Red Sun Setting

Laden with supplies that would easily snap my spine back home, I lurch forward to take another burnt hunk of scrap. Perhaps a receiver or a housing. I listen to my filters lightly hum to drone out the silence. Each step I took made another brown-orange print on the surface of this months-old battlefield. To most, this would be a tragic sight: miles of melted vehicles and bodies burned to cinders. To a fool like me, this was merely opportunity calling.

I ran my hand over the exterior of a rover that had most of its paint scorched or worn off by the wind storm. An electric pistol clutched in the mangled hands of some lost, desperate soul. I wrenched it from the poor bastard’s frozen-black digits, as he did not have any further use for it. Snap, went most of his fingers. I held the pistol in my heavy gloves. The gun was made for people that lived here. The trigger was like the handle of a caulk gun and it was twice as heavy as any regular pistol, but that was to compensate for gravity, I guess. In another life, I wore the same band he had about the thick, plastic sleeve of his suit. Blue with one big star in the middle of it with a pistol that looked more like a toy than something I’d take my own life with. Settling into the shotgun, I set my pack nearby as I changed out the metal filter strapped to my chest.

Hisssssssss, click. That was it. That’s all it took these days to survive on a planet that was thought to be inhospitable for centuries. I spent the next hour making a list of the trinkets and baubles I managed to scavenge. Scrap, scrap, two filters (mostly empty), electric pistol, MRE, copper wire, and even more scrap. I offered to share some of the peanut-butter banana ration, my favorite, the blue-banded driver. He declined. Bad taste, I guess.

Another dust storm was starting to brew up. A dust storm wasn’t like the kind of thing you’d see back home with sand whipping and tearing everything apart. Here, it’s like a fog that you just can’t see through. If you were lucky, you had a high-powered lamp that let you see a little more than ten feet in front of you. I’m not the lucky type.

Ping, ping, ping, da-dum, ping. The warnings flashed before my eyes, “WARNING: DUST STORM IMMINENT. SEEK SHELTER IMMEDIATELY”. These warnings were supposed to scare children to keep them from leaving the cities. It certainly wouldn’t stop me. I began to use nylon bands to leave a trail between each shelled-out vehicle.

After a few hours of scavenging what the blue-bands left behind, I had enough dusty scrap and junk to get at least a month’s worth of rations. The storm was rolling over the horizon as the white pebble-sized sun set in the distance. I hadn’t realized how much time I wasted chatting it up with that driver. My boots kicked up even more dust as they gently thudded against the scorched ground as I made my best effort to run back to the last vehicle, several meters from where I was currently. It was too late. I made a crippling mistake.

Pitch blackness with grey and orange whipping at my monitors. My helmet insisted that I change my filter, but I was out of luck in that regard. No more filters. I already went through the few I had left. An hour had passed since I lost track of those nylon cables. Over this short passing of time, these corpses started to look familiar; like a short glimpse into the future. I stumbled over something while I was distracted. I caught myself and stood before I floated down into the dust. I now had no idea what direction I was headed.

The hiss of the filter protesting began to startle me as I was nearing the end as the corpses grew more and more abundant. Blackened, burned, and stiff, their soulless and shriveled eyes seemed to look at me, mocking the fact that they outnumbered the living for several miles in any direction. My lamp, artificially flickering from the detritus in the air, picked up a glint. Within the brittle and contracted hand, something was grasped: a small heart-shaped locket of brass. I pried it away and glanced over it as it grew harder and harder to breathe. My hands, shaking and becoming numb, desperately touched as though it would preserve my doomed soul. I lay down beside the body, their blackened face hardly visible beneath the scratched pressure-glass. I had wondered why he, of all the dozens of bodies for miles, smiled. He was laughing at me. He knew what a fool I was. Behind the lightless eyes of him were stories told. He knew well what I was: a thief, a defiler, a grave-robber. His smug grin was all I needed to confirm my suspicions.

My breathing turned to little sips of what usable air I had left. This locket had a latch. Flick, flick, flick. My stiffened fingers struggled to see what was inside. Desperation as though I needed what was within the locket as much as I needed air. A little girl. A woman with a humble but genuine happiness on her face as she stood with the smiling corpse. A warmness fell over my body. I understood.