Withered + Sere: Immemorial Year, #1

Withered + Sere

TJ Klune

BOATK Books

Copyright © 2019 by TJ Klune

Cover art by B4jay

Second edition

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Contents

Withered + Sere

seven words

blood trail

the other side of the woods

fucking psycho bulldog

the minds of men

alma’s song

ashen and sober

the doors in the storm

the sanity of robots

the cage of man or god

face to face

a decision made

revelations

the ballad of bad dog

father, may i?

the scrape of knife and kiss

Afterword

Crisped + Sere

About the Author

Also by TJ Klune

Withered + Sere

Once upon a time, humanity could no longer contain the rage that swelled within, and the world ended in a wave of fire.

One hundred years later, in the wasteland formerly known as America, a broken man who goes only by the name of Cavalo survives. Purposefully cutting himself off from what remains of civilization, Cavalo resides in the crumbling ruins of the North Idaho Correctional Institution. A mutt called Bad Dog and a robot on the verge of insanity comprise his only companions. Cavalo himself is deteriorating, his memories rising like ghosts and haunting the prison cells.

It’s not until he makes the dangerous choice of crossing into the irradiated Deadlands that Cavalo comes into contact with a mute psychopath, one who belongs to the murderous group of people known as the Dead Rabbits. Taking the man prisoner, Cavalo is forced not only to face the horrors of his past, but the ramifications of the choices made for his stark present. And it is in the prisoner that he will find a possible future where redemption is but a glimmer that darkly shines.

The world has died.

This is the story of its remains.

For Sam, Abi, Ely, and Erika:

You guys are weird, abnormal and strange,

and your faces make me happy.

Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming,

he that is no longer able to despise himself.

Behold, I show you the last man.

~~Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra

seven words

Once upon a time, humanity could no longer contain the rage that swelled within, and the world ended in a wave of fire.

But before this happened, there was a great and powerful man. One day, so very different than all the days that had come before, he sat in his office and wondered how it would feel to burn to death.

It was cold, this thought. But not because he was a cold man—he wasn’t. Not really. No, this great and powerful man was practical. Analytical. He would not have gotten to be where he was without these traits. Though, in that evil known as hindsight, he wondered if this had not been a mistake. It was difficult to know, and he knew he would never have the answer. History often judged the actions of others, but now, there would not be a history to bring judgment. Not of the human kind.

He wondered if it would be quick, that first wave of fire. He wondered if there was anywhere his people could hide. If there was any place they could run. He thought not. He didn’t think it would matter even if there were. His advisors had already told him there wasn’t enough time. The grim looks on their faces had told him that, at least in this matter, they spoke the truth.

They had begged him to leave. They had begged him to go to ground. You must! they argued. People will need you after what is to come! They will need someone to look up to if we are to survive! But even in their pleadings, he could hear the defeat in their voices. The resolve breaking. They knew as well as him. He saw it in their eyes, the way they had dulled. The humanity was gone. The spark. And the great and powerful man knew that once the spark had died, there was nothing left to hope for.

Even if he’d done as they’d asked, it would have only been postponing what was to come. Others had arrived in his office with their projections of total loss of life. Their maps, covered in red. Their dire warnings. There must be a way to stop this, they said. There must be a way for this to end peacefully. But they too had seen the images of the destruction of London. Of Dubai. São Paulo. Sydney.

San Francisco.

Las Vegas.

Phoenix.

Seattle.

They had all seen the explosions, sun-bright. The fires that followed. The burnt husks of people flash-frozen into ash. Their arms hiding children. The way they cowered. Millions gone in no more than seconds. Everyone in the room had seen, and their words were hollow.

The great and powerful man noticed one of the scientists had yet to say a word. This quiet man was balding, almost lost to fat. He wiped away a sheen of sweat from his forehead with white-knuckled hands and looked down at his lap.

What do you think? the great and powerful man asked, raising his voice to override the conversation in the room.

All fell quiet.

The fat scientist sighed.

Well? the great and powerful man snapped. We haven’t got all day.

Bernard Russell, the fat scientist said.

What?

Bernard Russell. He was a British mathematician. He—

I know who he is! the great and powerful man interrupted. I don’t need a goddamn history lesson! He could hear the underlying hysterics in his own voice. He had to calm himself.

The fat scientist sighed again. He looked up at the men and women in the room around him before settling his gaze on the great and powerful man. Yes, he said. You do. We all do. Bernard Russell once said that war does not determine who is right. Only who is left.

The great and powerful man stared as the room erupted around him in jeers and cries of anger. Of derision. Moralistic bullshit, a five-star general sneered. We take them out, and we take them out now!

We don’t even know who they are, said the Secretary of Defense.

It doesn’t matter. We bomb the whole region. A flyswatter is better at killing bugs than a bullet.

More cries erupted, but the great and powerful man only had eyes for the fat scientist. The fat scientist did not look away.

What do you think we should do? the great and powerful man asked the scientist, his words almost lost in the roar around him.

Now? the fat scientist asked.

The great and powerful man nodded. Now.

Now, the fat scientist said, you explain why.

To who?

Everyone. You owe them that much. They need to know. For those who are left when the dust settles, if it ever will. They need to know what we did. That we should have done more. That it is too late for us now. The fat scientist wiped the sweat from his brow. They need to know so it won’t happen again.

I don’t…. I…. I wouldn’t know how to start, the great and powerful man said.

The fat scientist leaned forward as the voices rose in argument around him. I think you do, he said.

Eventually they all left, and the great and powerful man wondered how it would feel to burn to death.

At first, he knew the air would begin to heat. It would suddenly become hard to breathe, the hot air stifling and filled with carbon. The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck would rise up and then start to curl. His eyelashes would singe. All the air would be sucked from around him and a great wall of irradiated fire would rise over him and his eyes and his tongue and his fingernails would burst into flames and all thought would cease. This would all be over.

The great and powerful man wondered if that was for the best. We are doomed, he thought darkly, to repeat ourselves. He remembered from his childhood, in that great haze before his mother died, hearing her voice as she read him Peter Pan. He remembered the story as a frightening thing, a wicked tale of lost boys and of never having parents. He hadn’t thought of her or the story in years, but now her voice rose in his mind as she read for him the story: All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

He covered his eyes.

The door to his office opened and he heard the patter of little feet, the cry of a sweet voice saying Daddy, shouting, Daddy! He wiped away the moisture from his eyes and smiled as his daughter ran around his desk, her pigtails stretched out behind her, twisting. She leapt into his lap, and he circled his arms around her. He felt her heart beat against his chest and knew then all that would be lost.

Okay, Daddy? she asked, reaching out to touch his nose.

Okay, darling, he said, though he lied.

You cry? She sounded concerned.

No, he reassured her. No.

Is it bad? his wife asked from the door. He saw the way her hands trembled.

Yes, he said. He kissed his daughter on her forehead. She laughed. High and free. Like bells.

Is there time?

He thought about pretty words like he’d given his daughter but decided against it. Somehow, she would know. Not enough, he said.

His wife nodded, as he knew she would. The wife of the great and powerful man was great in her own right. He remembered when they’d first met. He’d asked her for a light, outside the law library on campus. She didn’t smoke. He was in love. She laughed at him. They married four months later against their parents’ wishes. She isn’t WASP-ish enough, his parents had said. He’s a goddamn conservative! her parents had cried. It didn’t matter. The heart wants what it wants.

What do we do? his wife asked him now as she moved away from the door.

The selfish part of him wanted them to stay with him. That if he couldn’t go, at least he’d be surrounded by his family. But that is not who he was. It never had been. He knew the captain stayed with the ship until the very end. His wife and daughter shouldn’t have to pay for his mistakes, even though they might still when it came down to it.

You two will be taken to the bunker, he said. There’s hope there. There’s a chance. He told himself he believed his words. He did. He had to. He knew it had all escalated too fast.

And you? she asked, her voice hardening. He knew that tone. He’d heard it many times before. What about you?

I have to stay, he said.

Stay where, Daddy? his daughter asked.

He looked away from his angry wife toward his daughter. I have to stay here. I have to talk to the people again.

In the camera?

Yes. In the camera.

His daughter thought on this a moment, her forehead lined in concentration. I stay with you? she finally asked.

He shook his head as he tried to breathe past the lump in his throat. No. You’ll go with Mommy.

Where?

Someplace safe.

There were more words. How could there not be? There are always more words. Always more time to say things that don’t matter rather than the things that do. There was anger from his wife, and harsh things were said. She begged him to go with them. She cried, even though he could tell she was trying not to. She had always hated crying. Tears did nothing. They resolved nothing. She wiped them away with the backs of her hands as her voice cracked. She shook her head. She bunched her hands into fists to stop them from shaking.

Their daughter looked up at both of them with wide eyes. She started crying because her mother was. She started screaming when men burst into the room saying they had to go, they had to go! His daughter reached for him, but she was pulled away even as their fingers touched, and for the rest of his life (a time that was shorter than even he knew) he would remember the grazing of his daughter’s skin against his own. That last touch, that last moment he ever saw his daughter, his daughter, who he sometimes made laugh by scrunching up his face into weird shapes. His daughter who would put carrot sticks between his teeth and lips, and he’d pretend to be a walrus. His daughter, whose toenails were painted green and blue and red because she loved those colors, Daddy, she just needed them all at the same time. His daughter, who he held at night when the bad dreams came, telling her there was no such thing as monsters. That last little moment when their fingers touched would stay with him in the days he had left. This great and powerful man, this father, had no way of knowing that his daughter would live for only fifteen more days, his wife holding his little girl, telling her to shut her eyes, to just shut her eyes and think of Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, as the bunker they were in shook and eventually collapsed under the weight of a falling mountain.

But now? Now, their fingers touched for a brief moment and then she was pulled away. Now, his daughter screamed. Now, his wife shouted and struggled to escape strong arms that engulfed her. And now, the great and powerful man hung his head and did nothing as they were whisked away.

The great and powerful man stood by himself in a deserted hallway, staring out a window. He could still hear the screams of his family echoing through his mind. He shook his head, trying to force them away. He had made his choice. He had to focus.

He remembered a time, shortly before his daughter was born and before he’d become great and powerful. He and his wife had walked next to a river he could no longer remember the name of. It had been springtime, and the trees were flowering. His wife, heavy with their first child (First of four, she would remind him constantly, often filling his head with visions of tiny tornadoes made of little hands and feet), smiled as he plucked an iris from near the bank of the river and placed it behind her ear. I’m going to win, he’d told her.

She watched him for a moment before rising on her tiptoes and pressing a brief kiss to his chin. I know.

The relief he had felt was palpable. You do?

She’d laughed. Yes. I knew, even when it was just a dream spoken aloud in the middle of the night. When we joked about such things. I still knew.

Even then?

Even then. You will do good things, my love. Wonderful things.

He’d gathered her up carefully in his arms and held her close.

And now, in the deserted hallway, he wished he’d never begun.

Wonderful things. I still knew.

A young man appeared through a doorway and cleared his throat. The great and powerful man glanced over at him. He held a sheaf of paper in his hands, gripping so tightly the edges wrinkled. One of his speechwriters. A newer one. He couldn’t remember his name. Not that it mattered.

I have this for you, the young man stammered.

The great and powerful man waved him away. Not today.

B-but… sir?

You know how to start, the fat scientist whispered in his head.

And he did. He knew what needed to be said.

I won’t be needing that, the great and powerful man said.

The young man appeared unsure. He turned to leave but stopped before he could take a step. Sir?

The great and powerful man looked out the window again. The sun was setting. On so many things. Yes?

Will… will it be okay?

What? He heard his daughter’s laughter in his ear.

Everything. The young man’s voice broke.

The great and powerful man turned to look at the young man whose name he could not remember. One day, he said, and out of all the lies he’d told himself in the last months, maybe even years, this was the one he chose to believe the most. One day. One day someone, and I don’t know who, but someone will say enough. A line will be drawn, and there will come an hour that we will rise and say we’ve had enough. That we won’t take the darkness any longer. That we will say no. That we will fight against those who would break us. We will fight back, and in this hour, we will have succeeded in what we have set out to do.

The young man’s eyes were wide. Is that day today? he asked quietly.

The great and powerful man deflated and looked nothing more than a normal man. No, he said quietly. It’s not today. You should leave. While you can.

Will it matter?

I don’t know. Probably not.

Your wife. Your daughter.

Yes?

They… they won’t… we won’t….

No. We won’t.

The young man left and did not look back.

The great and powerful man sat at his desk, a group of people, cameras pointed at him. He watched as a woman pointed at him and counted down with her fingers.

5.

I know what to say, he thought.

4.

It’s what they need to hear.

3.

It’s what they should hear.

2.

It’s the only thing I have left to give.

1.

The lights above the camera went on. The group in front of him watched and waited. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of his neck. He touched his wedding ring. He looked up and directly into the camera.

And said seven words.

As those seven words spread across the globe, bouncing instantly along the airwaves to billions and billions of pairs of eyes and ears, there was a moment when it seemed all the world held its breath. Upon hearing the seven words, they all exhaled as one and began to break down, because those seven words meant much. They meant sorrow. They meant relief, as darkly cold as it was. They meant nothing and everything, and as they echoed and became waves that drifted off into space to travel for as long as the universe was old, they carried with them a beginning that would signal the end of the world as they knew it, brought down on a wave of greed and anger. Of betrayal and power. Of selfishness. Of terror.

Of fire.

And that is how civilization fell. The bombs dropped. Cities collapsed. Billions of people died in a matter of months. A button was pushed again. And again. And again. And again until there was no one left to push the button.

In those weeks and months that followed, miles above Earth, satellites drifted darkly around the planet, the land below ablaze, large columns of smoke catching in the atmosphere and stretching out into long tails. The satellites would spin for as long as Earth maintained its pull of gravity, but they would no longer function. They no longer transmitted to the scarred and pocked world below. They no longer moved except with the flow of the earth. They were dead.

But far off into space, transmissions carried, bouncing radio-frequency waves that crashed and collided with the universe. And out of all the unfathomable number, there was one that began with seven words. Seven words said by a man who died two hours after speaking them when a suitcase nuke exploded forty feet away from the helicopter he was boarding in an attempt to join his wife and daughter. In the end, he never learned what it felt like to burn as he wasn’t even aware he had died when the blast hit him. His last thought was I hope I come back here to—and then he was gone. There was nothing left of him but his seven words. And they carried long after the whole of humanity became nothing more than a thing of the past in a future of chaos.

God forgive us for what we’ve done.

a wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves,

and the trees stand. I think i too have known autumn too long

—e.e. cummings

blood trail

A man moved through the stunted trees. His footsteps were soft, each step deliberately chosen. He stopped for a moment, cocking his head. Listening. Waiting. A heavy breeze blew through the bare branches of the trees. They rattled together like bones. It didn’t bother him as it once had.

The man heard nothing more and took another step. He adjusted the strap to the oak bow over his shoulder. He thought about the sun hiding behind the leaden gray clouds above. It had been a while since he’d seen it. It had been a while since he’d seen the sky behind the clouds.

The man known only as Cavalo moved through the trees, unaware that it was his fortieth birthday. Even if he’d known, he wouldn’t have given it a passing thought. He thought little of such things now. They were frivolous things. Things meant for the towns. Not for him.

Maybe part of him knew, but it was suppressed. Buried. Like the sky. Like the sun. He was aware of things, sure. The weight of the pack on his back, a quiver of arrows sewn at the side. Dark feathers attached to the ends of the shafts. The scrape of the heavy tunic against his thin chest. The dark stubble on his face, flecked with gray and itchy. A lock of hair against his ear, loose from the deer hide strap that held it back. The sharp, metallic scent in the air. His companion moving unseen thirty yards to his left. The weight of the old rifle hanging around his neck. It was rarely used. Bullets were precious things. Unusual things. He had many of them, collected over years. He tried not to use them if he could help it.

That didn’t mean he hadn’t before. He fired the rifle every now and then to make sure it still worked. Into a tree. He always dug out the bullets, the flat discs still hot in his hands. He’d done this twice a year since he’d been given the gun by his father at the age of sixteen. It’s a Remington, his father had said, though when asked how he knew, his father had shrugged. That’s what I was told when it was given to me. See those markings at the top? A scope would have gone there. It helped you see things far away up close. Like those binocs that old Harold has. It’s gone now. Have never been able to find one that fits when the trade caravans come through.

His father had died just a few weeks later. Found in a ditch. Neck broken. Thrown from his horse as he rode home. The smell of rye whiskey still hung around him even as the flies began to land on his open eyes. Accident, the constable had told Cavalo when he came to deliver the news. Just an accident. These things happen, you know.

Cavalo had nodded and asked after the horse. It’d been found two miles away, grazing in a field. He later sold it for coin. Didn’t get for it what he’d asked, but a horse that throws a rider was a hard sell, even if the rider had been drunk.

He’d left the town shortly after, the rifle on his shoulder.

Cavalo now had forty-seven discs.

But the shots into the trees hadn’t been the only times he’d fired the rifle. There had been two others. Once to stop the charge of an angry bull elk he stumbled upon in the low hills to the north. Its eyes had been milky white with blindness, a deep froth pouring from its mouth. Irradiated. It hadn’t made a sound when it charged, its accuracy frightening. Time had slowed for Cavalo, and even though his heart thudded like thunder in his chest, he’d moved slowly. Surely. The stock against his shoulder. Rifle cocked. Sights lined. Breath in. Breath out. Fired. The snap against his arm. The loud crack in the clearing. Spray of blood as the bullet pierced a white eye, an impossible shot that Cavalo couldn’t do again even if he had millions of years and millions of bullets. The bull had come to a stop. Shuddered once. Twice. Fell over as it began to seize. Its tongue lolled from its mouth as blood dripped from its nose. Cavalo had stayed with it until it died, the massive chest rising one final time, followed by an exhale, followed by silence.

The man, much younger then, had sat near the bull, watching it for hours. Eventually night had begun to fall, and predators stirred, drawn by the smell of dead flesh. Cavalo had stood and walked away.

There had been one other time he’d fired the gun. But that didn’t matter now. It was in the past. It brought ghosts. He didn’t like the ghosts.

He’d had a handgun once too, but he didn’t know what had happened to it. After.

He continued on now, listening.

He