“From the Ashes, Part One”

[Authors Note: Contains passing references to nudity]

Running. As fast as he could. Towards what, he didn’t know, yet. It was a faint outline in the distance. Nothing more. It was enough. Enough to throw him into a frantic sprint. All thought, and nearly all sensation had been purged. The pack he had been carrying, the one that had grown steadily heavier these past few days, may as well have been just air. Any sense of soreness or pain was gone. There was only running.

The sound of the souls of his shoes slapping into the grey stones that layered the beach slowed their tempo and stopped at a pile of driftwood. His spirit fell. It was not what he had at first made it out to be. It had looked like shelter. A shelter. One that was man made. He had ran as if running from a predator for a pile of driftwood.

He squatted down with his hands on his knees, and felt his throte go dry and tight. He wasn’t sure if it was from thirst or disappointment.

It was then that he finally felt the burning in his lungs, the aching weakness in his legs, and what he was sure would become a new blister on his foot. All at once he felt sweat break out from his pours and soak his inner layer. He undid the straps of his backpack and let it fall onto the gravel beach, then unzipped his coat.

He needed to get dry before he lost too much body heat. He stripped down the layers of black polyester. The words of his father echoed in his ear. “One day, we may be able to make cotton, but polyester is something that will not be made again for a very long time.”

As he took off his final shirt, the reality of the cold, bitter wind blowing across the lake pierced his chest like a knife. The moisture on his skin condensed into droplets. He wiped as much off himself as his undershirt would absorb. It would dry out quickly, but he wasn’t planning on washing it for at least another week. He would need to push that schedule forward to avoid an unbearable smell. He had learned that lesson the hard way.

It was then he noticed them for the first time. Stretch marks on his arms. He had not seen those since the Hungry Times.

A wave of memories flooded in. He had long forgotten them. The Hungry Times is what they had called it. One day his Father had sat the entire family down. Mother. His siblings, their spouses and their children. And himself. Father explained that they were all going to be hungry for a while. “Just a little while,” he said. When asked if we were running out food, he said, “No. We’re just going to be a little hungry for while. Then things will go back to normal.”

“But for how long?”

“About a year.”

He was right, almost to the day. It lasted about a year. That year seemed like forever. So much always seemed to happen in a year when you were that young. He remembered feeling hungry every day, and father encouraging him not to run around too much. Not that he could after a while. At some point he had even forgotten what feeling satiated felt like.

But a year, what seemed like forever, came and went. And soon he had even forgotten what it felt like to be constantly hungry. He had forgotten it completely. The memory had faded along with those stretch marks, now finally remembered with this new set of scars.

For years after, he remembered thinking how amazing his father was. He had predicted what would happen, almost exactly. Was he just that smart? Could he somehow see into the future?

Only now, reflecting upon a memory long forgotten, did the answer seem obvious. The harvest had been bad that year. They had almost starved to death.

A renewed rush of wind reminded him of his present task. He finished stripping the last layer cloths, down to his socks. Standing full naked in the howling breeze, he pulled out a fresh layer of undergarments and redressed himself. His sweaty cloths he laid out on the pile of driftwood. It was too cloudy and early in the day to be ideal, but the strong wind would dry them out in a short time.

His stomach growled. It wasn’t time to eat, yet, but he should probably push his next meal forward, anyway. He had expended a lot of energy, and he needed to think about his next moves. He reached into his bag for his water canister, and took a long drink. The cool liquid flowing down his parched through, along with the cuttingly cold air across his face, was a mixed sensation of pain and relief that he had grown used to.

He looked out onto the lake. The moisture from his breath mixed with the light fog in the air. ‘It’s definitely time for that,’ he thought. He reached again into his bag and pulled out a small, metal case. He opened it. A pair of black rimed glasses. Not quite round. Not quite square. Not quite the right fit, but glasses. His father’s glasses.

They weren’t his “prescription”, either, but it was the best pair for his vision, and he took them on his father’s insistence. Donning them felt like a solemn rite.

Fuzzy patches of color gave way to a crisp vibrancy of texture. The sun cracked over the hill, banishing the fog and breaking out onto the water like a shining field of sparkling crystal. He stood there for a while in the cold wind, gazing out onto the shining lake. The sky was parting overhead, and gray water faded into blue. It was still too early in spring for there to be too much greenery, but you could still see the sprinkled shades of green dotted across the grey forest as the leaves were just peaking out from their branches.

‘What am I doing here?’ It was a question long overdue. His journey had a strict itinerary. His father and he had mapped it out. Seven sites in one year. Seven sites where his father believed there might be another settlement of people who had survived. It took a somewhat circular rout, and would lead back home in about a year’s time. The plan had some leeway, but that time was now running out.

He had gone far off track. One small thing had sent him traveling up along the left tributary of the river rather than the right. One small branch. It had been broken off in a way that had not seemed quite right, yet he couldn’t explain to himself why. Just because he had never seen an animal do such a thing doesn’t mean it hadn’t. Still, he couldn’t quite shake it from his mind.

He had even started traveling up the right tributary. He had made up his mind. He had a plan, and abandoning the plan wasn’t just dangerous, but a betrayal to his father who helped him plan it. His mother and siblings would also be eagerly expecting his return in a year’s time.

And yet, the further he had walked, the heaver he felt, and soon a great pressure had filled in his chest, as if he were pressing against an invisible wall. Something, somehow, whether from within him or beyond him, was telling him to just go and give it a good, hard look.

So he did. He forded across each tributary to the far bank, and approached what he saw from the far side.

It was a broken tree branch. A small one. It hadn’t died and fallen off. It hadn’t been brushed aside, nor sagged under the weight of snow or otherwise. What seemed to be was as clear as day. It looked as if something with hands, two human hands, had taken the branch on each end and broken it in two.

And so, that was it. As if by fate, chance had him spot that branch, and his own compulsion would drive him down a path he had not planned to travel.

Along the way he found more odd signs. Brush that seemed to have been trampled by something too heavy and wide for a deer, but too small for a bear. Missing tree bark that lacked any fur or claw marks that would suggest it was done by an animal. Moss cover rocks that been overturned with nothing else disturbed around it.

He had deduced, or at least had hoped, that these were trail markers left by someone who had hoped to find their way back, or perhaps were now backtracking across.

He followed his ghost trail all the way up the tributary, until he came to a small, stone damn where the tributary met a lake. This damn was not set up to produce electricity like the one back at home, but it could be. His father had told him that such damns exist all over the world, but he had never seen any other than the one on the farm. Here it was, just as his father had said. As man made as the lake beyond it.

And so here he was, staring out across the water. He was far away from where he should have been, and at the end of a trail that seemed now to be a fools errand.

He would have already investigated the first site by now, and been well onto the second. If he backtracked now, he would arrive home three months late, at least. It would also involve traveling through an area of swamp in late spring and early summer rather than winter, when the mosquitoes would begin to come out in large swarms.

Would he have to stop somewhere and wait a whole year? Should he double back home and try again next Spring? It was certainly the safer rout, and not unplanned for. But the disappointment and sorrow ached within him. He had thrown off the entire journey based on a paltry set of unlikely signs. He would be going home not with a success or failure, but having never completed the journey at all.

His stomach let out another growl. Gentler this time. It was catching on to the fact that sometimes it just isn’t going to be fed, but now was time enough.

As he glanced down to his gear, he could see more clearly the piles of drift-

‘Wait.’

It wasn’t just scattered piles of driftwood. It was mounds of it, and pieces of similar size appeared to be laid close together.

His heart began racing. He shut his eyes and immediately began breathing in deeply to calm himself. He needed to think clearly and rationally. He needed to look at this objectively, not just see a pattern he wanted to see.

It must have been a least a minute till his heart rate slowed to normal. He opened his eyes, and took a moment to take in the scene. Yes, it was a lot of driftwood. A lot just for one area. Yes, it was scattered over a wide area, but not wide enough to believe it all arrived there naturally. Not enough trees close enough near the shore, either. What’s more, there seemed to be a clear border to it, beyond which it went from a scattering of still too much driftwood to none at all.

He breathed deep, again, to contain his excitement. ‘What else?’

Twigs were clumped together, as if they had been piled up first before being scattered again. There was also a pile of thin logs running roughly parallel. Some logs were lying several feet from the area, but the pattern was clear. ‘What were they doing?’

Patches of beach didn’t look quite right. And they were round. He pressed his hand into them. The ground was soft and gave way as he clenched the rocky sand and let it run through his fingers. The surrounding shore was hard and compact. Someone had dug those holes, then filled them back in.

He stud up, stepped back, and took it all in, again.

Then he saw it. His breath left him. The vague outline he had seen in the distance that caused him to run. All this scattered wood had a rough right-angle to it. They must have gathered it here to build a shelter, then disassembled it to hide that anyone had been there.

His throte grew tight and dry, again. ‘What else?!’

And with that question came his answer, and all the broken pieces came back together. They had dug the holes to make posts to hold up logs for a wall. The wall was to shield them from the bitter cold that was blowing from that direction across the lake. There was a vague outline in the sand on the leeward side. A fire pit? A bed?

He scrambled for his shovel and frantically began digging. This soil also easily gave way, as if recently reburied. He didn’t dig for long before seeing it. What looked like not stone, but charcoal. He picked it up, and saw the layered texture within its charred color. He held it to his face. The faint smell of burnt wood mixed with the soil. He clenched it his fist. It crumbled instantly. Its shattered pieces scattered to the wind, leaving behind a black stain. Within the swirling trenches of his fingerprints was imbedded the final proof of an extant humanity.

Ash.

Tears began streaming down his face. Water and salt he could scarcely afford to loose, and yet there was no stopping the smile on his face, nor the laughter that made it hard to breath. “I’ve done it, Father. I’ve done it. This is proof of it. We’re not alone.”

He fell back onto the ground, and a wave a joy washed over him. The sun fully crested the hill, and though the air was cold, the sunlight was warm enough that it felt like a mere cool breeze on a summer’s day. “I’ve done it!” he shouted as wind roared, as if to carry his words up to the sky. “We’re not alone!”

The heat on his face recalled to him a memory of he and his father watching a campfire just as the embers were dying. “But there must be other just like us!” He never forgot that look on his father’s face, staring silently down into the embers, with an expression that he couldn’t be sure was either doubt or sadness.

“It’s alright, Father. You don’t have to be sad anymore. We’re not alone...”

Three weeks. Twenty three days of constant pursuit. He hadn’t been foraging or fishing. What he had in his dwindling food reserves were what was needed to sustain him. He could only continue this pace for a few more days. When that happened, he would need to go slower, and fish along the river, if he could, and decide whether to continue at the slow pace, or turn back. At he lake, he could restock for a few days, then likely return home before the winter set in. For now, he had no intent of giving up his pursuit.

The forest was growing ticker and greener. The air grew warmer. On the north end of the lake he had found its tributary, and determined without much debate that this was the path the Lone Wanderer fled upon. Even if they had a store of food like he, they still needed a regular source of water. No human could carry weeks of water on their back. Going off track to look for an alternative source posed too much risk, and bled too much time.

He still found the obvious trail markers along the way, but many other signs of his quarry were made in the ever thickening greenery. In fact they weren’t even trying to hide their presence anymore. Large sections of brush were hacked aside and left a clear trail. Perhaps they were getting desperate, or simply tired.

It’s possible they were also running low on provisions like he, or had already run out. If they were going without food while also constantly moving, they would very quickly become weak and make sloppy decisions.

An imminent now seemed likely. He began to wonder what must be going through their mind. What would he be thinking if it were he that was being followed?

The best course of action would not be to run until all his supplies and energy were spent. He would hide and wait to ambush his pursuer. If there was going to be an encounter, it was best to do so having an advantage.

Just then, he saw something. Not just a faint shoe print, but clear tracks, and recently made. He already knew that their shoe was smaller, and judging by the gate, they were also shorter, and thus slower. A good sign of his inevitable victory.

The tracks also seemed to stagger every now and again. They were indeed likely weak and tired. There was also something else about them. Not just the size or the stride, but the gate itself. Something was off, yet somehow familiar. Could it be-

‘A woman.’

He heard a loud snap just over his shoulder.