Uprooted
With nights as dark as the night that had come before, and days as cold as the next, we would not survive much longer here. I don’t know what time it is, I do not know what day, I do not know how long this war had raged or these fires have burned.
I sit upon the moist earth and draw lines in the mud with my dirty fingers. It passes through the gaps in my fingers and sticks between the cracks in my skin. It soothes me to feel the warmth of the dirty beneath the cold surface, makes me believe that there might be life somewhere on his desolate planet. It is good to believe in something when there is nothing worth believing in. Some choose the solace of someone they cannot see; I choose the solace of knowing that somewhere else is better than here, that not everything is evil and wrong.
The sound of the tent unzipping breaks the silence of the moment, and I can hear footsteps approaching. She sits down beside me, her face streaked with dirt, hair matted, eyes heavy and tired.
‘You look terrible,’ I say, forcing a weak smile.
‘So do you,’ she smirks, a small gesture in a bleak world.
I survey the land around us. The thicket of trees that seems to thin as it stretches north have yet to be touched by the white-hot destruction. Their leaves are amber and green, so unlike the rest of this godforsaken world.
“How is he?” I ask finally, unable to withstand the silence. She hesitates, turning her head back toward the camp for a moment.
She sighs. “He’s not well. “
“It’s the isolation,” I say. “The fires may burn you, the bombs may destroy you, and the famine will starve you, but it’s the isolation that drives you to insanity.”
She shifts uncomfortably, her legs tucked under her body. Her dirty face is painted with an expression of sadness and aprehension. “He’s been using up the food rations.”
I nod, already aware of his transgressions. “Is there any alcohol left?”
“He has the last one. I tried to get him to stop but… no, there’s none left.”
I worry. We have not been without alcohol for some time, and the last time we ran out He threatened to set the entire campsite ablaze. If we run out of food, I dread to think of what might happen then.
She strectches her arms out wide, yawns, and lays quietly on the ground. I can see her eyes are still open for some time as she stares out into the vast nothingness that spreads before us like an ocean.
I am ready to drift into slumber. My eyelids are closing and I can no longer support my body. I drift, my body forcing me back into awareness. I steady my body. It is my turn to keep watch, and She is asleep beside me, positioned fetally among the dirt and dead leaves. I put my hand on her frail body to assure myself that I am not alone, to assure myself that She has not yet gone home.
For a moment, I feel as if we might survive. That at least we may fight for as long as we can, may break free from this darkness that surrounds this weak place. But that moment does not last as I hear the tent open again from a distance behind us, and I hear the sound that had filled the ears of all the alliances and renegades: the click of the bullets being loaded into the gun echos in the silence of the dusk. I get up and turn around. He stands at the tent’s entrance, soaked with alcohol, hair drowned in dirt and gin, the skin of his face pulled back with humorous contempt. There’s a gun in one had and a bottle in the other. He’s hunched over slightly, his posture excessively poor.
“You were going to kill me,” he says, voice wild with isolation.
“No one is going to die tonight,” I say, slowly stepping in front of her still slumbering body. “Please, put the gun down. We don’t have enough ammunition left to fight our silly wars with each other.”
He spits in my direction. The hatred in his eyes is all too apparent, they glitter with the kind of fury normally reserved for the enemy. I know there is no resolving this issue. We cannot move past a conflict that was meant to spill blood.
I pull the small pistol from the waistband of my jeans. I point the gun at his face, my finger resting calmly on the trigger, ready to tighten at a moment’s notice. ‘We are the last of us.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing.” he drops the bottle to the ground and points the gun at me, his finger tightening aggressively around the trigger.
She stirs somewhere behind me, her feet scuffling against the ground. I hear her get up and the small sound of a quiet gasp. I try to keep my hand out to guard her behind me, but she is defiant. She pushes past me and stands between us, a human shield for both sides. There is nothing I can do but lower my gun.
The three of us stand in a stiff silence, she’s looking at him and I’m looking at her and he’s staring at me, neglecting to lower his weapon. I take a cautious step forward, a hand outstretched to pull her back towards me, to safety. My fingers just touch the thin fabric of her clothes.
He fires the gun. The light flashes in the dawn and the bullet rips the quietness of the air before it buries inself into fabric of flesh and bone. She puts her palm to her chest where her heart rests beneath her ribcage and looks to me. There is blood across her shirt, small and dark but growing brighter and spreading. Her eyes say everything her lips cannot as she reaches out to touch my hand. Our fingertips touch for just a moment, and then she’s gone, nothing but a pile of deadness on the floor of the forest.
He points the gun at me before I am able to react. We are both facing each other, with death held in our hands. Our eyes are level. There’s a hate in his and a worthless pleading in mine. I’ve heard the stories from other camps, seen the carnage left behind by insanity. I have seen the blood and mutiny, all of it. The ugliness had reared its pitiful head too long ago and it does not intend to leave us untouched.
His finger twitches against the trigger; I pull hard. The guns go off at the same time. The bullets hit in different places. Mine, in the head. His, in the stomach. He falls before the pain surges through my body like a lighning bolt. I drop the gun before my body drops itself. I land near her, and I want to reach out and touch her but I dare not disturb the dead.
I do not want to die here in such a lifeless place. The canopy of living trees is not so far away now as it was before. I believe I can make it, it is close enough. There is something that let’s me bring myself back onto my feet, but I do not know what it is. I know that I no longer feel as if I am inside my own body. There is an emptiness in my stomach as I saunter forward, as if I am on the outside looking in through my eyes. It is a strange feeling, but I no longer feel any pain. I am numb.
I stumble, and then finally crawl, toward the rich sapplings; the beacons of hope in the darkness. The amberness of the leaves beckons me to its embrace and I collapse into the fallen foliage. My clothes are stained with the stickiness of blood — I am so close. The sappling is only a few feet away. I can’t slip away now. Not yet. I need one more final moment of beauty before my world closes in on me. I need to know my existence is not worthless. I need to know there is still something left in this world worth dying for.
With a minute surge of adreneline and determination, I push myself onto my knees, hands now dripping with my own blood. And I crawl, forcing my body onward, suddenly much colder than the air around me. The world begins to dim as I can feel myself slowly slipping away. But yet I perservere, knowing that greater men have died for less and that there is nothing honorable in an ugly death. By the time my hands graze the gentle bark the world is almost gone. The coldness of loss is filling up my body, and I can barely keep my eyes open. My breathing is heavy and slow and I shake like a dying elder gasping for his last breath. I position myself into a sitting position, my legs splayed out into the dirt, my fingers buried in the leaves.
As I sit against the bark of a dying tree, I look up and for a moment I can see a small break between the branches above me. Through the leaves I can see, no matter how small the sight, a glimpse of the downing sun that has perservered through the eternal darkness. The sun that has torn through the ashes and fire and acidic rain. The sun that falls on my face, that is the last lightness that I see.
