Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

And when the man turned and saw the pup, he did not see her out there in the night, watching still. For a long while she watched from the darkness. Watched as the man stared at her mewling runt. Watched as the stranger mumbled to himself and then rose.

What he would do next she didn’t know, but she knew… she knew it had once been something she’d been a part of.

It was the only way. Her runt would never survive within the pack. And a mother is still a mother.

No matter what.

And always.

She watched from within the cold cloak of a howling night as the man bent, held out his weathered hand and waited for her pup. She watched as an ancient thing written into the language of all their DNA began again.

And it was a lost memory found to her.

And….

She knew the pup would live now.

He’d been alone for a long time.

Too long.

Too long since he’d crossed the wastes east of Saint Maggie’s home along the coast. His home. The only home he’d ever known. Too long since he’d steered clear of the craziness the mad wanderers he sometimes encountered called El Lay as he quested. Sent forth, like the others. Sent forth to find what was lost. Sent forth to find the past, if it still lived, breathed, existed.

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.