The End

By D.M. Ritchey

“Just as well,” he said to himself.  “Civilizations come and go.”  Mimms admitted to himself that he didn’t much like the human race.  Nor himself.  But how many people had liked themselves?  And it sounded phony, what he’d just muttered, civilizations come and go, like some academic’s sound bite, and Mimms knew it was for the bravado effect, to help him along.  But it was true.  The future is the past.  Mimms was thinking now that if he got through this he would help build a new type of man, one who could avoid these cycles of construction and annihilation.

Sounds were rare but each one froze him.  There were marauders.  And then he was thinking that this prolonged stillness must be affecting him, but not so much as yesterday.  His dormant senses must be reviving.  He was picking up new signals.  There now, a squirrel moving carefully through the highest part of a tree, far out of sight.  He heard it.  There now, a twig floating down, removed by the wind, down to tap the dried leaves on the forest floor.  This was change.  He would change by this fear.  It would sharpen him out from what he had been, a species of the urban type, to what he must become.  And he would change.  This, too, is the cycle.  He would teach others, if Fate willed it, and they would beat the cycle.  With that, he picked up his pace across the mountain.  Later, at a rest, Mimms took out his compass, looked northwest, projecting his imagination along the topograph in his mind’s eye, projecting his imagination over the mountains.  He was looking for sanctuary.  Where could it be?  Was it here?  These mountains were closing in on him.  There were shadows, ravines that dropped down out of sight into tangles, spiked by rocks.  The Sun often did not penetrate to the ground.  Again he thought of turning back, thinking there must be survivors back east.  Of course there were.  But what kind of people were they?  And what of the ones ahead?  And that set his thoughts back to the old days, and he remembered living on the East Coast.  What the monster cities were like.  Living there had been a sort of death a long time before the end.  He admitted that to himself now.  Personal space had shrunk to small that many people were demented, though they did not know it.  Some people tried bravely, commendably, to maintain civility, to pretend not to notice the direction society was going.  The cost of living was going up and up and the government had refused to reduce immigration.  It seemed there was no chance for the common man to escape, not without a huge amount of cash.  The common man, the poor man, was trapped.  And now Mimms was seeing these mountains through a different lens.

Remembering the old days, he realized what had been bothering him all the while about these mountains, something beyond the desolation, or connected with it.  Where were the houses?  He had seen a few, way back around the base of the first mountain.  They had appeared to be abandoned, but that was beside the point.  There should have been more.  There should be some up here, even here, and he was wondering now that he hadn’t crossed private roads.  There should be more roads up here; in fact he hadn’t encountered one yet.  Nor had he heard dogs barking.  He was miles from the last road he knew of now, and so far as he could tell, miles from any human mark.  He was not even sure he was on a path at all.   This forest was so dim that he wondered if he was imagining a path, and how long he had been imagining it.  He went on up and broke into a thermocline.  Instantly the temperature dropped ten degrees, maybe more.  It was near freezing and he knew the night would be rough.  Now he was grateful for the extra blanket in his ruck, heavy and bulky though it was.  He looked at the sky, as much as could be seen through the canopy, seeing level, dark clouds.  So maybe snow tonight.  A bit farther on a gentle wind started that broke the air that had been still a while, stirring the brittle fingers of the dormant branches.  Mimms heard it better today, much better, and other sounds—of the day animals going into hide, and the night animals coming out.

And the fog came in.  Or mist.  He didn’t know the difference.  He kept on the “path” as well as he could but the whiteness was swallowing the light, yes, that was it, he decided, the fog was eating the light.  Things seemed to be pulsing; but that was only the pain in his eyes from trying to focus in the whiteout.  He didn’t know fog from mist, no.  He was a city guy and fog is fog and you don’t turn on your high beams.  He was seeing nothing at all now above him, just whiteness, and up close he could see the ice crystals drifting past. It was getting on dark now and he was desperately tired and he nearly stopped to pick out a hole to sleep in, but then he remembered the valley.  And he was not far away enough yet, and with the valley in mind he pushed on into the whiteness and the darkness that was coming in behind it.

Later he encountered roads, very old roads.  Some he thought were wagon roads, and that automobiles had never traveled on them.  Three or four hours, and he stopped to rest.  He had not seen the valley today, that last valley.  So far in his flight he could have looked back from any situation and see parts of it, back through the trees and declivities of terrain.  But no more.  He felt relieved.  He started up again, and on his next switchback he encountered an erosion run.  A very large tree had fallen; its root system and disrupted the drainage patter and so this fresh gouge in the earth.  Large stones had slid out of their places.   He noticed an odd shape, a butterfly-shaped object.  He stopped to examine it, thinking it an odd fragment of rock.  But when he prodded it out he saw it was an axe head, a large double-bladed axe, very old.  The wood had rotted out of the eye.  Mimms turned it over, feeling a strange exhilaration, the mystery of an artifact.  He thought he saw writing, or a symbol, deep under the discoloration from the soil and rust.  He could not read it.  He scraped it a few times with his knife, but it did not reveal itself.  He figured it was the stamp of the timber company who owned it.  Mimms felt a sort of assurance, maybe power.  He clutched it between his palms, debating what to do.  It was heavy, and he certainly did not want to add it to his rucksack.  Like any greenhorn in the mountains he was carrying too much, and the load was nearly breaking him down.  But he hefted the axe head again, and stowed it away.

That evening he made another fireless camp.  It had been a hard day of monotonous climbing, descending.  He slept in a laurel thick, a deer hide.  In the morning he huddled and took out his map.  It was over forty years old, the data gathered by an air force that probably no longer existed.  Mimms had crossed one power line but did not see it on his map.  Here was one less reference for him.  But he would figure out where he was, roughly; he was pretty good at that.  He oriented the map to his compass, working out a northwest direction through the brain-folds of the earth.  It was very difficult to keep anywhere near the direction he wanted.  The mountains and valleys ran from southwest to northeast.  He had worked out three days worth of hiking now, a course that headed his way, but it would require miles of zig-zagging to use natural passes.  He looked more closely.  He was thinking about Man; after 150 years with his earth-moving equipment, his explosives, he still had not reached through here.  Mimms thought, if he wanted to reach Lake Erie he had to cut his own course most of the way, until he came down to the flatter lands.  There he could follow roads.  Sooner or later he would have to, no matter the risks.  Sooner or later he would hit an inhabited valley.  He might find an automobile.  The villages marked on his map might be gone, or evacuated.  This used to be timber country.  Timber towns came and went, like mining towns.  But if he found the right road, and a car, he could simply drive to Canada, like in the old days.  Maybe petrol would be available and he could get all the way to Canada.  He would skirt Erie city and work his way north.  There, he figured, the cold climate would have suppressed disease and discourage refugees from coming.  The St. Lawrence River, the lakes, were natural barriers.  Maybe the Canadians and upstaters had formed militias and were guarding the bridges.  Or maybe he could cross over on ice.  Mimms balanced compass and map.  There, two valleys over from where he thought he was now, and old county road snaking along the creek.  That was his goal.  He would follow that until he hit a bigger road—this one, his finger shot left two inches—and follow that, and so on.  He doubted he could make that little road today, but by noon tomorrow for sure.   Mimms felt very worn down.  It was impossible to sleep well in the forest, and think of it now, in the end times, and you are hunted....  But still Mimms felt confident he would get there and walk along that road. Maybe he’d find a vehicle.  (“Wouldn’t that be nice!”)  Or maybe someone would offer him a ride, or shelter, and advise him.  Or maybe someone would shoot him.  If marauders came he could dive into the timber and run like hell.  He wished he had a powerful rifle.

In this pre-dawn he set off after his breakfast of peanuts and water.  Later he would eat the last of the canned meat he had taken from that little store in the valley.  Then what?  What if he didn’t find food below?  Well, come down he must, and let Fate take him along.  He came up to the first ridge, crossed down.  Little sunlight here.  The gloom and silence brought back memories of his family and friends.  The end, the awful, paralyzing fear you felt in mass disorder.  The mobs hurling themselves like insane beasts, looking for safety, food.  There was nowhere to go.  The lethal government forces who met them.  Now his heart was pounding.  Was this the end for him?  Would his heart stop?  To die this way did not much bother him.  He’d rather not be alone, but still, it was better to go here, die on one’s feet in the mountains.  There was dignity in it, a recovered tone of the hunting animal.   Better here than the common way in the old days, in a hospital bed for costs that would bankrupt your family, with a tube up your ass, watching television.   Mimms stood there captured by his rebelling hear, waiting to sink and die, but it never came.  He sat, still thinking about those last days. Yes, he had prepared himself and his family.  He had told them what might happen and what they would do.  He had purchased supplies and a few things necessary to escape.  But it was impossible to cover everything when all you had were abstractions and mostly rumors, or faint contact with conditions outside your area.  The city man lives in a bubble of sorts.  He had not considered mountain problems.  No, it had all been about automobiles, and roads, or walking down roads.  That’s where his head had been, and so had everyone else’s, that’s the way they thought.

“This is like Hades,” he thought, looking around.  “This is like Hell.”  And he thought of the next stream as the River Styx.  Crossing the River Styx.  The gloom of it here, the fallen timber, the moss and boulders and tangles.  It went on and on and on, primeval, breathing.  He could hear it.  The people in the cities would not have made it this far.  The urban man of the fourth or fifth generation was biologically different from the rural type of man.  The city man’s biology moved faster; his senses were turned to the vibrations of cities.  Mimms came down the long slope, arrived at the stream after hours of crawling and vaulting the timber.  he fell there to a seat, letting the sounds of the stream wash over him.

It was a big one, this stream, almost a river.  Certainly the biggest so far.  The gloom around here exceeded all the others, except what he had thought was Hades, back there.  And this stream, slamming down the ravine, smashing into atoms on the rocks.  He got up and went upstream, thinking about the rainbow that should be here in the floating water fragments, but there was no direct sunlight down here.   A quarter mile, then half a mile, and he still hadn’t seen a point at which he might cross.  Timber in heaps and tangles, enough to build a town.  Finally he came to a tree that had fallen across, and crossed to the other side.  He crawled like a crab up the boulders that were slick with mold and spray.  There was no path.  He looked at his compass and started off.

After a while the hardwoods were gone.  He found himself in hemlocks and pines.  The gloom here was even worse.  But he would end his day here.  Mimms was tired, too tired to go on; but he thought he could reach the ridge before nightfall if he pushed.  And the gloom really worked in his favor; he was better hidden.  There were marauders.  Mimms laid out his poncho and blankets and rolled in them.  He went to sleep.  His last thoughts were of other people—survivors like himself.  He thought some might be near.  He hoped so.  Maybe tomorrow he would meet some.  Tomorrow the road.  He would get on that road and make some real progress towards the new world.  He would meet people.  He had faith.  He hoped they would be decent.

Mimms work up with something in his mouth, something irritating his cheeks and lips.  He shot upright, spitting.  The sink, still dark like Hades.  He looked at himself and fear shot through him, froze his breath in his throat.  He was covered with pine loam.  The spongy material had been neatly packed over him in a continuous shell.  No wonder he had felt warm last night.  His heart racing with fear of assault any moment, he looked around, saw the floor scraped out nearly.  He shot to his feet, his senses wild, waiting.  But he saw nothing, heard nothing.  Mimms retreated behind a tree and cowered, the wind blowing in the treetops with what he heard as scornful laughter.  The treetops invisible in the darkness.  How long would he hide?  He waited—for what, he did not know.  He waited and listened.  Then he thought he smelled smoke, but wasn’t sure.  Just a whiff, as ghostly as smoke or anything can be. He thought about the valley then, frightened that his mind was pulling back from this dire situation, thought about the valley again and the corpses he had burned.  Yes, back in the valley, he had cremated every one he saw.  He knew the burnings would signal his presence to militias and marauders but a line of faith or atavism ordered him to dispose of the bodies respectfully.  And he also wanted to prevent the spread of disease, as if he might be returning someday.  As if civilization might carry on in this little town.  So he had collected the corpses, if they could be collected, and burned them.  

“Providence is looking out for me,” he thought, looking back out now on the loam still clinging to his clothes.  But that term, Providence, did not seem the best to use here.  It was a term from the old world.  Maybe it still worked; Mimms did not know.  So he said again with a sense of the old world, and a second time with his sense of the new.  At last he came out, a little disgusted with his cowardice.  As if he had anything to fight with—which was entirely his fault.  He could have had almost any type of firearm but he didn’t want to bother.  Didn’t want to take care of firearms and watch them.  Quickly he gathered his kit and ran.  Hours later the event of the night was still shaking him.  Now his mind was really going, he was thinking.  Once, he thought he saw a man below him, coming up at a slant, expertly.  Mimms saw a heavy brown beard, a poncho or cape of sheepskin.  Just a glance. He froze.  Should he call out?  He decided not.  He waited, but saw and heard nothing more.

He pushed on.  The terrain changed, the trees, now in oaks, small and very old.  He had not seen anything like them except maybe those miniature Japanese trees.  They turned even smaller as he reached the higher elevations.  The ground turned very steep and Mimms started the zig-zag pattern to reduce gravity’s wear.  His arms were aching from pushing off with his stick, while the ruck was pulling his shoulders off.  He shoved himself on up, marveling, through his pain, at the trees.  Their skins were beautiful, like that of some rare amphibian.  Mottled green, indigo, with cinnamon borders.  Their limbs reached out in a torque pattern.  Maybe the event of last night had unhinged him, he was thinking.  He wasn’t sure any longer what was going on, wasn’t sure he could trust his senses.  Movement alone could anchor his mind, which seemed to be going.  So he increased his pace, resolute to live.

He came to the spine and now the trees were a refinement of their brethren below, smaller, their colors stronger.  Mimms sank to his haunches and listened.  Once—twice—and again he thought he heard boots, boot soles on rock.  But the wind seemed snatch the sounds away.  He would hear nothing more like them.           

On now, through this grove—it looked like the hand of Man, it seemed organized—these ancient ones.  Mimms saw the rocks, colors in the rocks; different as well from anything before.  And then he was sure that men had never been here.  That was the difference.  That was it.  And this: these trees had lived so long they had made pacts with each other, to space themselves equally amongst each other.  Thus with competitive energy turned inward, they gradually, over the centuries, turned themselves to align themselves best with the sun, each for itself.  Thus they became, further, ligneous brains, growing ever more sensitive as a species, each tree-animal now refining its own internal chemistry to synthesize the raw chemicals into higher and new compounds.  And so this alien world.  How it had escaped men, Mimms did not know, nor had he the energy to wonder at it now.  He was aware of a new world, but he dared not stop.  Not now.  And could any man be sure that every bit of the Earth had been traipsed, and used, and analyzed and catalogued?  He walked slowly.  Down in the next valley was the road.  He would get there well before dark.

Then he saw that his watch was gone.  He stopped, staring at his bare wrist.  For a moment the urge to go back for it took him, a silly urge.  But he wasn’t going back there.  And anyway he could get by without it.  But still, he wished he had it.  It was one more link to the past, to the days of security.  Here in these woods, he had felt the symptoms of withdrawal, of his blood cleansing itself of caffeine and sugar and so forth, and his nausea and headaches.    But still he’d rather have the watch, too.  And he wondered, again alarming himself, if he was addicted to time as well.  He suspected that all people were, everywhere, in urban areas.  Time and cheap accelerants for the human system, in most food.  Of course.  And that is life.  And it wasn’t so bad, Mimms thought in a flash.  It was better than this.  And maybe for the third or fourth time since plunging into this spine of rock Mimms recognized this as the nightmare.  There was too much in him, you see, too much insulation between his people and the old people.  The minds, each transferred to the times of the other, would go into shock.   All of them.  And so the missing watch was maybe the will of something greater, because it would remind Mimms of his cravings.    Mimms could get by on looking at the Sun’s position, now.  He was sure he could estimate it within two hours.  As if he had a plane to catch somewhere...  But he found himself looking to the Sun.  Too often, though, heavy clouds, or canopy or terrain blocked his sighting of it. 

Mimms went a bit farther and came to where the ground started drifting down.  Below was the valley he was seeking, and a road out.  A road to somewhere, under some open sky.  The payoff would be worth the risks.  But first, down the huge face of this mountain that sank out of his vision now, down into darkness and immense trees.  But beyond, maybe survival and even civilized people, or people whom the end had not turned into savages.  Down he came, carefully.  Then he saw it, the road, a road far down, a scratch-line between the rocks and timber.  Mimms knew people in such places as that gloomy little valley were poor and resentful.  Generally.  There was nothing for a man’s living here but these wild trees.  Mimms wondered how the end had affected them.  Some few would have surely stuck it out where they lived.  They were poor, yes.  Poor, hard people, and armed.  No doubt that they had codified their own hates, as we all do.  Do you believe that, reader?  That you have your hates down in your rolodex and are quite ready to spin it—are always looking, in fact, for a reason to spin it, a roulette of your spirit-hunger that allows you to make your own combinations.  In effect you custom-build your own religion.  How many of those poor people, Mimms was wondering still, had cheered at the collapse of the central government? 

He spent much time observing the road, scanning what he could see, which was, for a longest time, nothing but forest, and the strange bulk of the monster trees below.  After a while he saw the faintest gossamer smokedrift; it was a long way off, above the hairline of the valley.  His eyes followed it down and there he saw it, the clearing, a rhomboid speck of a roof.  Mimms could not see a road to the house and the clearing from the little valley road.  It was so far off, like the Moon, or a photograph on your calendar of a remote place.  He started down.  One tree species gave way to others and then he came to the monsters, that bulked up like a solid black wall.  Light vanished just a few meters inside.  He felt them, too.  He came closer and heard them breathing, or so he thought.  Did they seem to be waiting, as well?  He thought they did, yes, he sensed it again: they were waiting.  Surely not for him; he wasn’t that important.  So he was thinking of himself. 

He wiped his face and thought he was losing his mind.  But he came nearer to one and he saw it: deep furrow,  into which he could insert his entire arm, and the skin of the creature deep red and something like hairy, or cilia coming out...  Surely he was hallucinating.   He thought of food poisoning, maybe that canned meat.  And then he thought of the axe head, and maybe he should fit a handle to it.  He took off his ruck and found a hardwood tree back a ways.   He cut down a small limb, carried it back to his ruck and sat to work.  He scraped the axe as clean as he could, reamed out the bits of rotted wood in the eye.  Then he started fashioning a handle to it.  Finally he inserted it.  The thing wobbled, so he  knocked a sliver in, and it was good enough.  Then he sharpened it against a rock.  That done, he stripped naked, washed himself with the last of his water.  Shivering in the cold.  He had no razor or he would have shaved too.  Still naked then he brushed his clothes as clean as they would come, shook them out.  He dressed and gathered his kit, picked up his axe and started down into them.

The monsters seemed to close around him.  The dimness, the stillness.  These ancient ones that defied the cycle.  What were men to them?  Nothing.  Hefting the axe, Mimms went forward slowly, thinking that eyes were on him.  No longer feeling distance, he paused again and again to listen.  He thought of the house below, the little road, people.  Lake Erie was not that far, and the northlands, a new start.  Keep moving.  The end was maybe the beginning.  Then—he would never understand why—he quit.  He dropped his ruck and slowly, with a calmness he had never felt before, made camp.  He set up without a fire, as he had done every night since fleeing Philadelphia.  That world was gone, long gone.  And Mimms thought of his murdered family.  Later, when he fell asleep, he felt empty, and did not care if he woke ever again.  But their breathing pulled him out.  His eyes opened.  It was night.  He dared not move as his eyes roamed the shadows, over the forms of the monsters, fifteen, twenty feet across.  He looked up the bole of the monster under which he was camped, up to where its arms mixed with the stars.  He waited, heart pounding, his hand crawling towards his axe.  But he did not lift it.  He knew it would not work here.