Walking Towards The End

"I know what you're thinking."

"You don't. Stop trying to understand."

"Olivia," Lewis kneels down looking up into my eyes, "Please."

I push him away. "Three days, Lou!"

"It's okay."

"How?" I demand.

Silence tears through the space between us, the scalding burn of the sun reminding us that our time is limited. There are only three days left.

"Livy-"

"Don't call me that."

"Then you have no reason to call me Lou."

Again, the quiet, but I know our minds are anything but silent. We have always known that the leaders of our small city, Menedék, would eventually falter. The extinction of the human race was, and still is inevitable.

"Three days," I plop down in the hot sand, not bothering at the burn in my hands.

I watch Lewis as he scoops up a handful of the dry earth, and then lifts his hands into the air so the wind carries the grains into the sky. When the academies were still open, I remember reading on the holographic screen at the front of the room about the first signs of the end of the world. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions so intense that people fled in a mass exodus.

"It's like the Esodo," Lewis says.

"You still remember?" I soften my tone, "The sand reminded me of that."

"We better get out of the sun," Lewis stands up and offers me a hand. I swallow my pride and slide my hand into his. Our fingers stay laced for a moment too long. He pulls me up. "Will your mother be worried?"

"Mother?" I almost laugh, but I've forgotten what that feels like. "She's too worried about Thomas."

"Oh."

Thomas, a burly eighteen year old with broad shoulders is my brother, although I prefer not to call him that. Mother has a fondness in him that I've spent too much of my life trying to win over. I shouldn't have wasted my time like that.

We start to tread through the sand, our steps heavy with the weight of our thoughts and our emotions. When my mother had first heard about the food shortages she had tried to save some of our rations, hiding it in the shadows of our home. After Thomas fell sick because of the rotting food, mother realized that without the technology that we used to have, it just wasn't possible to be able to save food as we had when I was only a girl. Now, the only food that’s left: grain. 

"Breakfast. Grain. Lunch," I pause and sigh deeply, "Grain. Dinner. Grain."

"It doesn't get much different."

"Almost monotonous."

Lewis nods, "You aren't nervous, Olivia, are you?"

"Well, if someone told me that I had only three days of food left before I starved-"

"That's not what I meant."

My breaths are short and uneven as we walk, but now my heart is pounding as well.

"Trying to forget," I mumble, the burn in my calves barely recognizable as I've gotten used to walking in the sand.

"I think it's a fruitless attempt to complete the objective,” he says.

Caccia. The hunt. The leaders of Menedék met only a day ago to discuss the details. Lewis and I are required to leave tomorrow. 

“The children,” they had said. “Give us your children and we’ll give you a future.” 

My mother was only one out of the many that broke into protest, “Thomas!” Mother had said, exasperated. Then after realizing I was standing beside her, “Olivia.” 

“Caccia is a hunt to seek other life on the planet. And, if we’re lucky, a possible solution to the end of our extinction. We need only the

able bodied and the young,” the leaders had said.

 "Seems a bit late if you ask me,” Lewis brings me back to the present, to the scorching heat and the expansive sea of sand. 

"If they want to survive so badly why do they send out young adults like you and I?" In the distance I can make out the rooftops of Menedék, the tan cliffs towering over the small city. "To suffer in that heat?" Then I add. "And we're the future generation.”

Lewis’s father is in the Council, his position without much authority, “But he could change things.” 

“My father,” Lewis understands, “With his position? I don’t think so.” 

I swallow. “We have to stop this hope talk.”

“Hope talk?”

“Yeah,” I search for the right words in my mind. “We are talking like we can do something about this all, the Caccia and then the three days.” 

Lewis turns to look at me, his hazel eyes scanning over my face. There's a flash of concern and he reaches out to tug my hood over my face.

"Getting pretty red," a wisp of black hair pokes out from under his hood.

"It doesn't matter anyway. I'll be dead in three days."

Lewis stiffens as I walk next to him, his feet landing and stepping with mine.

"Do you mind?" He retorts.

"I'd like to embrace it."

"What, death?"

He knows it's coming. Why does he still run from the future?

"Hey," I hold out my arm so his chest bumps against it. I swipe at a pearly, black beetle crawling on his shoulder. "Lewis." He looks up into my eyes with a look of sadness and defeat. "It's going to happen." I pull my gaze away from his eyes. Those words were harder to say then I thought. "I wish I had something reassuring to say, but it just isn't the reality of the world we are living in right now."

"I know," a mumble.

"Yes," I bring him into an embrace, his arms tight at his sides. "But I'll be there with you, and so will your mother and father. We will always be there for each other."

The feeling of his arms as he rests them around me, I can't explain. A feeling of a sense of security like an anchor to my heart. We will always be there for each other, and that's what matters most.