Seven's Ashes-Chapter One

I remember ten years ago, I stood on a stone wall at the far end of a city. I looked out and there wasn’t much to see; just a desolate land covered with ash. I also remember twenty years ago, I stood on the same stone wall at the far end of that city and saw birds and trees and the green of the grass that I’ve since nearly forgotten the sight of. That one moment sticks out in my mind, I saw a small girl chasing something through the air. She was perhaps 50 feet away from me near the old chapel that now lies in rubble. As she ran, I remember that her hair was brown, it was very long and in it there was a blue ribbon. Her dress was clean and white. As suddenly as she began, she stopped and stared. She looked so deeply at me that I felt she could see straight into my soul. She only stood there for about 10 seconds, and she smiled at me. Then she was gone. It’s strange to me that I remember this moment better than any other in my life. I’ve lived through so much that I shouldn’t have, I’ve seen more than any other man ever has and most likely ever will. I was, it seemed, the last being alive. How I survived is a great mystery to me, and also a great curse. I should have died along with my family, along with the town, along with the girl in the white dress, but I remain here, lingering alone and ever searching for someone else.

I’m not sure exactly what happened, all I remember was an explosion that covered the earth with a gray ash and spread death like wildfire to everything around me. I was 17 at the time, and out on my own. I had left home earlier that year because I hated my family. The only one I ever got along with was my older brother, Zack. I found his body face up in a pile of ashy water about 5 miles out of town. He was with his girlfriend, and she was already starting to rot away. They say that there are 5 stages of grief, the first being denial and isolation. I seem to have skipped denial, there was no way of denying anything. Isolation, well, I had no way of going through that because there was really no one to avoid. The second stage is anger. I was very angry for 5 years. Angry at God, angry at whoever did this to the world, angry at my family for being dead, and angry at myself for having no possible way to avoid the situation I was in. The third stage is bargaining. There was nothing left to bargain, and even if there was, I’d have no one to bargain with. Not even God. The fourth, and most prolonged stage of my grief was depression. I was the last person on earth and I would never again here the voice of another. I would be there at the world’s end because I was the world’s end. Every day my sorrow crept up on me from behind and immobilized me for weeks. I’d sit in anguish, barely remembering to sustain my life with what little food I had left. Barely sleeping, and always my face was wet from tears. It took me 11 years to accept it, sometimes I feel as though I’m still stuck in the fourth stage, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put it all behind.

It’s almost funny, really, you don’t know anything about who I am. Or at least; who I was. I suppose that my identity doesn’t matter anymore because there are no other people to identify me among. I am unique by default, really. I have no one to be distinguished from. Well, there is a possibility, but first you should know a little about my life before the bomb. My name was Jackson Scheinost and I lived in a small town that doesn’t exist any more and you’ve probably never heard of it anyway. The name of it was once Star Lake, but no it’s just a big pile of ashes. I remember living there with my family, just across from the Quick ‘n Easy in a small gray house that was falling to pieces. I also remember fishing and canoeing with my father at the inlet, but now he’s dead and so are the fish. My father’s name was Noah, and he always reminded me of Peter Falk when he got older. My mom’s name was Mary and she was a very plain woman. We always said that her name fit her personality, it was nothing special and neither was she. She died when I was 13 when she “accidentally” fell over the side of a bridge. I was never told any details so I’m pretty sure there was no accident at all. I had one brother and three sisters, Zack was my brother and I already told you how he died. My sisters were Anne, Renee, and Constance. Constance was the youngest of all three, and she was the only one I never found. I found Anne and Renee huddling together under a bridge fairly close to where I had found Zack. they were both only half there and I don’t know how they really died. They disappeared shortly after the bomb went off. About 7 years ago I found the doll Constance used to carry around, slightly tarnished but in such a condition that I was sure she was alive. I spent the next 5 years looking far and wide for her but found nothing else for a very long time. As for my father, the only trace of him I found was his pipe. He used to carry it in his front pocket, and he always smelled of tobacco and peppermint. The day the bomb went off, I woke up with his voice in my ear, calling to me, but he wasn’t there. I gave up hope on his being alive when I found his body in a car 10 miles out of town, as if he himself were also looking for others. He had only died about a week before I found him. I buried his body near my mother’s and forgot about it.

My past does not matter now, for it was only what and who I was then, not who I became and am. After I left home, I found my own in an open, abandoned area 20 miles from our own little town. I stayed in a house that I was sure no one owned, although it was stocked full with food and fresh water. There was a car in the garage and a tractor in the barn, even vegetables sprouting in the garden. A year after the bomb I discovered the murdered bodies of a man, a woman, and two small girls in a locked shelter about twenty feet behind the house and 10 feet underground. They had all been shot in the back of the head, it was more like a massacre than a random shooting. Someone, maybe even more than one person, had planned this out well enough and they certainly knew what they were doing. I knew that they had died only shortly before the bomb fell because of medical training all citizens over 15 were required to take shortly after the war to help the army determine the time of death of soldiers who died in nuclear attacks. The fact that their death’s came at such a time never struck me as odd until long after they were buried in the ground. Had they known that the bomb was coming? What other explanation was there? I knew we had many spies in our country that hadn’t been found out by the government by some twist of fate. It was a strange house, anyone would say that at just the look of it. There was something different about it, it wasn’t like a regular home. Also, the fact that there was a shelter underground that obviously preserved the bodies made me wonder if these people had prepared for this long before it ever happened. I don’t know to this day how the whole property survived. The lawn is still green, the air is clean and breathable and the food still grows. All I ever found out about the house was that it was built with some sort of material that could resist nuclear attack, as was the shelter and the barn. That’s how I survived, staying in the house for those two months before the world was destroyed. For a very long time I went no further than 10 miles out of town because when I went out that ten miles, I became very, very sick for a very long time. I got a fever and I was delirious. While I was in this state of severe illness, I almost starved to death from not being capable of feeding myself or getting water for myself. Then I found Something in the barn that helped me very much to travel outside of this yard. Inside the barn I found a simple but sophisticated sort of bicycle with an enclosure around it that kept all outside air from entering it. At first this didn’t help me much, and I wasn’t sure if it was the air that had made me sick. I found several air tanks in the barn and made a sort of air pump. It was very primitive, but for the time being, it worked. It was hard to peddle with the air tank and enclosure, but in time it became easier. Whatever the enclosure was made out of kept me from ever getting sick again and helped me explore and get exercise.

With this bike I went fifty and more miles out of town in all directions, and in fifty and more miles, all I found was a stretch of earth that went on and on, covered only with gray ash and littered intermittently with the dead, rotting bodies of humans and animals. It was also in this stretch of land that I first saw movement. Far away, on top of a hill 10 miles or so from where I sat, I saw something, a movement, quick but awkward like an animal. It was simply a white streak that moved in between the dead trees and then disappeared in less than two seconds. It was so far off, I couldn’t be sure what I had seen. I returned to the house and for the rest of the evening, could not fall asleep. I could not blow out my candles, I couldn’t sit still. This was partially because I was so excited at the thought of another form of life, but mostly because I was terrified of what it might be. What could survive such an attack? What was out there that could still be alive amongst the deadness? I thought and thought on this, and suddenly, I wasn’t so excited about what I had seen.