Circles in the Dust (3 page)

This must be a dream, he thought. He sat and watched, torn between returning to the chaos and carnage mankind had descended into and disappearing into the eerie arms of nature. As he debated, a gray blur cut through the night, collided with the corner of a house and sprayed fiery rubble just feet from his dirty shoes. The heat of the blast crawled over his skin and he turned to the woods, fleeing in fear.

He ran with a newfound energy, ran toward what he hoped was a tower rising from the sea of trees, where he might find some people who would know what to do, some traffic controllers or something. He lost sight of it now and again behind the black arms reaching overhead, but the mammoth spire always reappeared above the green ceiling; a beacon of hope. David ran toward it all night, tripping over brambles and fallen trees, stopping for nothing until it rose up before him. It wasn’t a tower, but an enormous tree. He collapsed against its trunk, staring up into the boughs reaching out to keep the others at bay. Bark scratched at his face and arms, though he felt only agony in his young muscles. The sounds of destruction had long since faded away in the distance. The sun was poking its curious head over the horizon behind a haze forming in the sky when David slipped into a fitful sleep, dragged down by pure exhaustion.

Behind him the world burned.

CHAPTER 1

Winter and summer. Cold, less cold. Spring and fall were luxuries of the past. The scale had been tipped to one side, heat and sunshine lost as the world adopted a new face; a cold, rigid visage. The clouds hovered above year-round, letting only the slimmest fingers of sunlight pierce them, just long enough to give the last vestiges of humanity a little hope, a tenuous dream, only to choke off the light and leave them once more in the stifling dark of their past transgressions.

David mulled over this as he sat, hunkered down under the remains of a fallen tree, combing through his short beard with calloused fingers. Waiting.

A chill hung in the air over a sodden forest floor. Winter loomed on the horizon, edging out the little sun there was as it shortened the days in preparation for its arrival. Drizzling rain weighed heavily on the arms of ancient pines and blanketed the countryside with a moist sheen. The trees swayed slowly in the wind that was just beginning to carry the sharpness that signaled the approach of yet another winter. Not that winter would change the landscape too much; snow and ice would replace rain and fog. The ubiquitous cold would simply deepen. The air reeked of snow, an odor that taunted with its devilish sweetness. The sky glowered overhead, its gray demeanor seeping into everything, casting a dull pallor over the Earth. The ground was moist but firm, the rain not yet having soaked in, and was covered in the undergrowth that had survived the ravages of mankind. Small bushes and patches of grass poked out of the soil, reaching for the slowly returning sun, a young generation rising from the ashes of man’s dominion. It was all in vain; the small nourishment they found from above would wither soon. The living trees were scarce but hardy; many had fallen, more had died where they stood. Lifeless husks of the vast life they had once contained, the forest itself was a vast cemetery of the old world.

             
From his hiding place near the top of a grassy rise, David looked around him at the familiar valley, breathing in the earthy aroma of the rain. His vision flicked to a slight disturbance in the undergrowth. His restless fingers untangled themselves from his knotted facial hair. He had to be quiet now. Blurred movement against the shrubs and undergrowth, a quick flash of mottled brown, then nothing. Only the repetitive movement of its jaw betrayed its presence. It was close, a decent bowshot away. He nocked an arrow and pulled back the string, causing the bow to creak, a sound too loud in the morning stillness. The rabbit’s jaw froze, ears erect, a statue. David breathed out slowly and let his fingers relax. The arrow took flight, whipping through the air before colliding with that spot of life and pinning it to the ground. He let out a grunt of satisfaction, a little one. Walking over to the rabbit, he allowed his triumph to wash over him like ocean waves over a weathered rock. Animals of any kind were rare, and getting close to them was not easy.

             
When he reached the rabbit, he knelt down and pulled the arrow from its neck. A slim line of blood flowed from the wound, stark crimson against the creature’s creamy coat. The arrow slid through flesh and fur, David’s hands guiding it carefully to avoid breaking the shaft. He always took the utmost care of his equipment; when one scraped a living from a barren environment, precious few things could be spared. He was one of those who made a living on the outskirts of the world, where everyone rode a fine line between life and death, having enough and starving, surviving and suffering. Today he would survive, and he gave silent thanks to the rabbit for making sure of that. He grabbed his prize by the ears, slung his bow on his back and melted back into the dreary woods.

             
As he walked, he resumed his survey of the surrounding trees and the ground beneath his feet. When he was young, he remembered living in a city, dreaming of entering the woods. That made him laugh now. He would give anything for a home in a city, a little house with a fireplace and a refrigerator. Maybe someone else to keep him company. He lived a lonely life. Not that he could complain too much—he did like being alone, relying on no one but himself, knowing that he was capable of sustaining his own life without needing help from anyone else. Not that he had much of a choice.

He hadn’t even seen another human being since the end of the last winter, when the snow had begun to melt. This year? Last year? It was hard to remember. The last person he remembered seeing was Mitch. His fellow survivor had crossed David’s path on his way to the city. Mitch had tried to get David to come along, but he wanted no part of that. They had picked the city clean long ago, and no one who stayed there ever lived long. The thought of going to the city had given David a bellyful of butterflies, sent a chill down his spine even now. And Mitch was planning to go alone. He almost felt bad, forcing Mitch to go into the city alone, but David had been following what he had hoped were a few deer, and had little motivation to risk his life that day. Mitch understood; they were the closest things in this new world to friends and there was no point in angering your closest neighbor. He tried to remember what Mitch had been looking for. Must not have been important. Summer was nearing its end now, so that would put his last human interaction at least a few months ago.

              Trekking a few miles through the sparse wood, David came upon a cluster of fallen trees that he recognized as the edge of his territory. Making his way through the scarce brush, he had to use his free hand to push back the army of saplings striving to hold him at bay. As the temperature had risen over the years, so had the plants been reborn after remaining dormant for so long, waiting for the day when they could rule over the land as their ancestors had without the threat of eternal winter. David’s faint trails through the woods comprised the only present threat to the young plant life, though he tried to change his paths when they grew too distinct. For their sake, and his own.

He knew this place like the back of his hand. Just ahead a tree that had been split in two during a storm a couple years back jabbed its charred stub skyward, and a little ways past that was rock that looked like a turtle. The patterns in the botanical ceiling above were enough to tell him he was almost home. He continued forward, taking a different route than he had followed that morning. Elsewhere it might be solely for the plants’ sake; here he knew the importance of keeping his home as much a secret as possible. Raiders had found him before, and it was not pleasant. Not that he could particularly blame the raiders; his hands had their fair share of blood.

              He plodded along, absorbed in his musings, until he looked up and caught sight of the beacon that had drawn him here years ago: his tree. A massive pine, so large he could not reach halfway around its trunk. It was hard to miss. Towering over the rest of its nearby brethren, it stood tall and proud against the gray sky, defying all other challenges to its supremacy. Its trunk went naked and branchless for at least fifty feet, giving it a place in David’s mind as his sentinel, his own personal watchtower, impregnable and strong. The bark shimmered at the base, a rich silver, growing darker and darker as it rose, so black at the top he could not always pick it out at night. He still remembered the day he found it.

Walking up to his tree, David felt all over again that sense of protection that had stopped him that first night, when he had no direction and no goal but safety from violence and destruction. Even now it took a weight off his shoulders to stand under the guarding arms of his protector. He came over the last hill and looked down, pleased to see his home unsullied, tucked as it was in a deep hollow. His steps lengthened in anticipation as he closed on his hut, taking a deep breath full of home, that feeling that had taken so long to regain permeating the very air. He was proud of the home he had built, proud of every branch and log and nail and bit of rope and string that had come together to protect him when he had felt so vulnerable.

Originally no more than a lean-to just large enough to lie under, the structure had come to resemble a crude log cabin, though there had been no real logs involved in its construction. His younger self had been able to move only branches into place. A little larger than his bedroom had once been, it measured ten or twelve foot square. It had a door on the front, a little to the left of center and not quite as tall as he was, something he had vowed to fix but had never gotten around to.

Building that little house had been the most time-consuming thing he had ever done. Once the permanence of the cold became clear, David had spent what must have been a year constructing his shelter. It looked nice from the outside, though the inside was a different story; too young to have any real knowledge regarding the building of a house, young David had to learn on the job and quickly, nailing a bunch of branches to a few boards he’d salvaged from the city. Back when there were still things to salvage. The roof he had built the same way, making up for lack of expertise with copious amounts of nails. He added some tin that he had scavenged from some child’s backyard fort later. He smiled now, thinking about how much that fort, that plaything, resembled what he now called home. That was how it had been in the beginning, everything feeling silly and childish. Making this little fort in the woods. Going around looking for a bow and some arrows. He had fantasized about such adventures in his youth, going to live in the woods by himself. Unfortunately, he had gotten exactly what he dreamed of.

He sat down on the stump next to his fire pit and tossed the rabbit on the ground next to his seat. Using a handful of the small twigs he kept in a tin box, David fed the dying embers of his morning fire, leaning down to breathe life back into them. Now that he had something to eat, he started allowing himself to feel hunger. It had been a while since he had strayed from his forced vegetarian diet. Thoughts of fresh, succulent meat whirled in his head. Not only that but the pelt would make a cozy sock or mitten for the oncoming winter.

He looked up at the sky, squinting despite the clouds. He couldn’t remember the last time a blue sky had shown through the haze. It was one of those things he knew, but only as a memory. The sky is blue. He had not seen it in years, had no proof at hand, but he knew that it was. Sometimes it felt silly. Some days he had to remind himself that there were more colors than the greens and browns and grays he saw every day. He had to remind himself that he had a family once. Time had eroded their faces though, and he found himself wondering sometimes if he were going insane. Now, as he looked up at the bright barrier above, he chuckled. The sky is blue. He shook his head and resumed his work.

It might not snow year-round but winter had a monopoly on the seasons. You could tell when it was spring because it stopped snowing quite so much, and in summer the temperature would sometimes rise enough for him to shirk his jacket and feel fresh air on his arms, and the ground could be seen during its peak. It had gotten warmer and warmer as time passed, or less and less cold, to be more precise. That first year had seen the harshest winter David had ever known; snow up to at least ten feet, buildings collapsing left and right in the city, people starving to death in their homes. This year summer had stretched on longer than ever, though you wouldn’t know it after seeing David’s garden, which had carried all of David’s hopes for the future. He tried not to dwell on that disappointment.

Now that he had his fire going, David grabbed his metal bucket and made off to the river. He was pretty sure it came from the north, which, he believed, had been left mostly untouched, even before the war and everything after. Hopefully it was safe to drink. He had a pump-filter back at his cabin, though it had probably stopped being useful long ago. At first he had avoided touching anything for fear of it being contaminated after all the talk he had overheard in other camps about radiation and sickness in the aftermath of the war but he quickly realized how soon he would die if he shunned every possible source of food and water. This water would keep him alive today, and that was all he could ask for.

The river had become the proverbial water-cooler of the new world. If he was going to see someone else, it was usually the water that brought them together. Necessity had scattered the remaining survivors throughout the countryside, but they tended to meet at shared sources of water, and would usually stop and talk for a while. Humans are social creatures, and even David, the hermit among hermits, had to admit he craved interaction when he saw another of his kind. They exchanged survival tips, shared what little news there was to be had, traded goods if they had any to spare. Every once in a while, word got around that someone had been found dead in their hut, usually because of a broken leg or some other obstacle to obtaining food or firewood on a daily basis. They might be mourned by the handful that knew them, but death had lost its power over the last survivors by now and the possessions they left behind garnered far more interest than their death. Living every day with the knowledge that everyone you once knew and loved was dead and that you walked a fine line between remembering them and meeting them in whatever lay beyond forced David to stop being afraid of his demise. To see it for what it really was: just a part of life, one last step. Really, hearing that someone had died just meant less competition in a dwindling world to most. Man had been on top for so long and given such little thought for his future, he had left little behind for the survivors.

Today he hoped to avoid running into anyone at the river. Usually a little human interaction and the chance to talk for a while was all anyone wanted. Sometimes they were hungry, and that hunger would turn itself into an invite to dinner, even at the risk of being killed by someone who had just caught a rabbit and had no intentions of sharing. David had never killed anyone, though. Not for that reason.