to rebuild civilization, spiritually at least, if not materially.
“What became of that community?” he asked himself. “I wonder if they managed to fulfill their plan. Did their children grow up, leave the community and preach their knowledge further? If so, did the people they gave that information to eventually gave them to others, in their turn? Did they manage to fulfill their goal?”
He suddenly sighed and told himself probably not. After The Alignment, everyone became concerned about survival. Who would take the time to read a book when he is starving to death because he couldn’t find a can of beans or couldn’t catch anything that day? Or who would care about reading, while having to fight or hide from the rebels, to stay alive? Who would give a damn about a book when they have no roof over their heads and have no choice but to face the rain out in the open, knowing that they’ll catch pneumonia and most likely die, from lack of medicine? No one, let’s face it. Unfortunately, The Alignment broke humanity and it did so for good. No matter what some people might try, the old world, with everything in it and about it, including the human values, traditions and philosophies, is dead. And just like everything that dies, it stays so forever. You can beat a man whose heart stopped on the chest for as long as you want. If he has to die that day, then he will die. There’s no way you can jumpstart his heart again, no matter how hard and how long you try. If it’s his time, you’ll never succeed. And that’s exactly what those people were trying to do. They were trying to jumpstart the heart of a world whose time was up, with slim to nil chances of reviving it. The old was gone. It was time to let it go and let the new replace it, no matter how ugly it was.
Suddenly, he felt his eyes closing. He felt the urge to close them over and over. Finally, he fell in the hands of Morpheus. But, at the same time, he was enjoying the book. He didn’t know what to do: keep reading or go to sleep? Tough choice.
He was feeling his eyelids heavier and heavier. The sleep was gripping him with sharp claws and it didn’t want to let go. He closed the book and put it on the bed. He took his clothes off and made a pile out of them, which he threw in the middle of the room. He then took the book and put it back in the drawer. He then got in the bed and closed his eyes, thinking that right now, maybe he was the last human on the planet to have read a book.
***
He opened his eyes and rubbed them. He put his hands on his face and yawned. He was still sleepy, even though he had a decent sleep. But he didn’t want to go back to sleep. He felt the urge to do something, even though his body was drawing his head back to the pillow.
He jumped off the bed and looked out the window. It was still dark outside. But at the lower edges of the window, he could see light flickering. Curious about it, he got closer to the window and looked outside. He saw about ten to twenty torches lighting up a cornfield, in the middle of which there was Martha, gathering the corn. And suddenly, he realized how to be useful. He decided to go out and help her. So he put his clothes on and got out of the room. As he was heading toward the exit, he walked across the dining room, where he saw Simon sleeping on a chair like a baby, with his mouth open, his saliva dripping out of his mouth onto his coat. He decided to be silent and started treading carefully, as to not awake him, until he eventually reached the door, opened it, and got outside.
The prolonged night’s air was chilly. Thomas rubbed his elbows. In the sky, the stars and the full moon exposed their beauty. The multitude of planets displayed above his head made Thomas wonder if there were other worlds out there that suffered the same fate as his. Could there be another planet out there that went through its own Alignment and because of that, now had a shorter day? It could be. Out of the gazillions of planets out there, the possibilities that one of them suffered the same fate as Earth were endless. Surely, in the vast universe, there had to have been more than just one galactic alignment, right?
Thomas quickly brushed this thought away and started walking toward the cornfield. Once there, he saw Martha again, keeping on working on her crops at the torch lights. He approached her.
“Good morning!”
Martha looked at him.
“Good morning to you, Thomas!”
“Let me help you. It’s the least I can do to repay you for letting us into your house and saving my sister.”
“Oh, Thomas, don’t be silly. I didn’t do it because I needed your help with something or a reward from you. I did it because that’s what people do. They help each other.”
Thomas looked down and sighed.
“Not nowadays, they don’t. People like you are rare these days
.”
“I like to think that they’re not that rare. I like to think that The Alignment didn’t screw up humanity completely.”
“You seem to know what you’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tending your crops like that. You seem good at it. In fact, you are good at a lot of stuff. You can cook one hell of a food. You saved my sister’s life by treating her wounds. You know how to tend to your crops, and, from what I hear from your husband, you are one hell of a baker as well. What else do you know how to do?”
“Well, young man, I also happen to be one amazing painter. You should see the scenery I can paint. Well, unfortunately, I can’t show them to you. I painted sixteen paintings, and I had to burn them all last winter. What can I say? The need to keep warm surpasses the desire to preserve the beautiful. And something tells me that it wasn’t just my paintings that had such a horrible fate. I imagine the humanity’s entire artwork in all the museums across the world suffered because of the goddamn Alignment. Entire paintings, each one more beautiful than the last…Picasso, Da Vinci, Botticelli, Gauguin… somehow I think that they were either burned or vandalized by petty thugs who don’t know how to appreciate beauty in life. Damn them. The vandals, I mean. Those who burned them, I’ve got nothing against them. They were just trying to keep warm in a cold world, in more ways than one.”
“Yep, I suppose so,” Thomas said. “So… you’re good at more than just one thing. One might say you’re the jack of all trades.”
Martha smiled.
“Yeah, Thomas, I suppose you could say that. But most of the things I learned I did so out of necessity. I learned how to cook from my mother. She always used to say that a woman cannot be a good, decent wife unless she knows how to cook and clean for her husband. So, in order to prepare me for the great journey of marriage ahead of me, she started teaching me how to cook since I was six. Three years later, at the age of nine, I could cook three kinds of soup, baked potatoes and French fries, baked fish, foie gras, nine kinds of salad, stake tartar and much, much more.”
Dark Apocalypse: A Post-Apocalyptic Family Saga Page 27