Young Writers Society

Even after the ash settled, the sky was saturnine, gray like smoke choking the air around the charred remnants of the forest, thick and damp with humidity that made breathing impossible. Kali lay on the thin mattress for God knows how many hours afterward, staring up at the sky through gaping holes in the roof, listening to silence punctuated only by the ringing of her ears and ragged, gasping sobs. Her heart throbbed in her chest in a frantic, unrelenting rhythm and pain slipped up and down her thin, quivering frame as though keeping time to the rhythm dictated by her heart. The world seemed to be a world away, and even that was not enough for it to begin to crush down on her as though Atlas had realized it was a burden one man, even a God, could not do by himself. She lay there, hardly aware that Andrew had crawled over to her and had taken her hand into his, pressing his lips against it. She lay there, not able to bring herself to move, feeling as though she had awoken from a horrible nightmare only to find that it had not been a nightmare at all. Kali watched the sky, dimly aware that what she was truly looking for was some hint that God was going to part the clouds and come down for them. The attack, the chaotic explosions in the night, the screams, the flames racing through the world and know racing through her insides, could be nothing if not a sign that what had just ensued had been Armageddon.

Kali's back ached as she leaned over the grocery cart, releasing her grasp on it to reach inside and pluck out a can of peas that had just caught her eye. Even with the other cans that she had salvaged, seeing the huge dent in that one made her stomach turn sour. She had missed it because of the dimness of the new sun, because of the weariness clouding her gaze, and the need for hurry perpetuated by the incessant hunger creating a permanent hollow in her middle. Andrew waited for her just beyond that building. It was not a building; there were no buildings anymore. It was only a ruin, only half of a building, and the other half lay in the middle of the street, beneath the uprooted power lines. Huge chunks of pavement had been ripped out of the middle of the road and it was hard to push the grocery cart along but she did anyway, ignoring the searing heat of what pavement remained and the pain of broken pavement threatening to slit her feet open. It had been months since Kali had worn shoes and her skin had grown tougher, but sometimes it did not seem to matter. Only relief that they had found food and the fact that Andrew would be worried if she did not show up kept her going. Kali tossed the can as far away from her as she could, shielding her eyes as it caught the sunlight and reflected it back at the top of its spiral, and then continued walking.

When she reached Andrew, he was rolling something between his fingers. At first, she thought it was just stone, but when she realized what it was, only numbness kept her from sicking up. A piece of bone, unmistakably human, but at least there was no flesh clinging to this bone as there had been to so many others that she had seen Andrew playing with. At her approach, he only dropped it down into the pile of rubble had had retrieved it from and stood up to his feet swiftly, silently and unmoving and somehow like a shadow. He gave her a smile as faded and ruined as their surroundings and she returned one just the same, giving a nod of thanks as he took the grocery cart from her.

They spent the rest of the day strolling along in silence, as affectionate as strangers, and sooner than they'd thought to they had come to the end of that city and reached the empty stretch of highway, the kind where it seemed as though, despite the obvious ruin, there could be something else alive, just beyond your reach. There was likely not. Fear and hopelessness was far more successful at killing than disease and warfare. Except that all living things had not been killed; they had been exterminated. It had always felt to Kali as though both she and Andrew were intruders in a world they had no right to be in. It had been weeks since she had seen any animal, even more weeks since she and Andrew had seen another human.

They had thought he was a pile of rags at first until he had straightened up. He was a walking skeleton, and oozing scabs and filth had covered him to such an extent that she had given him as wide a berth as possible despite her initial instinct to approach him merely because he was another human being. He would probably be dead by now. Nearly everyone else was, and Andrew and she themselves only clung to life by their fingernails. For protection in the middle of a storm-tossed sea, they held a thin twig perilously close to snapping. Not even a twig; it was a splinter. To keep from falling into the gaping mouth of a ravine, they held plants that were nearly detached from the cliffs, hanging only by a fraying root. It was tempting to Kali to just let her grasp of that go, and pray to God that Andrew did the same so she didn't have to venture into death alone.

That night they slept together, huddled close for warmth, and she and Andrew tried to carry on a conversation as a desperate means of latching on to normalcy. After a while, they fell silent again and then lay there until sleep claimed them.

Winter swooped down like a vulture and ravaged the land further with keen, gnawing fangs before settling a white sheet down over the land that gave nearly a facade of purity. In a rare ironic show of humor, Andrew plucked twigs from a leaning tree on the outskirt of what had once likely been a small, rural community and fashioned it into something resembling a tree before wreathing it with ribbon, God knows where he'd found that from. He'd laughed bitterly at that, and despite the biting, cruel tone of it even seeing that sort of humor had made a warmness settle inside of Kali that she had not felt in a while. They made love beneath the tree that night, and the coldness had not been able to touch them. The loneliness of the world had waited outside for them to finish, unable to intrude on this moment because it had no place in something as perfect and wonderful, an experience that Kali had nearly forgotten could be so beautiful. Something about the death of the world around them made it seem even more beautiful, a brilliant flare of hope.

After that, throughout that winter Kali felt life begin to return to her. She made love to Andrew as much as she could, and it became to represent much more than a display of renewed passion, and instead became, to her, an attempt at making life. There was something symbolic to her that making love was making life, as though there was a reason, some reason just beyond her understanding, that those things in particular could not be destroyed by death. Some of the spiritual faith that had defined her when she was younger even began to return, and every town she went through that winter she scoured ruins for a Bible to read as avidly as she scoured them for cans of food.

In spring, they saw a cow grazing along what had been a dirt road. There was not much grass but he pulled up what there was, and something about his slow, deliberate movements seemed to convey an absurd ignorance of what was going on around him, an obliviousness that was simultaneously shocking and somehow indescribably amusing. Andrew had suggested bringing him with them so that they could slaughter him as soon as opportunity existed, but they reached a mutual decision to leave him behind. Somehow, it seemed as though killing one of the few live things they had seen in a while would be a sin of the worst kind. They had named him Homer before leaving and Andrew had clambered onto the cow's back, and then clung tight, half-expecting the animal to bolt off wildly, half-wanting him to. Kali shouted at him to get off, but, thank God, Homer had ignored the sudden weight and continued grazing and they had continued their journey. Kali laughed, more in relief than for any other reason.

A few weeks later they found a Bible buried beneath the rubble and Kali had picked it up and begun to flip through it, as careful as she could because of how frayed the pages were. In another room in the same house, they found the body of a little girl clutching her doll tight to her chest, her mouth open in a scream, and every feature had been so perfectly preserved that Kali was bombarded with disturbing, stifling images of how the last moment of this girl’s life was. Without her even having to, Andrew picked up the girl's body, making careful that her doll didn't fall, and buried her, leaving a stone over the spot where they buried her as a makeshift memorial. They ended up going hungry that night, partly because of the time they had taken to bury her, but it was one of the few nights where Kali's sleep had not been plagued by nightmares.

Sometimes it rained, and they would continue on anyway. There was something about the raindrops seeping into her skin that was irresistibly soothing, like a hand stroking a fevered forehead, and the steady downpour hid the desolation, covered up the silence with a persistent murmur. A couple of flowers tried to grow, but always failed; even weeds wilted, a brown, rusted color. The world was overrun with pallid, monotone colors that increased the inescapable sensation of helplessness, hopelessness, and hollowness that resided in every molecule of air, threatening to stifle her.

When it didn't rain, the sun was a wane, sickly yellow color that somehow seemed to become swallowed by the grayness and scarcely warmed the air at all. Sometimes, even Andrew's presence didn't prevent her from walking as though in a stupor, her eyes fixed on some distant spot on the horizon. Gradually, the bare, skeletal trees that occupied these backwoods roads began to shrink and what little grass had managed to grown in rusted clumps disappeared altogether to be replaced by dirt nearly the same color as the sun. Soon, they were crossing through a desert beneath a sun that grew hotter and brighter, with no trees to shelter her from the hell-like hold that spring held on this area.

For mile after mile, the barren landscape, interrupted here and there by a scraggly bush or a pile of jagged boulders, crawled into the sun and the empty sky, and there was no sign that there was anything else in the world but this. It was nearly two weeks after wandering into the desert when they saw the shape blurring on the horizon, smudged by the sun and the weariness that Kali carried around her like it was a friend. As they got closer, the shapes clarified and settled into buildings, and the first thing either of them noticed were that they were in remarkably good repair compared to the cities and small towns that lay behind them. Andrew remarked on the sudden appearance of the town just as their rations were dwindling as pure coincidence, but Kali's new spiritual belief and her incessant need to view things idealistically convinced her that the town was a godsend. The only thing that kept her from running towards the city as fast as she could was weariness, the heat, and the knowledge that as close as it appeared, it might not be as close as it seemed because of the desert's bizarre capability of distorting distances.