Six Volts

Six.

That is the number of volts in each of the batteries in this flashlight, a little army of electrons standing between me and complete soul-crushing darkness.

A day ago I would have traded this flashlight for a handful of grass seeds, but now it is the only thread tethering my sanity to the rest of my consciousness.

I was warned not to venture into the Old City. The traveler came with a rucksack on his back, bones rattling in his pockets, cheeks stained with rust as he lowered his mask to speak through the grate. For a thimbleful of water, he told me how many miles it was to the city and how he had avoided the sand traps and windstorms.

“What did you find there?” I asked.

He gave me a look I had seen many times and worn just as often. It meant, Be careful what you ask.

“Tall shadows,” he wheezed in a thin, voiceless tone. “Dark things down below. Always hunting. That is why they stay beneath the ground—they can’t hunt in the storms.”

“There is food?” I asked. That was all that mattered. Where there was food, there was life.

The terror in his eyes flashed forth suddenly, though I had the impression it had been there all along. “Below, yes. And death, too. Food for us, food for them.”

I asked where he would go now. He said he would keep walking until his feet wore through to his ankles, and then he would plant himself on a hill above the dust clouds where he might glimpse an eye of blue stirring in the gray.

I watched him stumble down the long road, his heavy clothes gnawed by the ravenous wind.

“We should have let him stay with us,” the girl said.

“There isn’t food for him to stay with us,” I answered.

“What will happen to him now?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, but I knew. Long before his feet wore through, that wind would chew down to his bones and leave only a pitted skeleton for the dust to settle upon. There was nothing in that direction but sand. I knew because I had foraged that way many times, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him so.

The rice ran out a few days later, and that was when I remembered the traveler’s words.

*   *   *

It was a cafe once, full of light and life, with brick columns climbing up to the ceiling and tables scattered about like a child’s jacks. Lovers held hands across the polished wood, while on the stage musicians plied their trade with upturned hats to collect the goodwill of their listeners.

Good times, now old and dead.

The storm is still whistling above and the sand comes slithering down, hissing through the hole that gave beneath my step. I came with the most honest intent of which man is capable: to survive. But a discarded scrap of plywood, left by some jest of fate to cover a hole that now looms over me like the eye of death, brought me down to this submerged darkness more precipitously than I had planned.

Lying here, I ponder the words of that wanderer of worlds and wonder whether he was right that the creatures seek the surface only when the storms abate. I hope he was wrong. If they are down here with me in the darkness, the stink of my skin will soon draw them.

Something stirs on the far side of the room. Instinctively I pick up my flashlight, then hesitate. To turn it on may mean certain death. Better to lie still and listen.

The wind whistles like a flutist holding the pipe too far from the lips to produce more than a hollow, hissing sound. Sand trickles down from above, filling the bottom of my hourglass.

A sound. Did I hear it? Listen…there! A scratching…

I set the flashlight carefully on end, plant my hands, and try to stand. One foot pulls beneath me, the toes bending to propel me upward, but the other foot does not respond. The communications are down. Somewhere between my brain and my foot, the messengers get lost.

I feel along my leg, inch by inch in the darkness, fearing it will taper off to nothing or end in rubble. A thigh, a knee, a calf, an ankle… But the foot is twisted, broken, and I have been hearing the pain all along, but its voice is drowned out by another. It is the sound of the footsteps of death. It is the sound of something scratching, scratching, scratching nearby.

I have to stand. I must not cry out.

I lift the flashlight and feel for the button. It’s under my thumb now. The weight of the flashlight is heavy in my hand—a desperate man’s club—and the creature is scratching, scratching, scratching—

And if I am to die, I will do so on my feet.

Ragged breaths, growing steadier. The sand sprinkles on the dead roots of my hair. Three things: (1) that hole is too high for me to reach; (2) when the storm abates, I will learn whether my theory was accurate; (3) if that creature can scratch its way into the room with me, it will.

The grains of sand are slipping away.

Scratch…scratch…scratch…

Scratch…scratch…scratch…

Scratch…scratch…

I step forward and listen, waiting for that third sound to complete the pattern. Silence, and then more silence.

It heard me. It responded to me. If it has already heard me, what is the point in being quiet?

The only way I can explore this room, which could be in every way different and deadlier from when I last saw it so many years ago, is to depress the button on the flashlight and sweep that holy light around me. How many eyes will turn its unwanted light back?

Is it better to see death coming or be surprised by it?

I am breathing too quickly. I press the flashlight to my battered coat to dim the light, then depress the button. A ring of fire flares up. I look away, my eyes carrying a phantom memory of the orange light

My blood drums in my ears as I aim the flashlight at the floor, creating a halo. Dust, bits of brick. I find walls, cracked columns, and shadowed corners I dare not question. There is still no sound of scratching.

I patrol the walls to discover what I already suspected: that there is one entrance to this tomb, and that it is probably where the scratching sound was coming from. The roof is collapsed, filling the only doorway with brick, plaster, and plumbing, and I have no way to move it.

In short, I am trapped. I cannot climb back up to the surface, and I dare not move that pile of rubble, not with that thing waiting for me on the other side.

Perhaps this is where I will die, in a place where the wind can never worry my bones.

*   *   *

She was trying to remember the last time she had tasted rain when I hissed at her to stop walking.

She spun her head, owl-like, to trace the rise and fall of the canyon walls around us. Her scarf, wrapped around her head like the bandage of an Egyptian mummy, creased and sprinkled sand down around her boots. She raised the sling.

“Put that down,” I said. “You don’t know how to use it.”

Her gaze could have cut steel. But she lowered the sling, and then she followed my attention to the sand beneath my feet.

“It could be nothing,” I said as my heartbeat grew to a steady drumbeat in my ears. Or everything, I thought.

She tucked the sling into her coat and bent down. She scooped a few inches of sand away before straightening and giving the earth a violent cuff with her boot.

“There’s nothing here!” she said.

I tested the ground again with my foot. “Not there,” I said. “Here.”

We both began to dig. Our gloved fingers scratched at something smooth, something that hissed when the sand scraped across it. My hand found a notch and I pulled, and the ground rolled back and the light could not pierce the darkness.

“Is it hell?” she asked in a voice so small it could have fit in my pocket.

I shook my head and took her hand, and together we stepped down into the darkness.

*   *   *

The storm is quieter now. Soon it will be gone entirely, and then my theory will play itself out. Either the monster will go on up to the surface, or…

Or it will be waiting for me.

I turn the flashlight on again.

The doorway is where I left it, blocked by a heap of rubble. And on the other side…what? A thing? A Scratcher? Is that what I should call it?

I start picking up bits of rubble—plaster and concrete—and tossing them to the side. I may die here, but I will not die curled in the corner like a tumbleweed battered and beaten by the wind.

I move faster and faster, clawing at the rubble in a growing frenzy, stubbing my fingers and chipping my nails. Stop that, I tell myself. You’ll wear them down to the knuckles.

But I have no choice. I can’t die, not like this.

I put the flashlight away so I can claw with both hands. The rubble recedes, shifts, spills around me. And then I see something I didn’t think possible—a deeper darkness, an eye of black staring at me through the ruined doorway.

The world goes quiet. All I can hear is my breathing.

And then something like footsteps overhead, only it’s not the thump-thump you might hear from human feet. Instead it’s a clicking sound.

I fight through the rubble, widening that eye of darkness. The only way out is to go deeper. There has to be a staircase leading up. The exit might be hidden on the surface, but if I can just find those stairs, if I can just know for certain I’m going in the right direction…

I sense rather than hear movement behind me. Turning back, I peer reluctantly into the darkness behind me.

At first there’s nothing. But then—

A long limb, bristling with fine hairs, droops down through the hole in the ceiling. It wiggles about, side to side, and then goes limp. Then it curls in on itself, as if it’s…

Tasting the air.

*   *   *

“Is it abandoned?” she asked.

“Not abandoned,” I answered. “Who would leave a place like this?”

“What if they ran out of food?”

I shook my head again. She was too young to remember much of the world. There were pictures and magazines, but she was not sure she believed them and I was not sure I liked to remember.

We went down into the smooth darkness and the wind fell to a murmur. I scuffed my boots along the incline and found sharp edges beneath the dust—stairs. Further down, my flashlight played on concrete walls. There were bunk beds stacked together, a red generator, a small stove.

She trotted over to the generator and ran her hand along the glowing paint. “Look at this!”

“That’s what the world looked like before,” I said. “Color.”

There was no blue in the clouded sky, no green in the poisoned earth, just dust and rust and the monsters in the gutted city. I did not know about those monsters then, but I would learn. 

“What is this place?” she murmured.

“Home,” I answered her. “This is home.”

 She had unwound her scarf and looped it around her neck, and the fine hairs of her face were sprinkled with dust but there was a paleness underneath that betrayed a lack of both sun and blood. I thought she should not have been so quick to trust this place, but she was young and I had stalked the earth for years more and there are some things only experience can teach, if one lives long enough to steal its secrets.

There was a second room adjoining the first, separated by a blanket, and she hurried toward it.

“Wait!” I said. In one hand I held the flashlight, in the other the hammer, and as she stepped aside I advanced on the blanket. I swept it back with my arm and thrust the flashlight forward. The light gleamed on plastic and tin.

“Why did they leave all this?” she murmured beside me. But I hardly heard her.

I stared at the cans of food and the bottles of water, the tins of vegetables and meats and the bags of flour and sugar and salt, and I knew that nobody would ever leave this place while all this food remained.

Not so long as they were alive.

*   *   *

The storm has long since abated, and as I stare at the aperture in the ceiling I notice that the light is changing. First it loses the faint luster it had, until it is only a dead light as gray as the rest of the world. Then it begins to shrink, recede, slip away like the tide…

Thinking of tides reminds me of water. Oceans of water. They must still be out there, even if they are rich with salt and polluted with all the toxins of this dying world.

The thought is maddening. I sit in darkness with the pain of my useless foot, and there is nothing to see beyond these walls of darkness, nothing but gray ash and gray dust and reddish rust. At least there is some color in the rust, I think, and then I laugh softly, coughing.

I am lying with my back to the heap of rubble. I have heard no more scratching from the other side, and this may mean that the leg—the limb, the thing—I saw dangling from above belonged to whatever creature was previously trying to get to me through this heap of rubble. Maybe the room on the other side of the rubble is empty. Maybe the creature satisfied its curiosity and moved on.

After all, the storm has passed. Maybe the traveler was right and the creature has gone back up to the surface.

Maybe, maybe—I wish I could fill my stomach with maybes, then I would never have to eat again, I could feed all the world and we would all be happy and we could rebuild, food for everyone, no more starving, no more clawing at the ground and picking at the bones of the old world! Food for everyone!

…

…

Maybe the creature is waiting for me. Maybe it drew me to the rubble by scratching, maybe it tested the air with its “limb” and tasted me. Maybe there are two of these monsters and they are working together in silent harmony, you draw him that way and I will come up behind him this way, see?

Stop it, I tell myself. It’s no use. You’re dead if you see it coming, dead if you don’t. Be quiet for a moment, why don’t you? Be quiet and think, damn it, think!

I go quiet. The world slows a little. The point is that I need to get out of this room before dark and I can’t climb back up through that hole, not with a busted foot. I need to get through this heap of rubble. It doesn’t matter if Death is waiting for me on the other side with a stupid grin on his face. He will find me here just the same, and it’s better to find him than make him find me.

There is still a touch of madness to my thoughts, like a carrion bird circling in the sky. Remember carrion birds? I ask myself. Remember carrion birds, you old fool?

…Where was I?

Death, yes, I was thinking of Death. No, I was thinking of the heap of rubble. I must get through before dark. It is the only way forward, the only way back. The only way back to her.

I place the flashlight between my teeth and reach toward the darkness. The flashlight is off—I know this heap of rubble well by now, and the light will only dazzle my eyes. It is not until I begin dragging away a rod of rebar attached to a stump of concrete that I discover the stickiness on my fingers. They are bleeding. The blood is clotting with dust and debris, and—

What about infection?

Never mind that now. Only people who have a chance of living need to worry about infection. You haven’t earned that worry yet.

My eyes have adjusted fully to the darkness by now and I can see that black eye peering at me through the rubble. I reach my arm through and find…empty air. No breath of wind, no touch of warmth, just…more darkness.

The only way forward. The only way back.

It is wide enough now for me to reach both arms through. I can fit. But I keep picking at the rubble, tossing chunks of plaster and stones of concrete, and try to ignore how the sound of them striking the floor seems to reverberate through the darkness like a tuning fork. Just a little wider, I tell myself, and I pick at the rubble until the fear has fully settled on me, draping its black wings around my shoulders.

I don’t want to go through at all. It would be so much easier just to stay here, to rest, to let my fate be decided by other forces. Going through will mean crawling, and if something is waiting for me on the other side…

You have to do it, a voice whispers in a small, secret place in my mind. If you ever want to see her again, you must do it.

The only sound now is my own breathing, labored from strain and fear. My head throbs. I turn the flashlight on, just for a second. As the darkness resumes, the imprint of what I saw remains etched in my vision:

Rubble—concrete, rebar, plaster, a gilded frame. An empty room on the other side, a floor silted with dust…

And lines scratched in the dust, like a child’s attempt at Roman numerals. The kind of lines that might be scratched by that appendage that drooped through the hole in the ceiling, searching for me.

A wave of fear builds, rising and gathering strength, and then it strikes me with full force and my body trembles, the sweat beads on my forehead, my breath becomes a staccato hiss that comes and goes as it pleases…

And then the fear passes. It is gone, but I am still here.

I lean forward and begin to crawl through the rubble.

*   *   *

The dream did not last, it never lasts, but for a while it continued and we smiled in the darkness of that bunker, our bellies full of food and our voices rich with stories, and I listened and she spoke of how it began for her and the brother she had lost.

It was the water that killed him. They found a rusted bucket half-full from the perspiring clouds, and she warned him of ash and he said they could go no farther, they needed to drink, and so he would drink a small amount and they would wait and they would learn whether the water was good.

So they waited. Her brother’s face lost its color. Then came the shaking, the empty retching, and they knew there was poison in the water because there was poison everywhere, in the bleached clouds and the crumbling dust and the tainted air, a toxic world that could kill but not cure. She waited a long time for him to die. Then, when his lungs had stilled and his heart had stopped and his eyes had ceased to flutter, she rose and set out into the wilderness.

“You must have been afraid,” I told her.

“I am always afraid,” she whispered.

“But not now. Now you are safe.”

She was silent a long time in the darkness. “What will happen now?” she asked.

“We will go on living.”

“Until we run out of food and water?” she asked.

“Then we will find more.”

“Where?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What if there is no more?” she asked.

“There is always more.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I believe it.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I have to.”

And she did not ask why again. I suspect she understood. I did not tell her that I lived because of her, or that I treasured the sound of her voice more than the bottles of water. I did not speak of the nights I had held the empty gun to the side of my head and listened to the dry strike of the hammer as I imagined it echoing with me into the unknown, chasing my shadow somewhere beyond this blighted world.

I did not tell her that I would have extinguished the rest of humanity to keep her safe.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Nothing. You should sleep.”

“I can’t,” she said. She paused, then spoke the next words carefully. “I want to see the sunlight.”

That was when I knew that no matter what sacrifices I made, I could never keep her safe. She did not remember the old world, but she loved it still and she would never accept this one. I had accepted it. There was no better place, no haven or refuge to find. That was why I had pressed the gun against my head.

“It’s too dangerous,” I told her. “The air isn’t clean.”

“We breathed it before.”

“We had no choice. Now we have a choice. We have everything we need here. Aren’t you happy?”

Her voice came small and far-away. “Yes,” she said, and the word fell flat like a dead thing.

*   *   *

The edges of the rubble dig into my sides as I wiggle through, a worm seeking the surface. I fall to the floor, striking my broken foot and stifling a cry, and the sound of my fall resounds against a greater emptiness, a cavernous emptiness, and then there is no sound but my breathing—ragged…slowing…stable.

There is no going back. This is the only way to the surface.

But what is this place, and what have I found? I rise and depress the button on the flashlight. It clicks. The beam flashes on, then disappears. I slap the flashlight and the light reappears.

I have left the cafe and entered…somewhere else. A broad hall with columns of white brick and…a subway car resting still and silent on the tracks. The light catches smudged windows, garish colors of red and yellow even the dust cannot mask, large colorful letters of graffiti spelling the signatures of the vandal-artists. The train lies there like the bones of a dragon in its lair, a monument to something of great power now dead and never able to move again.

There must be stairs nearby. There must be a way up.

But as my flashlight skips along the train, sweeping toward the platform in search of the stairs that will return me to the world of the living, something catches my eye. I swing the light back and see…

A sneaker. It is protruding from one of the subway car doors, propping it open. The sole is strikingly white, the color of a bone in the desert sun.

It is only a sneaker, a boy’s sneaker. Leave it alone, for heaven’s sake! Get to the stairs!

But something draws me toward the subway car. Maybe it is the cavernous silence. Maybe it is the knowledge that if there are stairs nearby, and if they lead up to the surface, there should be some breath of light coming down into this darkness, even with night approaching.

I limp toward the car, pausing every few seconds to listen for that clicking sound or a scratching against the wall or a soft shuffling in the darkness…but there is nothing, only me and the flashlight and our joint life support, the little cylinders imprisoning a tiny army of electrons. It makes me think of catching fireflies in a bottle, and that in turn reminds me of the Before, the lush grass and the starlit darkness and dancing…

Dancing with her, not the child in the bunker but my wife of long years, the feel of her neck so soft beneath my fingertips, her mouth touching mine and her hair tickling my face…

Focus, you old fool. Do you want to die down here? That Scratcher may still be around. Wouldn’t he be disappointed to catch you, you old sack of bones. Not much meat here, eh?

I reach the subway car and scan down its length with my flashlight, searching for the glow of eyes or the shifting of a shadow.

Just me. Me and the voice in my head.

I study the low-top sneaker. The sole is wide and the texture reminds me of ice cream or the icing of a cake, but it is a small shoe, a seven or an eight, and I lean into the car and follow the shoe to the jeans and then to the black belt of a healthy torso, not shriveled or sunken like mine, and then…

A spike of adrenaline shoots through my veins. The spine has been snapped at the pelvis, the ribs cracked like autumn twigs. The head is missing, along with one of the arms. The remaining arm lies bent at the elbow, a small tattoo faintly visible along the wrist.

I stoop to lift one of the ribs. Deep gouges line the bone, as if it has been chewed by a dog. But these marks are precise, so sharp they could probably cut through the steel frame of the subway car.

Then I see the scratches along the floor and seats and across the ceiling. As if a creature too large for the subway car crawled inside, and then maneuvered with difficulty from car to car.

I have lingered too long. As I retrace my steps, my foot catches a rib and sends it through the open door to clatter onto the rail below, knocking a short melody before lying still. A phantom echo cackles back, its voice carrying from the long deep darkness of the tunnel beyond the rail car.

Something shifts on the subway platform.

I wheel my flashlight about but there is nothing, only the white brick pillars and the heap of rubble I climbed through. I continue tracking the wall, expecting at any moment I will see a shape of nightmare with beady eyes and dripping mandibles, and instead I see stairs farther down the platform.

The stairs lead up.

How far is that? A hundred feet? Two hundred?

It is difficult to measure the distance with only the flashlight. I step onto the platform and begin limping toward the stairs. The flashlight bounds ahead of me like an eager dog.

Something hisses in the darkness like the release of pressure from a tire or a sharp intake of breath, a sibilant sound that raises every hair on my body. Forward, I tell myself, don’t look and it won’t be there, leave it alone and it will leave you alone. You damn fool, why did you use the last bullet on the rabbit?

I would have used the last bullet anyway, a cold voice answers. One way or the other.

Climb, climb! the first voice rejoins. Your life depends on it! Everything depends on it—the girl, the whole world, everything falls apart if you die down here in this darkness, torn apart by monsters! You have to escape! You have to reach the surface again! Damn your broken foot, snap it off, toss it aside, what does it matter if you lose a foot so long as you get out of this wretched place?

I lift my arms with every limping leap, scuffing each step and bobbing the light, and the noise of my own frenzied movements fills my ears and I cannot hear what may be shifting, creeping, scratching in the darkness behind me. I pause for breath and turn the flashlight back on the platform.

Nothing.

They stay beneath the ground because of the storms, the old man said. But the storm has passed. They will be waiting for me up there. Hunting.

Better to die in the light than in the darkness.

I turn my gaze up the subway stairs, and in the moment before the arrival of the flashlight beam I see…light. A dim glow, like a streetlight that has just turned on. The light of the beam is serrated by a black gate, closed and held together by a chain.

I climb higher. I do not move as quickly now. I am listening carefully, every fine hair in my inner ear attentive to the slightest vibration, and as I train the flashlight on the gate I see…a hole, a place where the iron has been bent out of shape as if by the claw of a backhoe or the massive momentum of a bull. The iron has been bent and torn like tinfoil, and I stare upward through the bars of the gate and see the distant, hesitant glow of the celestial bodies bleeding through the choking paste of clouds and pollution and airborne dust. It is full night now and I can feel the bitter cold slinking down the stairs as the surface drops sixty degrees.

So close. It will be a long way to limp, but what is that to you? You’ll be alive, you’ll get back to the girl, no more lying in the darkness and listening to the Scratchers and praying death comes quickly. And the foot? The foot is bad, sure, but it can heal, you may limp the rest of your life but that’s a small price to pay to go on living. Think about the girl, you old fool, think about the girl and how alone she is and what she’s thinking right now and what she has done for you, and where you would be if she hadn’t come along. You’d be sleeping in your own vomit, praying for the monsters to take you, scouring the surface for anything to take the pain away once and for all.

And I do think about the girl as I stand on the steps with the cold air drifting against my face. I think of the girl for a long moment and imagine her scratching tally-marks on the wall of the bunker, or counting the rations I left her as the realization dawns on her that I will not be returning. What then? What if she leaves before I can get back?

She will wander the surface like she did before she found you; she will go on wandering until thirst or hunger or some malformed creature takes her…

But you will go on living. Nothing can kill you, oh no.

I must get back to her. If I don’t, she will die, and then I will die and there will be no hope left in all the blighted world, the disease will have won, we must fight and that means we must survive, and I must get to her before she leaves and risks all—

Hold on. Once you get back, what then? What will you eat? What will you drink?

There is still enough for a few days, another voice answers.

A few days? the first one replies with soft scorn. A few days for her, sure, but none left for you—you already finished the rice.

Then we will go somewhere else, we will find another—

The dialogue comes to a halt as a sudden clarity dawns on me. I twist my shoulders and turn, casting a long look down the invisible steps behind me that spill into the subway station where the body of the boy lies mangled in the car and something, somewhere, scratches in the darkness.

It’s no use. She will die if I don’t return, and she will die if I return empty-handed.

But perhaps there’s another option.

A knot of resolve hardens in my chest, and I descend the stairs.

*   *   *

Her bed was empty. I touched the sheets and felt no warmth.

This is it, I thought, the end of everything. Well, I suppose I should be grateful she stayed as long as she did.

I filled the backpack with a few possessions, slipped the hammer into the loop of my carpenter jeans, and thumbed the button on the flashlight. The concrete walls of the bunker felt like a tomb without her voice to interrupt the quiet. Maybe that was all life was: an interruption to the quiet of the universe, a pause in the cold continuity.

I opened the door a crack and let my eyes adjust to the light. The day was somewhere between sunrise and sunset—there was nothing more to be learned from the fractured light that broke and bent and dissolved in the toxic clouds, reaching the surface as a bleached glow robbed of all the qualities that had once made it good.

I should have barred the door. I should have blocked it with something heavy so that she couldn’t get out. But there was something wrong with that idea, something that harked back to the evils of the world before the first dust cloud rolled from the distance like a tidal wave, covering all before it. We had been free in that bunker, she and I, though prisoners of this world—free to speak, to share, to love. And though she had forsaken our oasis for the desert, the choice was hers to make, and in that way perhaps we were still human.

But I could not leave her to die. I pulled the mask over my face and climbed into the cloudlight and searched the ground. The dust was too fine, too lacking in texture to capture the prints of her shoes, but nevertheless there remained small impressions to betray her path.

Where was she going? What was she looking for?

I glanced around but there was nothing to see except the dunes, no east or west or north or south. There was the way we had come weeks ago, but I did not think she would venture back into that barren place with its pocket spiders and oil slicks. That still left a wide bracelet of choices, none more sensible than the last, and if I lost the tracks there would be no telling where she had gone.

My breath condensed in the mask. I walked.

The tracks led up and past the dunes and soon the ground was windswept asphalt, and I could see for a long distance without the haze of low-lying clouds or eddies of dust. One corner of a picket fence, the wood stripped and pitted, struggled to enclose a pair of A-frame swing sets and a spinner that looked like a top with chairs stacked on it. The wind had bored holes into the metal frames of the playground sets, and in the resurgent gust came an intermittent whine from one of the swings as it drifted gently on its current, hanging from one intact chain.

A few feet away, a tricycle—all rusted metal and brittle plastic—sat alone by the picket fence. The seat was clean, not covered with dust, as if someone had sat on it just to see if the relic would impart some ancient knowledge, share some secret of another age.

Had she sat there, thinking of the tales I had told her of Before? Wondering if I was telling the truth or spinning wishes into stories?

There was nothing more in this little town than gutted houses leaning inward, and a cell phone tower set back from the road. The tower stretched high above the ruined town and disappeared into the gloom of clouds, as if to touch the sunlight.

As if to see whether there was still a blue sky above it all.

If she had really come here…

The tower was as rusted as the playground sets. Standing at the bottom, I craned my neck back and stared into the network of bars that held the four corners of the tower together, and the ladder that climbed impossibly upward until it disappeared into the clouds.

Gazing up, I understood why God had confounded the people at Babel; why some things were sacred and could only be dreamed, never touched or seen or disturbed, for some things were too great for the eye to behold and, once beholding them, the eye could never turn away.

In the words of the long-dead poet, “That way lies madness.” And into madness I would follow her.

I set my hands on the ladder. The lower rungs were intact, but as I climbed I came across several rungs that had been broken, their jagged ends pointing at me like spears. They must have been broken recently because the wind had not had time to dull their edges.

The tower seemed to groan and twist as I ascended. I looked once through the supports of the tower at the desolate world below, and then looked no more. Hot blood rushed through my veins. My hands began to shake. It was a long way down and I thought that if I found blue sky above, I might watch it until my hands could grip the metal no more and then release myself from this world once and for all.

The tower juked in a gust of wind. The dust hissed along the ground far below, through the rusted playgrounds and the crumbling houses, and I told myself to stop thinking of the ground below me, to remember only the girl, to imagine how I would find her and save her and how good it would feel to hear her voice again.

“Are you up there?” I called into the clouds. No voice answered—not God, not the girl.

“Hello?” I called again.

Still no reply.

So I climbed while my strength endured, climbed against hope and into madness, thinking of that traveler—that wanderer of worlds—and how utterly lost to reality he had seemed to me, and how by choices made for me and by me I had become him.

Then, blinking against the dust, I saw in the midst of the thick cloud the soles of a pair of shoes bent on the rung above me.

She was there. She was here.

“Come down!” I called. The tower shook with a deep groan, and I thought it would have bent like the top of a pine tree if it could bend. But it could not bend—only break.

“Do you hear me?” I called again. “Come down!”

Her voice came from far away. “It’s…beautiful. You should see it—you must see it.”

What was that in her voice? Was it wonder, was it…joy? I clenched my hands on the rung and braced against the freshening wind. “You have to come down!” I shouted back. “The tower’s going to fall!” I watched her soles rock gently on the ladder as she adjusted to the gusts.

The worn tower groaned as metal buckled. I felt the structure tip earthward, then stabilize without gaining momentum.

“Please!” I shouted. “Please!”

The feet shifted. A hand appeared and took mine, and then she was pulling me upward and I stood on the rung beneath hers, trembling like grass in the wind, and I saw…

Blue. Color, light, and the dazzling brilliance of the sun throwing beams unfiltered by the clouds, and I could feel its tender warmth on my face. The tower rocked beneath me and I laughed at the sky as tears ran down my cheeks.

“It’s still here,” she whispered, watching me with quiet joy. “It was only hidden.”

I nodded to her. All through the dark and lean days, this world of purity had hung over us, sprinkling down into our imaginations and powdering our dreams, waiting for the re-awakening of the world.

“The stars!” she whispered with wide-eyed excitement. “Do you think…?”

I took her hand and raised my eyes, feeling the long-patient flower of hope bloom bright.

“Yes,” I said.

And all was beautiful to me.

*   *   *

“There is food?”

“Below, yes. And death, too. Food for us, food for them.”

I descend the stairs back into the darkness of the subway, thinking only of the girl—the girl I thought I lost, the girl who wanted only to see the blue sky and know for herself there was something good and wonderful beyond the toxic clouds. I would lose her again if I went back to her empty-handed, and this time there would be no fetching her back.

The boy in the train has not been dead for weeks or months, but for days. He was surviving down here in the darkness—or else he came down here to survive, and instead met his end. Either way, he was eating something.

I follow the platform back to the subway car. It is difficult not to sweep the flashlight as far as it will penetrate the darkness, but I must not disturb what does not wish to be disturbed. A voice begins to berate me in my head.

The boy must have come down from the surface. He was desperate, he was a fool, he was just trying to escape the storm and then one of the monsters caught him, that’s all there is to it. You will never find where he was living or what he was eating. You should go back—die in peace with the girl. That is better than her never knowing what happened to you, isn’t it?

But no, death will not come unexpectedly. I can see the cold hunger settling on us as the days march on, invisible in the darkness, and strength fails and reason follows until we join the ruin of the world.

Isn’t that better? the voice insists. To end it together?

But no—starvation is not “ending it.” Starvation is…letting everything slip through my fingers, slowly, prolonging the loss to the last possible extremity. Starvation is cowardice, and I would rather die facing the darkness than closing my eyes to it.

Is that what she will think? the voice rejoins. Will she comfort herself with your silly philosophy when the days go by and you haven’t returned? What about when she finishes that last bottle of water? She will curse your name, wish she’d never met you. She will—

I have reached the subway car. The boy is still lying where I left him. I turn his arm over again and see the markings. They are not a tattoo, as I first thought, but a map—a series of arrows and notations leading who-knows-where.

I search his pockets, my fingers crinkling against candy wrappers, until I find the pen. With the flashlight between my teeth, I copy the markings one by one with painstaking care onto my own arm. I notice a number of abbreviations, Tu. and Tr. and Do. I stare at them for a long moment before the tumblers click into place.

Tunnel.

Train.

Door.

My heart beats more quickly. He didn’t just stumble down here—he was making his way through the tunnels, perhaps living in here. There could be a cache of food and water—clearly he was in good condition—and if I can find this place then I can find the girl and we can go on, we can live, there is hope and there will be new days and we will find a way to endure!

I only have to find where he was staying.

The dark maw of the tunnel opens before me, impossibly wide, sinking into utter blackness. Not a drip of water reaches my ears, not a breath of air touches my face.

All is still. All is waiting.

I hold the flashlight before me, thinking of the sky above the toxic clouds and believing it is still there, recalling the joy in her eyes as the sunlight washed her face.

Holding this picture in my mind like an icon, I press on into darkness.