Post-Apocalypse Liturgy
0.
These are the days in which the dead outnumber the living, and in which most of the living
act like the dead.
1.
The wind in this place is a howl that never gets tired.
Still, I march on, a lonely soldier in a foreign land, desperately trying not to feel like a refugee.
The remains of my regiment left me long ago and are now buried under grey sand-dust or are walking, but away. This does not mean I am walking to anywhere, or that I know what I’m looking for
or what I will find.
I once knew a girl, and then knew that girl as a woman – two distinct and different people who would be strangers to one another if they ever meet.
I once knew a boy, who did not become a man because I couldn’t **** the other man with the axe fast enough. There’s blood flecked under my nails and it is not his but it may as well be. I carried his keychain with the rabbit foot on it for the longest time, but in the end bartered it for clean water.
These are two of the people who are walking away from me.
2.
Here there is only a scarf over my mouth and nose, scratched sunglasses and my battered boots moving, always forward. There is no longer a North Star to guide me so who knows what direction my feet are taking me.
I see hollowed trees and cracked tarmac peeking out from the dust. The sand and the dust are the only things that move here, swirling, like us, directionless and in circles.
But not like me, no. I am moving Forward
Through the shimmering haze ahead I see a smudge, a smudge that is not a ruined tree or a ruined building. Just a ruined person, and they’re coming towards me. I check my hands, my knife, my pistol that has no bullets but does have a heavy **** and no one needs to know it’s just a glorified club.
We stop a few meters apart from each other. He’s wrapped in ***** bits of cloth and smells like turpentine and fatigue, but he holds himself like a wire. He’s looking at my pack, the blade at my hip.
“Howdy stranger. Any sign of life your way?” I haven’t spoken in weeks and no longer have a voice. I shake my head.
“Got any water to spare?” Again, I shake my head. He keeps looking at me, all wire and tightly wound desperation.
I’m going to have to **** him, so
I do.
3.
It’s a lonely dark, trapped between the teeth of suspense and resignation - an abandoned parking lot at midnight where an old drunk man cackles at nothing.
And I made
****** sure I was surrounded by nothing.
Sing to me silence
Remind me that I can still breathe.
4.
I still talk to you sometimes.
“Remember when we met? You smiled and looked clean and told me there was water nearby. I didn’t trust you, didn’t believe you but followed you anyway. Maybe because I couldn’t smell anyone else, maybe because I hadn’t been clean in what felt like years
(but only dead gods can tell time here, so who knows really?)
Maybe because I still had a bullet left or maybe because I was
Lonely.
Were you lonely? Is that why you trusted a wandering wretch like me?
Or were you one of those dead gods who could see the Future, who could see the Forward, and what came at the end?
Sometimes I ask you things forgetting you are no longer there. When I’m thumbing the sharp of my knife and say
“Pass me my pack would you? Need the whetstone.”
Or
“Do you remember Before? Were you old enough?
I remember,
Before
Before
Before
Before…
Do you remember if it was better than this?”
Or
“Stop hogging the blanket already, just lie closer to me.”
And I wake up thinking you’re there but it’s just my own arms wrapped around my own waist.
5.
When I see the first sign I imagine I am hallucinating. I saw a bird earlier this morning, and that can’t be right. I saw you this morning, and that can’t be right either.
But I walk and soon hear something I haven’t heard in a long time. Someone is laughing.
And the town I wander into is not really a town, just a place to sit and sleep, cobbled together with people and plywood and spit.
‘Hopetown’ it’s called. And that would make me laugh if I remembered how to.
I’m greeted with a mixture of caution and curiosity. There must be a few dozen of them, ***** but alive and they smile at each other and have the energy to talk with their hands. There are huts and there is a circle marked by stones and a fire pit in the middle that is a meeting place. There is a hut with a table out front that is a ‘supply store’. There is a row of bicycles, some more battered and twisted than others, and I look at them carefully.
I come in peace, I come in pieces.
Stranger, stranger, become a bard and tell us of distant lands.
But there is nothing to tell about distant lands. There is only sand, and ruins, and those people walking away from me.
So I make something up.
It seems good enough, I can stay for the night.
I trade a battered toy doll with only one eye for a refill of water and a can of some food with the label scraped off. I ask for boots in my size because mine are broken and giving me blisters. They say sorry, don’t have any, and ask me to sleep with a woman with dark red hair and bird thin wrists. Plant a new seed, they ask me.
Don’t they know I’m shrivelled and hollow? There’s another woman and a man I’ve seen who I’d rather sleep with, but I’m a guest here and I say yes.
Rozelle, her name is, and I forget it immediately. It’s safer that way.
I can tell she doesn’t want to sleep with me and I’m still thinking of you so we talk for a while about things I also forget immediately (safer, safer, safer) and then we fall asleep next to each other. She can always tell the others it didn’t take,
It’s common enough.
I wake in the night like a ghost has tapped me on the shoulder. I don’t like it here, can’t remember the last time a body was so close to mine… It was you, wasn’t it? Then it must have been centuries ago.
So in the dark of night when there isn’t even a moon I steal the stallion of the bikes. I have to knock out a sentry to get it, but I don’t **** him, I put him to sleep quietly.
Because I am the villain here.
Maybe that means I should have killed him, but I don’t want to be the villain. Bad is what this life has painted me as, and I don’t want to be that.
Not that it matters because I’m only ever going
Forward.
So I ride,
Going
Going
Going
Gone.
6.
They might follow with pickaxes, but townies don’t like to travel. They have water, they have each other. But still I ride all night and into the rising sun but
Still don’t burn.
Two days I ride and nothing happens but space.
Wait, that’s a lie. I rode past a graveyard for the elephants: huge trucks, hollow, huge trailers, hollow, huge dreams, hollowed out.
hollow hollow hollow
I peddled faster, then, because I don’t like mirrors.
And now the sun has fallen out of the sky and I usually stop before then and find a place to camp but I was caught up in getting past the graveyard and forgot about it.
Now it’s pitch black – no stars anymore – and I’m walking my stolen bike, looking for a dune I can crawl behind and sleep with one eye open, bike tied to my wrist with a bit of rope I found several suns ago.
And then I see the glowing shadow of a fire. I smell cooking meat. This cannot be a good thing. I consider riding on but without giving myself a why I lay down my bike and crawl as silence up a sloping hill so I can spy on the people gathered around the fire.
Apart from my hunting knife my most prized possession are my binoculars. I put them to my eyes like a spy from a Before movie. There are three men and a woman around a sad fire.
A leg is being turned on a spit.
The leg belongs to a middle aged man slumped on the sand. He has no limbs left, and there are ***** bandages on the stumps of his arms, his left leg. The Eaters kept him alive for as long as they could, taking a hand there, an arm here, an ear and some toes there, but now he is dead and they will cook and eat the rest of him. Feast, feast, and starve until they steal another body, another soul.
I turn to go but see something else. A girl
Hogtied and *****, tangled hair.
She’s a scrawny thing but they’ll eat her anyway. I wonder if she knew the man, if he was her father, or a friend. Or just a stranger.
I once ate someone:
She cried and cried and cried and I devoured, devoured, devoured until there was nothing left
But her flesh.
“You’re a cannibal of the heart” she said, still crying.
And I shrugged, because I no longer felt anything (this was before you, of course)
Because this is the book of our lives:
Read it and don’t weep
There’s not enough water to spare.
And she is another person who is walking away from me.
7.
But I want to be the hero.
I want to be
Something someone will remember with a smile
And not with tears, or rage
Something someone will remember without reaching for a handgun.
8.
It takes a few minutes of planning, and some sneaky footwork. They have weapons but so do I and I have surprise. So I get behind the one with the shotgun by his knee and slice his throat.
Surprise!
Can’t remember much of what happens next but it ends with three bodies on the ground with the man without limbs, a blossom of red on my forearm and a lot of sweat, a lot of kicked up dust.
And the leg on the fire has burnt now.
Ashes to ashes, and so on and so forth.
The kid is looking at me as if her eyes could slice. And who knows, maybe they can – she was certainly born After and no one knows what is possible anymore.
“I’m gonna get this off you, ok?” I say, holding my knife and touching the gag trapping her tongue. She doesn’t move and I slice it off and she still doesn’t move.
“What are you going to do with me?” She asks. And I don’t have an answer.
I didn’t think that far
Ahead.
“Nothing. I’ll scavenge that lot” (I **** a thumb at the bodies behind me and repress a wince as my bleeding arm screams) “and go.”
What she says next is unexpected.
“Can I go with you?”
I look closely. She’s feral and ***** and reminds me of jungle cats from Before. She might jump me in my sleep and leave me for dead, steal my knife and bike and name and ride into a sunset and burn in it.
But I want to be a hero,
I don’