Maxwell's Diary

We ran for our lives that night. My brother and I, at the ages of thirteen and fifteen, had accumulated some powerful enemies. It seemed as if they had nothing on their agendas but murdering us. And it was all for a black book that we found. Davari and I, orphans in a world that humanity has no idea how it came to be.

As far as I know, I was born during the era following the great calamity. I couldn’t tell you what that means if my life depended on it. But it seems that this book has the answers to that question and how to stay alive. We lived in an orphanage that some nuns ran. Our lives were all but simple. Our world was chaotic. Government dwindled in light of a cataclysmic event that nobody remembered. Whole cities extinct, and bandits, thugs, and looters were more common than regular people. We live in a world where you have to be a monster to survive. Otherwise, my brother and I would have been dead much sooner.

Civilization struggled to understand how the chaos happened, but humanity still hasn’t come up with any answers. School taught us that it was nuclear war. Groups of radicals said that it was extraterrestrial beings. The nuns were apprehensive that schools didn’t teach that it was an act of God. They believed that our sins were the reason the world was decimated. However, this book that I now had in my possession told a new tale that would make a massive impact on our planet.

But what impact did humanity have on the fall of societies and government? My brother always had theories, but something had him spooked as he started to realize that there were things that we learned that did not align with texts from the old society. Land did not match the maps that we had in front of us. Stories did not explain the fall or why we neared extinction. Furthermore, the schools did not teach us how to read on our own. A nun from the Orphanage, Sister Mazie, taught my brother and me. But shortly after the head nun, Mother Lindus, found out, Sister Mazie disappeared.

Davari and I talked about our lives and dreamed about the day we would finally get away from the orphanage. We stopped asking questions about our surroundings because specific questions made most adults cagey and paranoid. Ten years after The Great Calamity, as most call it, society attempted to get some sense of order once again, but primitive methods were once again becoming prominent in the culture. Many of the kids in the orphanage were born before or shortly after the calamity. My brother and I had never known who our parents were. Orphans were treated like scum, and we didn’t have the privileges or the same rights as other children who still had families. So my brother always dreamed of creating a better world, and he got most to see his vision.

The village we lived in was once a flourishing metropolitan area that was full of life. But now, we reside in a church, cast in a wasteland of nearly destroyed buildings and famine. We settled in the buildings that were still somewhat intact and stayed out of the rest due to a lack of structural integrity. Also, there was no electricity or running water in our area. We learned plenty about God from them, but they couldn’t tell us why we were frequently treated so poorly.

Davari was always reading and looking at diagrams, maps, and schematics, teaching himself about things that he could hardly explain. His intellect was unmatched by anyone I had ever seen in my life. He stayed silent in school and mostly played dumb, but we all knew; All but the adults anyway. So when the plan was made, I wasn’t surprised. I just trusted his judgment and followed him into the fire.

“We’re not going back to the orphanage.” He whispered in my ear at school that day.

“What?” I questioned as I looked around us for listening ears.

“What about Mother Lindus?”

“Those people won’t care enough to know we’re gone.”

“Where we going?”

Davari started to look around as well. He leaned in to whisper in my ear and said, “the end to all of our problems.”

From that moment, we escaped the school and headed to an abandoned building left by a company from the old world. It was on the side of town that we had never gone and was surprisingly in good shape. We went inside, climbed our way up to the top of the stairwell, and began to hear a group of men coming up behind us. We ran to the top floor, and Davari found a secret passage hidden behind a bookcase in the top floor office.

“What’s in here?”

“Okay, don’t call me crazy, but this building used to belong to a company called Primotech.”

“And?”

“I heard Sister Mazie talking about some research that everyone was doing on the company because there’s a treasure in here.”

“Treasure?”

“Yeah, supposedly, there was money left behind by the man who owned this building.”

I took a second to process the information as we walked down the stairs.

“Didn’t we learn that money of the old world doesn’t exist?” I debated.

“Yeah, but if it did, then the value of it would be quadruple what it was worth back then.”

“How are we supposed to find this treasure? We’re only kids.”

“Yeah, but do you see anyone following us right now?” I stayed quiet for a moment and shined my flashlight up the stairs, to be sure.

“Secret passageways lead to secret stuff, and we the only ones to find it after all this time.”

I hated when he was right. I didn’t argue with him, but I followed him down the hall, lost in thought.

“Okay, how did you know about the bookshelf?” I asked.

“Because I read.” He answered. “I know I may seem dumb. But, that’s only because the school is only teaching us things they want us to know. Not the important things.”

“I never said you were dumb. But, what do you mean by that?”

Davari took a deep breath and let his head fall for a moment.

“Ask yourself, why do the school, churches, and shops have plenty of books, but the schools never open one to read to us?”

I stopped walking to think and reminisce. I couldn’t recall a time that we read a book in school.

“You’re right,” I said. Davari swiftly started walking again.

“I know. The world that used to be was full of people who were corrupt and manipulative. The world ended because of greed and a thirst for power. The way I see it, we have to get to the power first before the greedy people do.”

“Do you know how much money it is?”

“Twenty-thousand dollars.”

“TWENTY-THOUSAND!” I yelled with excitement.

“Shhhh!” My brother stopped and began to look around. We continued to walk the dark hall, and we were approaching a door at the end.

“That is a lot of money!” I whispered.

“Yeah, I just keep replaying in my mind what could happen if we find it,” Davari replied.

“We could buy our freedom.” Davari raised an eyebrow and looked at me.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“You always talk bad about the life we live. There has to be something more out there, right? With that much money, we could do anything!”

“You’re right.” He answered.

Davari and I followed that passage until we reached a secret room that contained another office. It was full of flat-screen monitors and had a desk in the middle. Sitting at the desk was a corpse. His posture was straight up with his hands on the desk in front of him. His clothes from the right shoulder down had brown stains underneath a massive hole in his head. Somehow, this man’s head had exploded and whatever took him out burned a considerable section of the wall behind him. Underneath his hand, lying on the table, was the black book that we came for.

I pried the corpse’s hand off the book and handed it to Davari. His eyes lit up as he flipped through the pages.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It says, If you are reading this, then the prophecy was correct, and the world as I know it has been destroyed, and I have perished with it. The Gods came to destroy us, and humans with extraordinary abilities helped them. In my final days, I stashed a sum of twenty-thousand dollars under God in the place that I once worshiped. He told us not to honor profits over his likeness so they will never find. You will find more instructions there. Good luck.”

“The treasure is real, and I know where to find it!”

My brother and I waited until the morning to get out of the building. By this time, the people who followed us were long gone. The notebook explained a lot about the world before the calamity. My brother almost seemed obsessed with it, glancing at its contents whenever he wasn’t at risk of tripping as he walked. We exited the building and were tasked to avoid people outside the building and to walk the streets, looking for us, we assumed. This area was known to everyone as a forbidden territory. These guys, being here, only showed us a truth about our world that we should have known all along: there was a deep dark secret to our new society.

Strategically, we made it back to the orphanage when we knew the nuns would be out for the day. My brother assured me that the money was there based on the research of the man we found dead in the Primotech building. I found it hard to believe that a man so powerful would leave that much money in the hands of an Episcopal Church. We headed inside to the church’s sanctuary. Davari wasted no time getting to the altar, where a giant statue of Jesus stood, looming over the pool pit.

As Davari searched the church, we were ambushed, betrayed by Mother Lindus and the assassin that haunted me my entire life. We managed to get out of there when another group attacked the church and initiated an all-out gunfight. Davari had the money, and we ran as fast as we could to flee the war. But just as we were about to be in the clear, Davari pushed me into a river.

My brother fell to the pavement as I fell into the river with $20,000 in my possession. I was thirteen years old. I didn’t know what to do with it. I would eventually find a place I could call home where I grew into a man that I thought my brother would be proud of. My life changed because of that money. I did the good for the world that I said I would. But, forces outside of my control would still come to haunt me. Twenty- thousand dollars helped create a brand new world that my brother dreamed of. I did that in his honor. But little did I know, I did not lose him that day as I lived with the burden of being the richest man in this failing world. With a target on my back, a man was also being raised to become my demise. My brother didn’t die that day, and he made a way to build something that could destroy me. Twenty-thousand dollars gave me the life of my dreams. But he had misery. Now, as I look at him, I see he wants revenge.