Walking the Ruins

Salt and Rosemary

Elaine is dead, yet we need food, water, tools, provisions. We have to keep living.

That's what I tell myself.

We spend the next few days as if in a dream. Foraging, searching in the rubble. Elaine's death is always with us, but we are busy ignoring it. Not thinking of it, not talking about it may make it go away.

We find some more blades, which we tie to wooden staffs, thus crafting simple spears. Rose discovers an axe. The handle has rotted away, but, after some tinkering, Kevin manages to replace it with a new piece of wood. The metal's hold on the staff is shaky, but the thing does look impressive.

I spend hours alone, avoiding the others, trying to hunt. The best hunting grounds seem to be close to the river. I catch another rabbit, and then a duck. Some fish end their wriggly lives on my spear.

But our bellies are never quite full.

Kevin finds a piece of wire and manufactures a bow, which Steve uses to shoot a squirrel. To be precise, it isn't the arrow that kills the animal. Rather, the simple projectile just knocks the creature from its tree. It falls into a pond, and we can catch it. The actual killing is ghastly, manual work. The animal makes a poor meal—lots of bones, hardly any meat, especially when shared among the five of us.

The most important treasure is found by Rose. In a basement, she discovers a sealed metal container filled with a white powder. We think it's road salt, used for de-icing pavements, all those years ago. But Kevin explains that road salt is basically the same stuff as the salt used for cooking. First, I am a skeptic, but then I have to admit that it makes our food taste so much better. The salt, and some rosemary that Rose has found.

Steve and Jenny make an excursion towards the northern shore of the lake, planning our relocation. They leave early in the morning and return at sunset.

Jenny looks happy that evening. Her sucking up to him seems to have its effects.

I watch them, feeling helpless. But I won't do her the favor to suck up to him, too. I concentrate on my hunting instead.

On the evening of our third day after Elaine's fall, we decide that it's time to go looking for winter quarters at the lakes northern shore. The decision unanimous. We all want to get away from here.

Next day, the weather has turned. The air is unpleasantly cool, and clouds cover the sky. Tendrils of fog hover upriver, over the lake. It feels like Fall. It's definitely time to go and look for a place to stay during winter, and to stock provisions.

After breakfast, we pack our things. My backpack has grown heavier. It is filled with dishes, bottles of water, apples, cooked duck, knives, and various tidbits we found in the ruins. In a world where most things are broken, it is difficult to leave anything behind that is even only half-intact.

My iron poker hangs heavily from my belt, and I use my spear as a walking stick.

"Everyone ready?" Steve asks. It is a rhetorical question—all of us are assembled around him, burdened like mules. "Let's move!"

As usual, Steve takes the lead. He is closely followed by Jenny, who seems to think that this is the natural order of things now. Kevin and Rose take third and fourth positions. I am forming the rear of our procession.

I take a final look at the decayed building where we spent the last few days. I won't miss it, and I feel eager to leave. It must be an inborn instinct, an eon-old feeling that tells us to prepare for winter when the weather turns cold and the days are becoming shorter.

In front of me, Kevin and Rose discuss possible recipes for cooking fish and apple, an apple fish stew. Ugh!

First, we cross a part of the city that I know well from my forays of the last days. But soon we leave the familiar terrain and enter a region where I haven't been before. The gray sky is a heavy stone slab brooding over the dark, broken skyline of the buildings. A cold wind seeks entrance into my clothes.

Rose and Kevin have changed their topic. Now they ponder the question if it is possible to use duck fat for frying vegetables. OMG, I think, and walk more slowly in order to get out of earshot, not wanting to listen. OMG – an abbreviation I will be unlikely to use for texting again, ever. My phone is buried at the very bottom of my backpack, its battery drained, and no working power-outlet is in sight, let alone a charging adapter. And the last mobile network provider must have ceased its operations centuries ago. Why am I holding on to that phone? I have considered throwing it away, but that would be an admission that I will never make it back to a world that has telephones and the Internet.

Rose and Kevin are still talking, about twenty steps ahead of me, but I do not hear them anymore. Good, my dark thoughts need some space.

What is my place in this world, I wonder—a world that apparently got rid of humanity. Understandably, in some ways, because humanity has caused it so much pain, has been the source of such evil. We're the only five individuals of our species to have escaped the destruction—or, rather, we have found our sneaky way around it. For the time being, at least. But we're not welcome here, and if we don't watch, this world will kill us, one by one. And we can only survive by killing and by rummaging through the waste of our ancestors, or descendants, rather. But wait, they're not our descendants either—but maybe they're descendants of my brother, which would explain why they've failed.

A gust of the cold wind tries to tousle my hair, but it is way too greasy to care. I move my hands to zip up my jacket, but I find it already as zipped up as it can be.

Looking to the right, I see my reflection in a half-broken window. I stop, fascinated. I approach the glass. The face in the mirror is thin, and it looks tired, haunted. My hair seems to be glued to my head. My jacket is filthy. I shudder – not only because of the cold.

Then I see movement in the reflection behind me.