The moon hangs low over the horizon, a bright white sphere blazing against the muted, fiery colors of the sky. The blood has seeped from the sky back into the ground, rendering it heavy with guilt and color, the dry dirt matted with grass and branches, ashes and skin. There is fear in the still heat of the air, loss in the thick dust that lays heavily on the metal surfaces of what was once a city and is now a junkyard. It isn’t even a scrap heap; there is no one to salvage the remains, no one to recycle the destruction into something else.
For a little while, they are the only two moving figures on earth. The skeletons of trees do not sway. There is no movement of grass by wind, insect or familiar footstep. They alone break the silence, the softest crumble as the dirt beneath their feet moves is as loud and as shocking as gunfire. When they pick their way across collapsed buildings and metal frames, the screeching of metal against metal is deafening. Her feet are still bare from when she took her shoes off to creep quietly through clean, sterilized hell. They are dark with dust and dirt and blood now.
He has not said a word – not a single word since the strangled sentence he uttered just before he pulled the trigger. At the time it had been indecipherable, choked and violent and grieving. But in the past few hours, she has had time to pick through it, to pull the letters out of her memory one by one. When it finally comes to her she stops, quite abruptly in the middle of what had once been a street.
“I hate you.” Is what he had said, before the crack of gunfire shattered him, before the shouting of guards, of doctors and scientists had forced them to turn and run before the dead had hit the floor. For just a moment, she feels like retching, consumed by disgust, that his last words could be so brutal and cruel. But then he turns to find out why she stopped, turns to face her and she can see the truth etched as permanently on his face as it was evident in his voice.
She remembered, as she shook her head blearily and kept plodding along, the way the words seemed to burn him, leaving scarred and smoking paths in his skin and the air as they made their way along the trajectory that the bullet would later follow. She can see now the scars on his face, the contortions of self-loathing, of anguished missing and inimitable hope conquered by cold loss. And for a moment she is disgusted that she could have ever suspected otherwise. She is nearly doubled over from the force of it and wonders, desperately in fragments, how he can keep putting one step in front of the other.
But when she looks at him, his back is straight, his footsteps sure. She sees the path of his vengeance. She sees the blood on his hands and the righteous fire in the unforgiving lines of his shoulders. She pulls herself together, forces herself to forget a time when she could have walked away uncaring and clear-minded. She hastens her step and takes his hand and feels him flinch. She knows that her touch hurts him but she does not let go.
They stop. There are shadows moving toward them in the distance. Let them come.
