Chris Pourteau - Tails of the Apocalypse

The chance, however remote, that it might be gave me something to focus on as we walked. Part of me truly believed we needed a miracle to return life to a dead land. No matter how remote the possibility that Ascalon actually existed might be. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I knew that.

I told the others what I had in mind.

They followed me to the monument.

Before we disappeared inside the cavern at the foot of the hill, Priya let slip that she’d seen a stray trailing us for the last hour. Neither of the brothers had seen it, and I didn’t dare admit that I’d been seeing my own dog for the last month or so, or that he was watching us even now from a spot up by the Athenian structure that guarded over the top of the hill. There was so much destruction over the last hundred miles we’d traveled, it was amazing to think the ancient monument was still standing.

We lost Priya in the darkness.

Four of us walked into that cave, but only three of us emerged.

There was no sword in the stone waiting for me to find it.

We crawled about inside the cavern, reaching out blindly to feel our way along the walls in the claustrophobic darkness that smothered us. The air was old in there. Stale. It didn’t taste like the air outside, which in turn didn’t taste like the air I’d grown up breathing. The air now carried the dust of our lost world. Every lungful inhaled was another little bit of our loves that we’d lost drawn into us. That almost made the hell of it all bearable. But again with that word, almost.

I don’t know what happened. There was no fight. No screams. But with no light, we were fumbling around in there, trying to feel our way towards a prize we could never hope to find. It was a stupid way to go about it, I know that now. It wasn’t as if the sword would just be lying on an altar down there, waiting to be drawn up. I had tried to sell myself a lie that there was something Excaliburish about the whole thing, and that by raising the sword, people might start to believe that our greatest hero had found his way back and that we would prevail, we would batter back the darkness and find a way to rebuild. But even I didn’t buy the lie I was selling anymore.

I followed the golden blur of my ghost light out into the fading twilight. The Celts used to call it the time between times. It was one of the two hours of the day when magic was possible.

I guess the only magic here was that I was still alive.

I’m sure the brothers felt the same way, but like their Scandinavian stereotype, they weren’t very talkative. At least not with me. I think the fact that we’d lost Yusef and Priya weighed on them. But they didn’t argue when I said we had to move on.

We weren’t going to find a holy cup or a gleaming sword or any other sort of relic. I had come to accept that. I didn’t want to believe it, but I accepted it. We were still three hundred miles from the Downs, where I’d made my home with Em and Buster. I wanted to think that a lot could happen over three hundred miles. But as each mile passed beneath our trudging feet with more of the same dust and decay to show for it, how much could really change over that distance?

Heldur was the next to admit he’d seen something, but he was much more precise in his description of it. It wasn’t an animal. It was a sallow-skinned naked man, feral, his face blistered and raw, clumps of hair fallen out to reveal suppurating sores and puss seeping from his scalp.

I wasn’t sure if he was Heldur’s ghost, or if the feral man was the first survivor we’d found.

I’m not sure which possibility was worse.

Hejdur woke us in the middle of the night to say he’d heard something and crept out to investigate because he was sure he’d seen the same feral man lurking close to our makeshift camp. That gave me the creeps, but to be blunt, better some feral enemy come at us tooth and claw than the grimmest reaper turn out to be an irradiated corpse skittering across the blasted landscape. That was the stuff of nightmares right there. If he was real, we could put him out of his misery.

That’s how I’d started thinking; the first man we’d encountered, and I was picturing ways to end his life. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

When Hejdur returned without finding the man, the brothers decided they were going after him.

I didn’t follow them.

I needed to get my head around the fact that I was seeing monsters where there were—at worst—desperate, dying men. I didn’t like what the long walk was turning me into.

It wasn’t until I’d been walking for an hour in the opposite direction that I realized I had no intention of heading back to the camp. I was going home. Alone.

Only I wasn’t alone, was I?

I was following my own golden ghost light south toward home.

It didn’t take more than twenty miles for him to make himself known again. This time as we walked, he kept looking back over his shoulder, as if to make sure I was still following.

His tail whipped back and forth, always happy, just the way I remembered him. The closer we came to home, the more familiar my ghost light became.

He’d found a stick.

It might as well have been the canine equivalent of Ascalon or Excalibur or whatever other name that fabled sword went by the way he strutted with it in his mouth. So proud. There was a wonderful nobility about the way he watched over me as he led me home. There was no judgment for my having not been there when he and Em had needed me the most.

I wept as I walked, a single track of tears trailing down my dirt-smeared cheek. I was sure I was losing my mind, driven mad by the solitude, twisted by the grief until I’d finally broken.

I thought of all of the other animals the survivors had seen around the wreckage. A few had seen wild horses, flocks of sparrows, owls in the trees, crows, dogs like Buster; there was even a hart.

They were all soul guides, psychopomps.

Their role in every culture was the same: to shepherd the soul into the Afterlife.

But I wasn’t ready to go.

Not yet.

I wanted to go home first.

We reached the crater that had been London. All that remained was mud and silt and broken stone buried under a cloud of ash. Long shadows were burned into the ground by the heat from the nuclear blasts. Twisted wrecks of cars and buses resembled nothing more than struts of old meccano. I reached down to stroke Buster, needing to feel the familiar comfort of his soft fur beneath my fingers.

He hadn’t barked once in three hundred miles.

He looked up at me expectantly.

Once upon a time I would have dipped my hand into my pocket for some sort of treat when we walked through the woods. We were denied those simple pleasures now. But we were together, and that was miracle enough to this non-believer.

At last, a miracle in a broken, blasted land.

We were a day from home.

I hunkered down beside my best friend, ruffling my fingers through his fur, and said I only wanted one day, just one more.

He looked at me with pity in his eyes and understanding.

I wished I could read his mind.

“Penny for them,” I said, as he inclined his head, looking at me.

He answered by licking the ash off my fingertips.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten—or what that last meal had been. Fish, maybe?

That felt like something I ought to remember.

We walked through what remained of the capital. Everywhere I turned there were ghosts. They offered their own mournful laments carried away by the wind.

I saw lovers holding hands.

I saw an old man on the corner smiling at the ghost of the woman who’d been his wife for sixty years.

I saw kids on the corner kicking a football against a wall that wasn’t there.