Sun Bleached Winter Read online

  * * * *

  As I finish packing the rest of our things into my backpack before we leave the house, I stop and linger on a faded photograph beside my writing pad. I gingerly pick it up and study the dirtied image: one of Claire that was taken at somebody else’s birthday party, two months before the world collapsed. She’s waving at me from the top of a water slide at a theme park, excited and happy.

  Suddenly, I begin to cry.

  My tears splash onto the picture and distort her face, and then I slump forward and sob silently into the floorboards.

  “Lionel, are you ready to go?”

  I look up. Claire’s standing expectantly in the open doorway, watching me without an expression on her face, not understanding my pain.

  I turn away from her and wipe the tears out of my eyes.

  “Come on, hurry up! Finish packing!” she says impatiently.

  I glance one last time at the picture of the old world, and then I carefully fold it up, put it into my pocket, and climb to my feet.

  She’s still waiting.

  “Let’s go,” I say, and hoist the bag over my shoulder.

  * * * *

  Hours have passed.

  “Look, there’s a building over there,” Claire whispers, nudging me with her elbow and pointing at a jagged shape on the horizon.

  I stop walking and squint, trying to make it out. A small concrete square, jutting out from the side of a towering cliff, with some sort of wireframe spire affixed to the roof, pointing upwards into the sky.

  “Looks like a broadcast tower of some kind.”

  “It could be a ranger station,” Claire muses. “Makes sense if people used to hike or camp around here. Do you think the broadcast system still works?”

  “Does it matter? Who’d be listening?”

  We move onwards and I try to put it in the back of my mind, but some stupid, feeble shred of hope that refuses to die makes me halt and turn reluctantly around.

  “There might be supplies,” I say—an attempt to drown out emotion with logic and justify the danger of investigating the tower.

  It takes us most of the next three hours to hike all the way up to the cabin. When we get there, I’m surprised to find that it’s still for the most part intact, though it has suffered for its long isolation in the wasteland. The concrete façade has turned dark grey with a thick layer of dust and grime and is crisscrossed by dozens of tiny cracks. The small radio tower attached to the roof is just slightly bent and leans over at an angle, like a flower that has wilted from a lack of sunlight. There are no windows, but there’s a single steel door that serves as the structure’s entrance, with flecks of rust forming at its edges. A tiny, faded sign hangs just above it, where only a single word—Ranger—is printed in faded ink.

  “Looks like nobody’s been here for a while,” Claire observes. “I think it’s safe.”

  I signal to Claire to be silent and slowly push the door open. A metallic creak disturbs the silence and fills me with foreboding. I’m entering where no living soul has been in years. I’ve unsealed a tomb.

  “Hold on,” I mutter, fumbling through my backpack for our father’s silver lighter and one of the candles from last night.

  “Hurry up,” she whispers excitedly beside me. “I want to see what’s inside!”

  Finally, I find both the candle and the lighter, tucked away on the very bottom of the bag. I pull both of them out, and after a few more seconds of fumbling, I manage to light the candle, flooding the entryway with dim, flickering light.

  After making sure the doorway is empty, I creep inside into a single large room. It’s an oppressive place, made out of plaster and concrete, completely bare save for a foldout map of the surrounding hills and a yellowed calendar, displaying the month of December, pinned to one of the walls. A metal desk is lined up against the back wall, with a closed laptop and an ancient looking radio console placed upon it. Everything’s blanketed in a thin layer of dust. A narrow, plastic bookshelf is beside it, filled with survival manuals and logbooks that haven’t been touched in months. A small sink and a medicine cabinet take up the opposite wall.

  I move over to the medicine cabinet and catch a glimpse of my tired, filthy face in the mirror. I look away from it as I reach for the tiny knob on the left and pull the door open, revealing two shelves, empty except for a white pouch sitting discarded in a corner. I take the pouch and examine it, my heart jumping as I realize it’s a first aid kit. There’s a zip still attached on the side so I open the kit and rifle through the contents. Most of them look untouched. I quickly count the bandages left and note the names of the disinfectants. An examination of one of the bottles informs me that the medicines are still in date. A steel pair of surgical scissors and a roll of tape are sealed in a clear compartment along the top of the bag. I stow the entire thing in my backpack immediately.

  “Hey, there’s a body here.”

  Claire is standing in the corner of the room adjacent to the entrance, where an emaciated corpse is slumped over a plastic chair. I lean over to examine him and notice that he’s been shot-his forehead is split open and loose skin dangles from the edges of a deep fracture, which stems from a tiny bullet hole. Shards of bone are sprinkled across his chest, and a dark brown, circular bloodstain paints the concrete wall behind him.

  “Marauders?” Claire asks, staring into the misshapen face. I begin to nod in answer, but then I notice the revolver grasped in his hand, carefully resting on his lap like an offering to a god that deals in chaos and misery.

  I wrench the weapon out of his brittle fingers with a sickening snap and contemplate it. It’s a six-chambered gun—a service revolver that I used to see on police officers and security guards before the End—and one of the chambers is empty.

  “The gun’s still here,” I say simply.

  “You’re just going to take that?”

  “It’s still loaded. We can use it to defend ourselves,” I say, smiling at the good fortune of such a find.

  “He didn’t use it to defend himself,” she says solemnly.

  * * * *

  By the time we finish combing the tiny room for anything useful that may have been discarded in a shadowy corner or under the furniture, it’s already time for the sunset. I use the term “sunset” loosely. There’s no great show to see of it like there would have been back in the days before the apocalypse. No crimson skies for lovers to crow over, no orb of light on the horizon to douse everything in a dreamlike shadow. None of that. Now, the sky goes from pale grey to dark grey and finally to black. We decide to spend the night in the ranger station and move on at first light in the morning.

  We unpack our blankets and lay them down on the floor in the corner opposite the corpse and prop our bags (used as makeshift pillows) against the concrete wall so that we can face the front of the room and have a clear view of the door, just in case someone comes to visit in the dead of the night.

  We spend a few minutes discussing the possibility of dinner and decide to keep the tin of Spam for another time. We’re used to going without food. Often, we have to go hungry for days before finding the smallest scrap to forage or a starved animal to slaughter. Most days, we subsist on nothing at all, save for the rare scraps of rubbish discarded by those who’ve come before us, or the emaciated, sickly rats that sometimes emerge from the underground to die.

  I give Claire a forlorn, apologetic look as I stow the tin back into my backpack. In the candlelight, her skin is pale and ghostly and her face is tired and gaunt. She manages to flash me a weak smile of understanding and winks one of her bloodshot eyes.

  “You’re just making sure there’s more for you when you sneak away for your midnight snack, aren’t you?”

  She stretches out on the blanket beside me and is asleep within minutes, her breathing steady, calm, and her face serene and peacefu
l. A temporary peace, at least. We’re lucky we can still sleep, that we can escape this reality, even for a little while, and dream of better things. Sometimes, the thought strikes me that it might be better to be dead. After all, if the only times when we can forget about the suffering we endure is when we sleep, then what’s the point of trying to struggle on through the waking hours? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go to sleep and not ever wake up, never have to be dragged back into this existence?

  I lie awake.

  I stare at the corpse of the man who gave up and then reflect upon the ham radio set up on the desk. I’m lost in thought, wondering about a future that may never come to pass. What will happen now? Is this all that’s left?

  I pull the loaded gun out from my coat and hold it in front of me, contemplating it. Perhaps the guy who’d used it to put a bullet in his brain had the right idea, after all? When I first saw it, I took it simply because it’s a weapon, a way to protect myself and Claire from the horrors that lurk out there, just over the next hill, but for some reason, I can’t help but wonder if it’s something more. Could this gun be our ticket out of here, a way to wake up from this never ending nightmare?

  I press the barrel of the revolver against Claire’s forehead as she sleeps, blissfully unaware of the world, and tense my finger on the trigger. It would be merciful to kill her now. All I want is for her to be happy, and releasing her from her torment, bringing her into a realm of peaceful oblivion, seems the most humane thing. Yet, for some reason, I can’t do it. My finger falters as I try to pull the trigger, and I lower the gun, tears welling up in my eyes.

  I guess the reason why we continue to struggle is just simple instinct. Written into our very genes, the primal urges of evolution, to live on and prosper, no matter how much the cost or how harrowing the experience must be. If it were that easy to end the suffering by simply pulling the trigger on a gun, I would be long gone now. There’s something that keeps me going, something that forces Claire and I to eke out our miserable lives. It must be instinct.

  Suddenly, I’m struck by a deep, overwhelming feeling of helplessness, and I can’t bring myself to sleep. I get up and decide to pass time by fiddling with the radio receiver on the desk, trying to imagine I’m at home in my study and that the world hasn’t ended. I close my eyes and twiddle the knobs on the faceplate and press random buttons on the keypad. It’s just another normal day of my life. I’m just moving through my playlist of songs, trying to find my favorite one, so I can be motivated to finish writing that last story I was working on, the one for which I could never find the words. I can hear it now, almost. With all my concentration, I imagine the opening notes of the chorus playing in my mind, and I can swear that for a fleeting, happy second, I think that it’s real.

  Incomprehensible static crackles through the radio’s speaker, and jerks me back to reality.

  What is this? A blur of white noise, a beacon of hope in the silent night. Indecipherable voices mumbling somewhere out there in the maelstrom, calling to me. I furiously fiddle with the receiver, trying to home in on the broadcast and make it clearer. I bash buttons desperately and turn the receiver knobs from left to right. The static fluctuates, growing louder and duller in rapid succession. At last, for a scant few seconds, the static recedes almost to nothing, and I catch the last few words of the broadcast.

  “The city…New City…Come…Safe place.” Seven lonely words, whispered urgently, desperately, reaching out to speak with the world, and then the receiver is silent.

  There’s nothing here.

  I turn it off.

  Chapter Three

  It’s the twenty-fourth today, though I couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is. We emerge from the ranger’s station to find a bleak, overcast day waiting for us, the air cold and the ground grey with frost. It’s no different from most other days. Occasionally, it snows, and a bit more often it rains, but the sky’s always overcast and the world is always painted in only slightly different shades of grey. Here, it’s always cold, though it’s colder than usual, today. It is late March after all; we’re already in the midst of autumn. Seasons still apply here. It’s just that the only difference is whether it’s cold, very cold, or freezing.

  I wrap my coat as tightly around myself as possible and fish a frayed beanie from my backpack to put on my head. Beside me, Claire drapes herself with the blanket she slept on and adjusts a faded black trilby hat, pulling it as far down over her face as she can.

  “Where to today?” Claire asks, in a quiet voice.

  “Wherever the path takes us. As long as we stay alive.”

  I’ve decided not to tell her about the broadcast from last night. I’m not sure what to make of it, myself. I’ve been wandering long enough to know that there’s no true safe place left on Earth. I’ve seen what’s become of the world, and even if the broadcast was genuine, an effort to call people to some permanent shelter or settlement, there’s nothing to say how long it’s been on the air, or if the people who made it are still alive. If it does still exist, I can’t be sure where this “New City” the broadcast spoke of even is. No, there’s no point giving Claire false hope. What she doesn’t know about can’t hurt her.

  Still, I can’t help thinking about it as we pack and get ready for the day ahead. What if there is someplace out there where everything is okay? In any case, I wouldn’t know for sure if I kept wandering around in the wilderness.

  We leave the ranger’s station behind and spend the next few hours hiking through the loneliness. We don’t talk, because we’re already exhausted, and because it’s potentially dangerous, so our journey is forged in silence. It’s an eerie, deathly silence, as lifeless as the land around us, where the ground is nothing but dirt with patches of grey snow and the scenery consists mainly of dead tree after dead tree, and seemingly endless hills stretching onwards to the horizon.

  We have no destination in mind, no set path to travel. If we find shelter to spend the night in, we count ourselves lucky. If not, we sleep wherever we are when darkness falls, staring up into an empty, starless umbra. We’re just trying to survive. Our only directive is to avoid others who are trying to do the same.

  Occasionally, we come to a landmark that distinguishes itself from the withered trees around us. We pass the rusted-out wreck of a truck, half buried in snow. I try to open the door to search it, but it’s frozen shut, so we move on without a word, too tired to attempt digging it out of the slush. More time passes, and we emerge into a shadowy clearing to see the torn remains of a canvas tent dangling from a tree branch, debris scattered across the ground and icy human bones sticking up out of the snow like eldritch plants. We quickly glance at each other, a moment of silence for the people who died here, and we move on, without looking back. None of it means anything.

  * * * *

  As we walk, it slowly gets darker, but the snow begins to thin out as well. We put the steep hills behind us and soon we’re travelling through a flat plain, where there’s more dirt than frost and the rare tuft of grass shoots up into the dusty air. The trees become less dense until they too are left behind, save for the random logs scattered across the landscape, just slightly more numerous than the patches of greenery.

  We continue on through the field, taking in the change of scenery. We pass by the remnants of a wooden boundary fence, fallen into disrepair, marked by lone posts standing here and there, with broken strands of wire trailing along the ground between them. Bored, I follow the length of wire with my eyes and watch it twist and turn through the grass. Soon, it ends at yet another wooden post, this one almost completely obscured by the brush and then I notice, growing along its base…

  “Hey, there are mushrooms growing here!”

  “Are they edible?” Claire asks, with a hint of desperation, as I tear them from the soil, trying not to crush them in my hands. They’re tiny, almost insubstantial, and fragile to the touch, but
they’re something.

  Focusing only on trying to keep the morsels intact as I scoop them into my hands, I’m only dimly aware of a shouting in the distance. Suddenly, a loud crack pierces the air, and the post next to me splits as a bullet thuds into it, just narrowly missing my head.

  “They’re shooting at us!”

  Marauders!

  I have just enough time to flash a glance at the thicket, making out two, maybe three men, armed with rifles, crouching in a small bush, before there’s another gunshot and I throw myself to the side, taking shelter behind the tiny post.

  “Claire, get down!” I shout, waving my arm wildly towards a bush a few meters away. “Get behind that cover! Don’t come out until I say so!”

  She drops to her knees, as a third gunshot rings out, and crawls over to the bush. I take just enough time to make sure she conceals herself completely behind it before yanking my handgun out from its nest in my coat pocket and leaning my back tightly up against the wooden post, ready to fight back.

  What the hell are you doing? A panicked voice screams in my head as the shooters fire another round, making the post behind me vibrate violently as a bullet hammers into it. You’re going to get yourself killed!

  I feel the adrenaline starting to flow through my veins as a primal, paralyzing fear takes hold. I’m a writer, not a soldier. What do I think I’m going to accomplish, launching into battle with a gun I barely know how to use? For a second, I’m on the verge of tossing the gun aside and running for it, but as I turn to search for an escape route, I see Claire’s face flash out of view as she ducks back behind the bush, and I pull myself together. There’s no time to hesitate. It’s kill, or be killed, the voice in my head screams. You have to protect Claire.