Gray

On the horizon, a black plume of smoke rolling upwards into unending clouds. A soft breeze moaned over gentle hills, rattled dead trees, smelled of fire. Empty towns sprawled for miles, cracked roads, piles of wood and metal and plastic. 

He touched his stomach, then the ledge he rested on. Cold and jagged. His eyes flittered from exhaustion. It was April, maybe. He had emerged from the frigid months skeletal and near death. He ate canned foods from the prepared few, often unsealed and molding, but calories. Sick mammals, unable to run. But it had been many days.

His hair was patchy, falling out in clumps. Kindling, added to dry grass and birch bark. Encompassing nuclear rot. Rain and snow, flesh and flora. Eternal autumn within, clinging life-force letting go.

There was a small town below, along a gray river. He picked up his bag and felt for the knife on his hip, then descended. He had seen no one, a desolate vista.   

What remained was a gas station sign, a monolith amongst ruin, a yellow clamshell. He stared at it. Color. He entered the station. The ceiling drooped and glass and debris littered the floor. He searched the shelves, crackling steps. Gum, cigarettes, cash for fire-starting, but left with nothing. 

Homes were ruins, impassable jagged mazes. There was one searchable structure, a trailer on the riverbank engulfed in a jungle of desiccated knotweed. Three fallen pines had crushed one side, but the other was unscathed. He pushed through the brittle stalks then stood on the trailer’s plastic steps. It smelled strongly of mildew. He pulled his coat over his nose. 

The door opened harshly, jammed by fallen ceiling tiles. Pale yellow insulation hung from the ceiling. It had been mostly ransacked. He found a Bic lighter at the back of a kitchen drawer, tried it and flame came forth. Piles of gray fuzz in the warm fridge. In the far corner of the upper-most cabinet, reached by standing on the counter, two cans of green beans.

In the only bedroom untouched by fallen trees, he sat on the bed. It creaked and sent dust swirling. Where once a mirror, now dusty shards under foot. He opened the bedside table, pushed aside an old mouse nest, and his hands met something unfamiliar. He pulled it up, held it in front of his face. A black nylon bag, and within it a small black camera, coated in dust. He cleaned it, then inspected it, an alien technology in the new gray age. Assuming it was broken, he pressed the power button and it whirred, then clicked, and the display activated. A bright blue screen, crisp and pure. He pointed it out the window, a frame of crumbling wall and tangled weeds. It shuttered and there was the world on the screen. How long it had been since reality was still. He put the strap over his shoulder, searched the home again, and left with nothing more.

The road ran on a hillside. It was covered in rocks and mud and a house which had slid with the soil. He leaned on the guardrail. Bare sumacs, and behind them the desolate sprawl. Beautiful, in a way. How rare that word had become. He raised the camera. The result was brutal, bleak, and geometric. But beautiful. He gazed at the picture, imagining it on a wall in the distant future, a symbol.

Future. A concept that had escaped his mind. He did not smile, nor feel happiness. Too deep was his pit of despair to yet find light. He gripped the camera tightly and kept on.

When light started to fade, and chill crept in, he thought of shelter. An auto shop just off the road, pavement cracked and sprouting with desiccated bluestem. The windows were broken. Tools and metal strewn about the concrete floor, but it had a roof. He set his bag on the floor, then gathered dry grass and sticks outside. He cleared a spot on the floor with his foot, metal scraping harshly, then made a pyramid of twigs. Grass was stuffed beneath. A poster torn from the wall, faded now but once an advertisement for tires, was ripped into small pieces, lit with the lighter he had found, then prodded into the grass. 

The fire caught quickly, for it had not rained or snowed for many days. He poked a hole into a can of green beans with a screwdriver, then set it by the fire, label curling as it burned. When it was finished, he wrapped his hand in his jacket, stuck his knife into the hole and cut the lid off. 

While he ate, he picked up the camera, looking once more at the photo he had taken earlier. In the top right of the screen: 18/18. He furrowed his brow and pressed the left arrow. The picture from the trailer. Then again. His breath shook. Tears close to forming. A young girl, perhaps five years old, sitting on a green lawn in front of the trailer. A white dress covered in yellow daisies, browned at the hems. Her dark hair was a mess. Dirt on her face. Blue eyes. 

Left again. She held a maple leaf, Autumn red. It covered most of her face. It was sunny. Left again. A close-up of a purple aster. Dainty petals, deep yellow pistils. Left again and again. More pictures of the young girl, of flowers and trees, of Autumn scenes. Always happy, always vibrant and beautiful. 1/18. The trailer. Great pines swaying beside it. Staghorn sumac on the lawn’s edge, berries maroon and passing. Long grass beside the steps.

The beans had gone cold. He finished them, then laid down, wrapped in a sleeping bag. He cried, tears running down grimy cheeks. Such sadness for what had been lost. So much beauty gone. But it was feeling. Crushing and overwhelming, but an emotion. He had not slept so soundly in months.

When he awoke, ashy snow fell softly, an overnight dusting. It was quiet in dawn’s gray. He could not remember his dreams but knew he had them. For breakfast, a can of brown bread acquired days ago. He tapped the knife on his hip, then the camera. He left the auto-shop, backpack filled with old posters for kindling, footprints in the thin, damp snow. 

Snow stopped falling. He had traveled six miles and stood now on a hill overlooking a crumbling town, the faintest white veil on the landscape. The plume of smoke on the horizon was growing. He took a picture of that snowy vista, then inspected it. There was a comfort in capturing the gray age, a relief in sharing the ugliness and despair with another entity. He did not have to think about lost families, nature’s indifference, forgotten history—the camera held those thoughts for him, shared the burden. His thumb hovered over the left arrow but did not press it.

He leaned against a dead pine and surveyed the town. No movement. He descended the hill, camera bobbing at his waist.

~ ~ ~

A fire crackled before him. He coughed and tasted blood. Clouded darkness hung over him. Weakness of mind and body were overtaking every waking moment. The air was poison, and his body was failing. A can of corn simmered over the flame and, with hands wrapped in cloth, he removed it with a shaky grasp. He finished it, then tossed the can into the embers. 

I need to sleep. It had been dark for hours, and he was exhausted, but a new force kept him awake. Hunched over on the stump, camera in his grasp, he scrolled through the pictures he had taken—barren sumacs, snowy towns, burned cars, ruined homes—, then at those of the girl, and her trailer, and the Autumn colors she danced through. When his eyes fluttered or his head drooped, he forced himself up, staring at the happiness of Before, then the devastation of After. Over and over, until he could fight no longer and fell onto his sleeping bag. 

It had been that way for four nights, falling asleep as he tortured his mind. He was too fatigued, too sick, to stop himself. He was nearly bald. Almost all food was indigestible. Skeletal figure. Rashes were appearing on his body, cuts remained unhealed. He always knew the danger; they spoke of it Before. What to expect after the bombs fell. He had since forgotten. A conscious choice, ignorant to inevitability. Nuclear rot tore through him—the air he breathed, water he drank, food he ate. Each breath removing a piece of his body. But he had the pictures. Those of Before to comfort him, those of After to unload his despair. 

When he awoke, the wind had shifted, and the air held a chemical scent suggesting more than a brush fire. The plume had grown in intensity and width, a black wall. Growing exponentially as he neared it, and as it devoured its surroundings. He could hardly move, and his vision was blurry. There was a farm on the opposite hill across the valley. Only five or so miles. That was his goal for the day. Then he would rest.

A cool day. All snow had melted, its moisture deepening the browns and grays that now dominated barren Nature. But his coat remained, for his body’s frailty could not combat even the slightest chill. He hobbled through a small neighborhood of trailers, all rotting folding in on themselves. Mildew mixed with chemical smoke. He was walking toward the plume but knew not where else to go. After the bombs fell, and he realized he had lived, his plan was to walk east towards the sea and south towards warmth. For some time now, he thought not of this plan, and hoped only peripherally that he was heading to the coast. A river burbled nearby.

He rounded a curve, then descended a hill, and was upon a bridge. The river ran beneath him, gray and brown. A dark shape a dozen yards upstream appeared to be a corpse, but he did not look long. He turned downstream, where smooth ledges protruded from the riverbanks, and made the water cascade in a thin, glass sheet before tumbling down stone and sending up mist. The flat beauty of Nature beneath a gray veil. Despite his weakness, he stopped for a moment and took a picture of those glass waters, and dark stone frame, and the splattering of mist behind it. It was a nice picture, composed poorly and with unfavorable light, but raw in its simplicity. One that is not meant to be looked at for long, but to make the onlooker yearn to visit the pictured place. 

Show the gray age to verdant futures. He had almost forgotten about greenery, about the lushness of Spring, the weight of Summer. The camera had become a device of hope. One that forced him to consider that humanity might prevail, that Nature might rejuvenate. He had become a storyteller, perhaps one of few, or none. So few survivors—who else had a means to journalize with such inarguable truth the result of human folly? He turned then, back upstream, and raised the camera at the body decaying on the river’s edge. He inhaled deeply, closed his eyes, and the camera shuttered. An eternal corpse. 

His self-bestowed duty invigorated him, and he climbed the opposite hill without rest. At its crest, he stopped. Vision was blurred, and his ears rang. His heart beat frantically and he sat against a rusty guardrail. He thought he heard a crow call in the distance, faint and in harmony with the breeze and the river below. He focused, and craned his head, but heard nothing more. There is no more life. 

The last two miles to the farm were a crawl, stopping frequently to rest, to cough and heave, to grasp at the implacable pain in his chest and place his palms against his temple to combat a pulsing brain. His heart felt weak. A pain expanded in his chest, then shot through his torso. He cried out and his voice echoed through the barren trees and hollers. How long it had been since he uttered a sound. 

Soon, he kept on. The farm was still mostly standing. An old home with a rotting picket fence surrounding a lawn of weeds, and white siding covered in dead vines and lichen. Parts of its roof had caved in, but others remained. A porch encircled it, though mostly crumbling. Behind it, what was once likely a corn field was now an expanse of desiccated weeds. A windmill’s bottom rose in the middle, its blades beside it. It was quiet.

The porch creaked from his weight, rotting boards ready to give way. The inside was peculiarly kept, debris that would have otherwise fallen from the open roof had been removed and walls were patched with clay or planks. In the room on the right, a large stack of canned goods. He went for them quickly, turning into the living room. He was met with a dark trembling gun barrel, and a man behind it.

They stared at each other for some time. The gunman only feet away from the other, who stood against the wall, hand hovering over his knife. The gunman’s young age was evident only in his eyes, for the rest of him was grimy and gaunt. He seemed tired, like holding the shotgun took all his strength.

“Please leave,” the gunman said. 

The man went to speak but triggered a cough. He heaved harshly, and blood appeared on his sleeve. His eyes fluttered and he slid down the wall, hands outstretched. The gunman relaxed the barrel.

“Are you alright?” 

The man shook his head as another coughed wracked him. The gunman lowered his weapon and watched the man cough and wheeze, apathy of survival clashing with pity for weakness. The man looked to be near death. Face sunken, hair a wisp atop his skull. Joints protruding from limbs, and discolored eyes that yearned to see no more. The gunman offered a hand, and the man took it without hesitation.

~ ~ ~

The fireplace sent orange light dancing around the room. It was warm in the house, and the wind whistled outside. Canned beef stew bubbled in an iron pot over the fire. A handmade calendar hung on the wall—April twenty-fifth. There was a cot in the corner, next to it a nightstand with a candle. It was almost a home.

The sick man was wrapped in his sleeping bag, laid near the heat. Consciousness was beginning to elude him, fading often into darkness, then appearing again in reality. 

“What is your name?” the gunman asked.

“I don’t remember.” It was a lie, but it did not matter anymore.

“Been alone the whole time?” 

“Yes.”

“Me too.” It was a lie.

Silence for a while. The sick man basking in his final glow, the gunman toying with a pocket knife.

“You’re very sick, aren’t you?” the gunman asked. The sick man nodded. “Must’ve been near a drop,” The sick man nodded again. “Where are you from?”

“North.”

“We’re all from the north.”

“Adirondacks.”

“I’m from just outside Columbus.”

The sick man furrowed his brow. “Where are we?”

“About a day’s walk from Petersburg,” the gunman said. “Virginia.”

The sick man laid his head back. So close. So, so close. But, thinking on it then, he did not know why the coast seemed a worthy destination. What did it offer that elsewhere couldn’t? Nowhere else to go.

A sizzle from the fire, soup bubbling under the pot’s lid. The gunman stood. “Soup’s ready.” The sick man had not tasted anything better in his life.

That night, after the gunman fell asleep, the sick man removed the camera from its bag. He stared at the pictures he had taken, then went to those of Before. He looked at them for a long while, wondered what her name was, what her mother did for work, what she dreamed of becoming. Then he deleted the pictures. All those of Before, leaving those of After. All the light, the joy, the muddy dress, the green lawn, the colorful Autumn. He breathed deeply then exhaled a heavy breath. Using all of his strength, he sat up and took a picture. The flash illuminated the room, the gunman on his cot, the calendar above him. It was blurred and washed out. He slept and dreamt of nothing at all.

The next morning, he was hardly alive. The gunman leaned over him. 

“Take this,” the sick man said, holding up the camera. “Keep it safe.”

The gunman took it from the sick man’s grasp. “Thank you.”

“Are you to keep on southward?” The gunman nodded. “Be careful of the fire.”

“It’s why I’m leaving. I’ve been here a long time.”

“That’s good,” the sick man said, then spoke no more.

That morning, spade met soil. The gunman was alone again, a silhouette against the brown hills, the gray sky. He dug a hole in the old corn field, dropped the man in, and covered him. He looked at the disturbed patch of dirt for a moment, pulled his pack onto his shoulder, then kept on, camera bobbing at his waist.