The After War

by Brandon Zenner

  “Fucking thing’s too small,” Steven said, his cheeks reddening. Brian didn’t respond. His can was already over the fire.

  The top of Steven’s can was now punctured in several places, and every time he got the opener going, it slipped again. Sauce was running out from the top and over his fingers. He steadied himself and began twisting and turning the small opener over and over, cutting away. The metal can buckled in the middle, and chili jumped from the opening and splattered over Steven’s poncho, speckling his face.

  “F—Fuck! Fucking thing! I can’t get a grip—”

  “Quiet down, for Christ sake. Give it here.”

  Steven sat on the ground with the can in one hand and the opener in the other, liquid dripping between his fingers.

  “Here, take it. Damn thing’s too small,” Steven said. “It’s broke.”

  “It ain’t broke.”

  “It’s broke.” He licked the sauce off his fingers and wiped his face.

  Brian opened the can, bending the top back to form a hook.

  “Here.” He passed the can back to his cousin, who placed it over the small flame. He held the opener in his palm. “You want this back?”

  “You keep it.”

  They waited until the liquid was bubbling and producing a constant flow of steam before fishing the cans out with their knives and placing them down on large rocks to cool. It was quiet, with the infrequent patter of rain falling on the tarp.

  “Long walk today,” Brian said. “How are your legs feeling?”

  “They’re fine.” Steven took a spoonful of chili to his lips, blowing away the plumes of steam. Brian wanted to tell him to wait, that the chili was still too hot, but his cousin was not in a particularly chatty mood. Steven nibbled a bit off the edge of the spoon, then instantly spit it back out. “Jesus, that’s hot. God damn.”

  The sun was low as they finished dinner, and with the last few rays of light, Brian went to his bag, then came back to the small fire with his hand behind his back.

  “Here,” he said. “I was going to wait till tomorrow, but it’ll be better today.” He swung his hand around, revealing a Twinkie with a cigarette stuck in the middle. “Happy birthday, brother.” He handed his cousin the Twinkie.

  Steven chuckled. “Shit, I nearly forgot it was my birthday.”

  Brian knew he was lying. “Well, I didn’t forget. Thirty-one tomorrow. Now, I’m not gonna sing to you, so you go on and eat that cake and smoke that cigarette.”

  “Ha!” Steven tore the Twinkie in two, offering Brian the smaller half.

  “I got the other one here. That one’s all yours.”

  They ate the Twinkies, which were unbelievably good. Sweets, cakes, and the like were not the sort of thing the men had stocked in the shelter. The few desserts they did have, they saved for birthdays and holidays. The same went for the cigarettes. Neither of them had smoked back before the bunker, only occasionally when they were drinking. However, after a few weeks underground with only three cartons of cigarettes between them, they wished to God that they had brought more.

  They grew to understand smoking. Huddled around the radio, back when there was still news coming in, sipping at a bottle of bourbon, they would listen to the gore reported over the waves and feverishly chain-smoke cigarettes. They had to stop at the last four packs and ration them out over the course of their seclusion, on holidays and the like. It was the only thing to do those first weeks until the airwaves turned to static and never came back to life. They were now down to the last six remaining cigarettes.

  Brian lit one for himself.

  “Thank you, Brian,” Steven said, as he leaned back on one elbow and closed his eyes.

  Brian exhaled a deep cloud of smoke. “Happy birthday, Steve.”

  “You remember the last time we had a cake? A real cake?”

  “Yeah.” Brian paused. “Yeah, I reckon I do.”

  “Nancy made it for your birthday.”

  “I remember. That was the night we had that talk with them.”

  Steven shook his head and sat up. “I don’t get it. I don’t know what they were thinking. They should have listened to us; we should have forced them—”

  “No, Steve, it was their own choice. We couldn’t have made them do anything they didn’t want to do. Forget it now. Let’s just enjoy our smokes.”

  “Yeah, it’s just—”

  “There’s nothin’ you can do about it.”

  “I know. You’re right.”

  They smoked their cigarettes, flicked the butts into the fire, and covered the fire with dirt when the flames had burned low. Steven tossed the empty chili cans far away from their camp and wiped the splattered juices off his poncho with wet leaves.

  They unfolded a second tarp on the ground beneath the one strung to the trees and unrolled their sleeping bags. Careful not to drag dirt onto their blankets, they unlaced their mud-caked boots and removed their bulletproof vests before retreating for the night.

  The men fell into fitful sleep, waking often at the slightest noise. Their rifles lay by their sides, armed and ready.

  ***

  The morning fog hugged the earth like a wet cotton blanket, startling Steven as he woke, thinking momentarily the fog was smoke creeping over the campsite. The precipitation increased as the day went on, beating at the misty clouds to clear the air in long intervals. By afternoon, the men were soaked as they entered the wasteland that was Stephenson Acre, and proceeded into the heart of the town. A flash of movement ahead halted them in their steps, and the men dropped to their knees behind a dilapidated brick wall.

  Steven stared, transfixed, then whispered, “That’s a big son of a bitch.”

  “Shh!” Brian turned sharply to face him with a finger over his lips. Steven turned back, sliding his binoculars from beneath his poncho, and Brian did the same.

  The marked path cut through this town, yet they could have gone around it—and maybe they should have. But it would be impossible to avoid towns altogether. Soon, the farther northeast they walked, the less wilderness there would be, and their trek would become almost entirely urban.

  Their eyes fixed on a filthy home, which stood out like a rotten tooth in a mouth full of broken teeth. The decrepit beige-brick building was a rectangular two-story structure, a bit taller than the surrounding homes.

  From where they crouched, they could see several neon orange signs strung up in the windows, which read PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING. Those signs might have been there for years, or maybe they were hung more recently by the group of large black men and the two sickly white men who were idling about the porch steps.

  The men had a fire burning in a steel barrel with a makeshift grate stretched over the top. Thick, greasy smoke curled up from an unrecognizable lump of meat smoldering over the flames. The largest of the men used a knife to flip the mass over, and a billow of smoke puffed and twisted into the air.

  The large man was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt despite the coolness of the day, with his massive shoulders extending far out from the armholes, his skin nearly as dark as his shirt. An AK-47 was strapped over his shoulder, and a machete was attached to his belt. The man was talking to the others, who all looked feral, filthy, and wore an assortment of military fatigues and ragged jeans.

  As the horde stood about the fire, they picked at the smoldering meat, tearing into the flesh with their hands, and tossing something—bones, perhaps—over their shoulders with reckless abandon. They sucked the juice off their fingertips like hot wings.

  Like baby hands, Steven thought. It looks like they’re eating baby hands.

  His mind conjured up horrid images, some real and some imaginary—close-ups of rotten and broken teeth, gnawing and chewing. Blackened, seared flesh torn from the bone. He shook his head, but the images remained. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he whispered.

  Brian nodded.

  They retraced their steps, crouching low until they were around the corner of a burnt shell of a
building and out of sight from the gathering. Corpses were scattered about, looking much the same as the first one they had encountered—brown leathery skin pulled taut over semi-exposed bones, bodies twisted in awful and unnatural positions. Loose strips of decomposed clothing matted over skeletons, melding into the soil.

  They passed a corpse in the front yard of a house, a nice house that had probably had a nice lawn and a garden, possibly maintained by that same body that now lay in the knee-high grass. There was another corpse lying on the side of the road, facedown in the crook between the pavement and the curb. Another was sprawled halfway in the doorway of the next home, its legs sticking outward toward them.

  Steven saw these bodies and realized that at some point in time, people—whoever was left alive—had given up on burying the dead, and cadavers were left to rot wherever they fell. Bodies scattered the streets and lawns, parks and sidewalks. They littered the earth, mixed with the blown-about roof shingles, tree branches, trash cans, crumpled soda bottles, and all manner of waste that society had discarded.

  We’re garbage …

  The men moved fast out of Stephenson Acre, with their rifles at the ready, cautious of the pockmarked terrain, until they were back in the safety of the woods. Soon their pace slowed.

  “What do you think they was eatin’ back there?” Steven asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  There was a pause as they stepped over a fallen tree, and Brian stopped to check his map and compass.

  “You think that’s people they’re eatin’?”

  “I said I don’t know. I doubt it. Of course not. Probably birds, mice, or something. It won’t do your head any good thinking that way. They’re gone now. Let’s move on.”

  They started walking, and the rain that had turned and sullied the air into a patchy mist all morning now began falling in droplets again. Thick clouds of steam rose from the lush mountains in such waves that Steven again thought it might be smoke he was seeing.

  The men tightened the drawstrings around the hoods of their ponchos and continued walking in the thickening mud.

  Chapter 6

  The Huntsman

  The security of driving in the van was not as comforting as Simon thought it would be. His senses were dulled with the outside world passing in blazing speeds.

  Out in the woods he had been able to hear, see, and even smell the environment all around him. It had been the scurrying of squirrels and the sudden flight of birds that alerted him to the presence of the wanderers who had come lurching out of the woods about a mile or so outside of camp.

  Nature acts like concentric rings of disturbance in a pond. When a pebble is thrown in still water, the circles start in the middle and work their way out. The wanderers that day had startled a deer, which in turn startled a rabbit, which then startled a squirrel, which startled a bird, which startled Simon, who startled the ants and spiders in the tree that he scrambled to climb.

  In the wilderness, Simon’s senses were sharp. The threat of an incoming person would be seen or heard long before that person would see or hear him. That much Simon was sure of. He had tested his abilities many times. He had hunted the primitive way, the way his teacher, Marcus Warden, had taught him. Having tested his ability to stalk and hunt deer, Simon had no doubt that he could evade people out in the wild. The senses of a deer are much keener than those of a human.

  Soon after reaching the cabin, Simon had prepared for his first hunt alone, by fasting for twenty-four hours so the scent of food would not emanate from his body. He then spent two hours in the sweat lodge he’d constructed out on the bank of the stream. The frame was built out of large saplings bent to form the rounded top, and a tarp was used for the skin and then covered with large tree branches so that it looked like little more than a slight hill. It was just tall enough for Simon to crawl in and sit. The fire—or hot rocks and water—was directly in the center.

  After the sweat, Simon swam in the stream, removing the impurities from his body and making his human scent clean, pure. He used this time to meditate on his life and the impermanence of all things.

  Just as the water flows in the river, ever changing, Simon thought, so do all things—the cells in my body, my positive and negative thoughts and emotions, my life, the life of the animal I am about to take. The only moment in time that is real is this moment, and even that has now become the past. All things, all dharma, they all die and are reborn, just like time. Each passing second is gone forever, and each second in the future is not yet born.

  With clarity of mind, Simon left the water and constructed a fire along the shore. He used a tree branch to beat at the flames, creating thickets of smoke to waft and encompass his body and soak into the pores of his naked skin.

  He dressed in shorts and nothing more. When the fire cooled, he removed charcoals from the cinder and rubbed the blackness over his body. He then covered much of his skin with mud from the stream bank and added a few strands of grass and plants to his hair and beard. In the end, he looked just like the brush and trees that were all around. An untrained person would find him difficult to spot, if not for the whiteness of his eyes.

  Then Simon left for the hunt, going to the deer runs that snaked all along the stream bank.

  He walked with meticulous steps, his foot touching the earth on the ball behind his toes, then slowly dropping from the outside of the foot in, touching down to the heel. The wooden spear he carried was sharpened to a razor point and hardened by fire, and a length of rope was wrapped around his midsection.

  The scouting process was long and deliberate. He looked for new tracks, fresh tracks. He needed to find a set that looked slightly off from the others—a small or hurt deer, one that was alone and weaker than the rest. It was difficult to comprehend preying on a weak and unfortunate animal, but he himself was a weak and unfortunate animal—much weaker and more vulnerable than the trained animals of that wilderness. Taking a life was a matter of survival. If Simon did not kill the weak animal himself, the wolves would, or the changing of the seasons from fall to winter.

  The scouting process was long, the time lost to Simon in his state of focus, but he found the tracks he was looking for. They were small, and one of the deer’s hooves left shallow, off-center prints. The edges of the dirt where the hoof sunk in were still moist to the touch, and Simon followed the tracks for hours. He crawled around thickets of bramble and thorny vines until he came within sight of a small deer, barely visible in the distance.

  His heart thumped loud in his chest, awakening him momentarily from his focused state. At this point he was barely human. He was an animal in the wild, and typical human thoughts were not processing as they normally would. His mind had never been as crystal clear as it was at that moment.

  A purely instinctual thought process was replacing the calculated and constructed methodology that he typically relied on. A grace he did not know he possessed overtook his motions as he moved from rock to rock, and tree to tree. His body and mind were working faster than he knew possible despite his movements being agile and determined.

  When Simon neared the edge of the field, he stopped with his chest pressed against the rough side of an oak. He stood there, just watching the small deer graze for quite some time—hours, maybe. Time had no relevance. It grazed in the field, going from tree to tree, and then walked to a small stream to drink before returning to the field. The animal had a routine, and Simon was learning it.

  As the animal grazed, Simon moved in the bush, so slow and so steady that not a twig broke under his bare feet and not a leaf crunched. He moved with the breeze, only when the wind ruffled his surroundings. He made his way behind a wall of land, carved out of the earth by the stream’s running water. The deer’s path went down a sharp decline from the top of the ridge to the water, and the grass there looked trodden. Simon’s shoulder edged close to the decline, just hidden from view from the top of the ridge where the deer was grazing in the field beyond.

  The noise of the f
lowing stream made it hard for Simon to hear the coming of the animal, and he was sweating so profusely that he was afraid that the deer would smell him. But he did not stir; he did not falter. He stayed like stone, his back pressed to the dirt wall, the spear gripped tight in both hands, cocked back and ready to lunge. Every muscle and sinew in his body was rigid, taut and strained, and his mind was clear and moving with incredible speed, carried on the wind and running water.

  The deer did not smell him or sense his presence.

  It approached, lazily down the earthen ramp, unaware of the danger that lurked behind the bend.

  Simon saw the wet nose first and then the side of its head. In a twitch, he sprang forward and plunged the spear deep into the animal’s neck.

  The animal bucked wild, knocking Simon into the stream, before falling to its side, writhing. In an instant, Simon’s animalistic senses evaporated, and he was human again.

  His heart was an exploded grenade.

  Splashing in the water to get back to his feet, Simon stared in awe at what he had done. He jumped to the dying animal, saw the dark eyes stare up at him as the life within them faded and disappeared. The deer snorted, and then it stopped moving.

  Teardrops fell from Simon’s eyes onto its fur.

  He cried and howled and cursed himself. He cursed the world, cursed humanity, and cursed the fact that he was hungry—so hungry. He tried to remind himself that every piece of meat he’d ever eaten represented an animal that had died in a similar way—a worse way, a tortured and inhumane way, in a slaughterhouse. But at that moment, he did not care. He had not been responsible for those deaths. This death he was. His own hands were stained in its blood, and he had now witnessed death firsthand.

  He rose to his feet and constructed a sled out of a few sturdy branches tied together with the rope he had coiled around his torso. Slowly, he carted the animal back to the cabin.

  Negativity welled inside him. He could not even look at the dead animal. He did not want to eat the meat, tan the skin with the animal’s brain to use for warmth. He did not want to use the bones for glue and tools.