The boy awoke with a start, mechanically rising and working his way into a raggedy jacket and snatching up a rifle from the cold ground. He made his way through the burnt out matchsticks that were once trees, his boots crunching on the brittle twigs and charred ground.
He didn’t remember much before everything had happened, but he did remember climbing trees. He’d climb them all day, clambering about without a care. His mother would always call him back from his forays into the uncharted wilderness of his childhood.
”Eddie!” She’d call out, into the vast expanse of woods that surrounded his home. “Eddie, dinner!”
He only barely remembered her face – kind, soft and vaguely plump, always smiling at him as he barreled through the door and into the kitchen. That long mass of brown curls that spilled partially past her shoulders, and her billowy dresses that she always seemed to wear in the summer time. Those times were like a half-remembered dream to him now, buried beneath all the ash and the ruins that surrounded him.
He had eaten dinner before the disaster struck – something with gravy, he recalled fondly. Everything he tried to remember before it was hazy, but he clearly remembered the dinner table – it was an old, rich mahogany that matched the stain of the shelves his mother decorated with plates and dolls. He remembered the dolls – little miniature recreations of girls that might be his age. He had often wondered, while chewing on a freshly cooked meal, whether the dolls had little lives of their own, and if they ever clambered about the high shelves as he climbed the trees.
He had ran out the door without even saying goodbye to his mother on the evening of the disaster, and made his way to the junction of several streams, clambering up a massive peak that overlooked the entire forest. He watched the sun sink over the hills slowly, taking comfort in the strange silence between dusk and darkness where the stars began to spread over the skies like a glittering tapestry. He remembered when it happened quite vividly – he had just leaned back, closing his eyes as the cool night air began to wrap around him. He heard a distant thud off to the west – he opened his eyes in time to see the flash, then the great plume of smoke smoldering on the horizon. In an instant, the blinding white coronas of miniature suns shattered the countryside around him. Before he could even leap to his feet, the ground began to shake, and the great plumes of smoke seemed to number in the thousands as they rose up like ghosts of flame over the otherwise beautiful horizon.
He remembered feeling fear, that cold sensation that weighed heavily in the pit of his stomach as he watched helplessly, and then suddenly the crippling heat and the blinding light all around him, and he felt himself thrown into the air, his body tossed about like a ragdoll as his ears bled from the onslaught of terrible, deafening sound, and then finally the quiet and all-enveloping darkness.
He grunted as he hoisted himself up the tangled roots of a splintered and broken redwood and walked along the massive furrows of its crisped wood. He didn’t like remembering things, as when he focused on the past too much he was wracked with intense headaches for hours on end. He couldn’t afford such a hindrance now that he had Nora.
The memories of her sprung unbidden to his mind, and as he began the long ascent across the broken boughs, his legs straining to hold their precarious footing, he remembered the first time he saw her.
It had been weeks since he had seen anyone or anything – he remembered clawing his way out of a pile of ashen logs, their centuries-old bark having provided him a thickened suit of armor against the blazes that swept through the woods he had once called home. His head had ached for days, and he had survived solely on the charred husks of what used to be a thriving wildlife population. He had tried to find his home, to find his mother with her kind smiles and her dinner table full of warm food and whimsical dolls, but the landscape was too treacherous, and he recognized nothing of what used to be his world.
He wandered, alone and half-mad for what seemed like an eternity, the forest he once knew by heart now a strange and alien graveyard of grey, silent sentinels whose skeletal branches once held a bounty of green. Ash was all they held now, and for the brief space of time before he would close his eyes and drift to sleep, he’d imagine that the ever swirling flakes of ash were snow. Comforted by this, he’d slip into dreams, only to be awoken by nightmares mere hours later.
He had been traveling north on that particular day, and had come across something he hadn’t seen in quite a long time – a cabin, and while it hadn’t been flattened into oblivion like so many other small signs of civilization that he had found, it had been somewhat damaged by several splintered and fallen redwoods, and its once rich grain was covered in the same pale grey ash that coated all his known world in the uniform, ghostly pallor.
The door creaked open slowly, its weathered hinges coughing up miniature swirling spectres of dust and ash as he stepped in. The wooden floorboards groaned loudly under his weight, the absence of any other sound only making his movements that more palpable with each hesitant step. Light spilled in from the windows and fractured upon the floor, illumining the scattered pieces of broken glass, shards of wood and broken toys upon the floor in a jagged, uneven fashion that revealed as much as it hid in shadow.
He kept silent for a moment, an unfamiliar yet not completely foreign sound on the edge of hearing. As he made his way through the ruins of what was once a quite expansive retreat for whomever once lived there, his eyes scanned every possible detail – ruined cookware, splintered chairs, pieces of wall, bits of cotton from furniture which seemed to have exploded when the trees came crashing down, he searched for anything which could possibly be making the very quiet sounds which continually drew him further into the house.
He thought that the house looked vaguely familiar, that perhaps he had visited the home before everything had happened. He tried to recall it as he wandered through the dining room — it was then he saw the hand, laying upright in a doorway, which sent him into a screaming fit of surprise and terror behind a nearby couch. He breathed hard against the wooden frame, cold sweat running from his ash-laden hair. After a few minutes, he mustered the courage to rise, as no pursuit or yell had come after his initial outburst.
The hand was still there, never moving from its original place. He took a few steps closer, and the hand still didn’t move. Satisfied that it wasn’t going to leap up and choke him, he continued onwards and found himself in an expansive kitchen. It was there he found the owner of the hand – a heavyset man was splayed out across a broken table, dried blood surrounding the once pristine tiles of the floor in a circle. While his one hand had fallen across the floor, the other clutched a rifle to his chest. His neck was a bloody mess, the blood having long since stained his surrounding clothes and the table beneath him. His body was in a fairly desiccated state, his dried skin taut against his bones.
Eddie cringed at the grisly sight, torn at looking away from the horror that lay before him and seeing the first person he’d seen in weeks.
He heard the noise again – a soft, shuffling sound, which appeared to be coming down a nearby hallway connected to the kitchen. Not wanting to face whatever might have done this to the man nearby, he carefully slid the rifle out of the corpse’s clutches, and after giving it a cursory inspection to make certain it was loaded, he began to make his way slowly down the hall.
Long, curling tracks wore their way through the piles of dust and ash that covered the floor, weaving miniature canyons throughout the floorboards. At the end of the hallway, a door was slightly ajar, and from within Eddie could hear an occasional sound of movement.
Taking a deep breath, he steeled himself and gripped metal of the rifle tighter for a moment before pushing the door open. Light spilled in from the window directly in front of him, the bright halo of white juxtaposed against the dark interior of the room casting everything within in a shadowed silhouette.
He reflexively shielded his eyes as he walked in, the sudden influx of light like a barrage on his senses. Squinting, he saw the contents of the room before him – a bed covered in stuffed animals, doll houses arranged haphazardly along the wall, while a desk was propped up against the window.
A wheelchair was propped against the desk, its steel handles glinting in the light. A diminutive figure sat within the chair, curls of blonde hair spilling downward in a variety golden hues. He hesitantly reached out a hand, expecting to find another victim of whatever had happened here – and he was greeted with a half-shocked, half-terrified face of a girl nearly his own age. Her blue eyes were surprisingly vivid – a stark, icy blue dash of color against the ghostly landscape of grey.
He remembered the only thing that went through his head at the time was that he was home, and he was inexplicably reminded of those comforting times sitting at the dinner table with his mother. It proved to be something that instantly put him at ease.
His memories faded for a moment as he finished the long ascent to the boughs of the massive treetops, and stopped to survey his next task. He slung the rifle over his shoulder with a slight sigh, and rubbed his hands together. Gripping a large branch, he began to methodically climb the tallest tree in the area for miles, using its massive burls as handholds as he quickly and efficiently scaled the tree and reached its peak in little time.
Slinging one of his arms over the massive branches, he swung the rifle around, leaving its barrel resting against the gnarled wood. Leaning down, he peered through the scope and began to survey the surroundings. He always treasured this time – the pervasive blanket of ash muffled all sounds as a snowfall would, and the deathly silence reminded him of the nights where he’d do nothing but gaze up at the sky. The few patches of starlit blackness that he saw these days were a treasure – ever since the disaster had happened, he had been denied the amazing panoramas which had lit up almost every evening he could ever remember – the stars forever covered by thick, ash-laden clouds that roiled aimlessly throughout the night.
He quietly surveyed the surrounding landscape, and his gaze lingered on one of the many streams that fed into the lake nearby. He focused on some vague movement behind a nearby bush, and his memories began to rise up once more.
It had been weeks since their terrifying introduction to one another, but Eddie and Nora had developed a fine rapport with one another – he especially enjoyed wheeling her down the hills that surrounded her former home. She had a wealth of supplies in her cabin, and he briefly tasted something that felt as if it had been cooked at the home he had nearly forgotten.
She was a very quiet girl – when he had tried to ask her about what had happened to what he assumed was her father, she didn’t speak for days, even when he had nearly thrown out his back attempting to move the corpse and called for her help. He didn’t mention him again, the only remnant of his presence was a stray bloodstain on the kitchen wall which Eddie had been unable to get out.
He would laugh as he wheeled her chair up and down the various hills – across old, cracked stretches of roads and the dusty banks of the nearby streams. He had even begun to practice shooting with the rifle while she slept – he had an existence worth clinging onto, and he intended to protect it whatever the cost.
He remembered talking with her at length, telling her about whatever he could remember before the fires, wondering aloud if perhaps they knew each other in the lives they left behind so long ago. She was nearly always quiet, and he had assumed it was from the trauma of losing her father so violently. But he remembered her eyes, how kind they were, how despite all the destruction around them there was still a dash of color and kindness left in his world.
Their somewhat idyllic existence became threatened when, upon opening the double door cabinets that held the treasure trove of preserves and canned foods one morning, Eddie found that they had nearly depleted their entire supply. He remembered knocking on the door to Nora’s room in that early hour, how his heart had sank when he had to tell her the news – he felt her fear through her quiet façade. After ransacking some of the other undestroyed rooms in the home, he had found fishing rods, and while he had never seen a fish since the sky was set aflame, he hoped desperately that something survived in the waters of the lake nearby.
Never one to let a friend down, Eddie put his worries aside when speaking to Nora about his plan – they’d make an adventure out of it, and he had even set up a little sling on the handles of her chair for her to put her rod in if her hands got tired. He hummed a tune his mother used to sing to him before he’d go to sleep as he wheeled her down the winding pathway to the lake – he didn’t remember the words, but the melody comforted him nonetheless.
The lake burbled with the sounds of numerous streams feeding into it – the waters were murky and grey, the occasional clump of ash floating by on its rippling surface. It seemed to stretch on forever to Eddie’s eyes, breaking up the monotony of the black matchstick tree trunks that perpetually dotted the landscape.
They managed to traverse their way down a relatively clear path and Eddie parked Nora on a flat rock near to the shore and helped her cast her line out. Scrambling down to the shore, he waded slightly into the water to throw his own line out.
The weather was particularly pleasant this morning, with some of the stormy grey clouds parting here and there to let the occasional bit of early sunshine to sparkle upon the lake’s surface. Eddie in particular was calm – for some reason, he had always avoided the lake or any large body of water, though he could never place the reason why he felt that way. Regardless, with Nora nearby and the rare sight of so much sunshine, his initial discomfort was quelled. He breathed a long, low sigh, and began to enjoy himself – occasionally, he’d break to run circles around the rock Nora was perched on and laughter filled the air as he splashed her only to duck getting hit with a fishing pole.
After about an hour or two, a slight ash storm began to kick up, the slow cadence of the falling blanket of grey incredibly reminiscent of snowflakes as they lazily drifted down from the sky. The pale whorls swirled erratically past the two children, and Eddie found himself amidst a spiraling column of inky grey hues – the blacks and greys bleeding together to form a miniature cosmos of ash and soot.
As he laughed carelessly and spun within the beautiful vortex, he found Nora amidst the grey haze, always her serene gaze quietly taking in everything, and her eyes blazed with a brilliant blue sheen that sliced through the grey and drew him in. He found himself walking towards her, his smile wide as he revisited all the times he’d found comfort just by her being there, by having someone to talk to, someone to share the experience of simply existing in this strange new world.
He leaned forward to kiss her, to sum up his feelings in the simplest of acts, but he slipped on one of the smooth stones lining the bed of the lake, and came crashing down into the water. Spluttering and coughing, he raised his head, his hair drenched in the murky waters. As he struggled to regain his breath, he caught a glimpse of the reflections in the water beneath – something loomed behind him, misshapen and terrible and it seemed to be reaching for him.
He remembered blacking out then, only brief flashes running, his muscles burning, and the screaming – such horrible screaming that he had hoped with every fiber of his being was not Nora. He woke up inside the house and immediately looked for her – she was sprawled out on the floor with him, and seemed to be alright beyond the fact that she was scared witless and lacked her chair. He clutched the rifle as he crept towards the windows.
He leaned quietly over the ledge to peek through the window – he only heard a brief scuffle on the floorboards of the porch, and then something huge came crashing through the glass, his world spun as an angry growl echoed in his ears. He heard the screaming again as his vision blacked in and out and his head pounded with intense, seething pain – the next few moments ran like a series of still vignettes in his mind, he remembered feeling hot blood running down his cheek and onto his neck, his muscles straining against the flashes of fur and teeth, and then the blinding blast of the gun as it went off with a sound like a crack of thunder.
The bear fell with a tremendous thud, and Eddie simply laid on the floor and breathed, muffled sounds echoing around him as his ears rang sharply and painfully. He heard crying somewhere, and struggled to get to his feet, his mind racing with thoughts of Nora’s safety.
He found her huddled over in a corner, shaken but safe. Turning back to make sure the thing that attacked him was dead, he finally was able to see the beast in full – it was clearly a bear, but not nearly as large as he remembered them being. He quickly knelt down and embraced Nora, seeking to comfort her as much as he himself needed it after his struggle.
For a moment, a cold pang of fear ran through him – he thought he felt a ragged wound in her side, but he was half-delusional from the struggle. He fell asleep then, exhausted and in Nora’s embrace.
He remembered butchering the beast – after the initial shock, fear and exhaustion had worn off, their hopes had been met with a very convenient solution – the larger wildlife still survived somehow, and while Eddie had never seen so much as a squirrel since the blast, the bear was clearly there. They dined heartily for weeks on the bear, Eddie cooking up steaks and kabobs and spinning all sorts of different ‘dishes’ that were essentially the same thing just to see Nora smile at his attempts to cheer her up.
He had begun to explore the woods around their home, and eventually found that there were animals about, they would only come out once he had scaled the treetops and remained deathly silent, however. He was able to catch several squirrels each trip, and at one particularly fortuitous trip, he shot a deer that had come to dine on the very beginnings of a patch of sickly looking grass poking up through the ashy ruins of the forest.
Their supplies had gone low again, and that’s why he had come out to hunt once more. His memories faded away as they caught up with the present — his breath fogged as he kept his gaze focused on the bit of movement he thought he’d seen. He thought he’d been hot on the heels of a bear, judging by the tracks and the scat he had seen when he’d started out a day ago.
A bush rustled within his sights some hundred feet away, and he instinctively tensed as he expected a bear to come crashing through, focusing on making the killing shot. He’d be a hero if he brought another bear home, Nora had seemed so happy when he’d create her bear soufflés, and bear cookies, and bear meatballs. He started to lose himself in her laughter, but then something came crashing through the bushes.
It wasn’t a bear – it was something huge and metal, and then Eddie recognized it from a he had seen before the disaster – a tank. It was a tank, and it was headed straight for him. His mind started to race with the possibilities of other people, but he was stopped short when a shot rang out from the trees near the vehicle, and a searing pain ripped through his shoulder as he started to fall.
He hit the ground with a hard thud, managing to break his fall by grasping at the various tree boughs on his way down. He was immediately on his feet, even as he clasped a hand over the bullet wound in his arm. He clutched the rifle to his chest as he began to run as fast as he could – the house wasn’t that far, he hoped he could make it, he could take Nora and they’d leave, hide somewhere.
His veins screamed with every pounding footstep that lead him inexorably back toward home – he could hear the sounds of the tank dwindling behind him, the crunching of the brittle trees growing quieter. Once or twice, he thought he heard voices behind him, but he was growing dizzy from the pain as he bolted past fallen tree trunks and began to hear the quiet trickles of the streams that surrounded the house.
He made a mad dash past the front porch and through the door, slamming it behind him as a hail of gunfire rained down from the hillside, punching through the wood of the house and leaving shafts of sunlight in their wake. He called out to Nora as he backed himself up against the couch, but suddenly another torrent of bullets blazed through the house, and he felt his right side go numb as he looked down at his chest and saw scarlet stains spreading over his ragged shirt.
He collapsed on the floor, his breaths coming in wheezing gasps. The pain was dizzying, but he started to crawl toward the bedroom, where he knew Nora must be hiding. He wanted to tell her it would be okay, that she could outrun whatever was coming. He collapsed as he reached the hallway, and as his eyes helplessly ran across its interiors, he began to remember that he had been here before, once.
As the life spilled out of him onto the floor, Eddie relived those memories that he had hidden away. He remembered being attracted to the windows, of the moving figures within, he remembered bursting through the flimsy material before the man inside could load his gun. He tore at the throat of him with his larger arm, and soon he was silent. He remember laying low to the floor, as he was now, and creeping along the room to the sound of crying at the far end.
He remembered the girl he found there, he remembered hearing a scream as he pushed the door open. He squinted his eyes shut and howled at the pain that tore through his body and his mind.
The thing that was Eddie that lay upon the floor shed tear after tear as the door burst open, men in uniforms pouring in. He could only vaguely see them as they surrounded him, guns drawn and pointed at him. Their voices drifted in and out of the dizzying haze of pain.
“Stokes, check the area. I don’t want more of these damn things popping out of somewhere,” One of them barked. The gun muzzle poked Eddie in the shoulder as the soldier grimaced, “Man, this one’s even uglier than the last one…”
Footsteps down the hallway followed by the creaking of doors opened cautiously, then a yell of, “Oh, s**t!” from the farthest point in the hall.
”What is it? There more?,” He yelled.
”No, but there’s a deader in here – a girl, looks like she bit it months ago!” Stokes replied.
”So? They probably died when the bombs fell.”
”She… she’s got doll’s eyes, sir. The sick mutant b*****d put doll’s eyes in her skull!”
Even as the words hit him harder than the blast he had managed to survive, Eddie’s world faded to black.
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