M. Banner - Stone Age

Like zombies from a bad movie, they all started moving in slow motion, ambling towards the large patio door leading to the beach. They held hands, bound together to face what waited for them outside.

Once through the doorway, they all looked up to the sky, walking still further.

Streaks of colors, bisected by rivers of multiple colors, and muted wispy clouds undulated like waves towards them in the sky. The colors were in concert with a strange whooshing sound, like a breeze.

It then occurred to all of them that the lights might never turn on again. As Max had told them all in his letter, this was the worst-case scenario. The sun would forever send massive electro-magnetic pulses into the atmosphere, generation after generation, rendering all electronics useless.

This was the new normal.

They would forever reside in a new Stone Age.

Russell Thompson reached over and opened up the drawer of the wood table beside his bed. With his bandaged left hand, he pulled out a leather-bound notebook given to him by his mother years ago. With his uninjured right hand, he loosened the leather binding ties and opened the book for only the third time. He glanced at the first page’s inscription, The adventures of Russell P. Thompson III . His deceased mother had written this in careful script. He beamed at the memory of his mother giving him this book when he was a teenager, after announcing that he was going to travel the world as an explorer. His father never tempted his desires, calling them, “fodder for idlers.” His mother rejoiced in his ambitious desires of travel, adventure, and prospecting.

Skipping past a page of writing to the next was a drawing of a cicada. He drew it a week ago; meticulously studying and copying in pen one of the millions of those flying around him. It was a sign of his rebirth. A cicada first comes out of the ground every decade or so before being reborn to fly. Similarly, his crushed body had come out of over ten months of therapy. He was in his larvae state before coming out of his hospital bed, reborn. Now he was ready to take flight.

He turned back to the second page again to see his nearly illegible scrawl from the first time he cracked open the journal. It was titled, “The road paved with gold,” followed by the carefully written block letters, “GSV EVRM LU TLOW SRWWVM FMWVI Z XLOOVXGRLM LU KROVW ILXPH, DSRXS SZW ML VZIGSOB KOZXV YVRMT GSVIV, RM GSV HGIVZN YVW, 143 KZXVH WFV HLFGS LU GSV YRT OLZM KRMV LM GLK LU GSV SROO ZH HVVM UILN GSV XSVIIB XIVVP XZNK”. Below this, he had written in the same careful block letters, “USE ATBASH.”

He didn’t need to study the letters using the Atbash cipher he had used to write those words from the tip. The words were already committed to his permanent memory, “The vein of gold hidden under a collection of piled rocks, which had no earthly place being there, in the stream bed, 143 paces due south of the big lone pine on top of the hill as seen from the Cherry Creek Camp.”

It was a reminder of his unfinished purpose. He turned the page, past the drawing, this time forcefully and with his good right hand started to write:

5 July, 1860

I can no more explain how I am alive, than I can of waking up in this Denver City sanatorium bed, the very same bed of a dying man who gave me my very reason for coming to Colorado, seemingly a lifetime ago. I should be dead. This I know for certain. There is no logical reason for my survival. Yet here am I, convalescing from burns, which I fear will forever remind me of that event, barely ten months previous. I remember feeling the heat and the pain and then blackness. After waking up a fortnight later, my attendants told me what had transpired. I was one of a multitude who were injured that morning. Many perished, perhaps even my friend Pete who accompanied me on this trip. I am certain he was more than a vision from that faithful day. I had thought destiny had turned against me as some sort of punishment.

He paused, looking up to his left leg, which was the part of his body, in addition to his left arm, which were totally burned and broken, but now mostly healed. Both arm and leg tingled together, an endless chorus of painful noise sung loudly from each. More painful was the knowledge that his father was the one paying for his treatments. The physical and emotional pain was until today, held back by the Laudanum. He no longer wanted to cloud his thinking with Laudanum, so ignoring their clarion call of pain, he turned his back to them and continued his thoughts:

Destiny has a funny way changing one’s course. Only yesterday, I learned I was in the same bed as the lunger who told me his story in my hometown of Lawrence and the tip that would lead me to gold. Because of his TB, he sought medical aid from this sanatorium, one that received worldly acclaim.

Betty, a beautiful angel, working as an attendant, nursed me back to health over these many months on a daily course of the sundry tales and life stories of the sanatoriums’ patients. Her stories and the unspoken love which has welled up in me, suppressed until yesterday, by the fear I would never possess the will to express my feelings for her. Then I learned the truth about my painful calling.

After returning from my regular walk, exorcising the demons of agony possessing my leg, Betty told me of one patient in particular. He was in the later stages of TB , she said tearfully. In one of his bouts of delirium, he said that he had struck it rich, uncovering the gold find of the century. All he had to do was get back to Kansas City to get help and lay claim to his find. She feared that he never made it back. I don’t know why, but I never let on that I was bound to this same man and my yet unfilled posthumous promise to him that I would make sure he was buried at his home and that I alone possessed his most cherished secret.

One cannot claim this as luck, any more than one can claim a new sunrise or sunset as accident. After all, what are the chances of one randomly finding a stranger with a secret that will change his life, then surviving the oddest of events I dare say witnessed by man, and then falling in love with your attendant, and waking up in the same bed as that stranger? Pondering such wonders makes my head hurt. The how, perhaps I will never be known, but the why is certain. It is still my destiny and purpose to find this gold and then propose to the woman I love. I will not be dissuaded from both my missions.”

He closed the book, and then secured it in a leather hide, folding each corner carefully, finally securing the hide to the book with a long leather strip, which was tied around its width and length.

Betty was looking forward to seeing Russell. He was nothing to look at, and was a little bit of a dreamer, but something had changed since yesterday. It was as if he had awoken from a dream and he was alive again. She was excited to see what he was like today. All night, until she arrived for her shift, she was filled with happiness. She could not wait to see him, and she hoped he felt the same.

She spent extra time getting her makeup just right, adding an extra measure of red to her lips, and color to her checks. She brushed her thick black hair more often than normal. She pressed her uniform, making it look crisp and nearly new. She wanted to look perfect for Russell, and hoped and prayed he would notice.

After visiting Mr. Jenkins, she entered Russell’s room. He wasn’t there. His bed, the second of eight, separated by curtains, was turned down and his belongings looked gone as well. She walked up and saw there was a letter on his pillow. It had her first name on it . She opened it up and read: