by gaslight

The End had come suddenly, in the way that most things break, in an unexpectedly expected manner. Humanity saw the horizon, ignored the signs, paid the price; the usual story. There had been war for as many years as it took for it to feel like normality, and then came a time when dialogue became perceived as fruitless, communication gave way to fear, and eventually all it took were the egos of a few to extinguish the existence of billions.

***

‘You are nothing without me’.

As she stepped through the chessboard rubble of yesterday’s treasures, his cold, dead, words echoed around her tired mind, like old, scratched vinyl unable to finish a simple revolution, repeating and stuck in a frantic moment of warped time.

‘You have nothing without me’.

That’s how everything had seemed for so long. Nothing. She had felt nothing, hoped for nothing, and now, as she gazed across what remained of a thousand homes, was left with nothing. Yet, this new life was not empty, far from that. Could this new nothingness be freedom? To begin again, no matter how desolate, to find this clarity in existence – it was, and it simultaneously was not, death: it might be liberation, or equally, the opposite.

‘You can’t live without me’.

A vast wasteland met a fiercely polluted skyline, as far as her stinging eyes could discern. Her feet were long since torn apart by hundreds of thousands of steps, walked through necessity, desperate to survive. The fires still burned the last remnants of her world, but even in that, there seemed to be an ember of warmth radiating hope; even with the smoke plumes signalling from the past, constant reminders of the devastated epoch of yesterday, torn apart at the seams.

‘You are weak’.

Every breath in this jagged landscape was new effort. Periodically, she would hold a hand to her chest, as if to reassure her own heart that the tightness would eventually subside. There would be masks somewhere. The first two hospitals she had tried had been destroyed, gutted within, and without. It was hard to tell anymore what had been caused by the scavengers, and what had taken place at the End.

‘I am always with you’.

Her hands brushed against the small silver locket hanging at her neck. The recognition stung in her memory with a venom so potent it caused a wave of nausea. She had not taken it off, and she knew she should have done. It was shaped like a heart, and she wished it would remind her of love. She wished for anything to remind her of love. He had given it to her longer ago than she could remember, before she became his prisoner, when there was still a world with a future. He was right, he was always with her, even after the End… even after everything that came before, he was still there. He was still a rancid poison festering, lurking, in every exhausted cell of her fragile body.

***

Immediately before the End, her only life was a small room with only one high window. In the early weeks and months of her incarceration at his hands, all her hope was reflected in the sounds of young children playing in the near distance, and the occasional sight of the swaying branch of a pear tree. That was until the day the children stopped playing, and the only laughter she heard was in the artificial, stilted, and clumsy soundtracks of inane reruns on a faulty, forgotten television. Even so, it gave her a certain familiarity, an illusion of stability; only the sirens outside continuing to increase in regularity gave away any sense of a world beyond the room. That world was changing irreparably, while she languished in his time capsule prison. She spent days lingering in a misplaced sense of gratitude that the tap in the corner never dripped, that her stomach did not rumble, and that she had a bed on which to sleep. His words twisted into new truths in her mind; her reality became a fiction.

***

She was trying to stop re-playing the scratched records in her tormented head.

There was too much time to think, and too much ground to cover. She had heard there were still ways to erase the bad things, even though they had always been illegal. It had always been so secretive, she did not know if it ever actually worked, if they used drugs, or even if they cut you open and took part of your brain away. She knew how much it cost, though, and the vastness of the payment sum seemed to reflect at least the potential of success.

There had been a time she had looked forward to the future, but she could not remember even fragments of those joys. All her memories were momentary, fleeting, and bound tightly within a limited series of images that flashed sporadically and violently, less often than the vinyl record’s mantra chants, but more vividly. The pictures came with such force, and urgency, it seemed every time they came, it felt like it might be the world coming to another End.

Over time, everything becomes normalised. The crunch underfoot of a thousand broken things was a noise that had stopped registering after only a few miles of walking. In this new life, there was always walking. To survive, escape, to nourish, to hide. Refuge, safety, dryness. The broken crunching could be glass, or bones, or creatures, or anything, really. The fields were long gone. The houses were shells, skeletons, structures of varying integrity, but all similarly clinging to only miniscule belief in their own survival.

As her hopes surged once more at the distant sight of the remnants of a once-proud, well-stocked supermarket, so too did the confusion of images as they flashed into the forefront of her mind, escaping the mire of her subconscious for a few seconds, in order to pollute the moment. Each flash felt like a slice of her soul, being carved by the cruelty of her past.

***

He had not always thrown food at her; before the room, she knew there had been restaurants, but she could not remember a single moment of any of those meals. The memories came simply as the sensation of the heat of the coffee in her hair as she turned to escape it, and flashes of the look in his eyes as he watched her salvaging each morsel of the meals he threw down upon the floor. Sometimes, he would create great works of culinary beauty, only to mock her in this way, as the caged animal he had made of her.

***

Her pace quickened with the vague promise of some sort of salvaged treasure ahead, or with the desire to run from the continuously haunting connections being made in her neural pathways. Even she was not sure anymore whether she was running into a new future or, instead, continually away from her past.

The locket bounced around her neck as her pace quickened, and every time it hit her skin, it drove another image out of her deepest darkness and into the glare of that immediate second; the pressing of the locket hard into the thin skin of her chest, as his eyes burned into hers, telling her he would never allow her to leave. There must have been a point where she had at least tried, for him to be so enraged. The bruise he left was black, and sore, and yet, it remained the smallest and least significant of the injuries he had inflicted.

In the weeks since, she questioned why she should have survived, and wondered what happened to him during the End; it seemed likely he had perished, and her hope was that it had been painful, gruesome, prolonged; anything truly befitting such a monster seemed almost beyond the realms of what she believed she could even imagine. At first, she had been terrified he might have lived through the End, at least until the first scavenger came. Even though weeks had since passed, she had only seen seven other survivors, all women.

She realised she had been running and her lungs had done all they could do for now; the air thick with consequences, and her throat beginning to taste like metal. Coughing, she paused, bent over, her hands on her thighs, and the locket hanging down, suspended in mid-air like a tear destined to explode from the weight of a lifetime of sadness. Both this heart and her own felt heavier than they ever had before, the locket accusatory by its very presence, almost demanding an explanation for its own existence.

Coughing hard and crying her first tears since the End, she wondered how long she would have waited for the end of the world if it had not come when it did. How long would she have kept her eyes closed each morning just to imagine she was waking up somewhere else? When would those days that became weeks that became months have become too much to bear? Braving the aftermath of the End had afforded her a righteous freedom amongst the apocalyptic devastation, despite it denying her justice, vengeance, any form of retribution, or even a simple, bland, talkshow closure. Even if his demise had been horrific - even to the degree of his deserving, her delight would now be merely speculative. Maybe, even though it disgusted her to contemplate, this fuelled her desire to survive the challenges here in this newly wasted land.

Tearing the locket from her neck in one brutal movement, a briefly painful scratching motion, incomparable to anything that came before, she looked at the hatefully gleaming silver heart in her scarred, and now filthy, palm. Nothing that reminded her of him could ever be recognisable as an emblem of love. A tiny red flash within the heart seemed to beat before her eyes, almost imperceptibly, and she felt the deep violent churning of her intuition sickening her entire body, from the pit of her stomach to each prickling hair across her shoulders.

Metal hearts do not beat: tracking devices transmit.

In that moment, the world ended again, and she felt the walls in the tiny room, the darkness, everything closing around her as time stopped. A deep inhale paused the blood in her veins, and her fists clenched around this millstone talisman of possession. All the words from the sticking records and all the flashes of broken images now played through, into the present, in an explosive cacophony of horrors. As they tumbled through her soul, ransacking her confused sense of truth, she began to understand, each tangle becoming less so, until she found the key. The locket that lay dying now in her hand was his very first gift to her:

‘Because I know you’ll be mine’.

She could not tell if the tears that burnt her face belonged to a million yesterdays or to this exact moment, and she began to feel what used to be confusion giving way to rage, her fear buckling with a new sense of power. Never before had she felt anger in this way; seething nerve endings, boiled blood, and the fierce rush of new chemicals through her shaking body, giving her the new life she had long been seeking in this decimated wilderness.

Without thought or care, the locket dropped from her fingers, away, into the ground to become nothing more than another incessant crunching reminder of the earth’s destruction.

It had taken the ending of the world for her life to begin.

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