Semi-Scarred Dirt

The dilapidated house stood forlornly against the grey horizon, the lone dark sentinel keeping a careful eye on a dead world. John looked at it as the last dredges of daylight slunk below the horizon, rapidly turning the pasty grey frame of the sky a hungry mauve, then a deep velvet black. He sighed and rubbed his hands together out of habit, wondering if the winter weather gear in the box by the front door was still full. He could use a good pair of gloves for the future; especially one’s knitted by his mother.

His thoughts hung on his dead mother for a minute, then drifted back through the past. He shook himself before he could get too caught up in reminiscing. He trudged forward, stepping foot on the muddy and overgrown grass and heading up the hill.

The inside was in better shape than he expected, and he did find a pair of gloves, although they weren’t hand-knitted. He settled in for the night, collecting a few wood logs from the still stocked storage area behind the house. An old house in quiet farmland a few hours from the city had its benefits, even more so now that the world had ended.

The fire crackled and warmed him, hungrily snapping at the shadows that frantically darted back from its blaze. He laid out his sleeping bag and settled in for the night. Although the thought of sleeping in his bed did cross his mind, he elected to sleep on the floor. At this point, beds reminded him too much of the old, dead world.

He kept his firearm by his side, doubting he would need it. As he lay there, he wondered what had drawn him back home. Back to the nest of memories. Back to the beautiful warm past, where he so wished he could stay.

It had started as a feeling roosting into his very soul. He felt the call to return home. It wasn’t like he was tied down to anyone or anything. He wandered the decrepit country, the lone skeleton stalking the graveyard.

So he had returned home, and yet he still did not feel satisfied. And as he thought that, his eyes wandered to what lay in front of him. His back was to the fire, and he faced the old and faded couch. His eyes studied the thick coating of dust that covered the floor. And then they locked on to something golden and circular. It lay shrouded in shadows, using them as if they were a cloak.

He exited his sleeping bag, crawling on the floor towards the couch. He reached under the sofa, his fingers slipping around the object. He pulled his hand back and gazed at what lay in his palm.

The tears began to fall as he gazed upon the golden heart-shaped locket. He was unable to control himself. It was his wife’s. He had given it to her the day he asked her to marry him. His hands shaking, he struggled to open the clasp. With a quiet groan, it opened, revealing the contents locked away for so long.

The tears poured out of him faster and thicker than before. The picture of himself and his wife stared back at him. Giant smiles plastered on their faces. They were looking towards each other, their eyes staring intensely into one another.

He clicked the locket shut and attempted to compose himself. His wife had lost it only a day or two before The End had occurred. He had always wondered where it was, but in a rush to get as far away from the city and the blast zone as they could, they didn’t have time to look.

And then it dawned on him why he had been drawn back home. He would keep the picture, but the locket had to be returned to his late wife. He already began to dread the harrowing cross-country journey.

He slept. In the morning, gazing at the map of the United States he had in his possession, he traced the route he would take. It would take months to reach the west coast. Yet he could picture it, the carefully curated grave lying on a hill underneath a tall oak tree—the community surrounding it, the tall and imposing walls that kept the chaos of outside at bay.

After she had succumbed to the disease that wracked her body, he had felt disconnected from the rest of the community. The survivors were good people, honest people. They worked hard to build a future. They were the only real sense of civilization he had ever come across after The End had occurred. Yet he had been unable to stay there, instead choosing to wander the wastes in search of, well, he wasn’t sure what.

So he began his journey back to the West Coast, struggling each day to survive. The country had become barren in terms of supplies over the years. Long ago, he had adapted and begun to hunt any animal he could get his hands on. His diet mainly consisted of rats and other small rodents. He supplemented it with any edible plants he could find, along with the occasional lucky cache of canned food.

The landscape he traveled through was shriveled and blackened. The sun was barely seen through a thick smear of grey-white dust and smoke. He passed through dead copses, the trees long withered into poor caricatures of their former selves.

A month into his journey, he was forced into skirting closely to Atlanta. This was due to his lack of supplies, even though his original plan meant staying away from cities. He picked through the outskirts, finding a little bit of canned food. He also caught three rats, roasting them over a fire and chasing them down with the last of his water. From what he could see, the former city was a pile of rubble. A few buildings still stood, humped at peculiar crooked angles. Without human hands to maintain, human creations fall apart.

The journey was arduous, but the real trouble didn’t begin until he was halfway there. He was somewhere in the depths of Nebraska. Here the world seemed alive and vibrant. It was a small slice of peace, the eye of the storm. That is, it was until he ran into the first pair of human beings he had seen in six years.

The two men stepped out of the tall corn stalks, barring the road he was traveling on. He sighed, his hand slowly going towards his firearm at his side.

The men were complete opposites. One was tall and skinny, somehow still maintaining the semblance of an athletic form. The other was short and fat, his balding pate glistening with sweat in the hot sun.

They carried wicked-looking baseball bats with nails and other sharp objects jammed into them. “Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Said the tall one, walking towards him and dragging the bat on the ground.

He was in no mood, and he simply unholstered his pistol, quietly aiming it at both of them. They stopped, then began to back up fearfully. Firearms weren’t common anymore, and even though ammo would be scarce, there was no way they would take that chance. At least, he hoped so. He hadn’t had ammunition for it in years.

Both men turned and disappeared back into the corn stalks, and he quickly went on his way. He didn’t stop that night, putting as much distance between himself and the other two as he could.

He awoke in the middle of the night two days after the encounter, sensing something amiss. A muffled scuffling sound echoed quietly throughout the abandoned grocery store he was sleeping in. Peeping out of the office door, he looked into the corpse that was now the store. Two shadowed figures slowly crept through the aisles. It was the two men from before; he was sure of it.

He slunk down low, gathering up his belongings and stuffing them into his bag. He held the cool metal of the gun in his hand, praying that the intimidation tactic would work again if he had to use it. He stayed low and out of sight, leaving the office and keeping his back to the empty shelves that lined the edges of the store. The shadows hungrily chewed and swallowed him.

The two men continued their search, now close to where he was initially sleeping. He could feel the sweat between his palm and the pistol grip. His foot came down, letting out a soft squeak. He inaudibly groaned, straining his ears to hear a reaction from the men.

There was none. He quickly moved through the store, exiting it and breaking out into a sprint.

From that point on, he was more cautious of the possible trail he was leaving. He was unsure how they had followed him, but he made sure it wouldn’t happen again.

The days became shorter, and the autumn slowly drifted away into thin nothingness. One night he found himself beside a river, watching the sun sink deep into the purple-blue chest of the horizon. His hands shook as he glanced at the locket held in them. The picture on top of it was now faded and creased. To his shame, teardrop stains softly marred it. He had wanted it to be preserved perfectly.

Faint bird calls filled the air, and he ate a can of beans. He was close now, only a week or two away from the colony. \

He put the locket away and went to sleep. He gently awoke in the morning, the soft beams of the sun lightly caressing his face. He stretched, ate the other half of the can of beans, and drank a tiny bit of water.

A pack of wild dogs howled, and he stiffened. It was best to stay clear of most wildlife. He was lucky, never once running into the dogs, although he did come close a few days later. He had not seen a single person since the two men way back in Nebraska.

When he was two days from the camp, he ran out of water again. So he sped through the rest of the terrain, arriving in what remained of the once soft Salinas Valley. The valley had once been the top agricultural area of California. It had been mainly unaffected by the radiation, and all these years later, food could still be grown in the dirt.

The survivors had gravitated there by chance. It was five years after The End when both of them had stumbled into the area. What he now found made him fall to the earth, loosening a deep primal howl of pain.

The colony had been destroyed. The walls were crumpled and torn, carelessly discarded wrappers in the wind. The carefully constructed wooden shelters were burnt down into blackened piles of ash.

In a daze, he wandered through the senseless destruction. Eventually, he found where he had buried his wife, underneath her favorite oak tree.

Or what remained of it. The tree was destroyed, a sharpened stump left in its place. The stones he had placed to mark her grave were mere gravel; dust in the wind. Shallow craters and pockmarks filled the area in all directions.

For the second time that day, he fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face. Then he began to dig frantically, the dirt piling up beside him as it also ate away at the ragged skin underneath his fingernails.

It was no use; she was gone.

He clung to both the locket and picture for some time, eventually gazing up at the brightly blossoming moon. The iron-studded stars twinkled with mischief and smiled back.

He turned away, burying his face in the semi-scarred dirt and watering the earth with his grief.