Ain't Talkin'

By the end of the day Roche was deep into the wooded lands southwest of Carson City.

Half a dozen wastelanders had followed him for some hours, their bare feet plodding along the highway pavement under the beating sun. Whenever Roche eyed back over his shoulder they would hide behind rundown vehicles or in ditches.

Just kids.

Kids with no homes and no families. Too often they were born into being wastelanders with no chance of ever getting out. Some made their way to larger cities and walled refuges. Some joined bands of roving mercenaries as ammunition carriers or servants. Some fell quickly into prostitution, thinking that if they made enough coin they could get back out of the life and go somewhere nice.

They were hopeless cases mostly. Some made it, Roche was sure, not that it mattered in the big scheme. The world turned onward. Men died, women died, children died and the aftermath of the catastrophe continued to erode at the fabric of things. In the end there would be less nothing than there was now. . .and Roche scanned the hills around him along the 50 and saw a whole lot of nothing.

He was making good time. His mind had blinked in and out of the white, and he knew that the minute holes sometimes appeared and disappeared seemingly at a whim. Little lapses in the here and there. Most folks didn’t notice them at all, but the walkers were more susceptible than most.

Roche had the strangest feeling that he had missed a day somewhere in the last three. That a whole 24 hours had picked itself under his fingernails and just as quickly cleaned itself out before he’d ever noticed there was anything there to wipe out from under the edges.

Yet he was farther down the 50 than he ought to have been. Lucky plodded along beneath him, mostly walking but adjusting to a light trot on the roads downswings and cantering when she caught an even straightaway of road. She wasn’t fatigued enough to have gone all night. It didn’t make sense. But, whatever did anymore was more frightening than the shit that didn’t.

The thick-trunked old pines that stretched away on the hills to the north and south of the road were grasping at the undercarriage of the sky. Needleless and scorched by the wind and the sun Roche could see for miles between them. In intermittent fires and over the years of the trees being cut for building their numbers had thinned dramatically. Roche wouldn’t have known except for the stumps.

Here and there a sprightly little shit would eke itself out of the dusty earth and make a chance at life, all bright green needles and wispy branches. By the time the leftover radiation that seeped through the soil and the unforgiving sun beat it back to hell the tree was little more than dried twigs.

Didn’t matter. Mankind had fucked nature beyond repair long before the catastrophe if you listened to the stories and read the old books. The ether blast that had ripped the universe a new one had only been icing on an apocalyptic cake.

People said the planet, Terra 1 at least, was closer to the sun now. Not much, a few miles at the most, but enough that the star had burned the world’s surface to the point of overcooked.

Roche rode on through the streams of dust and the cadavers of once mighty trees, almost thinking twice before he tossed his finished cigarette, still barely lit, off to one side. But a forest fire wouldn’t have been the biggest of the world’s problems right now. Not by the longest shot ever taken.

Roche patted Lucky on the neck and tossed the cigarette.

“Be ready to run a marathon if that catches.”

Lucky whinnied and trotted on, understanding.