Beneath the Ashen Veil of Darkness

by Robert Bartlett

  The basal flow, which hugs the ground, and an ash plume that lay’s just above it due to the turbulence between the basal flow and the overlying air.” She stops to catch her breath, fighting back the visions of the poor hopeless millions that she knows have already been caught in its path. “Nothing stops it. Not even water. It will destroy everything in its path. It will knock down, shatter, bury, incinerate, or carry away nearly all objects it comes in contact with.” “Any living creature unlucky enough to find itself in its path will be flash incinerated at temperatures that literally cause the body to spontaneously combust. Studies on the skulls found on the island of Pompeii, from the Mount Vesuvius eruption, showed scorch marks on the inside of the victims skulls showing where even the brain itself had literally caught on fire.” Her voice no more audible than a whisper as she finishes, the silence of the room broken only by the soft sobbing of many of its occupants. “So what are we supposed to do?” The overweight security guard, that wasn’t much more than a glorified mall cop, Fred breaks the silence to ask. “Go home to be with your families if you have them. Everyone should go be with the people you love and with those that love you.” Kelli meets their faces, masked in looks of disbelief and horror as they filter out of the room to go to wherever it is that they have chosen to go in this unprecedented moment in time to live out what is most assuredly their last days. However long that may be no one truly knows.

  As the room clears, Kelli is about to leave when she notices Stevens sitting alone in the back by the vending machines slowly sipping a mountain dew. “Why haven’t you left yet Stevens?” Watts asks. “I don’t have anywhere to go” Jeff answers sadly. “My parents died in a car crash coming back from a weekend in Lake Tahoe when I was a sophomore at Cal-Tech and I’m an only child. I’m going to die alone!” Jeff barely gets out the last word before he breaks down into uncontrollable sobs, slumping to the floor. Kelli rushes over and squats done to sit next to him and wraps her arms around him in an awkward attempt to comfort some one that already knows what fate has in store for them. Between his shuddering sobs Jeff manages to choke out “Why aren’t you on your way home to go be with Ariel and Sebastian?” The tears that had been threatening to escape from her eyes for the last 20 minutes softly begin to flow down her cheeks as Kelli whispers, “Because they’re spending the weekend with their dad and his new twenty something girlfriend.” “Well can’t you just go be with them anyway? I’m sure they would understand” Stevens asks. He has to strain to hear her answer, “No. They were spending it sightseeing and rafting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.” They sit together in disbelief, alone in the observatory and weep.

  Somewhere in western Montana, a Father fills his truck up with gas as he is smiling about how excited his two young sons were when he told them about the weekend long fishing trip he was taking them on this weekend as a treat for school starting back up. In eastern Idaho, a young Mother sings Disney carols with her daughter as they make their daily morning commute to her pre-school preparing for this year’s fall festival concert the school puts on every year with the three and four year old classes. In western Wyoming, a farmhand works on repairing a section of fence that has been damaged by a herd of pronghorns migrating through the valley the previous evening, enjoying the quiet serenity of a mountain country morning. And in northern Utah, a young woman is beaming with an excitement that isn’t phased even by the thick, morning rush hour traffic as she drives to the first day at her new job, her new career, since graduating from college this summer. All over the tri-state area that is connected to Yellowstone, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. Into Utah and the southern Canadian providences of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, life on this fateful morning began as normal. Businesses opened, morning shifts began as night shifts ended. Young teenage girls whispered to their girlfriends about their first kiss at last Friday nights football game while young teenage boys bragged to their friends about theirs. All of this was extinguished when the volcano erupted, killing millions in a flash of earth, lava, and violence. Some died changing the radio. Others died while standing in line for their morning coffee. But all died. Most having no idea of what had even happened, mercifully dying without fear or little pain. Death was swift and efficient as it carried them on its wings into the afterlife and began single handedly to write the next chapter of human existence in its own blackened vision. Death spewed ash all the way into the stratosphere where the jet stream, caused by the rotation of the earth, played its role by carrying the ash all over the globe, swiftly laying an ash cover to thick for the sun to penetrate even at its zenith. In just a matter of days death wraps its arms around mother earth in an embrace of malicious intent, blanketing her in complete and utter darkness……..

  “I take mine into contemplation and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our security.”

  “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee.”

  – John Donne, Meditation XVII

  Chapter Three

  Year One, Day Forty Five

  Kelli’s eyes flutter closed as her energy and life continue to ebb. To weak and dehydrated to truly comprehend if she is awake or asleep, the lines that separated the two worlds having blurred long ago. She and Stevens had scavenged through the observatory finding and collecting what food and drinks they could. Looking for things people had stowed away in their work stations. A box of crackers, a few energy bars, a half dozen bottles of water, and a medium sized tin of mixed nuts were the booty of their treasure hunt. Put that together with what they had broken out of the vending machines and one would easily, but foolishly, think they had found enough to sustain them for months. Months, unfortunately, had ended up being just a handful of weeks even with careful rationing. Her eyes flutter back open, the act of blinking now only taking place with tremendous effort. In the darkness, the horizon still has an orange glow from the fires set by the rioters and lynch mobs that had formed in the initial panic after the eruption. The government had declared Marshall Law, of course, but it had done little to contain the panic and violence of the ravenous hoard of maniacs. The hoards and lawlessness that was the city was one of the main reasons she and Stevens had initially decided to try to make their stand here at the observatory. To hold out, hidden in relative safety, until things either calmed down or as mobs like this often do, people just lost interest. The police force and National Guard sent to keep order in the city had lost control in just a matter of days, over run by the sheer number of people out of their minds with fear and panic. The sounds of sirens used by the fire department and paramedics trying to put out the fires and stop the bleeding also no longer wailed. Only occasionally did you even hear gunfire, the city now run by the rapists, murderers, looters, and thieves that had inherited it from the government after they had pulled out of the city and left it to its own fate. Her eyes flutter closed, “Hello mom” an angel beams down at Kelli, surrounded by a brilliant white light. “Ariel? Is that you? I thought you were with your father for the weekend?” “I was, but I’m home now mom. We all are. We have been waiting for you.” “Oh Ariel, I love you so much! I thought I had lost you!” Kelli’s eyes again flutter open to land on Stevens who was sitting directly across from her propped up against the opposite wall. A rat that had been eating what was left of Stevens nose now perched itself up on his half eaten face by using the open nostrils as foot holds, its head buried up to its shoulders in Stevens right eye socket. Jeff’s breath came in slow ragged gasps and his left pointer finger twitched spastically, in what was surely a subliminal registry of pain. She had hoped he had already slipped away when she noticed the first rat appear yesterday evening. The thought of the vermin eating Stevens while he was still alive sickened her but, like Stevens, Kelli was far too weak and close to death herself to do anything about it. So she sits there unable to help Stevens, feeling sorry for the both of them. Watching the rats devour her dying friend causes what acids that had managed to form in her belly to roll and turn threatening to come up.
What fools they had been. The food and sodas from the vending machines had run out first. Then when the water had stopped running from the faucets, they had ran through what bottles they had managed to set aside in just days, foolishly thinking that the water would get turned back on. Neither of them realizing just how bad things had actually gotten in the cities, they had used the water to try and ward off the hunger pains that threatened to eat them from the inside. Thankfully Kelli’s eyes flutter closed again, “You didn’t lose us mom. We were just separated for a little while.” “Where is Sebastian? Is he with you?” Kelli gasps as she frantically looks around for her dead son. “Yes mom Sebastian is with me. See, there he is standing over on that hill waiting for us.” The angelic figure of Kelli’s dead daughter Ariel steps back revealing a beautiful sunny spring day shining down over a grassy knoll behind her a short way in the distance covered in beautiful wildflowers. A group of people had gathered there and in the middle was Sebastian, standing and waving to his mother. “Can you see him? He’s right there in the middle waving to you.” “OH! Yes! I see him!” Kelli’s eyes flutter back open as her sons name is still on her lips from where she had been trying to call to him. The dry crackle that managed to escape her throat in life momentarily made the rats that were still steady at work on Stevens pause. The one that had been buried in his right eye socket peered at her from the left eye socket now. Its tail still hanging out of the socket it had used to enter the soft matter of Stevens skull. Thankfully Stevens’ finger no longer twitched and his chest no longer worked at trying to force air into an already dead body. Kelli’s eyes fall closed, just as she feels Ariel reach down and grab her by the hand. “Come on now mom. They’ve waited for us long enough. You’ve fought long enough.” Ariel helps her to her feet and they begin to walk towards the others, hand in hand, Mother and daughter, smiles upon their faces. Unmercifully her eyes flutter open once more, her body selfishly clinging to a life that the soul had already given up on. With a ragged exhale (which was a pitiful attempt at her daughter’s name) she looks down at the hand that she had sworn was in Ariel’s grasp just moments before, and looks directly into the red rimmed, doll black eyes of the rat that was now perched in her palm. Blood is evident around its nostrils from breathing in the ashes that still fell like snow flurries outside, the microscopic shards of glass reaping their havoc on even natures most perfect opportunist. At first she thinks it is the same harbinger that aided Stevens on his journey to the afterlife but a painful glance over at her pitiful friend reveals otherwise. The tail of the tiny monster still hung from Stevens’ right eye socket, the weight of the rat causing his head to turn to one side dropping his jaw open revealing his black swollen tongue. The weight in her hands shifts bringing her attention back to her side of the room, mercifully making her eyes flutter back shut, to weak now to hold them open any longer. “We’re almost there mom. You’re doing great.” “OH Ariel I thought you had gone! Please don’t make me go back there again. I want to stay here with you and your brother!” She is almost shouting in her sobbing pleas to her daughter as she cries for her to never let her go again. “SHHHHH it’s ok mom. You never have to go back there again. You’re home now. Here with us, forever.”

  Kelli Watson, the blonde, divorcee, mother of two, walks over the grassy knoll and slips out of sight. Holding her sons hand in her left hand, her daughters hand in her right as all the other beloved members of her family that had come to welcome her home just in front of them leading the way. At the observatory, a rat begins to gnaw its way into the thoughts and dreams of a still, blonde, emaciated form precariously leaning against a vending machine that had long ago gone empty.

  “People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in; their true beauty is only revealed if there is light from within.”

  - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

  Chapter Four

  Year One, Day Three Hundred and Twenty two

  The road is dark and narrow as the almost constant ash that still falls here in the Ashland, along with the perpetual darkness makes it hard to truly define anything. You could be driving down what you thought was a road one minute, discover it was actually once a boat ramp and find yourself waist deep in an ash mud lake that shared the same properties as quicksand. A lake that was once some ones pre-dawn Saturday morning little piece of Heaven. With a pole in the water, their young son fidgeting next to them dreaming of monster catfish and bass, delighted in the fact that his father had included him in something he instinctively knew was special. A lake that had once created memories and pleasures that was now just a dead, liquid cesspool. Unable to sustain life any longer due to the oxygen choking ash or acid rain that continuously fell from the skies and ran down the banks, without prejudice between animal life or plant life, combined with the blackened skies it efficiently kills everything. They had lost three members of their party that way the first time they had all agreed to venture out into the Ashland to scavenge for supplies. Clay had told Ron to take it slow and easy, but some, even in this version of our world, still had to learn the hard way. Except that now learning the hard way could mean winding up dead. They had been driving along what they had assumed was a road that led around the lake, except the road ended up being a short bridge. Ron had literally just driven them right over the edge. The car they were in landed on its roof as it had slowly flipped in the air. The consistency of the liquid that now made up the lakes “water” had made the car sink far slower than it would have normally sunk, painfully dragging its occupants to its depths. The screams of the dying and frightened had greeted them when they had arrived far too late. Unable to help being to blind from the dark and to cold and wet from the icy rain caused by the volcanic winter that now cloaked the planet, the car was already half way swallowed up by the muddy water when they had arrived at the scene. Hating to admit it, they were morbidly thankful when the liquid death finally filled enough of the car to muffle the agony it contained within it. It was a gruesome reminder for every one of the constant dangers that threatened to greet them around every corner out here in the Ashland. The Ashland had become the name the group adopted to call the area that begun just at the foot of the Ozark mountain range in western Arkansas, to where they assumed the initial blast and pyroclastic flow had destroyed and incinerated almost everything and everyone.

  “Hey dad, if I’m reading the map right, we should be close to where we lost Ron’s group the last time out.” Clay’s oldest son Levi updated him from the passenger seat momentarily pulling him out of his reflections. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to how his sons voice sounds through the mask they all are forced to wear when they are around fallen or falling ashes. It makes everyone sound detached and distant. “Thanks. I was afraid that was about where we were. That’s a day I wish we all could forget.” Clay responds. “Yeah, well Uncle Ron should’ve known not to drive like a maniac in an area we hadn’t scouted out yet.” Levi says trying to ease the guilt he knows his father is feeling from the death of his mothers little brother. “I know. But try telling that to your mother. It was my responsibility to look out for him.” Clay says with a heavy sigh. Levi lets it drop with a casual shrug of his shoulder, “She’ll get over it eventually dad. Ron was an asshole anyways.” Clay laughs, lightly hitting his son on his shoulder. Under their masks, they were both smiling as they continued on down the ash covered road.

  Chapter Five

  It had been two days since they had left the compound. Unable to spare the gas to run the generators that would supply the power to the UV lamps for the makeshift greenhouses they had initially constructed, they hadn’t been able to grow anything on their own for quite some time now. So, with supplies running dangerously short, they had been forced to start going out on supply excursions to rebuild their stock of rations and water. At first they were able to find most of what they had needed in the surrounding local area of the compound. But after their early successes, finding anything of use had beco
me more and more difficult. Finally able to make their way to and then down highway 270 towards Malvern and interstate 30, the utter destruction of the larger cities was a shock to everyone at first. The simple, but real fact of what the pampered and spoiled suburbanites would do to their neighbors when faced with the fact that they had no idea where their next meal or their next drink was coming from was actually quite disturbing. They had destroyed more than they had taken in the initial first wave of panic from the overweight and over medicated population of privileged suburbia. And what they didn’t manage to destroy they almost always unknowingly made whatever was left behind unusable. So, between the panic of the suburbanites and the fires set by the rioting governmental dependents pissed off about the hand outs that were no longer coming, there was very little left behind in these over populated areas that was of any real use. Not to mention the fact, that what resemblance of people that were left in the cities, were just small roaming groups of cannibals and lunatics that needed to be avoided. But for those left behind and savvy enough to escape to less populated areas or those lucky enough to have family or friends already set up in those areas of the country, survival was a daily responsibility taken on by the strong willed, strong minded, and strong backed. Clay Stratford and his wife Veronica along with their two sons Levi and Cain were one of the savvy ones lucky enough to escape out of the cities to the higher ground of the Ozark mountain range where they were also lucky enough to have Veronica’s half brother Ron. He was always preaching about governmental conspiracies, but Ron had also thankfully been doomsday prepping for years on land that he had acquired just outside of the Ouachita National Forest. “Crazy” Ron had saved all of their asses in the beginning when the volcano had blown, giving them a place to try to hold up and survive. But Ronald Owens, the moonshine making, marijuana growing black sheep of the Owens household, drunk on his own brew, had driven himself, his like minded best friend Lee, and the only woman that Clay knew of that could put up with all of his bullshit, Kim, right off of a bridge into an ash mud lake. Ron was too stubborn to listen to the ex-military city boy from “cushy city living with a gym membership”, when it came to mountain survival. So in the end, the savior of Clay’s family, the only one with the fore sight to set aside a place of hiding and preparation, was indeed, just an asshole.