With a Whimper

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. Begrimed, nailed shut, with ragged layers of silver duct tape sealing the edges, it was the only window. Starting clear, over the months becoming grime encrusted while the clouds cried out the polluted ash from the atmosphere. Not that there was anything to see from his apartment, just the ruins of downtown Atlanta. She cared for him through the illness, forsaking a holiday in Cancun to carry bed pans, help with fever and try to get him to eat. The bastard had gone and died just when Yellowstone blew, leaving her sealed in his tomb. She dragged him out into the hall, bundled him into the elevator and sent it to the ground floor before rushing back in and sealing the apartment.

They had laughed at him, her too at times, called him a prepper. One of the bedrooms of the three-bedroom apartment stacked floor to ceiling with food, water and fuel for the stove. The super would have shit if they had seen the cans of fuel stacked up. She wasn’t laughing now. The ash started falling three days after he died. Of all the ways for the world to end, buried by the remains of the Yellowstone caldera wasn’t high on her lists. Global warming, pollution, war, they all were the agreed upon ends, shit, even a rouge asteroid, not feet of ash and fridged cold.

At one time Atlanta and the countryside around it was her playground. Stone Mountain, Dahlonega, Six Flags, Little Five Points. Now it was all gone, all buried, all strange, now unknown to her. The internet and satellite radio had been good companions, until they just stopped. Warnings of not to go out, not to breath unfiltered air, the dangers of silicosis and concrete lung disease. She used the provided hammer, nails and tape to seal the apartment. She had knocked out the window in one bedroom to vent the stove and put in an air filter from the furnace. The stove her only way to cook and source of heat. She then had taped multiple layers of cardboard over the frame to seal the ash out.

She looked at the bedroom where the food supplies dwindled. In the other bedroom were the stacks of empty food 5-gallon buckets, now repurposed. Her nose had gone blind to the smell of the waste buckets, she had tried early on to dump them down the toilet, but after the second week, it refused to go down.

The food and water should last another month, the fuel, maybe a bit longer if she ate some the MREs cold. After that all bets were off. She slid open the drawer in the bedstand table, it was black and shiny and evil in its simplicity. To get it out of its biometrically sealed safe she had dragged his lifeless body over to the safe and pressed his cold clammy hand against the sensor, with a whir and a click the heavy steel door had popped open revealing all his man toys. Most, she had no clue how to work, but this one, this one she had seen enough cop shows to understand. Luckily, he had kept it loaded.

At first, she had heard others, some breaking into other apartments, some ranting, raving at the falling ash, others just coughing their lungs out looking for scraps. Each time she had stayed quiet and looked at her dwindling supplies until they left. She hadn’t heard anyone in days.

At first, there had been sirens, helicopters, airplanes. She had watched several crashes as their engines choked on the ash, before the world went silent and her filthy window showed a stark, alien landscape, until she could see nothing but bits and pieces through the clinging ash. Rain had come, first cleansing, then clogging, converting the fluffy ash to a sodden mess that dried like caliche entombing her. She wondered if ever there were future archeologists, would they find her desiccated body preserved like some ancient relic from Pompei? She remembered a school movie about Pompei and had nightmares about being buried.

Periodically she tapped the filter, careful not to break it, just enough to dislodge the ash, allow her one more day. Hope can be strong, hope for rescue, hope for companionship, hope. Hers had dwindled. Now she just hoped for one more day. She hoped she would wake up from fitful sleep to see sunshine through her window, the ash washed away. She adjusted the stove to put out more heat. She had read about the year there was no summer. Now she was living it. What part of the window wasn’t ash encrusted was rimed with frost. Before she refueled the stove each morning her breath formed clouds and the cold caused it to hurt to breath. She wondered which was less painful, freezing or the sudden bang.

She had tried prayer, but God didn’t seem to be listening. She guessed he had judged the world and found it wanting. There had been reports, before the grid ended, of other volcanos, long dormant, roaring to life and something about a pole reversal or flip, but she didn’t understand all of it. She wished for a little global warming.

Time marched its ash covered feet over the top of her, dwindling her food down to a single can of freeze-dried peas. The water was nearly gone. She looked at the single can of fuel left and at the revolver in her lap.

As the bang shook the window, a bit of ash dropped away showing a single bird deposited seed pushing a tender shoot up through the ash on the windowsill.