At the End

Jared Nash’s eyes popped wide open. Although there was little light, he was able to make out things around him well enough. He did not move right away. He wasn’t sure at first that he could. Scanning his surroundings slowly, he observed the world outside himself with mild but long familiar trepidation.

It was a stark, dark place. Eerily quiet with just a faint, faint whisper of a tepid breeze. A narrow dirt road led off to his right between stands of thin, ash-gray trees. The road and the ground beyond it and below the trees seemed to be made of the same gray ash. It was a world nearly absent of color.

The sky above was more of the same. Dark and gray. Not really sky at all but cloud cover. Gray clouds hovered, like a low-lying layer of ash. Ash borne aloft from the barren soil below or dropped down from some unseen source somewhere far out in the darkness beyond where the clouds now hovered. Ash nearly choking out the ambient light and air.

Nash struggled to breathe in the particulate-laden atmosphere but that came as no surprise to him, no more so than discovering that the world was anything other than the gray, soot-colored and covered entity that it was. Things were as they were. That they were not something else no longer concerned him.

As he remained unmoving, back against some solid object – surely a tree, like the many others around – he began to intuit a course of action. He understood, why he wasn’t sure, that he would have to begin to move, and shortly.

He felt his once strong and muscular legs through black camouflage pants. He flexed once thick arms, moved his once powerful shoulders, felt a heavy pack on his back. Silently he pushed himself to a standing position. It felt good to be upright. He waited for what the next sign – impulse – would be.

His mind cleared as he stood. He remembered that there was no one else. The others had slowly disappeared from the days of his youth until one day he found himself alone. He had been alone now so long that he sometimes didn’t even think of the others.

Each day was taken up with the simple task of staying alive. As the others had faded out, certain larger animals had appeared and they often threatened him. Although of late even their numbers had vastly decreased. Decreased as it had become harder to breathe, harder to find clean water, harder to find anything to eat.

Sometimes when he found a safe place to rest, a dark cave or a thicket of dead and dying trees, he could still recall the time before when there was a sky above with one orb at day another at night. There had been adequate, if difficult to find, amounts of food and water, and there were others.

At unbidden times he did think of the others. He had last glimpsed one perhaps two or three years before. They had aimed their weapons at each other. They remained at a standoff for what seemed like an hour, then went their separate ways. No one else since that time.

When he slept, he infrequently dreamed of the others and when awake tried to remember them. There was some vague image of people older than himself, and children, and a woman. The woman was still there in his memory. On rare occasions he could see her in his mind’s eye, smell the sweetness of her breath, the warmth of her supportive body. But that was long ago now. There was little from that time remaining. And what was left was dying.

As he roamed the mostly dead land, he often found decaying buildings covered in vegetation. In times before he had hoped to find others among the corroding, crumbling structures but he never saw anything more than an occasional bird or rodent. Now he seldom saw those.

He no longer searched for others, felt that there was no one else. No need to seek them out because they were no longer there. It was just him. He was the last one. But it didn’t matter. He wasn’t lonely. Each day it became grayer, darker, more ash to breathe in. He concentrated on breathing, finding water and anything to eat.

The weather was mostly bad and deteriorating. There were powerful storms. Terribly violent with winds that easily uprooted trees and rain falling almost horizontally and stinging the eyes and bare skin. Sometimes he longed to see the sun again, or better yet a huge full moon. He especially remembered one of those from when he was a child. Maybe if he climbed high enough he could get above the ash clouds and breathe cleaner air and see the sky once more.

Before him stretched a wide plain. Even though the ash in the air made distance sight difficult, he could see a tall mountain across the plain, its peak hidden beneath dirty clouds. He adjusted his backpack and headed straight for it.

Halfway across, he found a small rivulet of water running for a few feet above ground before disappearing back into the barren soil. Ashes flowed atop the stream but he cleared them as best he could and lowered his battered canteen in, filling it to the top. He drank some of the brackish water and bent to refill the canteen when he heard a noise.

Something was just over a small rise in the ground by the partial stream and it had made a grunting sound. He screwed the cap back on the canteen and secured it in the backpack. Slowly drawing his 1911 Colt .45 caliber pistol from its holster, he chambered a round and listened. The grunting was coming closer.

Suddenly, over the rise to his left a large boar hog came barreling out of the gray countryside. Nash dove to the right as the beast roared by him sliding on the ashy ground and skidding across the little stream. When the animal regained its footing, it turned, stopped and pawed at the ground. Snorting and shaking its head from side to side it prepared for another run.

Nash lined up a shot right at the boar’s brain pan. Just as it prepared to charge, he fired, hitting it directly in the center of its head. Blood and bone flew in all directions and the animal stopped, stunned. In a few moments, it regained enough of its senses to make another rush but a second round blew the remaining bone away and blew its brains to pieces. It fell where it stood, lifeless.

Holstering the .45, Nash took his serrated, thick-bladed knife and did a fast field dressing of the boar. Breathing heavily in the dense air, he saved only the good meat he could salvage from the pig and left the rest to whatever, if anything, that might scavenge it. He would wait to eat when he reached the other side of the plain.

By the time he reached the mountain base, it was mid-afternoon and he was tired and hungry. He made a quick fire and cooked a thick slice of pig meat to give him the energy for the climb ahead. The meat was stringy and tough but gave him the strength he needed for the mountain.

The trail up the mountain was rocky and uneven and hard to follow in the heavy ash fog surrounding it. The climb was exhausting and with each passing hour breathing became more and more difficult. His heart pounded and his chest hurt. But he pushed on. He wanted only to reach the top, to possibly breathe cleaner air, to see the great disc that was called the moon.

Finally, an hour or two after dark, he noticed that he could breathe just a bit better, that the cloud around the mountain was thinning, fading away. Then, panting and struggling under the weight of his pack, he at last walked into a clearing so light he could make out individual stones and formations on top of the mountain. He paused for a moment and was racked by a coughing fit. His chest felt tighter than before and he stumbled to one knee. He felt the strength ebb from his body and lay down on the rocky ground.

Lying there, he knew he was close to the end but when he turned on his side he could see part of the moon and knew he had to go on. Pulling himself up, he found an outcropping of rocks at the edge of the clearing and climbed out onto it. He took off his pack and leaned back against a heavy boulder.

He took a deep breath and savored the oxygen still there at that height. He sipped water from the canteen and looked up into the sky. The moon had risen and it was full, blanketing him in a cold, yellow light. He smiled and was racked again with coughing. The time was near but the moon was massive and seemed so close he might reach out and touch it.

Despite the moon’s brightness, it was growing darker and he felt the need to rest. He pressed his back against the large boulder for support and took one last look at the moon. It was so beautiful and powerful, had shone down on primitive beasts and early cavemen alike. Had left countless others before him with a sense of its humbling power and beauty, of its near eternal presence above.

Through closing eyes, he admired it once more, let its majesty fill his fading soul, absorb its last bit of energy. A small smile played at the edges of his mouth. His hands dropped at his sides. All was silence, the earth was still.

THE END

Bio: Author J. B. Hogan has published over 300 stories and poems and eleven books, including Bar Harbor, Bounty Riders, Time and Time Again, Mexican Skies, Tin Hollow, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Rubicon, Fallen, The Apostate, and Angels in the Ozarks (nonfiction, local professional baseball history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

E-mail: J. B. Hogan

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