The Second Sky

The Reaper Men Maybe together, we can save the world. The Reaper Men dispel this hope, but I won’t let them take it from me. Not today, or tomorrow, or ever. The world once held nine billion humans, and now only a few million remains. Others, though, like me, they walk these highways of the dead, hoping to find a shelter, a cure, and hope. You are the hope, and that’s enough to keep going. I think of those other highways and if there are a hundred me seeing the same thing, being judged by the Reaper Men, seeing friends and neighbors wrapped like mummies for the burning. The world is no longer separated by countries or governments or ideas but by graves of ash and dust and the leftovers of the Reaper Men. I walk East along I80, with the midday sun blistering the back of my neck with its unremitting heat, towards you. I need to get to the quarantine zone, and beyond the wall, before nightfall. I need to get to you. I need to get to you before the machine vultures cleanse these sick lands with radiation and fire. And before the dusk sits eternally upon the city that I once called home. I’ve been walking for five days now and over seventy miles. My boots have already shown signs of wearing down and aging. How many more steps before they’re nothing more than tattered leather? Threads of hope, torn. How long will I make it barefoot among this rough terrain? I think of my home, an ancient relic of a dream world. I will never see it again. I’m glad. Along the way, I stopped to find shelter in various houses. Each one smelled like archaic mausoleums. A ghostly essence of the dead or dying. I didn’t sleep in any of these homes. Nightmares flung me aside. Waking was always the hardest thing to do. My knee hurts, and my limp is getting worse. I should have remembered my brace, but I forgot it again. You were always the one who helped me to remember it. I didn’t have much time to pack, though. And the backpack seems more cumbersome now, though it carries fewer items. My food supply ran out a day ago. My water supply just last night. I hate myself for my horrible planning, but I didn’t have much time. The last house before the great highway leers at me with vulturous hunger. I walk towards it anyways. Like all houses along the way, the blinds were drawn, to keep out the sun and heat, which made the fever and splitting migraine worse for the ill. The brass door handle was cold and unlocked. I walked in. Sweat and decaying food made me cover my face. The sound, at first, was dead quiet, but then I heard the shrieking cough of a man. My heart sank, knowing what this poor fella was going through. Looking around, I find a picture of the family that once lived here. Three kids and a wife. I can tell by the sounds; they are no longer here. He must have buried them in the backyard. More coughing resonates within the walls of the house. He has a day or two at most now. He would cough himself to death and choke on blood that pool in his lungs, carrying with it the final breath. I pulled the .357 Magnum out of my bag and held it. Such a powerful key that slams shut all doorways. I clicked open the cylinder and moved it gently. Click. Click. Click. Click. I count the remaining bullets. Hope withers, and as my stomach twists, for only one bullet remains. My own scythe. And I need that one just in case things go south. There would be no mercy today for you, stranger. My heart is heavy as I walked out of the house and into the coming day. That was only ten hours ago but feels like forever. I walk now, remembering days passed. Before the sickness. Before the world died. I think of you. I think of the mess we made, what we are doing now to clean it up. I think of those long nights in the lab with science and our relationship being studied. I think of the living, the once civility in men, with his laws and former morality. All that was taken in an instant. I walk and believe we can have it again. I know I’m foolish, but hope moves forward one step at a time. For what sits in my pocket, the information I’m bringing to you. Each step comes from that small sliver of hope that peers beyond the grave. The highway holds the memories of a lost civilization. And now I’ve come upon the present. I’ve come upon the Reaper Men and the dead. The smell of bodies comes in waves of putrid aromatic shrieks. Farther along the highway, the smell gets densely suffocating. I vomit twice despite my empty stomach. I feel as if I’m I am Marley, come to show you the failed ways of the past. I am a man with no name, just like the scattered humans before me along the highway. I am a man of echoes, fleeing the clattering of chains resonating behind me. In this new world, there’s no need for names and titles or jobs anymore. When civilization crumbles, so does our identity, and we become nothing more than the nameless, either the sick or the immune, dead or the dying, the survivors, or the Reaper Men. They are the worst of us. The smell is horrific. But I have no food left to vomit. Recently dead, I think to myself. Rotting eggs and decayed rats in a cellar, a stench of meat that sat in the heat for too long. I adjust the mask covering my nose and mouth, knowing it will do me no good, even in that macabre hell I’ve wandered into. Knowing deep down inside, the mask will not protect from the invisible monster that has stricken this world with a final whimper. It is nothing more than comfort. It is a sign to others that I don’t carry the monster with me in my last breaths. To block out the smell of an ailing world and nothing more.