Portend

The eyes go flaccid in the final moment. Unfocused. Staring at nothing. Everything. Oblivion.

The image of her eyes – the dulling hazel, the pupils expanding as her rasping, red-flecked gurgling breaths ceased – would not leave his mind.

The lilting tones of her voice – that high crescendo of a laugh – were already fading like an echo into his memory. But those eyes. And the sputtering, sickening sweet coppery smell and the warmth flowing on his hand as he twisted the kni—

Enough.

He screwed his eyelids shut, rubbing them with his roughened hands as if it might erase the memory.

The moment passed. He turned his attention back to his surroundings. From this vantage point, some twenty feet up the cottonwood, nestled in a crook where the bough split, he could see that the trees and brush were spaced further apart. The vegetation slowly thinned as the land transitioned from the knotting, twisted forest to the high, yellowing grass that swelled and crested in waves as far as he could see.

Out there he would be exposed. To the weather. To raiding parties. To the ever-present radiation that pockmarked a landscape his people said had once been fertile before the War. The War that had destroyed everything and nearly everyone.

How long had that been? A century? Two? Time was a fuzzy thing in a world no longer possessed by a 45-hour work week or where profit drove every line, not just the bottom.

No, what mattered now was food. Shelter. Defending the walls. Keeping a watchful eye on the land beyond for signs of life. Danger.

And I failed.

There were not that many laws in Hazelton. People worked together, mostly, for the common good. Planting crops. Caring for the precious cattle, goats and chickens. Tending the sick. A tribe, family of sorts, built around a common hope for survival.

To that end, one of the few laws addressed sleeping while on watch duty. Punishable by death.

And there had been so many dead.

Screams. Flames. Laughter – cruel laughter. The crack of rifles and rapid claps of pistol fire.

He had woken to hell. A far worse hell than he had ever seen or imagined in his short life.

Below his post on the wall, he could see what appeared to be a man in thick black leather. The man’s head was encased in a bulky helmet clumsily painted to resemble some sort of skull. A red-streaked machete lay next to the kneeling intruder. The intruder’s gloved hands rummaged through the clothes of a body – man, woman, child – he could not tell. Nor did it matter.

Instinctively, he grabbed the rifle that stood propped up next to him, useless, when he had succumbed to exhaustion barely an hour earlier. There was already a round in the chamber. He lifted the barrel, sighting down…

The skull man slumped forward onto the lifeless body that the intruder had been pilfering only a moment before. Blood spurted from between the base of the helmet and the leathered shoulders.

By the time the Hazelton Regulars had beaten back the raiders – Elks, he assumed, based on the small ivory tusks that hung on simple chains around their necks – he had fled the wall. He knew his life was over. Maybe hers, too. Guilt could quickly associate in a small community, where survival in the best of times was tenuous and justice was determined through the lens of the collective good.

Death was the only thing that lay ahead of him. He didn’t bother to reload the rifle. He simply slung it across his back and grabbed the pair of pistols requisitioned to him as a member of the Regulars and sprinted home. He would grab supplies, try to convince her to come along with him and slip into the forest before anyone figured out his failure.

But he hadn’t expected death to greet him at his own door.

She lay on the floor of their simple common room, convulsing. A blackened hole beneath her left breast was the only obvious sign of violence on her green tunic.

He didn’t see the broken dishes. The upturned table. The threadbare, pre-War couch that had cost both of their wages over several months ripped open and its foreign stuffing dispersed through what was usually a tidy and austere space.

No. He saw the dark pool of blood spreading beneath her as she struggled to breathe. Her chest rose with a clattering, rickety sound that scratched at his ear drums.

He dropped to her side, placing a hand behind her neck. He could feel his world slipping from his fingers. His only connection to the past. The mystery of her. Him. Them.

He did not remember pulling the knife from its sheath at the back of his belt. Just the clattering. Gurgling. Drowning…

Returning to the present, he found his fingers fondling a tiny, heart-shaped locket in his breast pocket. Cool to the touch, the smooth, unassuming piece of metal held generations of secrets. If only he could open it. He had tried. Every implement he could find. Even used his pistol once in a moment of questionable wisdom spurred on by a night of drinking. Nothing. Not even a scratch.

It was all he had left of her. Left of himself. Their past. Their purpose.

His gaze settled on the barely perceptible horizon through the thinning trees. Beyond stretched hundreds of miles of grass and territory long forgotten that led to crumbling skeletons of great coastal cities. At least that is how the old stories went. He had never seen the coast nor a city. Except in tattered, faded picture books as a small child. They seemed foreign.

But he knew the family stories also told of a sacred charge. It had been bequeathed to him, young and unprepared – barely fourteen. His father had slipped the locket into his hands and whispered a few preciously obscure words into his ear between fevered spasms.

After burying their father, he had given her the locket. It seemed the prudent thing to do. She had been the wiser, more capable and responsible of the two. And after giving her a final kiss, he had taken the locket from her lifeless body.

Now, he was a hunted man with a haunted past. What lay before him seemed filled with impossibilities. And more death. Likely his own. Unless this simple locket portended a different future?

He slipped silently to the base of the tree, slung his pack and rifle and checked the old, slightly cracked Geiger counter. He had grabbed the device from the supply cache carefully hidden behind a closet wall panel. It hummed to life as he depressed the button.

The Great Wastes it is then…