Sins of omission

The flashlight plays across the rusted cans and stacks of flaking magazines on the shelves as I slowly sweep it across the room, breathing slow and shallow, straining to hear anything in the silence that hangs thick and heavy in the basement. This far down, past three dry bodies and through two heavy doors, the relentless wind outside is a memory, its sudden absence turning even this silent room deafening.

Particles of dust dance in the flashlight's beam, pinwheeling and pirouetting through the air, disturbed for the first time in how many years? God knows. Or he would, if he hadn't abandoned this hell, left it to burn and rot a lifetime ago, his grand experiment deemed an irredeemable failure. Can't say as I blame him.

The dust lays thick on the floor, presenting arcane messages written in a calligraphy of rat trails and ash drifts. I fight the urge to cough, an urge growing more insistent by the day, I've noticed, though I'm loath to let my companions know just how bad things have gotten. I suspect somehow they know already: they can smell weakness, their kind. They can taste it. I imagine it must be an overpowering stench in this ruined world, and almost laugh, not able to remember the last time I was so thankful to find myself lacking.

I pass the flashlight back across the room, satisfied there's nothing to find here, nothing worth choking down more of this dust for, anyway, and that laugh breaks free, becoming a cough that rips through me, weakening my knees and caving my chest as I hack, deep and wet, tears coming to my eyes.

In the silence before I can haul a breath into my flooding lungs I hear something, a gasp, a whisper, and I freeze, immediately alert, my eyes and ears straining to find the source of the sound while my lungs burn, desperate for the breath I choked off before it could do me any good.

I whip the flashlight to my left and for a moment I see it, a pair of eyes glittering in the dark, staring at me from behind a century's worth of TV Guides and bloated tin cans, split open by the force of their own decay, now long dry and dusty.

I blink the tears out of my eyes and try to find her, the girl hiding in the darkness with me, from me, but she's silent as a dream and she blows away into the dark like a cobweb. Her eyes stay with me, though: wide and deep, ringed by bony eye sockets under taut skin the color of nothing I can remember seeing, not for a long time. The moon, maybe. White and almost translucent, so thin and delicate you wouldn't even touch it for fear of spoiling it, tearing it.

I cough again, feeling something move inside me that shouldn't, and after several long moments regain my breath, wheezing harshly as I pass the flashlight's beam across the room again. How she survived, survives, down here in this tomb I have no earthly idea. How many more there might be is another question I can't answer, as I hear her chittering in the dark, like a rat. But then, I tell myself, maybe that's all it was anyway.

I back out of the room and through the heavy door, making my way back upstairs to the world, to the driving wind and the grit it carries, to the animals that walk like men that I find myself travelling with. She's better off down in the dark, alone and starving, than up here with the likes of these survivors. I know what designs they have for the women they find, what foul sin and wickedness they visit upon them and carve into their flesh, and while I'm too weak to stand against them, I have no desire to assist them in realizing these depravities.

I thump up the stairs and into the blinding sunlight, drawing my mask back across my face as I reach the burned-out remains of the first floor where my companions have already rifled through the desiccated remains found here and have grown bored and anxious to move on in waiting for my return. I meet their expectant stares.

"Just rats."



12 May 2015