As bright as day

I feel it circling us out there in the dark, and I pile some more wood on the fire. It cracks and pops, sending tiny embers careening up towards the sky, the trees around us casting dancing shadows as the flames climb higher and hotter. I peer out under the branches and try to convince myself that every glint I see isn't a glimpse of firelight on eyes or teeth, that the hungering dark can be held back for one more night, a few more hours, until the dawn comes, gray and cold, but bright, and we start to run again.

I look down at you, curled up facing the fire, and watch the light play across your features. You've always slept better than me, bundled up in furs and scraps, immune to the wind and the rain, sleeping the sleep of the just, your slow, steady breathing ticking away the hours as I watch over you and tend the fire, keeping my promise by keeping you safe, for however long I'm able. Tonight's no different: a black sky broken by the shattered moon, the silence of the tomb hanging heavy over the woods, oppressive and suffocating. But we have fire, so we have light. We have our health, or you have yours, anyway, so we can run. And we have each other, so we have a reason to.

I put another log on the fire, the thin white bark flaring up quickly as the wood slowly blackens. I reach over to you and brush hair from your face with clumsy fingers. You frown slightly and mutter your dreamspeak, half-formed syllables to go with hazy visions, worlds, I pray, unlike our own. Never could I escape into sleep and dream as you can, slipping into comforting obliviousness with an ease that I can't even hope to match. There you find freedom, where I remain a prisoner: ever observing, ever marking, ever fearing.

Poking at the fire, I stir up the embers and coax new life from them, their heat slowly consuming the stubs and ends of the burned logs and branches that have served us through the night, morning still a long way off.

My poker flares up and I douse it in the ashes before, thinking better of it, lighting it again, the flame growing quickly. Standing up through aching knees, I step over you and walk towards the edge of the light cast by our fire, holding the makeshift torch out before me. I raise it up and look out into the darkness, trying to, but hoping not to, catch a glimpse of our pursuer. I hear the groaning and cracking of some ancient tree off to my left, and before I can even turn, I hear another, right before me, just beyond the feeble light of my torch, and I swear I see that glint, that predatory malevolence lurking out there in the night, that which has dogged our every step and turned our nights to terror. Never had I seen its face, though long have I lived in fear of it. For miles and years, it seems, we've fled, and I've done all I can to keep you safe. There is, perhaps, one last kindness I can perform.

I turn and walk back to the fire, casting my torch into the dying flames. I ease myself down to the ground and curl up behind you, feeling you burrow into me as I wrap my arms around you. I watch over your head as the flames sputter and die, bit by bit, and the circle of light surrounding us shrinks and shrinks, and they close in. I bury my face in your hair as the last orange flame gives way to embers and I close my eyes rather than watch the end.



12 December 2018

Emergencey

I wake with a start, blood red skies burning away in my vision, replaced by the inky blackness of the bunker. I lie back, catching my breath, staring off into the darkness overhead, and I wait for her comforting arm to drape across my chest.

My breathing slows and I look over to the few lit dials on the console across the room to my right, the only source of light. I roll over and curl up, staring at those dials, trying not to acknowledge the void behind me, the space where her sleeping bag once lay, but I swear I can feel her fingers at my neck, brushing through my hair, so I squeeze my eyes shut and bury my face, trying to hide my tears from who?

Eventually morning comes, near as I can tell, and I set about busying myself for the coming day: routine is the enemy of madness, so I've been told, and it's all I've got left. I go through the motions of keeping myself alive: I roll up my sleeping bag and put it aside, clearing a space and putting myself through the poses she taught me. I sweep out quarters unoccupied for months. I take readings on dying batteries even as they leak onto the floor and into the air. I crack open a can of what the label tells me used to be beans, and this is what's left of my life.

We were safe down below as the fires raged above, death raining from the sky the world over, the world torn asunder and not one stone left set on top of another. Humanity cast down from our dizzying height by the push of a button, as if by design, all that was left a single family huddled deep underground, surrounded by the same weapons of war that bathed the earth above in nuclear fire, protected and sustained by and from that selfsame beast, the all-consuming monster war itself. It seemed poignant at first, these small lives spared while so many burned, or worse. And fear melded with gratitude for the first days, days of exploration and tentative, careful explanations to the children, until eventually fear was forgotten, and gratitude, as it does, died, and there was only life underground, drive more by inertia than will, momentum carrying them forward.

Days turned into months, and the horror of listening to the smattering of broadcasts on the radio was replaced by the horror of the silence that crept in their place. The cries of the dying gave way to a yawning nothing. Familiar voices calling for help for days and weeks, growing ever feebler, eventually faded away as the prayed-for deliverance finally arrived, though not in the form requested, torn to pieces by wasting and disease, or the diseased themselves. She wanted to help them, wanted to throw open our doors and welcome them into our home. She knew better, but knowing doesn't stop the tearing away, the loss and the pain.

The strongest voices rang out as long as they could, citing all the good books and holy words they could muster, pounding the pages to remind any who were listening that this destruction was a holy thing, brought upon us as a tool of purification, a test for the worthy. The twinge of madness was always present in these voices, creeping in around the edges, until their ends came, too. Some simply vanished, voices lost to the world, their apocalyptic transmissions echoing out for an eternity in the void. Others met their end head on, still thumping the pages and cursing us for heretics as they pulled the trigger.

It had been a long time since we let the children stay in the room while we listened to the radio, scanning across the bands, reaching out into the darkness above our heads, hoping to find what? Our deliverance? Companionship? Eventually just a reason to continue.

But the months stretched on, and routine became our ally. The children grew, and we regaled them with stories from before they were born. Long drives to the lake. Half-remembered arguments. Blue skies and pine trees. Birth and death and loss and love. Her mother. My father. She knew all the details; I was always bad at that.

How long it was, we couldn't say, but the air soured, and the stores began to dwindle, and her eyes hollowed, taking on an edge I hadn't seen before. The children didn't play anymore, and I found my stories, lopsided and incomplete as they were, simply weren't enough to hold them close and keep them from drifting any longer. Sickness had stolen into our shelter, the same sickness that had spread across the world above, and it stole my world from me a second time.

I buried them as best I could, and visited them every day. My momentum was spent, and I found will a poor substitute. Routine stepped in and I rose every morning, went through her poses, swept and recorded, ate and said her name like a prayer.

And then one day, our home became a tomb. It didn't happen all at once, but happen it did, and I could look away from it no longer. Dead children. Dead wife. Dead husband just waiting to join them. I talked with her about it, many times, and I could always hear her voice, her gentle and not so gentle urgings, some so old and familiar they brought a smile to my face even as they admonished me, not to be better, but to be as good as I was. Not to be stronger, but to be as strong as I was.

That doubt in me she was never able to break, that shadow she was never able to dispel, grew wider and wilder, and I knew I wasn't fit to rest with her. I knew I had to be stronger, fuller, better, before I deserved to lie with her again. I knew only weakness and a wasting death waited for me down here in the darkness, and that the only way into her graces was to crack the ancient seals and swing wide the doors on their great, groaning hinges, and to walk out into the light and whatever awaited me. 

I'll make her proud, I think, as I put my weight against the last door. Bones and waste clatter as they are swept aside, and even the dim daylight filtering in from the cave's mouth is blinding. I adjust the pack on my shoulders once more and take my first step out of the bunker.

1 May 2018