Memory of Something Almost Lost

The crooked smile of a crescent moon hung over the gutted skeleton of the place once called ‘Boston’. Even at this hour Rusty could hear the shrieks of the things that still lived here but they were far enough into the Commons now to safely make camp.

He signalled to his partner who spread his camo overcoat on the frozen earth, dried flecks of dark red staining the material, and started dragging branches into a pile next to it. Rusty dug through the mulch with his boot, looking for something dry enough to light a fire but the sleet had been almost constant since they’d set out three days back and the ground was soaked through and frozen. He swung the pack off his back and rummaged through items he’d looted from the dead city until his hand found something hard at the bottom. He hauled it from the depths and turned it over in his hand, a small black book he’d found in a dusty drawer. He flipped it open and scanned the pages of dense handwriting, each new entry marked with dates from before the fall by someone with no idea what was coming.

‘Come on, man get the fire going,’ his partner called out, ‘I’m freezing over here.’

Rusty moved out of the woods and into the clearing where his partner now squatted next to the wood pile, wiping down his rifle with an oily rag. Rusty squatted next to him, ripped a page from the book and crumpled it into a ball. He piled a few twigs on top of it, struck a match and touched the flame to the paper then carefully placed more twigs onto the growing flame.

Out in the forest something snapped and his partner swung his rifle in the direction the sound had come from. They listened.

Something was out there, shuffling closer, dragging something along the ground. Sometimes the freaks hauled around things that used to be important to them, like that time Rusty had seen a female dragging a cot through a ruined train station. This sounded big too, metal and rattling. His partner shouldered his rifle and thumbed off the safety. Then a dry voice shivered through the darkness.

‘Friendly,’ it called out. ‘Don’t shoot. Friendly.’

They watched as an old man shambled out of the gloom, a huge coat swamping his frame, a dirty scarf covering his mouth, and a rope across his chest attached to the handles of a metal trolley that he pulled behind him. The trolley contained two large, sealed plastic sacks and assorted relics from the before time – books, luggage, a box full of dead tech.

They’d set up camp here in the Boston Commons because the freaks tended to stick to places they’d known before - places they’d lived, places they’d worked. Nobody had lived in the park so it was usually empty and safe. And yet here was this old timer. The old man reached the edge of the clearing, stopped and raised his hands, his eyes on the rifle. ‘Name’s Reece,’ he said, his voice like broken eggshells. ‘Tom Reece. Was hoping I might warm myself a little if that’s alright with you fellers. I’ll understand if you want me to move on though.’

Rusty glanced at his partner. Usually in the wasteland people either shot at them, tried to rob them, or just ran away. This guy seemed almost polite, like a relic from a lost age. He also looked like a stiff breeze might blow him straight up the stairway to heaven, so what threat was he really? His partner lowered his rifle, clearly thinking the same.

‘Much appreciated,’ Reece said, moving closer to the struggling fire. ‘You want some help getting that thing going?’

‘No you’re Ok, we got it.’ Rusty said, tearing another page from the book.

The old man let out a low, anguished moan and stepped forward, eyes wide and fixed on the book.

‘No son, don’t do that. Here, I’ll trade you.’ He reached behind him, grabbed a small canvas bag from the trolley and tossed it on the ground at Rusty’s feet. Rusty bent down and opened the bag. Inside were neat stacks of green paper with pictures of old men printed on them, bundled together neatly and wrapped in paper bands with $10,000 written on them. ‘Give me that book and you can use a couple of these to get your fire going.’

Rusty shrugged, handed the book to the old man and took two stacks from the bag.

The old man squatted down, turning the pages of the book, squinting at the dense handwriting in the flickering firelight as Rusty added handfuls of green bills to the fire.

‘You saying that book is worth twenty thousand of these things?’ Rusty asked.

The old man chuckled, his hungry eyes crawling over the handwritten pages. ‘Lord, no. But it’s not about the price, it’s about the value. That money is useless to me but this book is a treasure, it’s a window into the world through someone else’s eyes, a memory of something almost lost.’ He looked up at Rusty. ‘You got anything else like this to trade?’

‘No, we’re Rangers from the MCM out here looking for medical supplies. We don’t carry things like that as a rule.'

The old man nodded. ‘Soldier boys. I used to be a soldier too, back in the day. I was here in ’64 when it all went South. Barely even shot a rifle before that day and hoped I never would. Military paid my way through college, see, so I wasn’t one of those boys who enlisted for the thrill of the kill.’

He looked up from the book and stared into the fire, his brow knitted with the pain of remembering.

‘My commanding officer shook me awake that day. Told me there was a situation in the city and I needed full riot gear and my gun then me and a buddy were dropped off at a roadblock on the edge of the city and told to guard it. They said we had to turn back anyone trying to leave and shoot at anything that got too close. That was the word he used “anything”.’

He paused.

‘After about twenty minutes two people appeared on foot, a man and a woman, walking up the road towards us. You could see she was weak and that he was supporting her as they limped along. I told them to turn back but they kept coming and he called back that she needed help, that she’d been bit. I told him to go back and take her to the hospital but he just kept coming and she kept slumping in his arms, weaker and weaker until she went limp and she slipped out of his arms and just lay there on the road.

‘Well the guy, he just lost it, started howling like a dog and cradled her head in his arms. I lowered my rifle and took a step towards him, hoping to give him some comfort. That’s when I saw her hand twitch. He didn’t notice, as upset as he was, and I didn’t know what it meant back then. I thought she was still alive and called out to tell him she was Ok. But then she grabbed his leg … and it was too late.’

He looked up and locked Rusty with a stare colder than the ground they sat upon.

‘I’d never heard anyone scream like that man screamed, not back then I hadn’t. I ran forward to try and help, to try and get her off him but the guy actually fought me off. Even though this thing was attacking him he still wanted to protect it, or the memory of what he thought she still was I guess. He called her Ellen, told her he loved her, and held onto it even as it snarled and bit him. I just stood there and watched until he stopped moving. Then the thing started coming for us.

‘We had these rubber bullets we used for riots, hard rubber balls that knocked you out cold and we hit it with one of those which put it down but we didn’t know for how long. So we got these two heavy duty bi-hazard sacks we’d been issued with and put her in one and him in the other in case he came back like she had done.’

He looked into the fire, flames shining in the wetness of his eyes.

‘We radioed command to report what had happened and find out what to do but no-one replied. So me and my buddy we loaded the two bodies into a trolley to get it off the road and he headed off to higher ground to try and get a better signal for the radio. I heard the shooting about the same time I saw the others coming down the road, stumbling along like those first two had done. Then the airstrikes came in and the city started to burn. And still they kept coming, some of them on fire now.

‘It was like hell had spilled out onto the earth. I was in shock I guess so I just sat there on the edge of that trolley and waited for them to come. I wasn’t scared I was just…resigned. I figured I was already dead and there was nothing I could do to change that so what was the point in fretting.’ He shook his head. ‘But they left me alone. They just walked right on past me like I wasn’t even there. They don’t attack their own, I know this now, so I figure the two I’d laid out on the trolley, the smell of them or whatever, and the fact I wasn’t screaming and running from them made them think I was one of them. Maybe I am in some ways, dead but still walking around.’

He smiled and looked at the book again, his grimy fingers tenderly stroking the surface of the page.

‘You know, back in the before when this was written and the dead stayed in the ground, people used to reserve cemetery plots so they could be buried together. I never really understood that. I figured when you’re dead you’re dead so what did it matter where you ended up.’ He smiled. ‘But on that road when I saw that guy refuse to give up on his love even when death had taken her from him, I finally understood. Love never really dies, and neither does hope.’ He closed the book and held it up. ‘But in order to have hope, you also have to remember.’

A dry moan rose up at the edge of the clearing, snapping Rusty’s attention towards it. He jumped to his feet and put the fire between him and the sound. His partner did the same, levelling his rifle at the darkness.

‘Easy boys,’ the old man said. ‘No need to get jumpy.’ He looked over at the trolley where one of the sacks was now moving very slightly. ‘Sounds like Ellen’s awake.’

He rose stiffly and moved over to the trolley. ‘Thanks for the company boys,’ he called out, slinging the rope back across his chest. ‘I’d best be moving on, she can probably smell you and it makes her kind of lively.’

He started to shamble away, pulling his trolley of memories behind him.

‘And if you find any more books like this, you keep hold of them for next time I see you, Ok? Don’t you be starting no more fires with memories.’

Then he trudged away into the dark forest, leaving the two men standing by their fire of damp branches and green pieces of paper with pictures of dead presidents upon them.