The Light Inside the Dark

By fire light the face of the one I loved had jet black hair and cinnamon skin. Here in the dark, by the other light, her cheeks and button nose were crimson, yielding to yellow around the face and cooling to cobalt blue about the hair. All the colors of light were present inside the night though they painted a different portrait. Still there was a greater light. It was this daughter of the morning star who was the light inside the darkness.

We stood together on a hill overlooking the great city. It was a place for the dead and dying. Fires in the streets shone like searchlight to our eyes. The cries of lost souls as waves upon the sand touched our ears. There were still people here we could save. In the midst of this despair I felt a great joy. We had arrived in time. My wife understood how I felt. Wife? Perhaps I should say spouse. It is a different world now.

I watched the winds whip the hair about my lovers face. She had come to his place as an angel of mercy, or perhaps as a messiah, even though she could not save these people from their sins. Salvage, not salvation, was our mission. The body of humankind was like a fighter who had just received a tremendous left hook. It was down for the count, conscious, but incapable of action. It was left to us to throw in the towel.

I am by trade a professional grave robber. By grave robber I mean that I am, or was, an archeologist. Before the time of the blow up I was deep in the amazon basin of Brazil. There in the tropical rain forest I had discovered a Mayan style pyramid. What the hell it was doing there was anyone's guess. After months of digging I found that it built to contain the body of a god or goddess of eternal night. Apparently this deity scared the hell out the tomb builders. Everything I read said, here is bad ju ju stay the hell away. I didn't know what to think. This was no deity of the Mesoamerican pantheon that I was aware. I found the ambiguous references to the deity's gender curious as well as funding one entombed. Except for the great god Pan I never hear of a deity dying. In the center of the pyramid I found a majestic sarcophagus. With the help of a dozen Indians we barely managed to lift the stone cover off the burial crypt. When the cover was removed the Indians ran away in terror. It seemed that the interred was not quite dead. I would have run away myself but for the fact that it had grabbed me. You see I had misread the inscriptions. The pyramid was not a tomb. It was a prison. You might also say that something I disagreed with ate me. I got over it. Besides once I got to know it better I found that even deities can be the victims of bad press.

By the time my new companion made and I made our way back to the States it was no longer there. Most of the major cites had simply vanished, taking millions with them. The resultant fallout took millions more. With fall of civilization we were reintroduced to some old friends. Typhus, typhoid, and the plague came back to visit. Populations that had not been touched by the bombs or fallout were being obliterated by disease. That still was not the end of the horror.

It was nuclear winter.

Famine, the fourth horseman had yet to appear but it was surely coming. The extinction of the human race seemed inevitable. The only hope left was to convert them to our point of view. So we began our long march across the shadowlands that was once America making converts as we went. At first people were afraid us, which to be honest was a perfectly natural reaction. However, when word begun to spread, they began to come to us voluntarily. My spouse being of the old school was shocked by this turn of events. As I told her, we were the only game in town. There was no other alternative if one wanted to live. I could understand her feelings. After being cast as the bad guy for so long it was rather disconcerting to find oneself being the good guy. Humanity was dying but I had found a cure for the disease and it was smiling at me.

One had to be methodical in searching for survivors. They often turned up in the most unlikely places and you had to be very careful in making contact. Most people were extremely traumatized and had to dealt with gently. I could smell a young woman in a nearby drainage pipe. I sat down where she could see me. I knew she was there and she knew that I was aware of her. I have found that curiosity, given time will displace fear. Ah, my little rabbit is showing her face.

"Come out, I have some food for you. I am not going to hurt you. I am here to help."

"Are you with the Red Cross," she asked tentatively.

"No, but I'm doing the same job." I tossed the food towards her so she would not have to come out too far.

She crept out slowly, cautiously, and then pounced on the food.

"My teeth hurt," she said while chewing. "Is that bad?"

"It's not good. That is one of the symptoms of radiation sickness. Have any of your teeth fallen out?"

"No, but I think they might. Am I going to die?"

"You will if I don't get you back to my camp. We have a cure for radiation sickness."

"Will it hurt? Will any of my teeth fall out?"

"No, it won't hurt. In fact you will find that it feels quite pleasant. I've had the cure myself." I didn't lie to her because that was the truth-mostly. Well, she would lose a couple of teeth but they always grew back.

"Why is it always dark and cold?"

"It's called nuclear winter," I told her calmly. The bombs threw great quantities of dust into the upper atmosphere. It is going to be cold and dark for a long, long, time."

"How long?"

"Hard to say. Maybe a hundred years or so. Would you like to go to our camp? There are many people there who would be happy to meet you."

"Anything is better than sleeping in a pipe and I don't want to get sicker. You really have a cure for my sickness?"

"I promise that you will completely recover."

"I want to go."

"Lovely, take my hand. Our camp is not far from here."

She stumbled now and then and I had to help keep her steady.

"How can you see so well?"

"I have adapted to living I the dark. Very soon this will seem like daylight to you."

"I wouldn't believe you if you weren't getting around so well." She paused for a moment and looked at me.

"How did all of this happen?"

"I have heard many stories. The one that sounds most plausible to me is that one of the states that the Russian Federation was trying to hold on to got spiteful. They launched strategic missiles at major Russian cites and since we were allies of the Russians at us as well. That invited counter strikes from the U.S., and well, world war three was over before any of us knew it had started. I am not sure if that is the truth. I was an archeologist out on a dig in Brazil when it happened. I didn't have access to newspapers, television or radio. All I know is that when we came out of the jungle the war was over."

"We?"

"My mate and I."

"What were you digging?"

"A pyramid. That is where we met."

"Is she an archeologist also?"

"No, more of an anthropologist and has been for quite a long time."

"I notice that you say mate instead of wife. Are we talking about a woman. I mean its OK if it's a guy."

"She is female." That was the truth. Just not all of it.

"Did you find anything interesting? At the dig I mean?"

"Oh, yes. Indeed yes. I found a whole new way of life. One way of like ends and another begins. Survival of the fittest."

"That sounds like Darwin."

"You are a bright young woman. I am referring to Darwin. The human race is dying. Between the bombs, fallout and epidemics the bulk of humankind is already gone. No food crop can grow in this darkness so famine will dispose of the rest. The cold and the dark will make life as it is untenable. That is, except for the people you and I will rescue. I have rescued you and later you will rescue others."

"I don't understand."

"You will. My mate will explain it all to you. She has quite a way with words."

"I can see firelight."

"We're home."

"So many people! How many are here?" "About 900 I think. I was worried that we wouldn't make 500. You need at least 500 people to avoid excessive in-breeding. I believe that in the end we will have a few thousand survivors." "You have babies here!"

"Yes we have had a few new arrivals. In fact I am expecting my first child. Here come my mate. She likes to greet all the new arrivals."

"She is beautiful."

"It makes me feel humble that she choose me to be her companion. I am excited about our child. I think that I am going to have our next one. You have a good mind, maybe I'll let you be the father of my child."

"What the hell are you talking about Mister?" she said with some alarm.

"We're not human," I said calmly.

"Oh dear god, her teeth!"

I stepped behind her and wrapped my arms around her. "Shhh, be calm and don't struggle. It goes so much easier when you don't struggle." Of course she struggled they all do. My mate put her mouth to her throat in the ancient ritual of our people. "See it doesn't hurt. You will just go to sleep and when you wake up you will feel much better." After a few moments my mate looked up at me.

"You may have some of this."

"Why don't you finish. The baby."

"The baby is doing just fine. You don't have to pamper me. I heard what you said to this little flower."

"I keep forgetting that your ears are as sharp as your eyes."

"Always remember that and remember this. If anyone is going to give you a baby it is going to be me."

"Is that a promise?"

"Oh, yes."

Being born is never easy whether it is for the first or the second time. I like to be on hand to help when the newly changed awakened. I guess you could think of me as a weird sort of midwife. "God, my throat hurts. You slimy bastard!" I didn't take that personally. The newly changed often woke up in a bad mood. "Actually, I am closer to being a bitch at the moment.'

"What?"

"Here drink this."

"What is this stuff, blood?"

"No, it is red wine. Drink it down you need the iron."

"Am I some kind of vampire now."

"You are no longer human but you are no kind of vampire. There are no such things as vampires although that is one of the names that humans have given us. We have also been called werewolves, ghouls, demons, incubus and succubus."

"Incu, what?"

"The incubus and the succubus were demons that changed their sex. You are a charming young female but from now on, every other month, you are going to be a charming young male."

"I'm sorry but I don't understand."

You and I belong to an ancient species. While we are not human we are still flesh and blood people. We belong to a kindred that evolved eons before the human race when the world was a cold and a dark place. We were and still are a very long lived people. We were a good and happy race until nature dealt us a series of bad hands. The first disaster was the change in the atmosphere. A poison gas appeared."

"Poison gas?"

"Oxygen."

"Oxygen a poison gas?"

"It was to us. The word at that time had a complete ecology that did not depend on oxygen. That ecology was extinguished. We are the only survivors of that time because we had the technology to adapt our physiology to the new environment. But where we had once numbered in the billions our population only numbered in the millions. On the heels of that the second disaster struck. The earth was enveloped by clouds in those days. The time came though when they parted and unfiltered sunlight shone upon the world. Millions died immediately and our civilization collapsed. Again we picked up the pieces of our lives and went on. We became nocturnal and rebuilt our lives with some success. Then the third disaster came."

"What was it, volcanoes, earthquakes?"

"A new vicious race evolved that could live in the sunlight. They systematically hunted us down in a calculated process of extermination."

"What were they called?"

"Homo Sapiens."

"We tried to wipe out that race."

"No dear they did. We are not human beings."

"I forgot. What happened after that?"

"The last great change. We had managed to recover some of our technology. I don't know what our original form was I can only assume that we did not look like human being. Hell, we may not have even been humanoid but we used our technology in one last ditch effort to survive. We assumed the form of the human being. In that way we could hide in plain sight. So within limits we became human like. We scattered to the four winds and became nomads hiding and surviving as best we could."

"Within limits?"

"We couldn't change our sexual nature. You have noticed that none of us look particularly male or female?"

"Yes I have. I wondered whether you were a man or woman when I first saw you. You acted like a man so I assumed you were."

"Force of habit. We are cyclical hermaphrodites. We change sex from one lunar month to the next. That gives you a whole new slant on social relationships."

"What about the blood drinking and the changing."

"Those are really two separate issues. The blood drinking has a simple explanation. We have a very strong need for iron and blood supplies that need. We have the advantage that we can survive on small amounts of food. What a human would need for a day will keep us for a month. I am talking about normal regular food here."

"I was wondering about that," she said with relief. "The bite that changes life, however, is an odd quirk of evolution. As I have said we are a longed lived race so we don't have many children at any given time. somewhere in our evolutionary history we developed the ability to adopt humans into our race. Something in our blood, a virus perhaps, changes a human into one of us. If we had not developed that ability we would have gone extinct a long time ago. So there you have it. We have come full circle. We were born in the cold and dark and we are reborn in the cold and dark. We have our old enemy to thank for that. The stupidity of the human animal has given us back our lives."

"But who are we ?"

"I don't know. You and I shall both have to find that out. Now go on outside and get to know your new companions," I said shooing her outside. I had been up for twenty-four hours and was tired. It was time for me to turn in.

"How did it go with the new one?" asked my mate as I entered the bedroom.

"She woke up in a nasty temper but adjusted quickly enough."

"Just like you."

"I resemble that remark."

"I could bite you when you make bad jokes like that."

"Please do."

"You are shameless."

"You made me that way," I said holding her close to me.

"I only made you one of us. Everything else is your own. I heard most of your conversation with the new one and I have to ask the same question. Who are we? You know as well as I do that there is practically nothing left of the old civilization."

"This is a new beginning for us. We shall have to reinvent ourselves."

"Did you tell her about the ice?"

"No, I am postponing telling anyone about that. I want them to enjoy their new lives for a while. The ice will come soon enough. Have you received any new reports?"

"Yes, the glaciers have moved a mile in the past six months."

"Damn, I didn't think it was possible for them to move that fast."

"How long do you think we have?"

"At that speed we will see them here within the next fifty years."

"That soon. Where shall we go?"

In the so called great ice age glaciers covered about thirty-five per cent of North America. What is coming well dwarf that. It will be immense. The glaciers may push us as far south as Mexico. We are tough and adaptable but we are going to be pushed to the very limits of our endurance. Even we are going to have to build snug houses and build fires to keep warm."

"Cold has never bothered me before. I can't imagine it."

"We will survive the cold just as we will find a way to survive the sunlight when it comes back. Who know, maybe we will find a way to live in it."

"Now you are talking perversion."

"Perversion! I'll show you some perversion, my goddesses."

"Animal. Wait until I have you on the receiving end," she giggled.

"I can hardly wait," I replied.

Humanity lies in the long dead past. We seldom if ever speak of them anymore. The ice is very close now and soon we will be forced to leave our homes. I would like to stay here longer but the gigantic mountains of advancing ice give us no choice. The climate is now like Siberia in the middle of a particularly nasty winter. We have to dress like Eskimos to stay warm. I don't think it will get much colder but I cannot be sure. Arctic birds and mammals are thriving in the new climate and sea life seems to be unaffected. Life on planet earth is more hardy than I gave it credit for.

The past few decades have been happy ones for us in spite of the struggle to survive. More children than I could have hoped for have been born. My own first born has become a great asset to our community. That one is a good kid even though it is something of a heartbreaker. I will be glad when s/he decides to settle down. Its sibling will be born anytime now or at least I hope so. I am tired of being pregnant. I thought I was a nervous father but my mate is twice as nervous as I was. She always complained that I pampered her too much during her pregnancy. Now that I am in mine I can't get him to leave me alone.

As I write this a line from David Copperfield comes to mind. He asked himself if he would be the hero of his own life. That is also a question that a people must ask themselves and whatever answer is returned reveals the measure of their heart. I ask myself what is our answer to that question. I think, in the end, we will be the heroes of our own lives.

E-mail: tallent@earthlink.net

Visit Aphelion's Lettercolumn and voice your opinion of this story. Both the writer and I would love to read your feedback.

Return to the Aphelion main page.