"The time of test is just upon us"

I listen as their laughter fades and the sounds of night slowly make themselves known again.  When I'm satisfied they've gone, I lower myself from my hiding spot and pick my way carefully down the ruined stairs.  Glass crunches under my feet, the bigger pieces long since removed, raised in desperate defense or drawn across the throat of one of the precious few of us left.  What a cruel joke, that I should linger here, alone, while my children lay in unmarked graves.  Crueler still the knowledge that had they lived they would surely have cost me my life by now.  They didn't, they couldn't, understand the gravity of this situation, know the need for silence, mistrust, fear.

They couldn't have lived: they are not for this world.

Wisps of cloud drift overhead, the last remnant of the toxic storm that blew into the valley below, choking the life out of anything unfortunate enough to be caught exposed and unprepared, finally carried off by the western wind, carried off to ravage some other land, some dusty pocket where decent folk try to scrape some semblance of a life out of the poisoned soil.  Then the storms come, blow their homes to pieces and steal their breath.  Then the vultures come, the vultures on two legs, picking over the remains, taking what they want and leaving the rest to the dust and the wind and the sun.

These ones stripped the clothes off the bodies, taking that and more from the mother, then packed up the few misshapen vegetables the family'd managed to coax from the earth and headed southwest.  They all headed southwest after they got the word (heard it from a man who heard it from a man), taking what they could along the way.  And now I was headed that way too.

Moonlight streams into the house through the hole in the roof, though at this point it's more hole than roof.  I hold my breath and listen, but nothing's taken notice of me.  I peer through the remains of a window before slipping through the doorway.  I want to head down into the valley and look over what the vultures left behind, but there's no time.  I need to keep moving and I've already lost too much night.  Besides, the last thing I need is to be confronted again with the dream laying dead down there on the valley floor.  I need to see it, but I need to see it alive, fighting for survival against a world that wants to stamp it out of existence, fighting against this new, ugly human race.  That's why I'm headed southwest.

I get my bearings and start walking again.  It's tougher now, the stars don't make sense.  Someone took this world and shook it, some vengeful god, raining fire down on the good and evil alike, leaving a broken world of wickedness and wrath, with a hopeful few barely holding on, fighting against the storm of destruction threatening to topple everything they've built.  They know how delicate it is, and I know too, and that's why I have to see it.  I have to know we've got a chance, that these animals that stalk the night don't have the right of it.  I have to believe there's a reason to take another step, and for right now, getting to that church is all I've got.

I track the men leading me south around a towering mesa, but they make no effort to disguise their trail.  After all, what do they have to fear?  We made ourselves masters of this world, and destroyed it to show it.  I stay safely out of sight, maybe half an hour behind them, until they set up camp to sleep through the upcoming day.  It would be easy enough to slip into their camp and wipe them all out, one by one, make them pay for what they did to that family and I'm sure countless others I wasn't there to witness, but I can't bring myself to do it.  I don't know how many of us are left and I have to believe they'll be of some use, they'll serve some purpose.  So I wedge myself between some rocks, thankful for the shade they will provide, and cover up as much of my skin as possible.  I watch what I can of the coming sunrise before covering my face as well, weariness claiming me beneath my tattered tarp.

I think I imagine a far-off wail, carried by the wind.



19 March 2012