Better Than Nothing

Eyes shut and face flat against the dirt, the Woman squeezed her body through the pitch black tunnel. She followed the distant sound of something dripping in the dark ahead, and though she did not know how far she had to go, she dragged herself along inch by inch by her fingertips until her head finally cleared a small space.

After steadying her breath, she cracked a small glowstick and held it aloft. Its feeble green glow was barely adequate to light the confines of a cabinet. Still, she saw its light reflect off the surface of a tiny pool of water collecting in a crevice. The Woman unscrewed the cap off a plastic canteen and skimmed its mouth beneath the surface. Once filled, she took a sniff and retched. The water reeked of tar and asphalt, and would no doubt taste as wretched.

But it was better than nothing.

Careful not to cut herself on rebar, the Woman dragged herself backwards down the tunnel, until at last she emerged from the wreckage of a collapsed underpass. Once she had brushed the dirt from her face and her eyes had adjusted to the light, she tilted her head to the sky overhead. The sun shone bright and full over a vast eye of clear blue forty miles across, but the sky beyond its rim was saturated with impenetrable black clouds that reached in every direction towards the horizon.

There wasn’t much time. The Storm was coming.

The Woman made her way in the direction of the downtown district, maneuvering between piles of rusted cars and crumbled masonry and whatever detritus the Storm had tossed on its last pass through. What used to be streets were flanked by what used to be skyscrapers. The ones that hadn’t toppled in the past years had had their steel frames twisted and keeled from base to tip in gargantuan, surreal monuments. Every once in a while, some of these shuddered in their unnatural poses, sending whipping echoes that resounded from tower to tower.

The Woman clambered over a shattered barricade into the plundered ruins of a supermarket. There wasn’t much left here. The shelves were bare, the stockrooms empty, but after fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, the Woman discovered a dented tin of tuna wedged beneath one of the fridges. She unsheathed a serrated knife from her belt and with it dislodged the can from its cranny. She didn’t bother checking the faded expiry. The top bulged every so slightly, enough that she knew what would happen if she ate the contents. Still, she nestled the tin securely in her knapsack, between a pair of lime headphones and a dog-eared copy of The Poems of Rumi.

A distant rumbling drew her attention to the graying light drawing down outdoors. The Woman pulled her knapsack over her shoulder and hopped back out. The air was suddenly colder than when she’d gone in, and the black clouds— comfortably distant just an hour before— were very nearly overhead.

She sprinted through the downtown district, through strewn plots that had once held homes, through wind-plowed fields that had once held trees, and all the while the growing breeze pulled stronger and stronger against the folds of her clothes. By the time she made it to the storm cellar, she had to lean against a sustained gust that threatened to drag her back the way she’d come. With great effort, she managed to wrest open the doors to the shelter and climb in. Once she shut the doors behind her, she wrapped heavy chains around the inner handles, securing them tightly with a thick padlock.

She swept the hair from her face and sniffed.

“I’m back.”

She came into the room and dropped her knapsack by a rudimentary fire pit. Assembling a small but tidy pile of kindling from twigs and tinder she pulled from her pockets, she lit a small flame before tiredly seating her weary bones on the dusty concrete. The fire smoked and rose, illuminating two carcasses propped stiffly against milk cartons.

The skin on these bodies was dry and papery, but they looked otherwise untouched by vermin or rot. The one on the left was a handsome man— or had been. Soft blonde curls draped over heavyset eyelids now closed in repose. He might have been sleeping, but for the ivory pallor of his skin and the clean, bloodless slice through his windpipe. The body on the right belonged to a middle-aged woman. Her head had been tilted away at an unnatural angle, as though in post-mortem shame. Whatever color her blouse had been before, it didn’t show through the brown blood that had impregnated the cloth.

A deafening boom rattled the room. On cue, the Woman pulled the headphones from her bag and affixed them over her ears until she could hear only muffled smears of the cacophony rising outside the cellar doors. Somewhere, a spat of enormous thunderbolts crackled in quick succession, louder by far than thunder any living soul had heard before the first Storm. The rising winds screamed like circling harpies. A chorus of metallic screams answered as the twisted towers of the downtown district bent and reformed into impossible shapes. A deep rumble sounded as asphalt stripped from the roads and the earth itself was sucked into the sky in thick plumes.

The Woman heard none of this. She pulled the tin from her knapsack and peeled its cap off before placing it on the fire. The tuna bubbled merrily, and the pink flesh looked innocuous enough as she forked some into her mouth. She immediately choked. The fish was rancid. Even so, she forced herself to chew and chew and chew then swallow. She did it again with the next forkful and the next, until she had scraped every last scrap from the can.

She uncapped her canteen and gulped down water that tasted of tar and asphalt, drinking until she tasted sediment. Her body seized with the overwhelming need to vomit. She doubled over on her knees and fought the feeling, tamping it down with her hand wrapped over her mouth, and slowly the feeling passed.

She reached behind her neck and unclasped the small heart-shaped locket bumping against her chest. She flipped it open freely, the lock on it having long since snapped off. The glass was gone out of the two halves, leaving only thin letters inscribed inside the hollow shells:

Love is the whole thing. We are only pieces.

The Woman snapped the locket shut and buried her face in folded arms.

“Bastard.”

A fat tear made it midway down her nose before she rubbed it away with the knuckle of her thumb. Her fingers trembled as they squeezed the trinket tight, and though she could feel the cheap metal dent beneath the mounting pressure of her fingertips, it did not crumple.

Something crackled in the fire at her feet. Head still bowed, she raised her fist violently as if to throw in the locket, but her grip on it would not lessen. Her arm fell lax and she wept, unheard, as the world outside tore itself to dust, unheard.

She looked up with bleary eyes at the bodies assembled on the other side. They shouldn’t be there. She ought to have buried them. At least she ought to have dragged the bodies out before the Storm, to be carried away by the winds somewhere, anywhere other than here.

Then she’d be alone, alone in the dark with what might be the last tin of food and the last drops of drinkable water left on earth, and if these things were true there was nothing left to keep the Woman from the Storm, no chains, no locks. Even dead and silent, the bodies were there when she left to search and the bodies were there when she came back to light the fire.

They were there.

And that was better than nothing.