When Gods Fail

***~~~***

When Gods Fail

By Nelson Lowhim

Copyright 2012 Nelson Lowhim

Eiso Publishing

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents:

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

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This is a work of fiction. All
characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance
to real people, living or dead or otherwise, is purely
coincidental.

***~~~***

I'd been stuck in the cave for weeks. Months
perhaps. Wasn't my fault. I planned to spend a little more than a
week in these caves, south of Portland, exploring new routes.

Then the earthquakes hit.

Stalactites fell from the ceiling above me.
One crushed my watch as I protected my head with my hands. Then the
slide started. I thought of running back up the route I'd just come
down, but dirt and rocks filled up my route up faster than I could
think, and I watched as my only way out was blocked.

I screamed, prayed to be saved, but after a
few hours I knew it was up to me to get out. Rationing out my food,
I thanked the Lord that there was a running creek where I was
trapped, and started to dig my way out.

I thought about what Carol would say if she
found out what happened. She'd probably ban my hobby. She never did
like it. I couldn't blame her. After a few days, when the cup I'd
been using to scoop dirt broke, I resorted to using my fingers. I
dug until my forearms knotted up and my fingers couldn't move. My
fingernails loosened. Failure seemed so close.

Food was running low when I finally felt the
dirt and rocks give way. I punched through to the other side and
widened the hole.

I came out in the mouth of the cave. It was a
room-sized, ball-shaped hall that led up to the cave's entrance on
the side of a hill. I expected Carol to be waiting for me. After
all, I was late, by several weeks, and she usually overreacted to
everything. But there was no one. I didn't think much of it, until
I climbed out of the entrance.

At this point my stomach grumbled for food,
and I felt weak. I looked forward to eating the energy bars on the
dashboard of my car. That's why when I saw that all the trees were
gone—nothing but a few stumps and a coat of ashes—I couldn't
comprehend what lay before me. My guts twisted into a knot. I
looked to where my car should have been parked, but there was
nothing. I doubled checked the cave entrance. It was the right one.
No doubt about that. The slope of the hill that tongued out of the
cave entrance was the same shape and angle as I remembered. The
outline of the hills and mountains around me also seemed right,
except there wasn't a tree to be seen—though who really memorizes
such things?

A forest fire?

Certainly conditions had been getting drier
recently. That meant an accidental spark could have set this all
off. How sad that such a magnificent forest had been destroyed. I
shook my head. Carol might not be able to get out here, the place
could be closed down, or worse yet, she could be mourning my
death.

On my map, I made out the nearest town. I
could make it there before nightfall and hopefully find a phone to
call Carol. I thought of how she rested her head on my chest, how
it hurt to see her cry. I shuddered.

I walked for what seemed to be hours. I
couldn't tell where the sun was because of a thick coating of
clouds, but it seemed to be midday when I started. Nevertheless, as
I walked through the ashes I noticed there was no burned wood
smell. There really wasn't a smell, just clean air. No insects
either. And, though I was certain it couldn't have been past August
at the latest, it was bone-chattering cold. You would think that
having been in a damp cave would have prepared me, but I was
shivering by the time I saw the shipping container. It was located
in an odd place, but I welcomed the sign of humanity.

I prayed that there was someone here, because
I didn’t have the energy for another push over the small hill
behind the container. I regretted leaving the cool waters of the
cave. Never imagined I would want to go back there.

I leaned on the container catching my breath.
I jerked back when I heard a voice. It was distant, as if the
container had a belly somewhere beneath the ground. I rubbed my
skin. It felt as if it had been burned in a full day of sun at the
beach. I looked up, no way; it was dark and cold.

The voice tickled my ears again. It growled
one more time. I heard the distinctive fricatives and vowels of a
man. I examined the shipping container. The door to the container
was not locked, so I considered walking in. Perhaps not. I wasn’t
certain of my precise location, but I was surely in rural Oregon.
Which meant I could be infringing on someone's property without
knowing it. Whatever had happened, however big the forest fire was,
the people here probably wouldn’t take too kindly to city folk. I
would have to be nice and polite.

I knocked. The voice stopped. I waited, but
nothing moved. I knocked again, this time louder. There was some
movement, steps and the door moved slightly. My heart started to
beat faster; it would be good to see another human.

“
Hey, shit head.”

I looked up and saw a man with a shotgun
pointed at me. He was large, held the shotgun with one hand, and
looked like he could fire it stiff-armed. His face was covered with
an uneven bristle of dark brown hair, and his skin, though young,
sagged with the signs of a man recently emaciated.

“
Uhhh, hi,” I said and
raised my hands. “Don’t mean to be trespassing on your property,
sir, but do you have a phone or some food and water—”

His face broke into a sneer.

“
I didn’t mean to come here,
on your property. I didn’t see any signs, and I haven’t eaten for
days. So I...” I stopped. His face contorted into a half smile. I
thought that perhaps I should have introduced myself. If I just got
the chance to call Carol, my wife, I could get out of here. But I
needed to get to a phone. “I’m Tom, I...”

He squinted at me, seemed to be looking over
my body for something. Between his hard looks, I could sense a kind
of kindness, kinship.

The man took another moment to stare at me,
then jerked and looked all around him, as if he were expecting a
horde to come at him. In fact he looked around for so long, his
eyes piercing every rock in the distance, that I was certain he was
scared for his life. Then I thought that they must have been
moonshine men, or worse, meth cookers. That would explain why he
was so jittery. And if that was the truth I was in trouble. I got
light-headed. Was this going to end well?

"Please," I said, exasperated that he was
just staring at me like an animal.

He seemed to sense my inner plea. “Bill," he
said and nodded his head, "pleased to meet you.” He placed the
shotgun beside him and reached out his hand. I shook it.

“
Tom. Pleased to meet you.
Once again I’m sorry about trespassing on...”

“
You really aren’t kiddin’
are you?” he asked with an odd expression on his face.

I looked at him. “About the trespassing?” He
seemed nice, or at least willing to help.

“
There is no trespassing
nowadays.” He stopped to look at the horizon. “Maybe territories,
but who knows?”

“
Like gangs?” I asked. With
meth raging the countryside it made sense.

He laughed at my insinuation. “Yeah, like
gangs,” he said.

“
Do you have a phone, some
food, maybe water? Really, I haven’t eaten all that much for
ages.”

Again he gave me that look. “No one has. You
really aren’t kidding about the phone are you?”

I couldn't see his point. Perhaps he was
poor. If he didn’t have a phone what was I to do? “You don’t have a
phone? Because if it’s money I’ll give my wife a call, and we’ll
reimburse you. Really, I need...”

He raised his hand to indicate that he didn’t
want to hear anymore. “Where does your wife live?”

“
Portland, she can be here
in an hour and we’ll give you some money.”

I stopped because he was shaking his head,
not at me but at something else that seemed to be tearing through
his mind.

"You certain this isn't a joke?" he asked,
staring at my eyes like I would reveal something to him.

I glanced at him, some anger boiling up. "Am
I kidding? Are you?" I tried to tone my voice down, but something
inside me wanted to scream. I took a deep breath and took my eyes
off him. Another look at the shipping container, and I noticed that
all the paint had flaked off and settled on the ground. It must
have been old. What was he doing living here? Meth might not have
been the answer, though perhaps the chemicals did this to the
container.

“
Where have you been the
last few months, buddy?” he said.

I hesitated, perhaps he would hate a hiker,
but I'd no choice. “I was spelunking and man... some earthquakes
started to shake up the ground, and wouldn’t you know it but I got
trapped.” I shook my head, and could see Bill shaking his too. Then
he started to laugh.

“
So you’ve been under a rock
huh?” He shook his head in amazement, leaned his head back, and
roared out a laugh.

“
Yeah,” I said and smiled
politely. “Luckily, I'd enough food to ration while I dug myself
out, but I ran out a few days ago. I got out and I walked until I
got here. I guess there was a forest fire here? How’d it
start?”

"You really aren't kidding," he said and
laughed again. At this point, I realized that I could smell him.
Body odor, shit, old food. Smelled him very well. I also remembered
that I hadn’t been able to smell anything else. As if the air was a
vacuum; no smell of ashes—which is what I should have smelled after
a forest fire—just pure air. I looked around again and thought that
it was odd that not a single plane in the sky had come over in a
while. My eyes rested back on Bill. He looked at me with
concern.

“
You better come in buddy,
you’re not going to like what I tell you,” he said and reached out
his hand.

I wasn’t certain if I should go with him.

“
I can use your
phone?”

He shook his head. “Sorry bud, there are no
phones. Well, ones that work at least.”

He spoke with such a mournful voice that I
felt bad for assuming he had one. Perhaps I was being too cocky.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean any offense. Then some food perhaps, and you
can tell me where to get to a payphone?”

“
Don’t know about the food,
but... you don’t get it do you?” he said.

I didn’t like this. “No,
I
don’t
get
it.”

He smiled. “There are no phones anywhere.
Phones need a network to work; there are no more networks. Get
it?”

“
The networks? The cell
phones?”

“
Cell towers, satellites,
land lines. All. Gone. Got it?”

“
You mean in the area, from
the fire?”

“
Bud, that was no fire.
Those weren’t earthquakes you felt,” he said and raised his
eyebrows emphatically.

“
No fire,” I said. Perhaps I
had come out the wrong hole, mistaken it for the place I had
entered and come out near the desert area of Oregon. Perhaps that
was what he meant. No, I had seen some burned stumps. I raised my
hands, exasperated. “Okay I give up, what do you mean?”

“
War, bud. They, we,
everyone went to war. Your wife, if she was in Portland, she's
probably dead. All cities got nailed. Not that it mattered; every
square inch of land on the planet was covered. The radiation
fallout killed anyone who was left. Well most anyone,” he looked
back out over the land.

I felt everything spinning, and wondered if
the hunger was finally getting to me. No way was I going to pass
out to some stupid prank, but some part of my brain swallowed the
story whole. The smell, the silence, in a part of Oregon that was
never this quiet, all added up. I'd seen other forest fires before,
and the beautiful thing about those was plants would start growing
immediately after. There was nothing here, not a green weed to be
seen, or an animal or insect alive. My heart dropped. Oh Carol. I
started to dry heave.