The Locket

The sun was high in the sky. The boy lingered in the doorway, glancing again at the cloth wrapped packet in his hand before tucking it into the inner pocket of his tunic. It was illegal to be outside when the sun was up, but a caravan had arrived from the west with travelers seeking refuge. Odd, to have a caravan arrive in the daytime, but perhaps it was a sign that this would be the day that he had waited for. The day he found the person with the matching locket, identical to the heart shaped trinket he had just tucked into his shirt, his most guarded possession. He glanced once again at the bright orb in the sky, wondering how long it had been since the last solar flare.

The council had voted, and the laws were clear. No human being could be expected to risk life and limb to meet the caravan that had limped into town in broad daylight. The risk to the limited population they had acquired was too great, the poison sun in the sky too strong, they would have to remain in the village square until darkness fell. The members of the council that still had compassion gathered to prepare a sort of hospital area, so that when the refugees finally made the trip from the caravans to the chambers, they could be treated and screened for admission to the village. Out of the thirty or so people they had counted in the caravan, only half would survive the deadly exposure to the sun.

Inside the hastily build conveyance that lingered eerily in the courtyard, buried under a tarp and nearly dead from heat and exposure, a woman lay among the others who had decided to risk the dangers and make the trip east, toward the cooler and safer areas built into the base of what had been the Appalachian Mountain range, back before the ozone was depleted. This woman wasn’t seeking safety, however. She was searching for her child. She had secured space for her small son in one of the first convoys to leave Nevada, back when the government had tried to help the first solar flare survivors to escape the blistering western states. Then, the cost had been manageable, and children’s fare was discounted. She hadn’t been able to afford passage for herself, and she was nursing her solar-exposed older child as best she could, so she sent her young son with a band of soldiers and townspeople. She hadn’t been sure how long it would be before she could follow her son, or if he would remember her, so she tucked a locket with her picture into his pocket. She could only hope he would be able to hold onto the small treasure so she would be able to identify him, and he her.

The sun glared down on the figure as he darted from one shaded doorway to the next. His life was still in jeopardy, as all the shaded doorways on this barren earth wouldn’t protect him if a flare came, but he was determined to see who had dared to risk daylight travel, and why. As he started to dart to the next building, a glow began to grow from the sky, and the heat built in intensity, causing the land to waver before him. He stood as far back against the door jam as he could, feeling the burning air pulsing against his cheeks and stinging his eyelids. As quickly as the heat rose, it began to dissipate. A small flare, not a life-taking flash of deadly heat like the one that had nearly killed him and had taken the life of his father and probably his brother. The last time he had seen his family, his brother was suffering from radiation and sun poisoning, his father buried in the nearby cemetery with all the other flare victims, and his mother, red and blistered from staying too long at the gravesite and catching the deadly rays of the rising sun. She had determined to save her youngest child, scraping together the last of the family’s savings to pay his passage to what they were told was a safe city under the mountains. As the military trailer had begun to roll down the narrow street toward the unknown, his mother had run into the cooling night to catch up to them and press a small package into his palm. The locket inside would help him find her when she was finally able to meet him in the beautiful mountain city. He felt the package once more, nodded to himself, and set off again, into the blinding heat of the late afternoon.

There was no city under the mountain, but a line of rough bunkers built against the base of the foothills. The first refugees were put to work by night, digging, hauling and sometimes blasting away at the rock face, creating the dream city under the mountain range. Without the use of any motorized equipment or engine power, the work was slow, and the long grueling nights sometimes seemed endless. The boy grew thick muscle across his back, his shoulders broadened, and his legs became long and powerful as he was tasked to do the only chore a smaller child could do, dragging endless tarps of debris out of the mouth of the entrance and dumping them into a ravine. As word of the growing city under the mountain spread, more and more refugees attempted to make the journey to the paradise they imagined. Most of them didn’t make it, as the trip would require days of exposure and even the most cleverly created carts couldn’t offer protection from a flare. And the ones that did survive were greeted not with a pleasant, cool city, but with hard nights of labor and blistering days asleep in the bunkers.

When the center of the village came into sight, the boy first felt deep disappointment. It didn’t look as though any of the people in the makeshift bus were alive. The few he could see were eerily still in the shadowy interior, the recent mini flare most likely more than the heat exhausted travelers could bare. He sat down in the shadows an waited. He would not give up.

Noises brought the boy awake with a start. The sun had set, and medical workers were surrounding the newcomers, hastily checking for pulses, administering cool compresses to those with signs of life and rushing back and forth from the supply sheds. The white tarp used for lining up the deceased held many more bodies than the orderlies were carrying inside. The trip had to have been a brutal one. The owner of the caravan had survived, but barely, and was telling the medical team of being chased by a group of criminals. The boy listened intently. The criminals were bad men and women who survived by ambushing the traveling refugees, taking belongings and food from the weak and dying, and often killing the survivors. They lived in caves and were more wild animal than human. In order to avoid the criminal gangs, the owner had decided to do the unthinkable and push on through the daylight hours to reach the village. The choice had taken its toll. The bodies of the dead were being wrapped in the large white canvass to be added to the mass grave in the ravine. The boy quickly scanned the faces on the tarp as it was rolled, but none matched the profile of the picture deep in his pocket. He withdrew the locket, sliding a dirty ragged fingernail under the clasp and peering at the beautiful woman inside. He had looked at it often enough that he knew the contours by heart but looking at her face comforted him. Snapping it shut, he gave it a quick touch to his lips for luck.

The woman looked across the dry courtyard, eyes filled with wonder. She knew she must me near death, because standing in the shadow of a long, low building, she could see her husband. He was handsome and strong, looking like he had in the early days of their marriage, before the first solar flares. In those days he had been working for a company that was creating an artificial ozone to blanket the earth and make things like sunburn and global warming a thing of the past. The project lead had jumped the gun and launched the cover particles before it was fully tested, against the advice of her husband and his team. The result was devastation and chaos. The particles didn’t cover the earth with a protective layer as it was supposed to but eroded the last particles of natural ozone and caused imbalance throughout the system. Solar flares soon followed, and being the team lead, her husband had been front and center for the events unfolding. Her older son had been assisting, monitoring the computers inside the ground control building while her husband watched through a telescope on a satellite near the earth’s atmosphere. Both had lost their lives because of the failed project. Now she was looking at her husband, alive and well, young and strong…but in the wrong time and place. Her exhausted mind couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, until she saw him lift the locket to his lips. A tear ran down her cheek and in a weak voice, she called out; “Charlie!” And she pulled the matching locket with his picture from her neck to dangle it through her fingers.

The boy startled at the sound of his name, it was the name of his childhood, a name he hadn’t heard in more than 10 years, but yet so familiar and soothing, like a balm to his soul. He smiled. “Mother"