Tails of the Apocalypse (20 page)

Sent forth for some hope that the past might still provide.

He’d killed twelve men in his travels because he’d had to. The worn shotgun was down to three shells and who knew if they’d go when they were needed most in a clinch. He wore the gun on his back amidst the clutter of his patchwork armor and road-mended scraps as he crossed the Mojave and the Valley of Death.

In Vegas he’d found silence and nothing.

Nothing that remained of the past.

Nothing in the big rooms he’d searched.

Everything had been burned.

Not even a scrap that something might be written on.

Not even a page.

He’d walked down into the southwest and searched every corpse of a town for a specific building like he’d been taught to look for. Always the finding was the same. The remains of an old fire. Fires. The empty spaces along the crumbling shelves where the past had once waited. Waited to be had for the easy taking. Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

And gone again.

Years passed.

Men died.

He loved a blind woman once, but she wouldn’t leave her people and so he’d continued on in search of the past.

What had happened to them all? he wondered one black dusk when the map didn’t match the landscape and the night screamed again like a howling savage, angry at a world that had destroyed itself for no reason that made sense anymore.

What happened to them all?

Mac.

Teddy.

The others.

What happened to them all? Those who’d been sent forth. Orphans who’d been rescued on that last day.

And in the past two years, as he’d headed back west with no past in his ruck to bring back to the last home on the coast, he hadn’t spoken a word.

Who was there to speak to?

The blackened stubble of once-houses stretching off to the horizon like endless tombstones.

The mutie-blind pigs who hunted him beyond the valley that a big highway had once run through. Where he’d seen the bomb crater from five miles off atop the ridge that led down into it.

The bombs that destroyed the world on the day he was just a little boy on a bus.

He heard the distant sirens from that day again. In his mind. After all those years. The day he was just five and an orphan. The day Saint Maggie had rescued them all, all the orphans, in a stuck bus for “such a time as this,” as Miss Wanda had told the girl who was becoming Saint Maggie.

“How don’t you know, girl…” dying Miss Wanda had cried. “How don’t you know you weren’t meant for such a time as this?”

That was… thought the once-orphan man standing atop the ridge, looking down into the massive crater that the had-to-be-a-hundred-kiloton warhead, musta-been, had left in what had once been an interstate all those years ago….

Thirty years ago….

Thirty-five years….

Maybe even thirty-eight.

Which makes me….

He hadn’t said a word in the two years since the crater.

Who was there to speak to?

He’d crossed the Sonoran Desert and seen a village alongside another highway. They’d given him corn tortillas and offered him shelter, but he hadn’t stayed. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think of any words that would mean anything.

A man older than him watched him go and gave a little wave that was like a prayer.

He took the tortillas in a monsoon rain and kept moving on up the highway, smelling their mesquite wood smoke in the miles that followed.

You can only see so much.

That’s how it began.

The thought….

To end it all.

How much can you see? he’d asked himself.

And then he thought of….

All the bones. Bleaching in the desert, and the mud, and the hardened ash.

All the wrecks.

All the airplanes smashed across the landscape.

All the short, dark stubble where once a house, or thousands of them, had been.

All the twisted metal and melting rebar.

All the blasted roads and highways.

All the distant cities that looked like haunted, eyeless scarecrows and the signs that told people to stay away. Poison. Radiation. Plague.

And all the bones that had once been a someone.

Who was there to talk to?

You can only see so much.

And….

There is no past left to put in my falling-apart ruck and take back home.

And….

You can only see so much.

He found the gorge on the edge of a place that had once been a town. Found it at noon and stared into its wide emptiness for the better part of a day.

He imagined the fall.

The final step.

You can only see so much.

That night, back near the town, on its outskirts in an old, abandoned gas station, the wind howled and he stared into his fire and imagined the fall.

And remembered all the bones he’d seen.

You can only see so much.

The past was gone. There was none of it left to take back in his ruck. It had all burned up years ago.

He shifted his head downward in agreement with the thought.

The thought to end it all.

The gorge was wide and empty and it would take him. There was room. He would leave, and in time, just become more bones in a world filled with them.

And that was when he heard the tiny cry underneath the howl of the night. The soft whimper.

He turned and saw the pup.

Puppy
, he thought and remembered something from a long time ago before the day the world burned up.

Puppy
.

It waddled two steps forward and collapsed down on its stubby haunches.

The man turned and scanned the darkness.

No one, no animal, no thing was out there to be seen.

The puppy began to mewl. Its attempt to howl. To cry for everything and every injustice done. To resign itself to fate without a mother to guide or protect him.

Oh, he thought deep inside the silent well that was himself. Don’t give up, little guy.

And he stood and felt so old, and then again, young all at once. So old from all the years on the road, looking for the past. So young because of that something he could not remember from that same dimly remembered past. That lost word….

Puppy
.

He knelt down.

He held out some scraps from the tasteless dinner he’d found no joy in.

And he felt the smile, the first smile in a long time, crack his burned lips as the stubby little puppy snorted and chewed and whined all at once.

The man scooped him up and held the dog against himself and away from the night and the darkness and the world that had died. He watched it throughout the night, waking and waking again to make sure the poor thing was still breathing as the temperatures dropped and the fire withered under the cruel blasts that raced like a lunatic out in the darkness.

In the morning, in the cold, orange light of the epic dust storm’s passing, in the silence that followed such, he spoke.

“I’ll call you Dog,” he barely croaked.

The puppy scratched at a flea behind his flappy ear.

“I’ll call you Dog.” Pause. He swallowed hard. “You can help me find the past now.”

The puppy tried to howl, surprised itself, and then looked around.

That morning they walked away from the town, away from the gorge, away from the fall, and continued on, in search of the past once more.

The dog grew and followed the man. Followed him into all the old ruins as they made their way west toward the setting sun each evening.

The dog who had once been a puppy wove in and out of the collapsed buildings and across the rubble as the man searched for the building he knew to look for, mumbling, “I am still faithful. I will never give up. I was … thank you for my helper. Thank you for my friend. I was just … too long by myself.”

When they, the buildings, weren’t found, and even when they were and they were empty save for the ash in the makeshift fire pits and the few bones they always found in such places, the man mumbled the words again, “Thank you, Lord, for giving me a helper to help me. Thank you for my friend.”

They shared the food they took from the land and the man would talk and throw sticks as they crossed the long stretches of a burning summer and a bone-deep winter until finally they came to the top of the mountain and saw the western ocean glittering far below.

When the man produced a small device, its
clickety-clack
noise-making made even the dog nervous.

“San Diego is like they always said it was. Annihilated because of the fleets and marines that were there,” mumbled the man. That spring they worked their way along the tops of lonely ridges, heading north along what was once called California on all the maps that had been burned for fuel and heating in the long winter that followed the end of the world.

“It seems like we’re going home, Dog. Giving up. But, there’s one last place to check and then….” He sighed as the wind beat at his clothes, making them flap and crack. “Then I don’t know where else to look.”

Dog thumped his tail against the chalk trail that barely existed anymore. Down below, along the coast well north of San Diego, spread the ruin of a massive urban sprawl that seemed ghostly and abandoned even from this high point.

“How can we have a future if we can give ’em no past,” muttered the man as he set to making their last camp in the coastal mountains.

All that spring and well through summer, they searched the ruin.

They found rusting cars.

Empty houses falling over on themselves.

Raven-haunted buildings.

Bones.

And the occasional salvager who shared a fire and told the man and dog that they were getting awfully close, dangerously close, too close to the El Lay and Mad King Arturo and the Dogeaters he made ally with.

Too close.

Too dangerously close.

On the wide stretch of cracked and broken highway, winding through the ruin of a sea of almost identical houses overgrown with weed and sage and vine, they came to the first totem of the Dogeaters.

Planted in the median, seven lanes of fading gray superhighway on each side. Clusters of housing collapsing along the hillsides above.

“Well…” whispered the man as Dog crept forward and barked at it.

Wide-jawed dog skulls, three of them, silently barked from the top of the rebar pole totem. Fresh guts and old skins dangled away from the sign’s crooked arms.

The man had known the new tribes of yesterday’s survivors to have done such things. To mark out their land with warnings like this. To keep others away. To keep what was within for themselves alone.

It was, in these hard times, the way things were.

But there was something about the dog skulls that was more. Something that said much more about the people who’d put them there.

“Best go wide here,” said the man above Dog’s growl. They moved off the freeway and down along some train tracks, working their way through the dried remains of a small swamp that had once gathered in the bottoms. Among the calcified mud and frozen rubbish of the past, they found another totem. And another further on. In time they were climbing up through dense eucalyptus groves that erupted up from the broken remains of ancient tract homes like the legs of giants, finding another nightmare dog-skull marker within sight of the last.

In the mosquito-buzzing heat within the shade of a massive, fallen eucalyptus giant that’d crushed three one-story houses all at once and long ago, the man dropped his pack and shed his patchwork armor for the day.

They were high up on a hill looking down into a bowl of residential ruin almost forty years gone. A planned community that had never planned for the end of the world.

“This was the last place, Dog,” he almost seemed to cry. “Further up the road and we get to El Lay, and everyone knows to stay clear of the madness that comes from there. Direct hit. Everyone knows that.”

Dog lay down next to him.

The man rubbed the velvet fuzz of the chocolate-brown sides of Dog.

“They find us in there and it won’t be good.” But what he really meant is that it wouldn’t be good for his friend.

“We’ll go back out into the desert, to the east, and skirt wide. After that, I don’t know where to look anymore. Maybe it’s all gone,” he said, staring out into the ruin and wondering about all those people that had lived there. What had they been like? Had they survived? Were they these Dogeaters?

He saw it.

Saw the type of building he was told to look for. Saw it far down there along the dim remains of an old road that wound along a hill above the dead swamp. Well within the borders of the Dogeaters.

All the years he’d been searching, he raged at himself that night, how many times had he found the exact same type of building. Just like he’d been taught to. And how many times had it been empty? Just fire pits and bones. Not a scrap of the past left in them.

“Every time,” he muttered within the vine-overgrown remains of an ancient family room that was scoured and brittle. An old, blackened family portrait still hung askew on one of the two walls that remained.

Every time.

They watched the fireplace and the fire within. In the night, an old owl hooted from the rafter of some nearby tract home, barely upright after forty years of hard sun and bitter winter.

He did not sleep that night. Late, when the moon was fat and low in the sky, he awoke and stood looking down into the valley once more.

Could he return and tell them he’d done his best? Searched everywhere to find the past? Could he?

He remembered her, Maggie. They’d called her Saint Maggie. But he had known her as just Maggie. He remembered the heavy smell of too-sweet flowers on her when she’d first scooped him up as the Doomsday horn rang out over the city and everyone fled. As fighter jets streaked across the sky and cars smashed into one another.

He remembered her running and saying, “I’m doing my best.”

Like it was a chant.

Like it was an explanation.

Like it was a prayer.

In the morning the man donned his armor and checked the last three shells. He loaded two and kept one in his jacket pocket.