After The Fall
BY CASEY GOLDING
1
BY CASEY GOLDING
1
Ward sat patiently in the cold morning air. His back to the ridge, he lifted his binoculars once more to scan the desolate valley. Feral cats and dogs could sometimes be found here, scratching out rodents from the burnt out farmhouse and blighted orchard of sad, barren apple trees.
Still nothing. The morning was wearing on; hunger gripped his insides, but he held off from eating the last of the hard bread he brought along for this hunt. Everything had to be rationed, everything had to last if he wanted to live to see the spring.
It was September now, or so he thought. Though it felt like November. The summer was short and provided very little. This would be the second winter since The Fall, and likely the last winter he would remain this far north. When spring arrived he would be forced to move on, he knew it and it gnawed at him. The land would kill him if he didn't.
A glimpse of movement pulled Ward back from his absent stare. Along the ridge bottom; a thicket of alders provided concealment to anything moving through the valley. A dark shape moved through there, slowly but deliberately toward the farm; three hundred yards out. He held his breath, careful not to exhale on the binoculars and fog the lenses as he raised them.
The morning sun glowed through the ashen sky, it's rays just reaching the edge of the thicket exposed from the shade of the ridge line. There they moved, in and out of sight between the dense tangled branches.
From what he could tell it was a woman and a boy. She wore a grey insulated vest over layers of weather beaten clothes. Her hair was dark, and contrasted against her pale face. A wool hat and ski goggles topped her head. A bundled tarp served as her backpack with bottles and tools tethered to it. She pushed through the maze of brush, a rifle ready in her hands, the boy followed in his camoflauged jacket and backpack. He carried something as a weapon as well, though it was hard to make out.
Travellers were few and far between lately and Ward learned that even these most unlikely survivors should not be underestimated. They could be bandits preying on peoples sympathies or worse, a scout party to a larger roving gang, flushing out others that would prey on them.
He watched as they came to the point of the thicket closet to the farmhouse. It would be a hundred yards for them to cross the open ground and reach the broken ruin. They sat and looked about the area wearily, the woman using a loose rifle scope in her hands to survey the yard.
She looked back over the ridge towards him, shading her eyes with her hand against the morning sun. Backlit and sheltered by a blind of logs and sticks that he'd used for hunting this spot over the past years, Ward was sure of his disguise. She turned away, back toward the house. In a moment she was up and moving towards it, rifle in hand, her pack left behind at the thicket edge with the boy. He was hiding, crouched in the brambles, but from Wards elevation, the camoflauged jacket offered little protection.
The house was only partly standing. A brick chimeny and wall on the east side, sagging burnt timbers forming crude walls on the other sides, the roof collapsed to nothing more than a lean to. The floor was partly intact and the cellar was stone. Ward knew what the rotten structure held. It was a grave.