It's Not a Wasteland

The whole place smelled dead. Not of death, but of deadness, of nothing having been alive there for God knew how long. The sun beat down an unforgiving white haze, and the metal rusted into pockmarks, and the plastic sloughed off its shapes to drip and drool into a series of malformed curlicues. She had absolutely no sense of how much time had passed, and kept losing her own feet in the heat waves that rolled off the blacktop.

There was no other life in this place, though she had practically no idea what constituted life anymore. It was hard to tell, in a world that was nothing but white hellfire and shimmering distance. She recognized an obstacle in her path, a sharp black haze in her windblown eyes. A tire? No. Shreds of a tire. Pieces of blowout. Her weary trek ceased for a moment while her steel wool brain tried to tell her what she should do in this situation. Eventually, after agonizing minutes, she stepped around it, catching a toe on its edge and stumbling sideways into the shell of a car. The rusted exterior felt molten. She screeched and fell sideways onto the blacktop, itself yielding a little with the heat.

She lay there a while, trying to remember life. She thought that, maybe, she had known life once. Other life. Not this searing blaze of aftershock. But everything was hazy. Her mind was petered with ultraviolet buckshot.

Something popped and snickered near her ear. Turning her eyes took an eternity, with her face pressed into the heat-spongy pavement, but she finally recognized the sound as the brittle flaking of rust off a nearby car in the breeze. She listened, and the whispering repetition pulled at something from deep inside her fragmented mind. There was a rhythm to it, something that echoed in her brain. A strum and beat. There wasn’t a word for what she was remembering. So many words were gone now.

But she twisted and moaned until she got an elbow painfully under her and rose, staggering, back to her feet. She would get up, and she would keep moving. These were things she could do.

She didn’t know why she suffered the impetus to move. Her brain was like a maze, she decided, and then, in that flash, she remembered what a maze was. There was a labyrinth of gray matter in her head and she was Perseus sans thread. Things hid behind the corners there, furtive things, home things, and if there was a way out, she didn’t know that she would ever find it.

So she moved. She wandered, foot after twisted foot, her side aching and blistering from the scorching vehicle husk behind her, towards nothing. Maybe towards everything. Maybe towards the way out of the maze. Who knew?

Music.

That was the sound the rust made as it flaked away in the red wind. That was the lethargic staccato of her feet on the highway. The half notes of her wheezing breaths, the runs and slurs and hi hat percussions of her watery organs on their last repeat.

Her mind did that sometimes, with words, shoved them into the spotlight of her awareness like naked actors on a stage, uncostumed and unprepared. After a moment of trembling in the light, they would retreat behind the curtain, leaving her alone and voiceless amidst her jumbled lines.

She thought that maybe it was driving her mad, but she couldn’t remember what it meant to be mad, or sane, or anything at all but what it was to walk forever into the interminable horizon.

She didn’t know why she moved, or why the meat inside her skull was full of shadows and twisting echoes. It was simply all that was left. Her categorial, biological imperative. There simply was nothing else except her unceasing forward drudgery. When she looked ahead, all she catalogued was distance, peppered with abandoned cars and the detritus of evacuation, that random amalgamation of sentimentality that people in a panic feel the need to preserve. She couldn’t recall if she herself had suffered any such emotions, when that end came, when people ran from somewhere to somewhere else just because somewhere else had to be better off than here. She didn’t know if that sun-starched photo album, binding shattered, lying broken-backed and despondent from the door of an SUV, had been hers. Or maybe that stuffed bear, all surreal colors bleached pastel by the sun and overly large, chocolatey eyes. Perhaps. Though probably not. There were no people-shaped shadows moving behind the curtains of her mind. She thought that perhaps she had had no one, in that weird, unreachable before.

She couldn’t remember if that was sad or not.

What she loathed most about this desolate yellow brick road was the loneliness. Sometimes, she remembered that word, that feeling, better than anything. She couldn’t feel much anymore, outside of the white fire in the air and the brokenness within her, but she remembered being alone. Hated being alone. Hated being the only shadow drifting so jaggedly along the pavement. It was somehow worse to be the only one on this twisted, endless mission, than if there were others to share her silent, stuttering journey.

Behind the instinct of her drive to move and move and move toward that light at the end of the highway, she could feel herself dying. Her insides were made of paste and paper, and their whispering clockwork was ticking ever slower. There was a hollowness in her, a cracking drought that she didn’t know how to repair. She thought that maybe that last fall, her most recent of many acquaintances with the searing asphalt, had torn something, knocked something loose. Splintered something in her. She also thought that maybe it something had been important. Essential, even.

Essential. That was a nice word, she thought, before it flitted back into the maze.

She thought she had known, once, where she was heading. Whether there was a wizard or just a man behind a curtain at this end of this wasteland that had become the universe. But anymore, there was only step after step until there weren’t anymore steps. She wondered how many steps were left. She wondered what it would be like to end.

Because she thought that the next time she fell, she wouldn’t be able to get back up.

She was right.

Peering through the long holes in the habitat wall, the tech felt nothing but pity. He watched her trudge mindlessly across the cracked and beaten road, weaving in crooked, lethargic circles between the burned-out husks of what were once cars. He felt bile rise in his throat when she weaved upwind of him; she smelled like meat that had spent too long in the ultraviolet sun of this brave new world. When the atmosphere had broken apart over the largest cities, it fried the grid pretty quickly, unmitigated solar flares overwhelming anything with a magnet in it.

Humanity, though, wasn’t broken. At least, not most of it. It took a few years to get things up and running again, to lay new wire and make new solid-state electronics, to build better windows and ways to protect from the new, unrelenting blaze. Solar power became more pervasive, if nothing else. After the initial – albeit bloodied and globally regrettable – chaos, man devised a new way to live, because that’s what man does.

Some people, though. Some people, for whatever reason, took the swiss cheesed ozone a little harder than everyone else. Well, a lot harder. They never really came back to themselves after that first shock. Instead, they became husks of themselves. Ghosts. Things that didn’t speak, didn’t think, didn’t perceive or plan or desire or do anything except burn in that godforsaken apocalyptic sunscape.

He watched her walk, as he did each day for six hour shifts, through this slit in the observation wall. He had a gun, but knew he’d never need to use it. She’d never know he was there, safe and sheltered from the white sear of the sun, because they never recognized one another. There were eight specimens in this habitat, three males and five females – they hadn’t been men or women for a long time now; they weren’t people anymore – that were under constant observation so that maybe, maybe, the ones left could understand what had happened to them. Eventually, though, they died, worried away to nothing, blown away on the sunlight to ashes and dust. And then the lab would replace them with the ones they kept downstairs in the dark, stagnant and waiting to be set free in this replica of the world outside, the world left between worlds.

As much as could be gained from understanding the ones like her, he thought it was mostly just sad. Sad how they never did anything but stumble and jag in that five-meter-square space, thinking it was the whole world; sad, how they never sought shelter from the furnace overhead; sad, how they never thought or remembered or wondered. Sad, how they never knew they weren’t alone in a place that wasn’t a wasteland.