1
The ash outside his blind was starting to build up again, he would need to shake the canvas walls from the inside or seal his peep-hole and head back down. From the top balcony he could see for miles when the clouds let up their constant storm of fluttering ash, but that meant going up to the exterior and that meant keeping the ash off his skin. Herzog sat with his sweat beginning to freeze underneath his rubber jacket and overalls. His respirator clicked lazily as he gazed through his rifle’s scope at the suburban ridgeline about a mile away. The clouds of ash were not blowing too hard and he could see the outline of the next neighborhood in the hill’s profile. Dull, grey and oily tedium was all that presented itself through the spotless lens of his rifle. It was a good gun, easy to clean, not too heavy to slow him down but weighty enough to break through doors, windows, bones. Herzog sighed into the tiny-echoed chamber of his respirator and pulled back from his prone position where just his rifle and head could peer out. He shook the greasy ash from his hood and wiped the barrel of his rifle with a rag before dusting off his shoulders and unlatching the door to the spiral staircase that ran from the top of his home at the small bell tower, through the old living quarters down into the first bunker filled with neutralizing chemicals, hoses and storage for protective gear. After that the stair kept turning for another forty yards down until it hit the landing dividing the well, storage rooms and generator from his quarters, library and temple. Years ago he had spent at least an hour every day doing the interchange between the sterile and clean air of his bunker and the noxious ashen dust that filled the valleys surrounding what was a neighborhood only a short lifetime ago. Now the exchange took him less time but he did it only once a week.
This would either involve the treks across neighboring burgs to find some old forgotten canned food, blankets, towels, rags. Anything synthetic that he could use to make a shelter or immerse in the chemicals for use as makeshift air filters. He also used these trips to map out the locations of the other six bunkers within eighty miles of his. They had been marked on the maps he had known from his childhood, but reading maps and studying cartography was futile practice when unapplied. Herzog had learned that on his 15th birthday when he set out to find his first bunker and spent two days lost in an ash storm, ripped his protective gear and almost lost his life when the dogs found him. Now he knew better than to go wandering without establishing a heading in the smudged grey torrents that would often spring from nowhere and reduce visibility to nothing. Even if the wind was calm it was more likely to be snowing ash so thickly that without a compass to read no safe movement could be made. It had been like that on his birthday all those years ago, when he had just marched out the front door of their Victorian home with his rifle, a map he couldn’t read in the ash, water, food, thirty pounds of ammunition and a tinder kit that he left next to the front door in excitement and was waiting for him when he finally drug himself back onto the porch.
He had not been outside the walls of his bunker for three years on that birthday, the last time, his twelfth, had been more terrible than anything he could have feared in the wasteland. He had been determined; after all it was he who survived. Herzog was not just a survivor, he was delivered, the one who would teach them all. He was taking his first steps towards unifying and recreating the world that had destroyed itself before he had made his first words. A land of fat, fearful cretins that had lain about shaking fingers at different colors and chosen scriptures before their leaders became dust, their waters dried up and the only creatures that would survive were those that needed the least and relied upon one another. That was how the dogs had been when they found him clutching his ankle under a culvert. He could barely hear them coming through the ash with their muffled paws and dead eyes. The first one had looked so sad he thought. Its little wet nose caked with ash and one milky-white eye probing along the concrete riverbed. His first reaction was to touch it. He wanted to pet the dog like the stories his father had told him about when humans kept animals as friends and tools to help them hunt. The little dog saw him raise his hand and snarled before yipping alarm back into the gentle haze. That was the first time Herzog had felt fear and its power to slow time. The shadows that followed after the smaller dog’s retreat looked like a horrible stygian cavalcade of sickness, malice and survival. The first two were easily taller than Herzog’s waist but the third was another creature all together. The two big dogs advanced along either side of the sloping ravine sniffing at his scent and slowly piecing out his location. These two were also missing parts of their site. The one on the right appeared almost completely blind, covered with mange and sores. Its lips appeared to be mostly torn away giving it a terrible grin constantly moistened by the sickly grey tongue behind its teeth. As it began to sense him more clearly it sniffed and wheezed deeply while turning its head, using what senses it had to wend through the falling ash. It looked unlike any of the dogs in his anatomy studies, a broad head and shoulders with stout sinuous legs followed by a short, sharp tail apparently broken long ago.
At least this first one couldn’t see him he thought, pulling his gimpy ankle underneath himself and fingering the safety free on his rifle. He was trying to move slowly back under the culvert and maybe find a drainpipe or somewhere to hide. The second dog began to emerge from the ash cloud and match the first in progress. This one was not blind and it saw him immediately. He had seen this kind in an anatomy book, he knew it, but it looked bigger, hungrier. She was jet black and smooth with a long snout and large pointed ears that were perforated and ripped but still twitched with a calculating reaction to Herzog’s muffled shuffling. This second dog was graceful when she stepped silently through the filthy drifts and her yellow eyes never left his while her long tail swished silently in anticipation, a deep scar ran from the crown of her head to her right nostril. Herzog drew back the bolt on his rifle when she slowly bared her teeth in silence to reveal a mouth filled with narrow needles of sharp bone.
Both dogs stopped without warning about twenty feet from the mouth of the culvert where Herzog was nestled. He was beginning to realize that his ankle was going to be of no use even if he got the chance to run and he began to jerk through his backpack with his left hand while the barrel wavered between his two targets. He tried desperately to control his breathing so his respirator would not fog and he would be able to take his shot. The third shadow traipsed from the ashen cloud with heavy thuds bearing neither stealth nor fear. This dog appeared to be more ursine that canine he knoted with growing terror as what appeared to be a chest-high mongrel lurked from the ash. Its shoulders were easily wider than his by half and its mane rose up from the back of its skull to its shoulders in a grey and black fin that sported the alternating ingrowths of underlying scars. Its chest rose above its hips and rippled with every closing plod, the monster’s green and yellow gaze looking directly into Herzog’s face. It had a muzzle more like a crocodile than a dog with a long bridge and gnarled outward pointing teeth that poked out from under its salt and pepper lips. The alpha’s wide and oozing nostrils flared with the scent of fear. It moved between the betas and snapped at the mange-covered horror before beginning a slow advance with the others in tow.
Herzog realized that there was to be no chase then, the pack was not even going to waste the energy running him down, he was already wounded. This stunned him for a moment before he found what he sought in his rucksack. Two emergency flares that shone like hell when he smacked their igniters against the concrete beside him. Herzog shoved one in the bank of ash next to him and held the other like a knife. The dogs wavered slightly at this and circled about beyond the pink-orange glow before realizing their hunger was more than their fear and slowly advancing. Herzog knew he had one more in his bag so he slid it to his back pocket and brought himself to his knee before laying his sites on the nearest dog covered in mange and slathering in the heated light of his thrown flare. It had been unfazed by the display of light, feeling only its hunger and the smell of sweat mixed with magnesium. It walked directly beside the flare and sniffed about one last time as its frame lowered and hideous jaw prepared to attack blindly at the nearest scent or sound of its prey. Herzog aimed his rifle and fired. The kick of the rifle sent a tremor through his arm, spine and leg providing a fresh spasm of pain almost causing him to topple as the road flare erupted onto the blind dog, the bullet creating a hole in its side that sprayed the dogs rear flank with searing molten metal. With a wheezing howl the mongrel thrashed past Herzog by a foot and rammed into the interior concrete of the culvert, knocking itself to the ground where it thrashed about in a frenzy of sputum and ash.
The other two dogs leapt back in terror before staring at the flaming scene in agitation, pacing across the riverbed and snarling. The female just emitted a series of little gruff barks directed down across the ground at the next flare while the alpha made a noise both unearthly and guttural, to Herzog it felt like someone was rolling a boulder over broken glass and blood. He cocked the hammer back again. He had four more shots before he could reload and he knew that no such time would be given if that flare was insufficient in frightening them off. The female sniffed twice and disappeared over the top of the embankment while the alpha began his slow approach again as the flare in the ash bank began to sputter below the thick layers that continued to fall as Herzog drew a bead between the giant’s eyes. He remembered for an instant on his twelfth birthday at midnight, the night before. His dad had let him stay up to enjoy the first moments of being a grown up. They had watched the Deer Hunter and read to one another from the opening sections of their library, the new beginnings of a lifetime of learning that Herzog had never been allowed to read before. His dad had told him how women and men create babies and train them to make the world better. He told him how people belong on this planet but not the way it had been, that was why the skies burned and most people had been destroyed, the earth and her systems would not tolerate such error so she gave to man the atom and with it he destroyed himself. He thought deeply for the first time in his life about his father and felt a calm without hatred or sadness, a moment that accompanies one through the terror of a first true survival. Herzog felt the conviction of his destiny squeeze the trigger and the impact of the rifle stock did shake him to the ground this time as his ankle tinged in spasm.
Herzog’s eyes peered through his respirator as he wiped away the ash to see the monster dead in the snow illuminated by the final spastic flickers of his second flare. He sighed and punched the ground in elation, stringently lifting his upper body to turn around onto his back before the black blur of the second dog rushed upon him. The animal pounded her sharp paws into his sternum, pinning him in the ash before she sank her teeth into the reinforced leather of his respirator and snapped his head back and forth. His world a blur and his chest hollow, Herzog tried to shove his hands against the dog but she was to large and would not let go of his mask which she was violently tugging up and down on his now bleeding face. Herzog fumbled for the third flare as her teeth started to sink through his mask and into his cheeks and forehead. She jerked him to the side and his head cracked against the culvert, stunning him for a moment. The dog finally ripped the mask off of his limp frame and began to tear at it beside him, thinking it was part of him. Herzog blinked as his vision became less cloudy and he felt the flare in his grip. Without thinking he smashed it quickly on the wall and it leapt into flame just as she turned back onto him, this time without a mask to protect the flesh of his neck and face. Herzog jerked his neck down to protect his throat before shoving blindly at the gaping jaws with the flare. He felt the teeth sink into his glove and then his hand before snapping open with a hellish snarl. Herzog kicked ferociously with his good leg to shove the dog away. The flare had been shoved into her upper throat where the molten tip had fused itself to the flesh. Herzog lay on his side heaving into his woolen collar and watching while the black dog choked and seized and burned and suffered not three feet away. Eventually the animal passed into shock or death, Herzog did not care. He rested and drank from his dwindling hydration bladder before using his gun as a crutch to steady himself. The ash was falling less now and there was even a hint of sunshine hazing through the clouds of drifting fallout. As Herzog looked towards the sun and the silhouettes it cast towards him, he glimpsed the outline of the bell tower atop his house. The dead river, he knew, might run through his neighborhood as the map he had brought showed. He also knew that there was no choice now, it was try the bank or wait for another pack of dogs to finish him.
He turned to go and hear troubled wheezing from the blind dog. It lay on its side, shaking and vomiting into the ash, its eyes blank and sorrowful with fear. The dog whined and twitched, the flare had burned through its skin and bored its way into intestines in some places. Herzog looked at the bright sun again before kneeling with difficulty in front of the dog. It shifted but was in too much pain to attack or resist. Herzog lifted the butt of his rifle as high as he could manage and swung it down with all his force. Two more times and the dog finally stopped breathing, Herzog carried plentiful ammo, probably too much he would decide later but when the bullet factories are melted by one thousand suns, each ballistics’ value must be weighed over a lifetime.
Herzog had ended his fifteenth birthday by nearly ending his life. He scolded himself as he sewed and disinfected the puncture wounds on his face and hand, each dab stinging and remind him of his near failure. He could not allow such mistakes again, too much was at stake of he died before delivering his message to the people that were to begin again. He had needs study the maps and make his own landmarks about the area. For the next several years he did this fastidiously, erecting rope lines from safe places and placing electric beacons at his home when he left so he could find is direction at least without sight. These systems became crucial in his location of the further bunkers. He knew that there were similar structures in the hills surrounding his home, and that each would prove key in supporting his people when he found them. He decided that he would build a framework for their second discoveries. He mapped out the headings he would need far in advance, so as long as he knew his location initially, he could track his destination using orienteering. His training regimen as well he stepped up, using his mind and body to not just emulate the severely dangerous skill his father had taught, but to embody it. Until his people were ready to follow him back, he had no need for anything other than survival and singular discipline. He studied his books, the books of his ancestors and his community. He read books that were written for other beliefs, books that would teach him how others could believe, how others were made to believe and were thus unified. He arranged and mapped out his survival in years, establishing what he could afford to eat and when. He inventoried and stockpiled the armory with meticulous focus, adding what he found from traveling the waste and adding it to separate inventories.
He also spent hours and days reciting the scripture of his survival from memory, the need to conserve, the necessity of unity under belief. The demands of a survival beyond regaining the globe for humanity, but making it what it should have been before this. He would make a world free of its laws and the sickness of its decadence, they would live as it was to be in the beginning before one thought that he could be more important than any other. Every day he would recite these teachings from memory while he bottled water from the spring, maintained his generator and nullified his outerwear’s latent radioactivity. The spring would keep him alive for the time being, but if the earth were to change her mind again and stop giving him water, he would need to leave ahead of schedule.
2
Every year after his twelfth, he had opened and read a selection from a series of envelopes that were kept in succession upon the wall of his temple. Herzog had opened and read every one but this final piece. The messages and their contents were all part of a journey he had begun before his birth. His parents had been chosen to carry the progenitor of a new race past the end of days. It was their duty and the duty of their congregation to protect him through the trials that would end their way of life. They had built him this bunker, they had trained him to fight, read, heal, lead and survive. His education was the result of multiple lifetimes of stockpiling any and all resources. Underground wells were purchased by his congregation whenever they were surveyed, seed banks and libraries were established, even his own parents had not been offered the choice of who to marry and reproduce with, but were given the honor of carrying their own savior into the future. As conflict grew and the signs of the end became more prevalent, the congregation began to stockpile weapons and medicine, fuel and vehicles. The number of bunkers grew from five to seven, the most recent carrying only martial supplies and having its location hidden from all but the leaders and the caretakers, Herzog’s parents.
Bunkers were to be his gift to the new people. War would have changed the face of humanity. People would be living without light and books, clean water and medicine. These were all things that Herzog could not only offer to his people, but things he could teach them. Skills and trades to be reestablished in the name of earth unity, and the power to defend those seeking unity. He would teach them never to waste or pollute, to protect the entity of their own unity and that of the earth as an organism. These ideas were swimming through his head as his twentieth birthday dawned and he moved instinctually to his temple. A small black and red chamber with and entire wall of books, his notebook of scripture for survival, one candle and seven empty envelopes waited adjacent to his sleeping quarters. Herzog’s frame had become lean and toned, each muscle trained for endurance and strength, on the morning of his twentieth birthday he knew that he could, without stopping, travel to every one of his bunkers in a complete blackout of ash. Using only the topography and a compass he could lead anyone to the secrets of his legacy and elevate them above the poison of the world outside, born of division. But he was not going to his bunkers today, nor would he for several years. Today marked the beginning of his exodus, he could sense it. He tore the seal and breathed deeply before reading the final words his father had left for this earth.
Herzog,
If you are reading this then you truly are the one that this planet will need in the coming age. I can only imagine the pain we have forced you to undergo in your brief life, for this I am sorry. You have never known the touch of anyone beyond your mother or I, I know this will make your journey hard and I am sorry again for its necessity. In the world before you there was nothing but division, people wandered through their lives seeking money or supremacy and ignoring the beauty of a planet screaming for them to love themselves and one another. Do not be afraid of these people, they need your help. The ones left for you to lead are the dregs, the happenstance survivors spared by the serendipitous will of a planet lacking unity. Do not take them for granted because without the unity of life, will and the people that cherish them we are all lost. Everyone who gave their life in the great fires of division will be lost in vain if you cannot return the lives of this planet to singular purpose. We have kept you isolated in this way so that this connection and its beauty will be of great importance, the first time you touch another human you will feel it, the power of human unity. When that has entered your mind you must be aware of its alternate presence because as you know there is no light without dark, no conservation without waste. The poison of division is what hides behind the magnificence of unity; its eradication is your struggle. Bring them together, do not falter in your love for what unity can bring, never hesitate to defend it through whatever means you can. After you leave this house today, I hope that you or your son will return for the gifts of our dead age, they will change the world. Now I must say goodbye, as I never did when I was alive, go North my son, a healthier world is still living beyond the clouds. I love you, your mother and I are so proud of you.
-Victor & Miranda, Second Scion and Wife.
3
It was impossible to sleep that night. Herzog’s mind was swimming with a noxious tonic of fear, anxiety and excitement. He had packed his kit with a serious burden and it worried him. The storms had become more intense as the long winter pushed past May, showing no sign of relenting. The drifts of ash had risen up the east wall of his home some sixty meters above him. He knew that the extra weight was only going to drag him into the unseen wells and traps under the grey and black powder that stood between him and the edge of the clouds.
The preparations of his forebears had been incredible and necessary. The only reason he was alive was because of their anticipation for food, water and medicine. What they could not anticipate was how the winter would change his ability to move. The ash was always falling. Mostly a light flurry kicked up by winds dusted the hills by day and night in a steady redistribution that shifted around buildings and hills. Landmarks would change and often disappear entirely over night. He had learned to orient himself easily enough to get where he needed but what he could not prepare for were the unseen and numerous sinkholes and ankle-breaking cracks veiled by the drifting snow. The ash itself wouldn’t hold much weight, it just sloughed and blew around like fluffy dust. It almost looked like snow when the clouds cleared enough to let some rays of sunshine through but the ash never melted, it just kept piling up until buildings gained a gentle one-sided slope. It was his private landscape of cold and dry filth that permeated everything and smeared greasily when he tried to wipe it away without the industrial chemicals in his bunker. He finally found a pair of snowshoes in a decimated sporting goods store that were wide enough to keep him from swimming through ash. The shoes hung from a rack adjacent to a wide and beautiful mural depicting happy, sweater-clad white folks sliding down beautiful alpine meadows with the slogan “Winter For All!” stenciled in jubilant blue. Herzog had looked on this hieroglyph of faded optimism and sniffled into his respirator, irony had weathered the end just fine. The shoes kept him high enough out of the ash that with practice he could make an entire trip without completely sullying his entire suit.
The snowshoes sat patiently against the exterior frame of the containment chamber, caked with ash and ready. They were atop his checklist, he would need them to make his trip go quickly as it might be days until he reached the precipice of ashen desolation. Even then it could be weeks before he reached any useful or potable water. (info on human survival needs) The water filter pump and replacement filters were in the bottom of his pack and he thought about them hopefully while his mind ran numerous scenarios where his legs snapped as he tumbled through a manhole cover or ricocheted down an ashen slope. He left his bed. After an hour of attempted rest and returned to his studio. He meditated, he lifted weights, practiced martial arts until sweat flew from his rushing fists and still his mind sputtered with worry.
His periscope caught the advancing grey-orange of the sunrise and he decided that as soon as the temperature ran above 35 he had to leave. Methodically he donned the fresh socks and under-layers he had been saving for this day. Fresh respirator filters, MREs, survival blanket, extra gloves and the seemingly unending extra tools that added ounce by ounce to his hulking pack until it was just heavy enough with the water. He began to turn off the lights.
Herzog walked lightly from room to room in his home wondering with every switch he deactivated if he would ever see the familiar flicker of his UV panels across his bed or his books again. He went across the staircase landing where his pack sat like a bag of life-sustaining ambition, tightly organized and no heavier than necessary. He crossed into the well-room where the spring was gently gurgling into the reservoir pipes and smiled, it looked like the reservoir would finally reach capacity while he was gone. He double-checked the overflow drainage to ensure that his bunker would not flood after it reached capacity. Turning to deactivate the light he stopped short and returned to the primary pipe and rested his hand on the cool, dripping metal. He reached out and unlatched the access panel. The fresh and earthy air of the pipe filled his nostrils as he brought his face delicately close to the rushing stream. Water speckled his nose and chin, chilling his face and causing him to blush. Slowly he sank his hands into the stream and cupped the icy water to his face and drank. It tasted different than after it had been processed by the reservoir, it was smooth and crisp, almost like moss or how he imagined moss would taste from his books. He took one last sip and sealed the hatch before turning out the light and sealing the chamber. He wanted to know if he would ever taste fresh water like that again, or if anyone else would and his expression shifted from melancholy to stern determination. It was time.
4
The metallic crunch of the blast door was a mechanical finality that he never heard, he was too focused on the next step. He walked through his childhood home like a bristling and burdened specter of the new world, an alien from the future finding the absurdity of human luxury all around him. He stepped left from his front porch and plodded the ten meters up a slight rise to the fenced-off knoll where they were still waiting. He dropped his pack one last time that day and kneeled between the stones. Each was carved with a name:
Miranda Herzog
1935-1975
Loving Mother
Victor Herzog
1932-1975
Father, Second Scion
Herzog rested his hands atop their tombstones, bridging his parents together with his hands like he had done all those years ago just after his twelfth birthday, until now the most important day of his life. They had celebrated and given him his first envelope before bed. His mother had told him she loved him and started to cry before kissing him and leaving for his parent’s antechamber. Dad had played chess with him before bed under the constant hum of the light near his desk. They had been playing every week since Herzog had turned seven. At this point he could almost keep himself alive for an hour before his father’s methodical and practiced assault broke through. When Herzog respectfully tipped his queen onto her side his father had smiled at him across the checkered battlefield.
“That was good, I am so proud of you.” Herzog was unsettled by the strange expression on his father’s brow; he was almost trembling with emotion. “You know, in our faith you are now a man and I expect you to do everything befitting a grown up, just like I taught you.”
“Yes father, I only want to make you proud and save the people that need me.” Herzog matched the sincerity of his father, they were both very serious men, it ran in the family.
“I am proud of you, but remember what we know of pride-“ Herzog cut him off before his father could segue into scripture.
“’Pride cannot save you from death, pride cannot give you sustenance. The only pride of virtue is that of a unified life and thriving people.’”
“You know more than I did at your age, you are ready. When you wake up tomorrow the world will be very different. Your emotions and resolve will be tested daily, I expect you to persevere for your own sake because within your survival, is the survival of all humans on this planet that still remain. You are strong, but nowhere near where your life will take you. Goodnight Herzog, open the letter tomorrow morning after your meditations and you will know all that I have to teach you. I love you.” Victor stood and turned to the door as Herzog climbed under his covers.
“Dad…” Victor leaned against the heavy steel doorframe.
“Yes Herzog?”
“I love you as well.” Herzog held back his worry from his father’s strange demeanor and he forced a smile. “Even if the world catches afire the second time tomorrow, I will always love you.”
Victor smiled in a sick and beautiful way as tears began to pour from his eyes and his brow quivered before he lifted his hand to the light switch and closed the door.
An electric buzz roused Herzog at the regular time the next morning and he had made his bed in silence before settling his back against the foot of his bed for meditation. An hour passed and only when Herzog had managed to slow his heart rate and feel his almost frantic excitement abate itself into a prepared calm did he allow himself to open his eyes and gaze upon the red envelope resting atop his desk. His skilled little hands deftly ripped the seam and extracted the letter. His father’s typewriter marked the disciplined speech and composure of a man who long ago stopped revising or needing to edit, perfection had become his discipline:
Herzog,
There is no way I can express my pride and love for you on this day. No matter the discipline we have shown you and that you have created for yourself, nothing can prepare you for today. This day is not a test, it is a rite. When you pass through this experience you will have truly become the only one capable of saving this world from itself. This was designed for you. The only thing you have or ever had is the unity of life, the power of all animals and people within you. This is what you must know and feel, humans die and that is our nature. We are not eternal, even our emotions amount to less than an impulse across the vast chasm of existence. We are only minute particles that combine to make the whole of life and each part is equally expendable. Understand that we have not made the choices we did because we did not feel love for you or the others on this planet, we need you to understand the rare importance of a unified life where every sentient being contributes all they have for unity. You must be alone to understand how precious life truly is, and how the sacrifices that must be made cannot be obscured by sentimentality or weakness. Compassion is a human necessity that cannot be ignored but has need be placed in frame to importance of survival. This is what you must do my son: survive. I am sorry for what you must now endure; in time you will understand and I hope when that day comes you will forgive us. The envelopes in the library will explain everything you need to know as you open them year by year. We love you, do what you must and leave the child behind today.
-Victor.
Herzog dropped the letter onto his desk and flung his chair to the ground before ripping the giant steel door open. His bare feet slapped the tiled floor frantically as he rushed into his parents’ antechamber. The door was left open slightly and the lights were out. Herzog paused and panted in the frame.
“Dad? Mom?” He flipped the lights on and began to tremble. His parents lay peacefully embraced, his mother’s head upon his fathers chest with their fingers entwined. Their faces were pale and sunken, Herzog saw no gentle rise and fall in their chests. Two emptied glasses sat on their nightstand and Herzog knew in that moment that he would never be the same before he flung himself onto their bodies and his body heaved with violent sobs. The calm and peaceful bodies jostled limply as he shook and wailed, trying to wrap their arms around him and force the warmth of his body into their empty shells. He wept until he couldn’t breathe, until the light timers dimmed the interior of the bunker to simulate sundown. His tears soaked their shirts and his body was racked in trembling spasms of grief. He slept without remembering anything but the pain of loneliness and when he woke the room had a different smell. They were decomposing and if their bodies stayed inside the bunker it would ruin his chance of survival.
Herzog placed his back against the footboard of his parents’ bed and meditated. His pulse slowed finally and composure trickled back into the disciplined framework of his small frame. He stood slowly and turned to their corpses as if he had looked upon them his entire life. Calmly and swiftly he wrapped the sheets of their bed around them and tied solid, perfect square knots into the corners for handles. He drug his father to the landing first, knowing that his mother was much lighter. It took him nearly three hours to drag his parents up the winding stair he had played on as a child. Each trudging step brought him closer to the surface and the end of his mordant chore. When he had finally heaved his mother’s body to the top of the last step he stopped. He realized he had not eaten anything for a day and his body was aching with need. He left them just inside the sanitation chamber and descended to the kitchen.
He returned an hour later and suited up. He pulled their bodies to the top of the southern knoll by their house where his mother had once grown a small vegetable garden when she and his father had first moved into their home. He dug for hours in the fading light and finally finished the second grave in the dark. He laid their bodies alongside one another and filled in the graves, ash mixed with dry soil as his shovel piled pound after pound atop their limp frames still wrapped in the last sheets they would ever use.
The pain and resolution from that day coursed into his heart and mind as he slowly pulled air through his respirator. Rising, he let his arms go slack and his hands slide from the tops of his parents’ tombstones. One last deep breath and he trudged back to the porch to don his snowshoes and heft his pack. Heading due north as his feet carved sunken tracks in the light fall of dusty particles Herzog looked back from the bottom of his street a final time at the bell tower of his home. He knew that in around three days he would reach the end of the clouds and then he knew not what else. He knew that this is what he had trained and studied for and it had just begun.
5
The first night was surprisingly warm and he felt slimy under his containment suit. The shelter he had built was protecting him from the increasing ash fall but was too simple to keep it all out. His first night away from home and without the routines he had grown accustomed to was a jarring but silent incongruity. He made a fire because it comforted him. It was small and his pile of tinder ripped from the siding of a dilapidated home was producing a strange green tint in the flames that alighted the ash-fall in a surreal halo. He felt shielded by this light as he sat in lotus position and meditated. The sweat running from the nape of his neck down his spine slowed and he felt more comfortable. The fire had almost dwindled to nothing when he broke his trance and nestled more white and flaky wood atop the embers. The chemicals in the wood almost immediately sprang to life and returned him to his peaceful green cell surrounded by a silent sea of ash. He read and finally slept after several hours.
The next morning was almost indecipherable from the night before. Dark and thick with ashen clouds, the sky seemed to have descended to envelope him and bar his way. The wind whipped violently as he struggled with his tarp and pack, sticking smooth and opaque ash onto his facemask. He perpetually wiped it clear from his vision and managed a compass reading after a while. He checked his map and found a highway heading North about three miles East of his location.
In the older days, he had read, people would use their cars to zip up and down, East and West on these paved highways. They could traverse the country in a matter of days, making his pilgrimage seem absurdly slow. He decided that it was time for him to take advantage of the leftovers and save some supplies. He reached the highway at a quick pace stopping only once for water and a chalky bite of MRE under a culvert.
At ten his father had given him a great gift. The impossibly heavy engine must have taken him months to find and days more to lug up the hill to the bunker. It was wrapped in a tarp when Herzog had walked into the decontamination chamber at the top of the steps and put on his light sanitation gear as his mother had told him to. He remembered distinctly how his father had been breathing heavily into his face mask and leaning against the mysterious tarp to catch his breath. Even through a heavy containment suit the deep and wide sinews of his fathers arms and shoulders showed. Herzog had seen those arms move manhole covers and telephone poles he remembered while mulling another mealy mouthful. The engine had been kept in the antechamber, being too permeated with fallout to pass quarantine, but it might as well have been next to his bed. Together they dismantled and polished the small engine on some cinder blocks. Working through masks and gloves they pulled apart each component to be polished and memorized by Herzog. His dad would hold up a bolt and ask him what its diameter was, how much it might weigh, what it was made of and where it went exactly in the unwritten blueprint that Herzog was composing in his mind. After the third day he could dismantle and reassemble to working order the entire machine. His father watched with guarded pride how quickly his son had learned mastery of something so foreign and complex.
Herzog began to recite quietly to his respirator the pieces of the engine from exterior to interior, missing none. He recited the function, composition and weight of each piece. He remembered every fluid and how it worked at his altitude and temperature. He would need tools. And tools he would find. Alongside of the highway he found an old gas station almost completely buried in ash. The wind had whipped against and around the storefront piling eight feet of ashen drifts over any doors.
Herzog focused his breath into long and deliberate strokes, using each wisp of air to full potential as he burrowed away with the attendant broom towards the storefront. Finally he tapped and cleaned the glass free with every brush to pull the locked handle before smashing his arm through, then his foot and again to clear the entrance glass. The tomb was almost perfectly preserved in its mercantile glory. Dust was lightly swept from a vending machine and isles of auto parts when Herzog entered along with the wind. On the inside looking out, the store appeared as a tomb of a bizarre pharaoh that demanded burial with enough wiper fluid, grease and auto supplies to last the afterlife. Herzog paused before the silently solicitous gaze of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her skin was lustrous and supple. Her hair fell in cascades of grey and white sex. Her eyes welled with concupiscence and he could tell her spine was arched in arousal. She wore a polka dotted dress cut so low he could almost smell something unfamiliar and terrifying. He gave her one last up and down before hefting a battery
The highway ran across his path through the thick ash and was half filled with cars traveling north. It was four lanes wide, with the northbound lane chocked by silent and ghostly-motionless traffic. There were more cars than Herzog could have ever imagined, of so many shapes and sizes that his mind thrummed with possibility. He calmed himself and plodded onward, seeking service vehicles, trucks and kicking tires. Most of them were flat and useless, broken husks tinted by acidic rain and caked with the grime of twenty years’ dust and ash. Many of them were still unlocked, some windows were open and all of them had bones in them. Buried in a cab filled with ash he found two skeletons, a toolbox and a pistol with sixty rounds that was heavier than his so he left it and took the bullets. Miles further he found a service truck with a crane-like cable winch above its flat bed hanging off the edge of a small overpass. There was a compressed air tank and gas can near the front of the bed. He placed his hand on the edge of the flatbed and the entire truck yawed. He almost took his hand off but stopped, lest he pitch it forward off the bridge into whatever the ash below had hidden. He placed his rifle onto the ground and pack on the tail of the bed, making the truck sink back further onto the highway. When he stood on it the wheels gently rested on the ash above old skid marks. He gingerly moved forward across the bed away from his pack and the truck stayed balanced. Herzog breathed slowly as he extended his hand across the fulcrum of the hanging truck and barely grazed the handle of the gas tank strapped to the rack of the cab. It was full.
Spreading his legs into a wide split he reached for the release on the come-along strap that secured both tanks to the cab, his finger wavering centimeters from the release. He breathed deeply and put his hand onto the air tank’s handle first. He clicked open the come-along and swiftly jerked the air tank back towards the tail of the bed. The flattened tires spread into the ash as the truck’s weight settled back to the highway. He sighed and snatched the gas tank with his other hand and new confidence. He stepped back slowly with his prizes of leverage and paused at the tail of the bed. He was not really sure how to get his bag and tanks off without upsetting the entire fulcrum. The winch crane swung towards the front of the truck and Herzog watched the impossibly close highway begin to sink away below his feet.
He leapt cumbersomely towards the sinking road with all of his force and tripped on his backpack strap. The gas and air tanks jerked him forward onto his face, smashing the bridge of his nose against his respirator and knocking the wind from his lungs. A rusty creak and deathly silence followed before the truck fell thirty feet onto the dust-covered highway below him and smashed with a cacophony quickly gobbled by the muffling ash homogenizing the landscape.
One long deep breath and Herzog was back on his feet. The taste of blood and rubber seeped around his teeth and down his throat. His right incisor was chipped. Herzog swallowed it and wiped the ash from his intake vents before righting his containers and inspecting them. Both seemed fine, the gas was not leaking and the air can had dents but sprayed a healthy gust when he edged in the valve. He placed them beside the toolbox and began a decisive search for his car. It had enough room, safety harnesses, and the engine was not too terrible. He wiped it free of dust with a blanket from the backseat once wrapped around small bones.
Using a screwdriver he chipped away at the corroded edges of the battery attachment bolts and loosened them with a wrench. The jumper cables in the cab gave him no spark when he brought them close.
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