Last Call

Shrill, forceful, flippant in the face of the end of the world, Liam never knew when the last call of the blue-winged teal population would come. He had hopes. Hopes that the birds would hold out until he'd worked through the last of their ammunition, long beyond the day that desperation invoked creativity in capture. Hopes that the birds would somehow miraculously last long enough for him to see his parents to a natural grave. That he wouldn't have to send them off to God on a meager belly full of pickleweed and cattail.

When the end times had started in earnest, their little family had hardly noticed. For years they'd kept mostly to themselves. Deep in the Louisiana marshlands, they lived off a patch of land that had been passed down generationally. The near uninhabitable nature of their land had allowed the parcel to dodge the maw of hungry developers as the years passed by. Liam had grown up in the marsh, running bird dogs and johnboats across the brackish water since he'd been old enough to shoulder a shotgun.

Liam hadn't stayed after he'd grown, but he wasn't gone long. After high school graduation, Liam had departed to get certified and find work in oil off the Gulf Coast. Pretty soon after he met Harris and it wasn't long before the two of them returned to the marsh, seeking refuge from stigmatization in the land that raised them both. Liam's parents were old school but loving, and his mama had fixed them a meal before they'd even managed to unpack their things in Liam's childhood bedroom. Their arrival only made the family more tight-knit and the rest of the world more distant, a saving grace in the hardship to come, birthed from prejudice.

Humanity's undoing was the responsibility of an aggressive parasite. The knowledge Liam had of it was what he needed to survive and not much more. It had taken out a portion of the population large enough to choke the world's turning. Animals dropped off in stride with human beings, leaving the steadily shrinking pool of survivors hungry and desperate. Through some merciful act of a distant God, their marsh had remained relatively untouched. Perhaps the same harsh conditions that made the land initially undesirable were the very thing to save it. Liam knew that, eventually, desolation would push subsisters across their path, but that time was yet to come. For now, they still had meat to hunt, and Liam knew his energy was much better spent on the present than the despair of an unknowable future.

He stood now, waist deep in chilly water. Hidden in a patch of roseau cane. Waiting on a bird. When he closed his eyes, he almost felt like a child again.