The Cellar: A Post-Apocalyptic Novella (2 page)

Arianna and Daren walked over to the middle of the village. The residents had already emerged from their shacks, which were slapped together from a collection of corrugated metal sheets, plywood, twigs, and tarp. At the center of the circle of shacks, two women busied themselves with a fire under a huge kettle. The rest had already gathered around as they waited for their meal. Daren saw the firelight dance on their faces with shadows going deep into each sunken cheek. It had been a while since they’d eaten anything and most of the villagers had their eyes fixed on Daren and his pack. At his mother’s instruction, he emptied his bag on a chopping block near the kettle. The twelve rats tumbled onto the scarred wood with their limbs splayed out. He swallowed when he heard a collective groan from the crowd. They were expecting a lot more.

“It’s all right everyone.” Arianna held up her hands. “We’ll find a way to stretch it.”

“Find a way to stretch it?” a woman blurted out. “How do you expect to do that? Those things barely have any meat on them.”

“Daren used to bring back a lot more than that before last week.” A man stood up and pointed at the rats. “The kid’s been slipping.”

Daren wanted to say something but couldn’t. The amount of prey he brought home
had
diminished as of late. Was it a coincidence that it started happening soon after Lara disappeared? It seemed that he had better luck hunting whenever she was around. He missed her in more ways than one.

“If that boy’s the only hunter we have left,” continued the man, looking around at the others, “then heaven help us all.”

Arianna shot a glare in his direction. The man sat down and avoided her eyes. She then looked at the rest of the villagers and raised her voice.
 

“Losing three hunters in one day is devastating, but we will all manage somehow. We’ve faced difficulties before, and we’ll find a way around this one.”

Low grumbles went around the campfire but no one actually protested. Most of them were too weakened from hunger to argue. Meanwhile, the village cook grabbed her cleaver and approached the chopping block. She made swift work of the rat corpses and tossed them into the boiling kettle. She then crumbled a piece of bark and scattered the pieces over the soup.

“You know that things are really bad,” Old Man Murphy piped up, “when we start using trees as seasoning.”

Daren watched as everyone got a bowl of diluted rat soup. Disappointment was etched into their faces as they searched for anything edible in their broth. Old Man Murphy stuck his finger into the soup and swirled it around. He fished out part of a rat’s tail and held it up as it dripped soup on the ground. He chuckled as if remembering a joke and brought the tail to his three remaining front teeth to nibble off the skin. A mother offered her own soup bowl to her four-year-old son, who grabbed it and gulped down its contents. He wiped the liquid dribbling down his chin and moaned that he was still hungry. The others finished their meals all too quickly and just stared blankly at the fire. The three deaths and the doom they heralded hung low and heavy over the gathering.

Daren realized he was the only one who stood between his people and starvation. Most of the twenty remaining villagers were too young, too old, or too sick to hunt. There were a few able bodied ones left but their job was to fight off the raiders. The village couldn’t risk them going too far afield to gather food. Gordon, Troy, and Rima’s deaths were a stark reminder of how dangerous that would be.

Daren hadn’t touched his food, and some villagers were already eyeing his bowl with longing. Even the boy who had eaten his mother’s share began to focus on Daren’s bowl as if the entire world had collapsed into that one solitary object. In another world, Daren would’ve caved in, stood up, and handed over the food to the boy. He would’ve gone to bed without supper just to see a child eat a proper meal. But in this world, the hunger had gnawed away his kindness.

The moment the boy lifted his hands to beg, Daren’s primal urges took hold. He brought the bowl to his mouth and gulped down all the skin, bones, and traces of fur. After slurping the residual sludge at the bottom, he lowered the bowl to look at the boy, whose sullen eyes stared right into his, awash with disappointment.

Daren stood up, tossed away the bowl, and stomped away from the gathering. What right did the boy have to make him feel guilty? The little brat had already deprived his mother of her food, and he had the gall to demand more. He wasn’t about to let a snotty little ingrate make him feel bad about not sharing.

But in the end, it’s really my fault
, Daren thought. No one should have to starve to death. He should’ve done more out there, tried harder to find more prey. He should never have returned home with such a paltry amount of game. He had failed the village.

He walked to the shack he shared with his mother and sat on the ground outside, his back against the shack’s side. With head bowed and knees to his chest, he closed his eyes and imagined what the villagers would look like in a few weeks. He saw them around the fire with their skin stretched taut over their bones, their joints almost poking through their flesh. How long would they wait before they gave up looking for rats and stripping off bark? How long before they began to eye their neighbors and lick their chops?

He had to think of something else. He had to focus on something wonderful to keep the horrid images from infesting his mind. So he allowed
himself to think of blazing red hair and emerald eyes.

He first met Lara several months before, when she had calmly strolled into his hunting grounds, making no effort to conceal herself. He should’ve driven her away. It was hard enough finding food without someone else muscling in on his territory. But he didn’t. Perhaps the desolation of a dying world made him yearn for company, and it gave him a strange comfort to know that in the barren expanse, another human wasn’t too far away. Or perhaps he simply found her pretty.

For many weeks afterwards, Lara had showed up in his territory regularly, but they’d given each other a wide berth. Then they had started talking to each other. It had started with a “hello” and “nice weather we’re having.” Soon they were sitting at a campfire, talking about life in their respective villages, sharing hunting tips, watching each other’s back. It was a great relief for Daren to be able to spend time with someone outside his village.

He remembered the cheeky smile Lara would flash whenever he would show her what he had caught, and the way she’d raise an eyebrow and smirk whenever she’d show him her superior catch. Hunting was never a duty whenever she was around. Some days he’d linger at hunting just so he could see her. But she was gone now, and he was bereft of reasons and goodbyes.

Where could she be? Could the raiders have gotten her? He dismissed the idea quickly, as if doing so would make it less likely. He considered other possibilities. Prey had been hard to come by lately, and both of them putting pressure on one hunting ground meant less game for each of them. What if she just decided to look for a better place to hunt? If that were true, she could have at least said something. But then again, why should she? Their closeness had its limits. Complete trust was too precious to give to an outsider. Nothing bound them together; nothing obliged her to inform him of her plans. He wasn’t her husband, her boyfriend, or even her friend, however much he wanted to be. The connection he thought he’d felt between them during those fire-lit evenings was likely nothing more than just two strangers keeping the loneliness at bay.

“Howdy, hope I’m not being a nuisance.”

Daren looked up to see an elderly, white-haired man hobble towards him. Old Man Murphy gripped his twisted walking stick and leaned most of his weight on it. He shuffled his way closer until he was standing over Daren.

“Did my mom ask you to talk to me?”

“Nope.” Murphy bent down slowly and took his place beside Daren. “She figured you wanted to be alone. I just wanted to make sure that was true.”

“She’s right,” Daren said. He was in no mood to open up to anyone.

“Well,” Murphy said, setting down his walking stick and rubbing his knees with his palms, “you should’ve said something before I sat down. With my joints the way they are, it’ll be a big to-do to get back up again.” He grabbed a piece of cloth from his pocket and coughed into it. It was a hacking, wheezing, geezer-like cough.

Daren groaned in irritation as he heard Murphy clear the gunk from his throat and flinched when a glob of phlegm hit the ground at his feet.

“You don’t have to get back up, Murphy.” He quickly shifted forward preparing to stand. “I’ll find some other place to be.”

Murphy grabbed Daren’s shirt and kept him in place. “Humor me, boy,” the old man grunted.

“Why are you here anyway?” Daren huffed sulkily.

Murphy didn’t answer straight away. He looked over in the distance at the other villagers gathered around the fire. They had begun to shuffle back to their dwellings. He picked up his twisted branch of a cane and pointed in their direction.

“Don’t ever think that you didn’t do everything you could for them.” Murphy shook his stick. “It takes guts to go out there and find something to feed those ingrates. You did the best with what you had.”

“I wanted to give Elsie’s boy my food,” Daren said with a grimace. “I wanted to be generous…but I couldn’t do it.”

“You wouldn’t have done that kid any favors by giving him your meal. You’d have gone hungry,
and what good is a starving hunter to the rest of the village? You need to keep your strength up.”

“What’s the use? Sooner or later we’re all going to die of hunger anyway.”

Daren waited for Murphy to contradict him. He wanted the oldest and wisest person in the village to tell him that he was wrong…that there was a way out of this mess.

“You make a good point, kid.” Murphy rested his head on the shack door. “The world’s dying, and there’s not much we can do about it. It can’t support us anymore.”

“You came here to cheer me up, right?” Daren turned to face Murphy. “I mean, that was the whole idea coming here, wasn’t it?”

Murphy merely grinned as he scratched the white stubbly mass on his chin. “I’d like to think that the world has the capacity to heal itself.” He looked up at the sky. “At least that’s how it used to be many years ago. Before The Event, the world was a lush, bountiful place with enough food for everyone. People used to live past eighty, if you could believe that. Now I’m almost fifty, and I’m the oldest damn creature this side of sundown.”

“The Event?” Daren said. “Isn’t that when the Unseen One smashed the earth with his fist to punish the sins of our ancestors?”

“So the story goes,” Murphy answered.

“You’d think he’d be done punishing us by now.”

“You remember those strange people who used to come over?” Murphy stared off into space. “The ones who called themselves prophets?”

Daren remembered the people wearing coats of multicolored fabric all meshed together. They claimed to dream about the future and warned people to repent before it was too late. “They’re the ones who kept talking about the Dark Days, when all the food would run out.”

“You still remember the sign that would foretell the end of days?” Murphy turned to look at Daren.

“A cloaked figure would appear,” Daren replied. “The Angel of Death would walk the earth…” He swallowed before he could continue, the mysterious events on his journey home coming suddenly to mind.

“For the final harvest of the damned,” the old man intoned.

Daren noticed how sunken Murphy’s eyes were and how much his cheekbones jutted out. It made him more aware of the skull lurking beneath the old man’s flesh.

“What if I told you that I saw the cloaked figure?” Murphy kept a level stare.

The hair on Daren’s neck stood up. A tingling feeling spread down his back and arms. The old man admitted to seeing the strange apparition, which probably meant Daren wasn’t imagining things. He felt like he was being dragged back into the dark corners of his childhood terrors.

“Murphy, if you’re joking, I swear I’ll—”

“I don’t joke, kid. Last night, I went outside the gate to take a piss when I saw it over by the trees. It had a hood over its head and it carried a sack.”

“Maybe it was just some traveler.”

“That’s what I thought,” Murphy continued. “But then I hollered out to the figure and, wouldn’t you know it, it moved like no human I’d ever seen.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Whoosh! Just like a spirit would. And”—he paused for effect—“it gave out a weird, greenish glow.”

A part of Daren wanted to hold on to the reality he was used to. He wanted the stories of the Unseen One and the Angel of Death to remain stories. He didn’t want them invading his world and wrenching away any control he may have over his fate.

“Maybe you were imagining things?” Daren asked with some hope. “Or maybe your eyes aren’t as good as they used to be.”

The old man thumped his stick on the ground. Dust flew up and curled in the air.

“I should’ve known better than to tell anyone about it!” The “t” sound made his mouth shoot a fine spray. “Everybody second guesses the old person!”

Murphy dug his cane into the earth and gripped it with both hands. He groaned as he tried to pull himself up. Daren could see that his knees were giving him trouble, so he reached out to help.

“I can manage on my own!” Murphy slapped his hand away. “Why don’t you bother some girls or do whatever it is boys do.”

Murphy hoisted himself up and trudged away, bent over and holding his lower back. Daren wanted so much to tell Murphy that he’d seen the figure, too. But he kept his mouth shut and just watched the old man hobble his way home. He wanted to believe it was just the gnawing hunger that was causing these hallucinations. And that all they needed was a little more food so they would stop seeing things.

⊕
 
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D
AREN
LAY
WIDE
AWAKE
. I
T
wasn’t because the wind had found its way to him through all the tiny gaps in the wall. Or because he slept on a rug covering bare earth. Or because the only thing shielding him from his mother’s snores was a thin sheet hanging between their sleeping areas. He couldn’t go back to sleep because of what he had dreamt.