City of The Dead

They woke early and set out before they sun had even risen,making the path difficult to navigate. Echo, tired from the week long journey, stumbled easily as unseen boulders and thickets of brush grabbed and pulled at her feet. Monroe, her guard,  held his hand out to her several times but she swatted it away until he finally got the hint. Her ran ahead of her a few steps until their group reach the edge of the hill. One by one they stopped as they reached the crest.  

           Before them lay a vast dry, flat land. Echo was startled by the large heaps of twisted metal. A solemn reminder of the old world, long dead. The technology and inventions of the past long forgotten to those on the outside. It wasn’t the piles of metal waste that caught the breath of the travelers. It was the small oddly oval shaped mounds of earth that filled the landscape as far as the eye could see. Echo noticed there were several different types of markings in a strange shape of the small that she had never really noticed before. At the end of every mound that was close enough to inspect with the naked eye, Echo could make straight pieces of a variety of objects. One piece protruded vertically from the earth at the head of the mound. Another piece was positioned horizontally to the first about half way up and held in place by different pieces of tattered fabric.

           “There must be hundreds of them,” whispered Monroe.

           “Ten thousand seven hundred and eighty six at the last count,” said Morrigan.

           “Every pilgrimage results in a few hundred burials. We have kept track since the first day. This is how we remember the old world. By laying the dead to rest,” stated a man not much older than Monroe by the looks of him.

           “This is how we remember the Catastrophe,” added Morrigan in a solemn tone.

“Morrigan, why are the mounds marked with those strange shapes,” asked Echo, not able to hold her curiosity.

“They resemble an early letter from the world before. We are forbidden to recreate it for good reason.”

“What is that reason, may I ask?”

“No, Echo you may not.” There was something about the curtness in her voice that halted Echo’s questions.

           They continued on down the final hill and onto the flat valley. The washed out red of the dirt beneath her feet was a stark contrast to the dull gray off Echo’s boots. Careful not to disturb any of the graves they often walked in straight lines, one after another.  At other times they walked spread out wide. Some stopping to inspect the ancient metal and small structures standing before the graves. Other kept their eyes forward. Focused only on the path before them. Echo understood. Like these people this was her first time and the sheer number of dead was staggering. She couldn’t fathom this many people alive and living together on the planet. Talyssa’s words haunted her. The elders calculated that they haven’t even buried a quarter of the bones that remained in the old cities. If she didn’t keep her eyes focused on the path before her she feared she would pass out from the sheer numbers she would have to calculate to understand the death toll.

           As they arrived at the edge of the dead city the mounds began to thin out, making it easier for the group to walk side by side. Monroe resumed his place at the right of Echo, still keeping his distance for her sake. The air changed suddenly and Echo was reminded of the smell of an old pair of her father’s boots that she had found in the back of her mother’s closet when she was eight. It was the stench of old and undisturbed things. Few ever came to this place.

           The group broke up in smaller units. Echo, Morrigan and Monroe grouped together. They walked between crumbling buildings larger than any structure Echo had ever seen in her short life. The first five or six stories of the buildings within view were covered in large brown vines that laced between any cracks or crevices they could find. To Echo, they seemed to be crushing the already degraded buildings and wondered how many more years these structures had on their foundations.

           “I thought there would be bodies just lying here in the streets,” commented Monroe. Echo had thought the same.

           “There were once,” admitted Morrigan, “but we have been doing this for a long time. The best way to start an impossible task is to start at the beginning. We have been making our way through the city row by row.”

           “How many rows have you made it down?” asked Echo, her voice cracked from the dry air.

           “Four rows.”

           “How many rows are there?” asked Monroe.

           “From what we can see twenty three. But that is just because the lines begin to blur after that. My father says that I will never know the exact number in my life time nor will my children or grandchildren.”

           Echo and Monroe exchanged a look and Echo realized that Monroe was just as stunned as she was.

           They continued down the path of fading walls and vines. Echo noticed that the vines were becoming greener the deeper they traveled. It took them twenty minutes to cross the four rows. The path began to become more cluttered with debris and rusting metal. Echo and Monroe slowed their steps as they inspected the scene before them.

           All across their path were elongated plies of faded fabric littered with alternating dark and white patches that protruded from just under them. Tattered remains of shoes of different styles, many foreign to Echo, rested at the end of most. Some had none. Some piles lay away from each other. Other piles seemed to rest side by side or even on top of each other. Echo’s eyes darted from one pile to the next as she tried to avoid the tell-tale sign that these were bones of people. The skulls. They were the most horrific sight to Echo. They were the clear sign that all these piles had once been living breathing individuals.

Her eyes tried to brush over a pile that laid just a few inches to her right. But the state of the skull stopped her from looking anywhere else. There was a dark color of fabric stretched over the entire surface of the skull giving it a terrifyingly familiar look. She could almost see facial features through the fabric.

“It looks like this one was wearing fabric over their face when they died, “whispered Echo.

“Echo, that is what skin looks like after so many years and without the sun to burn it away,” mumbled Morrigan.

Echo gasped and stumbled backwards away from the skull. It was true. She could see small hints of hair at the base of the hairline. The lips no longer covered the teeth and the nose was shriveled and contorted towards the right side of the face as if it was broken. The cheeks and eyes had sunken in so deep that it was hard to imagine there had ever been meaty flesh just beneath. The right side of the face was missing several inches of skin altogether and the bone was a pale yellow. At the back of the skull there were several inches of a red hair that was thin and wavy. It was the hair that peeked Echo’s interest and helped ease her disgust. She struggled to conclude if this was the hair of a man or woman or even a teenage adult like herself.

“I will start with this one,” declared Echo with a weak voice.

“Let me help you,” insisted Monroe as he reached down towards the body.

“No, she needs to do this on her own. She needs to feel the weight of what was once a person on her shoulders. She needs to take the time to ensure she has gathered every bone that was once encapsulated within this person. If she is ever to be our new leader she must learn the impact her decisions could potentially have on our people. See the impact that decisions of leaders before had on their people, study it so you ensure that those mistakes are ...,” instructed Morrigan.

“Never again to be repeated,” whispered Echo, finishing the mantra from her earlier childhood lessons.

Echo placed her pack on the ground and removed the old dusty canvas bag that Talyssa had given her before their trip. She spread the opening of the bag wide and put on her brittle gloves. Beginning with the feet she lifted the black shoes from the pile and the bones within shifted noisily in complaint to their sudden movement. She placed them one by one into the bottom of the bag and worked her way up the legs. The fabric was old and disintegrated at her touch but the bones still retained their structure and one by one she picked them from the ground and placed them gently into the bag. When she lifted the pelvic bone the small pieces of the spine scattered and mixed with the larger rib and arm bones. Echo took her time, making sure she retrieved every bone that belonged to this person. When she knew she had, she lifted the leather faced skull from its place, careful not to touch or disturb any of the delicate hair.

Once she had the entire collection of bones in her bag she stood and silently turned and walked the direction they had come. Monroe was standing a few feet away, his own bag cradled under his arms, waiting for her. They walked the twenty minutes back down the row towards the open desert. Neither saying a word.

Once they left the dead structures of the city they walked for an additional 45 minutes until they found places within scattered mounds to bury their charges.  Silently they each dug a six foot hole wide enough for their own body to rest within. Echo removed the bones from her bag one by one and to her best ability she arranged the bones in the shape of a human. She took her time with the smaller bones trying to recreate the fingers and toes with small success. When she was finished she crawled out of the hole and took to her knees. She silently said words that she hoped would pay tribute to the person these bones once were. Then quietly both Monroe and Echo filled in the graves and then returned back into the city to retrieve another set of bones.

“Should we not adorn the graves with some kind of marker like the ones we saw coming in,” asked Monroe. Like Monroe, Echo has noticed that the graves closer to the crumbling city did not have the matching grave markers of the forbidden letter.

Morrigan paused mid stride and with a sigh turned and faced a confused Echo and Monroe.

“Look, I didn't want to say this infront of the rest because, frankly, it's not for them to know. The forbidden letter was what the Old Fool, the leader of the old world, used to mark his name. He was a terrible stain on history and that is why the letter has been removed. It wasn't an immediate decision for our ancestors and that is why so many graves are marked with them. We do not desecrate graves, we make them. So that is why they are still there. The dead will not know if we marked their graves or not so let's have no more of this discussion.”

Echo saw the flaw in Morrigan’s argument but left it at that. The fear of repeating the atrocities of the Old Fool was enough incentive for her to move past anything related to him.

“Never again to be repeated,” Echo whispered to herself again and again as she went back for the next set of bones, the next victim of the Old Fool.

“Never again to be repeated.”

“Never again to be repeated.”