Umbrella Academy fic: The End of Something (2/2)
PART ONE
PART TWO
-o-
Then, one afternoon, he’s climbing through a half demolished daycare when the ground starts to shake. At first, Five thinks he’s just ventured too far into the unstable structure, but he realizes quite quickly that it’s more than that. It’s more than the floor that’s shaking; it’s more than the structure. It’s the whole damn world.
It’s an earthquake.
Hastily, Five climbs backwards, exiting out of the precarious structure as quickly as he can. He just clears one of the rooms when the roof falls in. Five trips over the bag of baby food he’s collected, leaving it behind as he scrambles out the front door entirely. His heart pounds as he falls down the front steps just in time to watch the whole thing collapse on itself.
That’s not the only building to suffer, either.
Five looks around, watching as the buildings keen. A few of the taller ones sway, and debris rains down. There’s a building down the street that careens over, and one across the street has two floors collapse against each other like pancakes. Five dimly realizes that he probably needs to get to shelter just as the rumbling stops.
He stands, still bracing himself for several long seconds. Remembering to breathe, he finds himself awash with adrenaline and no purpose to apply it. He’s lucky, to be honest. If the building had fallen or any of the adjacent buildings. Sinkholes could have appeared in the ground. But the treat he’s on is relatively unscathed even as the dust settles.
But this isn’t the only place in the world, is it?
Five’s perspective is terrifyingly narrow sometimes -- that’s what happens when there’s no one else alive -- but he’s maintained a sharp sense of the fact that his survival is only contrasted by the loss of everyone else. He defines this loss through the memory of his siblings--
His siblings.
His heart races again as he thinks about the graveyard, which he has so meticulously maintained. He’s taken to gardening it of all things. Keeping it clear of debris. Organizing his cache.
For today, the grid can wait.
Five turns back toward his family and runs.
-o-
The whole way there, he tries to assure himself. They’re probably fine. It’s a wide open space. His cache has probably knocked a few things over, but nothing is likely to be out of sorts.
His confidence flags somewhat as he gets closer. There are more fallen buildings as he approaches. In fact, one of the streets he has frequented is no longer accessible due to the influx of new debris. Five seems to be getting closer and closer to the epicenter. As he nears the park, he has to climb over a few smaller structures that have fallen, but he presses on until he arrives.
The park is a mess. The few dead trees that had been standing have been upturned. The slide is cracked all the way in half. The building across the street has tipped over, spilling all the way across the opposite end, making the park accessible from only one angle. And Five counts the graves -- one, two, three -- and he nearly stops breathing
One of the graves is gone, the marker buried in the rubble, slabs of concrete bigger than Five’s entire body crushing the ground to nothing. Klaus’ bloodstained cross is gone
Klaus is gone.
And Five’s entire cache has been decimated.
-o-
Five’s a fighter, but this time, there’s no fight to be had. He stays there, standing limply, surveying the damage for some time. But he can’t bring himself to go to the debris. He can’t.
He already knows what failure feels like, after all.
And there’s no doubt that it feels just like this.
-o-
The trip back to the church is one that Five makes almost without thinking. The damage is just as bad on his way over, and he worries before he gets there that there will be nothing left for him there either. The street before is all but decimated, and when Five turns the corner, he fears the worst.
But there’s a clearing with the church in the middle.
Its steeple is still tall and erect.
It’s the last building -- the only building -- standing.
Five, being the last person on earth, goes ahead and goes inside.
Everything there is just as he left it.
You could call it a blessing, if that’s your thing. Others might call it a curse.
Five calls it nothing. He breaks open a can of food in the basement, eats until he’s full and promptly goes to sleep.
-o-
For the weeks that follow, there is a hollow emptiness that haunts him. He loses the will to maintain his work. He lets his patterns fall by the wayside. He does not explore; he does not search. He makes a trek out once a day, sometimes with the mannequin in tow, just to check on the rest of the graves. And he makes the trek back every night.
He soon eats through the food stash, and he sleeps so much that he loses track of the days. He thinks maybe it’s been a month. Maybe it’s been too.
He’s not sure it matters.
Five’s not sure anything matters.
-o-
Then, one day, he runs out of food. Actually, he’s been out of food for several days, but he is just starting to get hungry. In fact, the hunger pains in his stomach are the most he’s felt in weeks.
By the time he realizes this, he also realizes that he’s let this go on too long. He has no supplies; he has no prospects. He’s dangerous thin and he’s frame is bordering on frail. In a haze, he’s let himself slip into a depression, and it’s very well coming close to killing him.
He tries to venture out, but up and down the street, there’s no sign of anything to eat. He tries to go further, but the exhaustion nearly makes him collapse, and it’s all he can do to drag himself back home. He can’t even make it to the graveyard anymore, and he drags himself into the sanctuary, gasping and drawn.
On hands and knees, he only makes it to the altar. He won’t even get to lie down on a comfortable spot if he’s going to die.
Flopping back, he looks at the ceiling, wondering if this is it.
His eyes wander the cross and he shakes his head.
“Don’t bother,” he murmurs. He closes his eyes, too tired to care. He’s done, maybe. He’s just done.
But he thinks of three tended graves. He’s already lost one, but what about the others.
What about all of them.
What about the world Five might be able to save.
The humanity he might be able to revive.
He opens his eyes, rasping through his dry throat. He rolls himself over, pulling himself up at the pulpit. Then, he sees it. A box he hasn’t noticed before; at least, not one he’s deemed relevant. It’s communion wafers, neatly packages and utterly untouched.
He’d classified it as religious paraphernalia and deemed it worthless. But he looks at it again. The eucharist: take this bread. Sure, it’s supposed to be the body of Christ and yadda, yadda, yadda, but it’s also bread.
It’s bread.
Literally starving, he lunges at it. His coordination is off, but he manages to rip the box open. There’s an open package, and Five shoves the stale pieces of bread into his mouth without tasting them. He almost chokes as he swallows them, but then he uses his numb fingers to open a fresh sleeves. These are fresher, and Five eats the whole box within minutes.
To his surprise, he finds several more boxes behind it.
Five eats them all, every last crumb. He eats until his stomach hurts, and he flops on his back again, looking up at the cross with his hand resting on his distended belly.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says. And he closes his eyes. “But thank you all the same.”
-o-
Five sleeps, and when he wakes up, he really wakes up. He realizes he’s been overly stupid and sentimental the last few weeks. He should be dead for the lack of his effort. He’s gone and wasted all his supplies, and there’s no justifiable reason for it. So what if a grave got covered? It doesn’t make his siblings any less dead.
No, Five has to get back on top of things.
If he’s going to survive, he’s going to have to want it.
And he does.
So he packs up the mannequin, readies his wagon and heads out. Revitalized, rejuvenated: ready.
-o-
It’s not easy work, but it’s the apocalypse. It’s not going to be easy. Five has to make his way through several blocks of debris before he starts finding buildings that are still standing. He makes headway quickly after that, and he has to make his way back to the church by the midday to drop of the new host of supplies he’s come across. He continues for the afternoon and circles around to the graveyard, where he eats his dinner.
He makes his way back to the church at nightfall, quickly organizes his new cache, and treks back upstairs by candlelight to head to bed.
Several more days like this, and he’ll be set for several months at least.
Then, the rain starts.
And it doesn’t stop.
Five stays inside for the first day when the deluge is just too much. Two days later, when it’s a constant but not pounding rain, he tries to venture out, only to come back in almost immediately. The rain isn’t right; the water is clearly contaminated. Five can boil it for drinking and cleaning purposes, but he’s pretty sure walking out in it straight on is probably less than advisable.
After a week, Five’s starting to get restless. He decides to risk it, and ventures out anyway. He makes his way through the muck, collecting whatever meager supplies he can, but the streets are flooded in some areas, and even when he makes it to the park, it’s too soupy to stay for longer.
He makes it back to the church feeling winded, and he is shivering when he settles down for the night. He doesn’t eat much for the lack of an appetite, and he goes to sleep thinking things will be better in the morning.
They’re not better. Things are worse, in fact. The rain has picked up again, and Five is clearly sick. Whatever’s in the water has flooded him, and he spends the next three days too ill to move. Even when he recovers, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. He starts rationing his supplies, just in case. To make it last longer, he makes a pile for himself and one for the mannequin.
She looks quizzical about this, Five decides.
“You’re reading into it too much,” Five tells her. “I know you’re a mannequin, okay? But this makes it easier to not eat everything.”
He adjusts her so she’s looking at him a bit more fully. He regards her with some satisfaction.
“You don’t need to get weird about it,” he says. “I’ve got enough things to worry about. I don’t need to worry about you.”
She says nothing.
Which is to be expected, of course, given that she’s a mannequin.
Still, Five finds it reassuring.
-o-
When the rain stops, Five is starting to feel anemic. His food store isn’t completely depleted, but his water is. He’s drunk all the bottled water on sight, and he’s out of dry timber for fires. He’s spent these last days in the cold and damp, and when he goes outside, it’s hardly a relief.
The world is saturated. The fires have long since been put out, and the dirt and grime has coalesced, coating everything in scum. The surfaces are hardly safe to walk on, and Five doesn’t dare bring out the wagon in conditions like these. As it is, it is barely safe for him to walk to the graveyard, but he’s been gone too long as it is. He wants to tend to things a bit; keep things in order.
Upon his arrival, however, nothing is in order.
In fact, the park is barely recognizable. The playground equipment as been washed away. The building that took out Klaus’ grave is gone, swallowed up by a gaping hole in the ground. The next two graves, where Allison and Diego are buried, have been exposed to the hole as well. Allison’s is gone, but Diego’s marker is still perched uneasily on the edge. The dirt has fallen away, and Five can see portions of bone beneath the surface, barely clinging to solid ground.
Concerned, Five tries to lower himself down into the hole, but he only manages to lose his last working flashlight in the process. He watches as it falls down the abyss; watches until it disappears from view, no sign of bottom.
Allison’s grave is gone.
If Five is going to find it, he’s going to join her.
Gritting his teeth, he drags himself back to the surface and looks at Diego’s grave. It’s salvageable, he decides. All he has to do is adjust it, maybe move the body. It’ll be tedious work, but what else does Five really need to do these days. He’s all set to get started again, when he hears a distant rumble. He ignores it at first, but another comes before he even gets to work on shifting the mud.
He looks up in time to feel the first raindrop on his face.
“Shit,” he swears, wiping it away. Another raindrop hits him on the forehead. “Shit.”
He has to get back to shelter; he has to get back to the church.
His family, unfortunately, is just going to have to wait.
-o-
Five runs back, sprinting as often as he can. The risk of falling and injuring himself is real and a dangerous prospect. However, the chance of him getting sick again from the rain is more pressing and even less avoidable. Five is aware, on some dim, practical level, that a fall could leave him stranded in the open, thus leading to his death, but there are too many logical steps to get to that point.
Five’s motivation now is more intrinsic.
They don’t call it fight or flight for nothing.
It’s just that, in the apocalypse, there is no one left to fight.
So Five runs.
It’s what got him here.
He hopes against hope that it’s what gets him home.
That is the thing, isn’t it? He tells himself as his feet hit the wet remains of crumbling pavement. That’s why he clings to his siblings, isn’t it? Because he doesn’t believe this is where he belongs. He hasn’t accepted it; that this is where his story ends. He doesn’t know how -- he can’t even fathom how -- but he has to get home.
He runs, skidding around a corner, the rain starting to fall harder now.
His family is a symbol, his link to the past. The things that used to be. Five’s not letting it go.
Five’s not letting it go.
He runs and runs and runs until he’s in front of the church, scrambling up the steps.
As long as he preserves them -- even two of them -- then there’s hope for him, for a 13 year old boy full of hubris. There’s a place at a dinner table, hot food on the table, seven siblings pulling round while a record plays in the background. Five can go back like none of this happened. Five can go back and none of this will happen.
He closes the door behind him as the renewed deluge starts up again.
Slumping to the ground, he pants with his eyes closed.
Five can still go back.
-o-
Of course, going back means surviving. The rain does not make this easy. He has, at least, managed to avoid the worst of the sickness this time around, but he regrets how few supplies he’s collected. He still has some food to last him, but the problem with the water is going to get pressing.
The irony is not lost on Five.
The pouring rain outside and he’s going bone dry inside. He manages to make a bunch of small candles he finds, but he has to light so many to heat a pan of water that it’s almost not worth it. He goes through half his candle supply in one go, and even then it takes hours to get him any water that’s still drinkable.
He tries to keep himself busy so he doesn’t think about it. He organizes the storage rooms a few more times, sifting through the useless things he has no possible need for just to keep himself from thinking about how likely he is to die in the next week if the rain doesn’t let up.
That’s when he finds it, in a box he’s dumped in a corner next to catechism booklets and broken kneelers. The holy water.
It’s packaged in little containers, clearly outfitted for a special occasion like Easter. Five’s never actually been to a church service, but he imagines that they must have been available to the congregation. For what purpose, he can’t say. He doesn’t understand the point of holy water.
It’s supposed to be holy, he figures.
But, he logically concludes, it’s also water.
His first temptation is to open the first little bottle and chug, but he finds himself hesitating. He’s not one to ascribe to superstition, but this church has been good to him. There’s no likely indication that it’s divine intervention or anything like that. Random chance is a more apt possibility.
And still.
It’s the one building still standing.
He ate wafers when he should have starved to death.
At the very least, he needs to think about what he’s doing. All this, his scavenging in a church, could be considered desecration by the righteous.
Funny then that none of the righteous survived.
He sighs, and cracks open a bottle. He lifts it up, and shrugs. “If it makes things better, I at least appreciate the gift,” he says, by way of explanation. “I don’t know if that matters or anything, but, there you go.”
He drinks the first bottle, and the second and the third.
Five doesn’t die that night.
He doesn’t die that week.
In fact, he’s still alive and well when the rain ends.
-o-
When it’s over -- really over, this time -- Five sees the sun for the first time since arriving in the apocalypse. It’s not a clear view -- the atmosphere has been badly contaminated by dust and debris -- but he can faintly see the yellow through the haze.
Although he needs food and water soon, Five’s first stop is to his graveyard. The water damage is extensive throughout the area, and Five is not surprised to find that Diego’s grave has been fully washed away. Whether it has fallen into the sinkhole or simply been swept away in the deluge, Five is not sure. But there’s no way to find out, so he finds that acceptance is the only viable way to proceed.
Besides, there is still one grave to care for. It may say Luther’s name -- it may hold Luther’s bones -- but it is representative of them all. If Five can protect this last grave, then it matters. There’s still hope for his family; there’s still hope for him. He can still go back.
With that in mind, Five sets himself to work. He works diligently throughout the day, cleaning up the debris and tidying the area. He clears the graveyard and props up the grave marker as best he can in the wet soil. By the time he’s done, it looks like a proper memorial again, and Five finds himself somewhat satisfied.
This task being complete, Five feels ready to face the day and its rigors again.
He can do this; he can survive.
And someday -- someday -- Five will make it back.
-o-
His resolve endures better than one might expect for a teenager at the end of the world. Though he is very isolated and the conditions are very difficult at times, Five faces the challenges with as much optimism as one possibly can. He scours a five block radius, then a six block radius. When he gets to 10 blocks, it starts to make him anxious. It’s hard to get back home in a timely manner. It makes it difficult to do his daily pilgrimage to his graveyard.
Still, somehow he always makes it back to the church at nightfall.
There, he tidies his cache, sorts his finds for the day, and tucks in with the mannequin in the priest’s office after saluting the cross with a smirk.
Gratitude, he decides, is a lot like survival.
You do what’s necessary.
-o-
Five hardly notices at first when the weather starts to turn. It’s a wasteland outside, so there are no obvious signs of seasonal changes. Still, he finds that he gets chilled faster, and soon he is scavenging for heavier pants, sweatshirts and gloves. He finally takes a thick winter hat and commandeers a full-on winter coat. By the time it snows, Five has to accept that it is winter outside.
At first, he tries to carry on like nothing has changed. He still goes out and forages. He still makes his gridwork radius, moving along as best he can. And he still tends the graveyard, shoveling away the snow to preserve the area as best he can from the onslaught of the cold.
The snow does not stop, however.
The temperatures start to plunge.
Five is no longer to make it far. The snow slows him down more often than not, and his fingers are threatened with frostbite. His food sources begin to run thin, and his water supply is scant. He has burned through all his firewood, collected meticulously over the course of weeks, and then, to make matters more fun, a blizzard sets in.
This is not a snowstorm.
This is a blizzard.
The snow is ferocious, and the winds howl. Five tries to make it out the front door, but the snow has drifted up against it so high that he can’t even see out over the top of the white mounds. He has no choice but to lock himself in, and draw into the warmer interior of the church.
The office has a fireplace, which has been a necessary part of his survival for weeks now. He’s out of fuel, however, and Five starts to feel himself freezing when he tries to sleep. Even with all his layers, his fingers feel numb, and Five eventually acknowledges that he’s going to be at risk for hypothermia if things to not improve.
Improvement, however, is not going to be coming from the elements. It is a hostile world outside, and if it is not actively trying to kill Five, then it is at least indifferent to the fact that he’s alive.
No, there will be no help from such a thing as fate or chance.
If Five is going to survive, he needs to show some ingenuity. Some persistence.
He’s a smart kid; he can figure this out.
Just how, is the real question.
He’s trapped in a church, of all places. A church in the apocalypse.
Pacing back and forth in the sanctuary, Five does his best to keep warm, to keep his mind and body going. He scoffs.
“So much for salvation,” he mutters, and then he takes a long, winded breath. The pull of the air is like ice in his lungs. He has to sit down.
The pews are without any flourishes. The church, though well maintained, is nothing fancy. Its simplistic design accentuates the more ornate finishes of the windows and altar. But no expense was allotted to comfort. These old wooden benches are hard to sit on, even through the multiple layers that Five is currently wearing. They’re just wooden pews, so old that the stain is nearly rubbed clean, making them more like planks of wood than anything else.
Five looks down.
Planks of wood.
He hastily removes a glove and runs his bare fingers over the surface.
A plank of wood.
He looks up at the cross and shakes his head. “Don’t say anything.”
And he promptly gets to work.
-o-
It takes Five longer than he’d like to pull up the first pew from the back of the church. The thing is bolted to the ground, and Five’s lost weight in the apocalypse. He’s packed with lean muscle, but he’s still a 13 year old kid. Not to mention the fact that he’s half frozen through.
Still, Five is nothing if not persistent, and after much labor. He has the first pew up. He takes up the second somewhat faster, and he’s almost got it down by the time he gets to the third. He pulls up the fourth before he drags the timber back to the office and starts to cut it up. This work is even more tedious -- he works hard not to cut his fingers off with the numbing cold slowing him down -- but he finally makes enough pieces small enough to fit into the fireplace.
With hasty excitement, Five goes for his matches. He has enough of these, at least, to last him for awhile, and he uses his trembling fingers to strike a match. The first one he throws on doesn’t catch, and he reprimands himself for neglecting his kindling. His last fire -- several days ago -- had burned down to ash. He has nothing left.
He scrabbles through the desk, finding a few more papers in one of the filing drawers. He throws them in, and lights a second match. This one takes to the paper immediately. It takes a little longer for the wood to catch -- Five throws on another match, just to be sure -- but soon the fire lances up the wood and starts to burn in earnest.
Five watches, studiously tending it, shifting the wood and throwing on a few more pieces, until soon it’s a crackling fire there.
“There,” he says with a nod to the mannequin. “We’ll be warming up in no time.”
-o-
It does get warm, and Five is able to take off his gloves, hat and coat for the first time in weeks. His hair has grown shaggy in all of this, but he pays it no heed. Instead, he continues to tend the fire, cutting up the first four pews while pausing for breaks. It’s a blissful day or so, and he even manages to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in ages.
Still, in the morning, he’s faced with the reality that his wood supply is growing thing.
He chews his lip and then shrugs.
“That’s not a difficult problem to solve.”
-o-
For approximately a week, the problem is quite manageable. Five spends a little time each day, pulling up the pews to stoke his fire. When the pews run out, he finds some chairs and a few small tables. He breaks off the wood paneling on the walls and burns that, too, but stops himself at the altar and the cross. The altar is too big to break -- he’d have to saw off pieces -- and the cross is too high to reach. He burns the outdated organe, the railing on the stairs and every other scrap of wood he can find.
This lasts him another week, perhaps, but the wind outside doesn’t let up. Whatever has happened to the world, it’s messed up the weather patterns severely. This is clearly the effects of global warming times a million. He has no way of knowing how long this winter will last. He has no way of knowing whether or not this is a new ice age. For all he knows, the world may never thaw, not in his lifetime.
And if the world never thaws, there’s a good chance that lifetime will not be very long.
He’s good with food and water for now, but the cold is pervasive. All his diligence to prepared for anything, and he’s not prepared for this. It’s not fair, really. Five works hard, and the universe keeps changing all the rules.
Five stews on this for several days while he burns the last of his wood supply. He walks restlessly throughout the room, keeping the door closed tight in a vain attempt to savor the last of his heat. He tidies the space a few times, reorganizing his supplies and remaking his bed. He adjusts the mannequin so she looks comfortable, posing her in the chair across from the desk.
The chair is plastic, by the way. It doesn’t burn.
The desk is metal; it doesn’t burn either. Five thinks about giving up the couch, but there’s no telling what will happen if he sets the fabric on fire. He’s already burned the end tables and the other chairs. Pausing, he looks at the inset shelves along the back wall. These shelves are built in, which limit their viability. They’re also painted, which may make them unsafe to burn, but Five is getting to that point where desperation dictates things that Five’s common sense might otherwise object to. Quickly, he starts taking things off the shelves -- the Bibles -- and dumps them on the desk behind him. He’s carting another handful when he stops himself.
The Bibles are thick.
The pages are made with real paper, thick paper, and the covers are substantial. In fact, he’s sure it would take a long time to burn.
More than that, it would be hot.
With one in hand, he takes it to the fire. His theory is sound, but he needs practical application. At the fire, which has grown low, he stops himself and thinks about what he’s doing.
Burning Bibles. Even without religious affiliation, Five knows there’s a certain amount of disrespect here. And his goal is to preserve humanity, not obliterate it. Society can still exist if he holds onto the social norms. That’s his ticket home.
And yet, if he dies, the norms die with him. There’s no one left on this planet to save. Just Five.
Right now, as it turns out, Five does need the word of God.
Just probably not the way he’s supposed to.
All the same.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says, sparing a glance at his mannequin. “If I die, then what happens to you? You wouldn’t like being alone, I think.”
Her gaze is relentless.
He sighs. “I know what it looks like,” he says, explaining as patiently as he can. “But it’s salvation, right?”
He turns back to the fire and throws the first Bible on. It catches instantly, the flame taking bright and bold and warm.
Five exhales in relief. “It’s salvation.”
-o-
Five doesn’t believe in miracles, but these Bibles are pretty impressive. They burn for hours, slow and hot and perfect. They sustain the fire days past what Five thought possible, and they’re far less work to prep than the wood from the rest of the church. He spends his time sitting by the fire, eating his meals and boiling himself some clean water. To pass the time, he flips through the Bibles before he burns them, curiously scouring the antiquated text as one might read a textbook or political treatise.
It’s probably not the book he expects, though he doesn’t find it as off putting as he expects. Many religious people spend a lot of time preaching, but this is a book of stories, mostly of ordinary people who do stupid things and still somehow come out on top.
Five can see the appeal, inherently. And the promise of salvation is something that he feels now acutely.
Yet it is a promised unfulfilled in so many ways. He thinks about how many people died believing of some promised messiah. And for what? For the apocalypse? For one 13 year old boy with a faulty ability to time travel?
Five’s cold but he’s not stupid, and he’s desperate but he’s not naive. He’s not chosen; he’s not called. There is no messiah coming. It’s just Five looking for his way home, his way back.
And if anything, the book supports Five’s take on this. His take on everything, really.
He reads hungrily as the hours pass.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, who you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
Five does as he throws the Bible into the fire, drawing himself closer so his body stays warm.
As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
If anything, Five is fulfilling the plan. This isn’t sin; this isn’t desecration. This is the preservation of the last holy place. For that is what Five is. The last temple.
God’s grace is fickle, it seems.
Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
And the fire burns.
-o-
The weather clears. As usual, it’s just in time. Five is down to two Bibles. He puts one back on the shelf and tucks the other next to Five as he loads her up in the wagon.
“I know you want to get out,” he says, pausing to adjust her hat on her head. It’s silly, but he likes it. It makes him smile. “And I think I’ve finally cleared a path out from the door enough for us to see what’s up. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She’s a mannequin, so she has no opinion.
But Five likes it enough for the both of them, standing on the front stoop. He looks out across the ground, covered in a pristine white coat. You almost can’t tell that there’s death and destruction beneath.
”Come now, let us settle the matters,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they should be as white as snow.”
Five laughs, shakes his head. “Okay, then,” he says.
And he sets off across the expanse.
-o-
Despite the need for rations, Five’s first stop is the graveyard. There’s so much snow that there’s not much to be done, but Five digs a path to Luther’s grave, and clears his way around it. He treads carefully, of course. There is a yawning sinkhole nearby. One wrong step, and all his hard fought survival skills will be for naught.
He takes his time because, survival is important, but it is merely the means to an end. Five tends the graveyard and reminds himself what this about.
Getting back.
Somewhere, in time, his family is still eating dinner. He can be there with them. He will be there with them.
That’s the end.
Worth any means possible.
-o-
Five quickly falls back into his routine. He’s slowed down by the weather. Though the snow has stopped and the temperatures are no longer icy, it’s still quite cold. The snow shows no sign of melting, which makes traversing through his grid of streets is easier said than done. Still, he is getting pretty good at this thing now, and he efficiently finds his way to enough food and other supplies to keep him going.
He comes back to the church each night, dropping off his supplies and taking refuge.
Still, his day revolves around the trips to visit the graveyard and tend to his family. It’s his personal pilgrimage. He comes to think of if as his intimate mass.
There are days when it feels limiting. There are days when he abandoned the grid and pushes himself further and further. But being too far out makes him panic, and he turns back and doubles his way home, just to be sure that Luther’s grave is still there.
He can’t leave; he can’t move ahead.
Not when the goal is -- the goal has to be -- going back.
-o-
The world does eventually begin to thaw, though it takes quite some time. By Five’s best estimates, he’s been here nearly six months at this point. He doesn’t suspect that spring will have much meaning, but he’s ready for the snow to go.
And go, it does.
As the temperature lifts, the snow begins streaming away. It melts in fast droves, leading to flooding and fast torrents. It’s tricky to get around; some of the makeshift rivers are that fast, that strong. But Five feels the thaw deep inside him; he can’t, he won’t stay idle.
He pours his energy into the graveyard. Now that the snow is clearing, he can finally get a better picture of what he’s working with. He tediously removes the remaining piles of melting snow, clearing the swaths of ground before picking up any debris that may have ended up in the area over the long winter. He’s working on laying a footpath of broken cement and stones to the graves, working through the wet ground, when it happens.
Five has shoveled the snow to the perimeter, you see. The drifts there are still substantial, artificially inflated by his efforts at removal. With the sinkhole nearby, the drainage patterns are a mess, and though Five has taken great pains to secure Luther’s position, the natural erosion has been somewhat unpredictable.
He feels the ground shudder at first.
He turns, shovel in hand, when he sees the snow shudder at the far end of the park. It disappears, sucked into the sinkhole, and then a rush of water comes down from the snowbank, sweeping toward Luther’s grave. The marker is dislodged first, swept away in the current. Then, the ground being loose and poorly supported, the whole thing gives away. Five watches as it crumbles. The grave is gone in an instant.
Then, the ground beneath Five’s feet gives way, too.
Frantic, Five lunges forward, just barely grabbing at the edge of the sinkhole as it consumes the park whole. He panics for a moment, adrenaline kicking in as he struggles to keep his grip on the wet ground. He has already lost the shovel, and he’s going to fall if he’s not absolutely on his game.
Breathing heavy, he looks down. There is no bottom; he could fall forever.
Looking back around him, he cranes his neck. It’s gone, of course. All of it -- his graveyard, Luther’s immaculate grave -- is gone.
The loss is sudden.
The loss is palpable.
For a long, horrible second, Five thinks about letting go.
It’d be easy. A long fall. Hell, it’s probably inevitable at this point.
Tears sting his eyes, and he looks back at the hole, trying to imagine what it’d be like. His heart thuds dully against his chest, and he struggles to understand. Luther’s gone. He’s joined Diego and Allison and Klaus. And Ben and Vanya, too, for that matter. Even his old man. All of them. Gone.
Like they were never here at all.
The shock of it rattles Five, and he feels his grip slacken at the knees. He’s not sure what to do.
He doesn’t understand.
All this time, all this energy, all this…
And it’s gone.
It’s gone.
It strikes him coldly, numbly: it’s always been gone.
It’s been gone since he got here.
He’s been clinging to bone. He’s been tending to memories. He’s cultivated a hope for the past.
And every last bit of it is gone.
The shock is throbbing now, pulsing with the beat of his heart as it echoes through his ears. He waits for tears, but they don’t come. He waits for depression, but the numbness is already dissipating. In their places, something else festers. Something more feral, something more visceral. Something far more suited for this dead world than grace and dignity.
He reaches up, grasping at the solid ground. He finds purchase and pulls himself up. His limbs tremble with the exertion, but he ignores it. He drags himself, muddy, cold and wet, back on to the ground, and he sits on hands and knees gulping at the air.
Rage.
That’s what he feels.
Anger and contempt and utter rage.
He gets to his feet. Smeared with mud, he turns to the wagon, where his remaining supplies and the well dressed mannequin are poised.
“Wait for me,” he tells the mannequin as he turns on his heel and stalks off down the street. “I’ll be back.”
-o-
It’s not a coherent thought while Five walks, but when he ends up in front of the church, it’s also not a surprise. He stands there, looking up at the structure, and he has to laugh.
It’s still standing. The church is all but pristine. For all that Five has hollowed out the inside, it looms taller than the wreckage, almost like a damn beacon of hope. He hasn’t admitted it, but he’s taken comfort in that. He’s used it as his refuge.
And for what?
Why is this church spared when so many other things have fallen? What is so special about this building? Why would any God save these four walls when everything else falls? What importance is a building? When there are people -- so many people -- who have died?
Holy ground?
In what matter?
There were exactly six things in this life that Five held sacred, and all of them are lost. There’s nothing sacred left here.
Nothing.
Five climbs the stairs to the church and throws open the doors, crossing the threshold for what is surely the last time.
-o-
He walks up the aisle into the sanctuary and makes his way to the altar. On his way, he grabs the first tool he sees -- an axe, he’s stored by the door. He wields it as he approaches, coming to a stop as he stands at the foot of the cross and sneers.
“If that’s the way you want to play it, then fine,” he says. “Take them. Take all of them. Take everything. Just take it!”
He’s yelling now, his voice echoing off the walls as he throws his hands wide.
“Take me, too! Take me!”
There’s no answer.
Just a quiet church.
An empty church.
Five drops his hands. “Fine,” he says. “Then I’ll do the taking this time.”
He lifts the axe and swings. It lodges into the wood of the altar. Five yanks it loose, sending it crashing down again. This time, a piece splinters off. Five grunts, bring the axe down again and again until the whole unit is in pieces.
Then, he lunges toward the windows, shattering the stained glass. In a rage, he slams through the walls, cuts up the floor. When he crashes through into the entryway, he finds the candles and the matches. He’s left a stock there all this time.
He doesn’t smile as he picks up the matches, kicking the candles over so they scatter across the floor. Instead, Five takes the matches, stalking back up the ruin aisle to the remains of the altar. He lights the match and holds it up.
“This it the valley of the shadow of death, and I’ve been here for six months!” he screams. “And where are you? Where were you when this happened? Where were you?”
There’s no answer, not from relics from a dead religion, and Five throws the match to the altar. It only takes a moment for it to catch, mere seconds for the flame to take hold. Five stands back, watching as it builds and licks up toward the ceiling.
Then, he takes another matches and throws it against one wall. He lights one in the office, sets fire to the stage. He sets the other wall ablaze and tosses one into the basement, tosses another until he’s sure it’s taken. He makes his way back in to the sanctuary as it fills up with smoke, the fire consuming everything.
“Everything falls; everything ends,” he says at the foot of the now-burning cross. He smiles grimly. “Everything.”
-o-
For a moment, the rush of adrenaline is all there is. But then, he chokes on the next breath and he realizes what he’s done. Not the desecration of a holy temple or any nonsense like that. Practically speaking, he’s lit the whole building on fire.
While he’s inside of it.
Sure, it’s satisfying and dramatic, but it also has the potential to kill him if he doesn’t get the hell out.
Five’s not sure what survival even means anymore, but his instincts lean pretty strongly that way. Turning quickly, he starts to make his way back down the aisle with some haste. His forward progress is thwarted however, as the structure begins to crumble. The walls are buckling; sections of the ceiling are starting to fall. The smoke is thick and cloying, and Five realizes dimly that it’s possible he’s let his emotions get the best of him.
This whole thing had been a bit childish and petty. He’d been mad; he’d been hurt; he’d been betrayed. His sanctuary had not saved him, and he had lashed out against it.
Now, it very well could kill him.
Justice?
Five chooses not to pursue that line of thought.
He’s too busy trying not to die in his own foolish haste.
He makes his way a few steps forward, but the whole back wall falls in. It crashes with embers flying, and Five has to retreat quickly. He trips over a piece of the roof, stumbling further in retreat to the burning altar, which is now nothing more than a nub on the ground. Frantic, Five reviews the other exits and he eyes the windows that he’s already broken. Both walls are ablaze, and smoke is billowing out of the office and back storage rooms.
Choking back a cough, Five’s eyes are starting to sting. He lifts his arm to cover his mouth, but it doesn’t do much good. He needs an exit; he needs an out.
And he needs it now.
The building groans, and Five looks up. He flinches when he realizes what’s happening, but there’s nothing he can do but dive to the ground as the back wall of the sanctuary falls down, crashing on top of it in a blaze of fire.
He’s expecting to die, quite honestly, a fiery and painful sort of death, but he quickly realizes that he’s not dead. In fact, he’s not on fire and he’s not been crushed. Rolling himself over, he looks up, and comes face to face with the cross.
It’s fallen free of the wall, twisting in its descent. It is lodged, one short arm jammed into the ground, leaving the whole thing at an angle. It’s strong line of timber is thicker and more resilient than he’d realized. Though he’s charred the outside, it’s still strong enough to stop the drywall from crushing him.
In fact, the angle has provided him with an out. Too shocked to think much harder about it, Five crawls his way out. He drags himself up out of the wreckages, and looks back in shock. But then, he remembers to look forward.
With the collapse of a section of the structure, there is new light pouring in. Light that perfectly illuminates the last, scant clear path toward freedom.
Five doesn’t hesitate to follow. He tracks the light through the burning wreckages, snaking his way around the debris. He has to jump over the remnants of the front wall, but follows the light as it leads him out the front doors. He exits just in time for the whole thing to collapse in on itself, leaving nothing but the desolate doorframe on top of the stone steps he climbed for refuge for the first time six months ago.
The church burns, turning black and fading. Five, though tired and breathing heavily, is no worse for wear.
He’s stands in shock, understanding again that his actions have consequences.
Actions have consequences.
And Five has to live with them.
Five has to live.
That’s the bitter truth, that’s the final condemnation, that’s the last hope.
Five stumbles back from the flames and falls to his knees, staring up as the fire towers above him.
That’s everything.
-o-
Five watches it burn. He watches it burn as night falls; he stays there, on his knees, as the flames die down and the wreckage smolders. He’s still there in the morning, as the dawn breaks on this fallen world, revealing the true extent of what Five has wrought.
There’s nothing left of the church; it’s utter destruction.
Yet, the sun plays across the rubble, twinkling in the dying embers. The daylight glistens with the most surreal kind of beauty Five has ever seen.
He is not here; he has risen.
Hope, you see, is a living thing.
And Five, despite all odds, is still alive.
Five won’t find his hope among the dead. He won’t find it in burials or graveyards. He won’t find it in relics and traditions. Hope can’t be found in the past. Hope is the future. The next moment and the next.
Five’s not been looking at it that way. Five’s been surviving the future in order to cling to the past. He’s actually believe he can go back.
He can’t, though.
Just like he can’t save his siblings’ bodies. He can’t go back home. It’s all rubble, and Five can pick through it to find what’s salvageable, but he can’t go back. Five left it, and this is the consequence.
He stands in the ash of the church and realizes that this is the consequence. There are no lines left to cross, no taboos left to touch. There is nothing sacred left to desecrate. His his siblings -- if his hope of a childhood can turn to rot -- then Five’s been clinging to all the wrong things.
Clinging to that past -- clinging to these comforts -- will kill him if he doesn’t cut them loose. He can’t stay here any longer. He can’t live like he’s going home. At least, not like he’s going home the same naive child that he was. He can’t save that child, but he can save them
Not their graves -- those are meaningless anyway -- but their future. Maybe he can save them all, every person and living being on this planet.
That means he has to stop looking back. He has to look forward.
This requires acceptance.
Total and wholehearted acceptance.
Yes, the world has ended. The apocalypse has been wrought. His siblings are dead. There is no dinner table waiting for him. There is no hot meal.. There is no family waiting for him to go home. Five’s can’t be the 13 year old he used to be. This was his past.
It’s over.
All there is now, in this bleak, horrible world, is the future.
It is a future Five has to build. One he has to scrape out, eek out, burn his way through. If he wants his family, then it’s not faith that will bring them back. It’s calculations. They’re alive in time, so he has to get back to them somehow, and he won’t find those numbers or variables in a hollowed out church.
That’s not even the point, is it?
Faith isn’t found in religious practices or lists of dos and don’ts. It’s relational; it’s relationships.
Faith, they say, can move mountains.
That’s all well and good.
But Five needs faith to move time.
-o-
He doesn’t sift through the rubble -- there’s nothing there to find, nothing he needs to find -- but there’s one small crucifix that survives. It’s fallen off the door, which swung off its hinges in the flames, crashing to the ground in front of the church. Five picks it up and looks it over. He thinks about throwing it back, to turn to ash with the rest, but he pockets it instead.
When he makes it back to the park, he loads up the wagon. He puts the little crucifix with the mannequin for safekeeping.
“I know it means something to you; you liked it here,” he tells her with a shrug, the closest she will ever come to an apology over this. Without the church, she matters to him. She’s all the home he has left, the only constant left. “And we won’t be going back, so I thought we’d take what mattered with us.”
The mannequin says nothing, but she looks silently please. Five rolls her eyes as he picks up the handle. He stands at the edge to give the graveyard one last look.
His siblings aren’t there anymore.
The thing is, though, they never were.
Five turns abruptly and starts down the street, the wagon rattling after him step by step.
-o-
The apocalypse destroys humanity, in the end.
All of it.
It just took longer for it to claim Five.
Five thinks, reasons, calculates, hopes that if he keeps going, he can find it again.
PART TWO
-o-
Then, one afternoon, he’s climbing through a half demolished daycare when the ground starts to shake. At first, Five thinks he’s just ventured too far into the unstable structure, but he realizes quite quickly that it’s more than that. It’s more than the floor that’s shaking; it’s more than the structure. It’s the whole damn world.
It’s an earthquake.
Hastily, Five climbs backwards, exiting out of the precarious structure as quickly as he can. He just clears one of the rooms when the roof falls in. Five trips over the bag of baby food he’s collected, leaving it behind as he scrambles out the front door entirely. His heart pounds as he falls down the front steps just in time to watch the whole thing collapse on itself.
That’s not the only building to suffer, either.
Five looks around, watching as the buildings keen. A few of the taller ones sway, and debris rains down. There’s a building down the street that careens over, and one across the street has two floors collapse against each other like pancakes. Five dimly realizes that he probably needs to get to shelter just as the rumbling stops.
He stands, still bracing himself for several long seconds. Remembering to breathe, he finds himself awash with adrenaline and no purpose to apply it. He’s lucky, to be honest. If the building had fallen or any of the adjacent buildings. Sinkholes could have appeared in the ground. But the treat he’s on is relatively unscathed even as the dust settles.
But this isn’t the only place in the world, is it?
Five’s perspective is terrifyingly narrow sometimes -- that’s what happens when there’s no one else alive -- but he’s maintained a sharp sense of the fact that his survival is only contrasted by the loss of everyone else. He defines this loss through the memory of his siblings--
His siblings.
His heart races again as he thinks about the graveyard, which he has so meticulously maintained. He’s taken to gardening it of all things. Keeping it clear of debris. Organizing his cache.
For today, the grid can wait.
Five turns back toward his family and runs.
-o-
The whole way there, he tries to assure himself. They’re probably fine. It’s a wide open space. His cache has probably knocked a few things over, but nothing is likely to be out of sorts.
His confidence flags somewhat as he gets closer. There are more fallen buildings as he approaches. In fact, one of the streets he has frequented is no longer accessible due to the influx of new debris. Five seems to be getting closer and closer to the epicenter. As he nears the park, he has to climb over a few smaller structures that have fallen, but he presses on until he arrives.
The park is a mess. The few dead trees that had been standing have been upturned. The slide is cracked all the way in half. The building across the street has tipped over, spilling all the way across the opposite end, making the park accessible from only one angle. And Five counts the graves -- one, two, three -- and he nearly stops breathing
One of the graves is gone, the marker buried in the rubble, slabs of concrete bigger than Five’s entire body crushing the ground to nothing. Klaus’ bloodstained cross is gone
Klaus is gone.
And Five’s entire cache has been decimated.
-o-
Five’s a fighter, but this time, there’s no fight to be had. He stays there, standing limply, surveying the damage for some time. But he can’t bring himself to go to the debris. He can’t.
He already knows what failure feels like, after all.
And there’s no doubt that it feels just like this.
-o-
The trip back to the church is one that Five makes almost without thinking. The damage is just as bad on his way over, and he worries before he gets there that there will be nothing left for him there either. The street before is all but decimated, and when Five turns the corner, he fears the worst.
But there’s a clearing with the church in the middle.
Its steeple is still tall and erect.
It’s the last building -- the only building -- standing.
Five, being the last person on earth, goes ahead and goes inside.
Everything there is just as he left it.
You could call it a blessing, if that’s your thing. Others might call it a curse.
Five calls it nothing. He breaks open a can of food in the basement, eats until he’s full and promptly goes to sleep.
-o-
For the weeks that follow, there is a hollow emptiness that haunts him. He loses the will to maintain his work. He lets his patterns fall by the wayside. He does not explore; he does not search. He makes a trek out once a day, sometimes with the mannequin in tow, just to check on the rest of the graves. And he makes the trek back every night.
He soon eats through the food stash, and he sleeps so much that he loses track of the days. He thinks maybe it’s been a month. Maybe it’s been too.
He’s not sure it matters.
Five’s not sure anything matters.
-o-
Then, one day, he runs out of food. Actually, he’s been out of food for several days, but he is just starting to get hungry. In fact, the hunger pains in his stomach are the most he’s felt in weeks.
By the time he realizes this, he also realizes that he’s let this go on too long. He has no supplies; he has no prospects. He’s dangerous thin and he’s frame is bordering on frail. In a haze, he’s let himself slip into a depression, and it’s very well coming close to killing him.
He tries to venture out, but up and down the street, there’s no sign of anything to eat. He tries to go further, but the exhaustion nearly makes him collapse, and it’s all he can do to drag himself back home. He can’t even make it to the graveyard anymore, and he drags himself into the sanctuary, gasping and drawn.
On hands and knees, he only makes it to the altar. He won’t even get to lie down on a comfortable spot if he’s going to die.
Flopping back, he looks at the ceiling, wondering if this is it.
His eyes wander the cross and he shakes his head.
“Don’t bother,” he murmurs. He closes his eyes, too tired to care. He’s done, maybe. He’s just done.
But he thinks of three tended graves. He’s already lost one, but what about the others.
What about all of them.
What about the world Five might be able to save.
The humanity he might be able to revive.
He opens his eyes, rasping through his dry throat. He rolls himself over, pulling himself up at the pulpit. Then, he sees it. A box he hasn’t noticed before; at least, not one he’s deemed relevant. It’s communion wafers, neatly packages and utterly untouched.
He’d classified it as religious paraphernalia and deemed it worthless. But he looks at it again. The eucharist: take this bread. Sure, it’s supposed to be the body of Christ and yadda, yadda, yadda, but it’s also bread.
It’s bread.
Literally starving, he lunges at it. His coordination is off, but he manages to rip the box open. There’s an open package, and Five shoves the stale pieces of bread into his mouth without tasting them. He almost chokes as he swallows them, but then he uses his numb fingers to open a fresh sleeves. These are fresher, and Five eats the whole box within minutes.
To his surprise, he finds several more boxes behind it.
Five eats them all, every last crumb. He eats until his stomach hurts, and he flops on his back again, looking up at the cross with his hand resting on his distended belly.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” he says. And he closes his eyes. “But thank you all the same.”
-o-
Five sleeps, and when he wakes up, he really wakes up. He realizes he’s been overly stupid and sentimental the last few weeks. He should be dead for the lack of his effort. He’s gone and wasted all his supplies, and there’s no justifiable reason for it. So what if a grave got covered? It doesn’t make his siblings any less dead.
No, Five has to get back on top of things.
If he’s going to survive, he’s going to have to want it.
And he does.
So he packs up the mannequin, readies his wagon and heads out. Revitalized, rejuvenated: ready.
-o-
It’s not easy work, but it’s the apocalypse. It’s not going to be easy. Five has to make his way through several blocks of debris before he starts finding buildings that are still standing. He makes headway quickly after that, and he has to make his way back to the church by the midday to drop of the new host of supplies he’s come across. He continues for the afternoon and circles around to the graveyard, where he eats his dinner.
He makes his way back to the church at nightfall, quickly organizes his new cache, and treks back upstairs by candlelight to head to bed.
Several more days like this, and he’ll be set for several months at least.
Then, the rain starts.
And it doesn’t stop.
Five stays inside for the first day when the deluge is just too much. Two days later, when it’s a constant but not pounding rain, he tries to venture out, only to come back in almost immediately. The rain isn’t right; the water is clearly contaminated. Five can boil it for drinking and cleaning purposes, but he’s pretty sure walking out in it straight on is probably less than advisable.
After a week, Five’s starting to get restless. He decides to risk it, and ventures out anyway. He makes his way through the muck, collecting whatever meager supplies he can, but the streets are flooded in some areas, and even when he makes it to the park, it’s too soupy to stay for longer.
He makes it back to the church feeling winded, and he is shivering when he settles down for the night. He doesn’t eat much for the lack of an appetite, and he goes to sleep thinking things will be better in the morning.
They’re not better. Things are worse, in fact. The rain has picked up again, and Five is clearly sick. Whatever’s in the water has flooded him, and he spends the next three days too ill to move. Even when he recovers, there’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. He starts rationing his supplies, just in case. To make it last longer, he makes a pile for himself and one for the mannequin.
She looks quizzical about this, Five decides.
“You’re reading into it too much,” Five tells her. “I know you’re a mannequin, okay? But this makes it easier to not eat everything.”
He adjusts her so she’s looking at him a bit more fully. He regards her with some satisfaction.
“You don’t need to get weird about it,” he says. “I’ve got enough things to worry about. I don’t need to worry about you.”
She says nothing.
Which is to be expected, of course, given that she’s a mannequin.
Still, Five finds it reassuring.
-o-
When the rain stops, Five is starting to feel anemic. His food store isn’t completely depleted, but his water is. He’s drunk all the bottled water on sight, and he’s out of dry timber for fires. He’s spent these last days in the cold and damp, and when he goes outside, it’s hardly a relief.
The world is saturated. The fires have long since been put out, and the dirt and grime has coalesced, coating everything in scum. The surfaces are hardly safe to walk on, and Five doesn’t dare bring out the wagon in conditions like these. As it is, it is barely safe for him to walk to the graveyard, but he’s been gone too long as it is. He wants to tend to things a bit; keep things in order.
Upon his arrival, however, nothing is in order.
In fact, the park is barely recognizable. The playground equipment as been washed away. The building that took out Klaus’ grave is gone, swallowed up by a gaping hole in the ground. The next two graves, where Allison and Diego are buried, have been exposed to the hole as well. Allison’s is gone, but Diego’s marker is still perched uneasily on the edge. The dirt has fallen away, and Five can see portions of bone beneath the surface, barely clinging to solid ground.
Concerned, Five tries to lower himself down into the hole, but he only manages to lose his last working flashlight in the process. He watches as it falls down the abyss; watches until it disappears from view, no sign of bottom.
Allison’s grave is gone.
If Five is going to find it, he’s going to join her.
Gritting his teeth, he drags himself back to the surface and looks at Diego’s grave. It’s salvageable, he decides. All he has to do is adjust it, maybe move the body. It’ll be tedious work, but what else does Five really need to do these days. He’s all set to get started again, when he hears a distant rumble. He ignores it at first, but another comes before he even gets to work on shifting the mud.
He looks up in time to feel the first raindrop on his face.
“Shit,” he swears, wiping it away. Another raindrop hits him on the forehead. “Shit.”
He has to get back to shelter; he has to get back to the church.
His family, unfortunately, is just going to have to wait.
-o-
Five runs back, sprinting as often as he can. The risk of falling and injuring himself is real and a dangerous prospect. However, the chance of him getting sick again from the rain is more pressing and even less avoidable. Five is aware, on some dim, practical level, that a fall could leave him stranded in the open, thus leading to his death, but there are too many logical steps to get to that point.
Five’s motivation now is more intrinsic.
They don’t call it fight or flight for nothing.
It’s just that, in the apocalypse, there is no one left to fight.
So Five runs.
It’s what got him here.
He hopes against hope that it’s what gets him home.
That is the thing, isn’t it? He tells himself as his feet hit the wet remains of crumbling pavement. That’s why he clings to his siblings, isn’t it? Because he doesn’t believe this is where he belongs. He hasn’t accepted it; that this is where his story ends. He doesn’t know how -- he can’t even fathom how -- but he has to get home.
He runs, skidding around a corner, the rain starting to fall harder now.
His family is a symbol, his link to the past. The things that used to be. Five’s not letting it go.
Five’s not letting it go.
He runs and runs and runs until he’s in front of the church, scrambling up the steps.
As long as he preserves them -- even two of them -- then there’s hope for him, for a 13 year old boy full of hubris. There’s a place at a dinner table, hot food on the table, seven siblings pulling round while a record plays in the background. Five can go back like none of this happened. Five can go back and none of this will happen.
He closes the door behind him as the renewed deluge starts up again.
Slumping to the ground, he pants with his eyes closed.
Five can still go back.
-o-
Of course, going back means surviving. The rain does not make this easy. He has, at least, managed to avoid the worst of the sickness this time around, but he regrets how few supplies he’s collected. He still has some food to last him, but the problem with the water is going to get pressing.
The irony is not lost on Five.
The pouring rain outside and he’s going bone dry inside. He manages to make a bunch of small candles he finds, but he has to light so many to heat a pan of water that it’s almost not worth it. He goes through half his candle supply in one go, and even then it takes hours to get him any water that’s still drinkable.
He tries to keep himself busy so he doesn’t think about it. He organizes the storage rooms a few more times, sifting through the useless things he has no possible need for just to keep himself from thinking about how likely he is to die in the next week if the rain doesn’t let up.
That’s when he finds it, in a box he’s dumped in a corner next to catechism booklets and broken kneelers. The holy water.
It’s packaged in little containers, clearly outfitted for a special occasion like Easter. Five’s never actually been to a church service, but he imagines that they must have been available to the congregation. For what purpose, he can’t say. He doesn’t understand the point of holy water.
It’s supposed to be holy, he figures.
But, he logically concludes, it’s also water.
His first temptation is to open the first little bottle and chug, but he finds himself hesitating. He’s not one to ascribe to superstition, but this church has been good to him. There’s no likely indication that it’s divine intervention or anything like that. Random chance is a more apt possibility.
And still.
It’s the one building still standing.
He ate wafers when he should have starved to death.
At the very least, he needs to think about what he’s doing. All this, his scavenging in a church, could be considered desecration by the righteous.
Funny then that none of the righteous survived.
He sighs, and cracks open a bottle. He lifts it up, and shrugs. “If it makes things better, I at least appreciate the gift,” he says, by way of explanation. “I don’t know if that matters or anything, but, there you go.”
He drinks the first bottle, and the second and the third.
Five doesn’t die that night.
He doesn’t die that week.
In fact, he’s still alive and well when the rain ends.
-o-
When it’s over -- really over, this time -- Five sees the sun for the first time since arriving in the apocalypse. It’s not a clear view -- the atmosphere has been badly contaminated by dust and debris -- but he can faintly see the yellow through the haze.
Although he needs food and water soon, Five’s first stop is to his graveyard. The water damage is extensive throughout the area, and Five is not surprised to find that Diego’s grave has been fully washed away. Whether it has fallen into the sinkhole or simply been swept away in the deluge, Five is not sure. But there’s no way to find out, so he finds that acceptance is the only viable way to proceed.
Besides, there is still one grave to care for. It may say Luther’s name -- it may hold Luther’s bones -- but it is representative of them all. If Five can protect this last grave, then it matters. There’s still hope for his family; there’s still hope for him. He can still go back.
With that in mind, Five sets himself to work. He works diligently throughout the day, cleaning up the debris and tidying the area. He clears the graveyard and props up the grave marker as best he can in the wet soil. By the time he’s done, it looks like a proper memorial again, and Five finds himself somewhat satisfied.
This task being complete, Five feels ready to face the day and its rigors again.
He can do this; he can survive.
And someday -- someday -- Five will make it back.
-o-
His resolve endures better than one might expect for a teenager at the end of the world. Though he is very isolated and the conditions are very difficult at times, Five faces the challenges with as much optimism as one possibly can. He scours a five block radius, then a six block radius. When he gets to 10 blocks, it starts to make him anxious. It’s hard to get back home in a timely manner. It makes it difficult to do his daily pilgrimage to his graveyard.
Still, somehow he always makes it back to the church at nightfall.
There, he tidies his cache, sorts his finds for the day, and tucks in with the mannequin in the priest’s office after saluting the cross with a smirk.
Gratitude, he decides, is a lot like survival.
You do what’s necessary.
-o-
Five hardly notices at first when the weather starts to turn. It’s a wasteland outside, so there are no obvious signs of seasonal changes. Still, he finds that he gets chilled faster, and soon he is scavenging for heavier pants, sweatshirts and gloves. He finally takes a thick winter hat and commandeers a full-on winter coat. By the time it snows, Five has to accept that it is winter outside.
At first, he tries to carry on like nothing has changed. He still goes out and forages. He still makes his gridwork radius, moving along as best he can. And he still tends the graveyard, shoveling away the snow to preserve the area as best he can from the onslaught of the cold.
The snow does not stop, however.
The temperatures start to plunge.
Five is no longer to make it far. The snow slows him down more often than not, and his fingers are threatened with frostbite. His food sources begin to run thin, and his water supply is scant. He has burned through all his firewood, collected meticulously over the course of weeks, and then, to make matters more fun, a blizzard sets in.
This is not a snowstorm.
This is a blizzard.
The snow is ferocious, and the winds howl. Five tries to make it out the front door, but the snow has drifted up against it so high that he can’t even see out over the top of the white mounds. He has no choice but to lock himself in, and draw into the warmer interior of the church.
The office has a fireplace, which has been a necessary part of his survival for weeks now. He’s out of fuel, however, and Five starts to feel himself freezing when he tries to sleep. Even with all his layers, his fingers feel numb, and Five eventually acknowledges that he’s going to be at risk for hypothermia if things to not improve.
Improvement, however, is not going to be coming from the elements. It is a hostile world outside, and if it is not actively trying to kill Five, then it is at least indifferent to the fact that he’s alive.
No, there will be no help from such a thing as fate or chance.
If Five is going to survive, he needs to show some ingenuity. Some persistence.
He’s a smart kid; he can figure this out.
Just how, is the real question.
He’s trapped in a church, of all places. A church in the apocalypse.
Pacing back and forth in the sanctuary, Five does his best to keep warm, to keep his mind and body going. He scoffs.
“So much for salvation,” he mutters, and then he takes a long, winded breath. The pull of the air is like ice in his lungs. He has to sit down.
The pews are without any flourishes. The church, though well maintained, is nothing fancy. Its simplistic design accentuates the more ornate finishes of the windows and altar. But no expense was allotted to comfort. These old wooden benches are hard to sit on, even through the multiple layers that Five is currently wearing. They’re just wooden pews, so old that the stain is nearly rubbed clean, making them more like planks of wood than anything else.
Five looks down.
Planks of wood.
He hastily removes a glove and runs his bare fingers over the surface.
A plank of wood.
He looks up at the cross and shakes his head. “Don’t say anything.”
And he promptly gets to work.
-o-
It takes Five longer than he’d like to pull up the first pew from the back of the church. The thing is bolted to the ground, and Five’s lost weight in the apocalypse. He’s packed with lean muscle, but he’s still a 13 year old kid. Not to mention the fact that he’s half frozen through.
Still, Five is nothing if not persistent, and after much labor. He has the first pew up. He takes up the second somewhat faster, and he’s almost got it down by the time he gets to the third. He pulls up the fourth before he drags the timber back to the office and starts to cut it up. This work is even more tedious -- he works hard not to cut his fingers off with the numbing cold slowing him down -- but he finally makes enough pieces small enough to fit into the fireplace.
With hasty excitement, Five goes for his matches. He has enough of these, at least, to last him for awhile, and he uses his trembling fingers to strike a match. The first one he throws on doesn’t catch, and he reprimands himself for neglecting his kindling. His last fire -- several days ago -- had burned down to ash. He has nothing left.
He scrabbles through the desk, finding a few more papers in one of the filing drawers. He throws them in, and lights a second match. This one takes to the paper immediately. It takes a little longer for the wood to catch -- Five throws on another match, just to be sure -- but soon the fire lances up the wood and starts to burn in earnest.
Five watches, studiously tending it, shifting the wood and throwing on a few more pieces, until soon it’s a crackling fire there.
“There,” he says with a nod to the mannequin. “We’ll be warming up in no time.”
-o-
It does get warm, and Five is able to take off his gloves, hat and coat for the first time in weeks. His hair has grown shaggy in all of this, but he pays it no heed. Instead, he continues to tend the fire, cutting up the first four pews while pausing for breaks. It’s a blissful day or so, and he even manages to get a good night’s sleep for the first time in ages.
Still, in the morning, he’s faced with the reality that his wood supply is growing thing.
He chews his lip and then shrugs.
“That’s not a difficult problem to solve.”
-o-
For approximately a week, the problem is quite manageable. Five spends a little time each day, pulling up the pews to stoke his fire. When the pews run out, he finds some chairs and a few small tables. He breaks off the wood paneling on the walls and burns that, too, but stops himself at the altar and the cross. The altar is too big to break -- he’d have to saw off pieces -- and the cross is too high to reach. He burns the outdated organe, the railing on the stairs and every other scrap of wood he can find.
This lasts him another week, perhaps, but the wind outside doesn’t let up. Whatever has happened to the world, it’s messed up the weather patterns severely. This is clearly the effects of global warming times a million. He has no way of knowing how long this winter will last. He has no way of knowing whether or not this is a new ice age. For all he knows, the world may never thaw, not in his lifetime.
And if the world never thaws, there’s a good chance that lifetime will not be very long.
He’s good with food and water for now, but the cold is pervasive. All his diligence to prepared for anything, and he’s not prepared for this. It’s not fair, really. Five works hard, and the universe keeps changing all the rules.
Five stews on this for several days while he burns the last of his wood supply. He walks restlessly throughout the room, keeping the door closed tight in a vain attempt to savor the last of his heat. He tidies the space a few times, reorganizing his supplies and remaking his bed. He adjusts the mannequin so she looks comfortable, posing her in the chair across from the desk.
The chair is plastic, by the way. It doesn’t burn.
The desk is metal; it doesn’t burn either. Five thinks about giving up the couch, but there’s no telling what will happen if he sets the fabric on fire. He’s already burned the end tables and the other chairs. Pausing, he looks at the inset shelves along the back wall. These shelves are built in, which limit their viability. They’re also painted, which may make them unsafe to burn, but Five is getting to that point where desperation dictates things that Five’s common sense might otherwise object to. Quickly, he starts taking things off the shelves -- the Bibles -- and dumps them on the desk behind him. He’s carting another handful when he stops himself.
The Bibles are thick.
The pages are made with real paper, thick paper, and the covers are substantial. In fact, he’s sure it would take a long time to burn.
More than that, it would be hot.
With one in hand, he takes it to the fire. His theory is sound, but he needs practical application. At the fire, which has grown low, he stops himself and thinks about what he’s doing.
Burning Bibles. Even without religious affiliation, Five knows there’s a certain amount of disrespect here. And his goal is to preserve humanity, not obliterate it. Society can still exist if he holds onto the social norms. That’s his ticket home.
And yet, if he dies, the norms die with him. There’s no one left on this planet to save. Just Five.
Right now, as it turns out, Five does need the word of God.
Just probably not the way he’s supposed to.
All the same.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he says, sparing a glance at his mannequin. “If I die, then what happens to you? You wouldn’t like being alone, I think.”
Her gaze is relentless.
He sighs. “I know what it looks like,” he says, explaining as patiently as he can. “But it’s salvation, right?”
He turns back to the fire and throws the first Bible on. It catches instantly, the flame taking bright and bold and warm.
Five exhales in relief. “It’s salvation.”
-o-
Five doesn’t believe in miracles, but these Bibles are pretty impressive. They burn for hours, slow and hot and perfect. They sustain the fire days past what Five thought possible, and they’re far less work to prep than the wood from the rest of the church. He spends his time sitting by the fire, eating his meals and boiling himself some clean water. To pass the time, he flips through the Bibles before he burns them, curiously scouring the antiquated text as one might read a textbook or political treatise.
It’s probably not the book he expects, though he doesn’t find it as off putting as he expects. Many religious people spend a lot of time preaching, but this is a book of stories, mostly of ordinary people who do stupid things and still somehow come out on top.
Five can see the appeal, inherently. And the promise of salvation is something that he feels now acutely.
Yet it is a promised unfulfilled in so many ways. He thinks about how many people died believing of some promised messiah. And for what? For the apocalypse? For one 13 year old boy with a faulty ability to time travel?
Five’s cold but he’s not stupid, and he’s desperate but he’s not naive. He’s not chosen; he’s not called. There is no messiah coming. It’s just Five looking for his way home, his way back.
And if anything, the book supports Five’s take on this. His take on everything, really.
He reads hungrily as the hours pass.
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, who you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.
Five does as he throws the Bible into the fire, drawing himself closer so his body stays warm.
As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!”
“Do you see all these great buildings?” replied Jesus. “Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”
If anything, Five is fulfilling the plan. This isn’t sin; this isn’t desecration. This is the preservation of the last holy place. For that is what Five is. The last temple.
God’s grace is fickle, it seems.
Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.
And the fire burns.
-o-
The weather clears. As usual, it’s just in time. Five is down to two Bibles. He puts one back on the shelf and tucks the other next to Five as he loads her up in the wagon.
“I know you want to get out,” he says, pausing to adjust her hat on her head. It’s silly, but he likes it. It makes him smile. “And I think I’ve finally cleared a path out from the door enough for us to see what’s up. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She’s a mannequin, so she has no opinion.
But Five likes it enough for the both of them, standing on the front stoop. He looks out across the ground, covered in a pristine white coat. You almost can’t tell that there’s death and destruction beneath.
”Come now, let us settle the matters,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they should be as white as snow.”
Five laughs, shakes his head. “Okay, then,” he says.
And he sets off across the expanse.
-o-
Despite the need for rations, Five’s first stop is the graveyard. There’s so much snow that there’s not much to be done, but Five digs a path to Luther’s grave, and clears his way around it. He treads carefully, of course. There is a yawning sinkhole nearby. One wrong step, and all his hard fought survival skills will be for naught.
He takes his time because, survival is important, but it is merely the means to an end. Five tends the graveyard and reminds himself what this about.
Getting back.
Somewhere, in time, his family is still eating dinner. He can be there with them. He will be there with them.
That’s the end.
Worth any means possible.
-o-
Five quickly falls back into his routine. He’s slowed down by the weather. Though the snow has stopped and the temperatures are no longer icy, it’s still quite cold. The snow shows no sign of melting, which makes traversing through his grid of streets is easier said than done. Still, he is getting pretty good at this thing now, and he efficiently finds his way to enough food and other supplies to keep him going.
He comes back to the church each night, dropping off his supplies and taking refuge.
Still, his day revolves around the trips to visit the graveyard and tend to his family. It’s his personal pilgrimage. He comes to think of if as his intimate mass.
There are days when it feels limiting. There are days when he abandoned the grid and pushes himself further and further. But being too far out makes him panic, and he turns back and doubles his way home, just to be sure that Luther’s grave is still there.
He can’t leave; he can’t move ahead.
Not when the goal is -- the goal has to be -- going back.
-o-
The world does eventually begin to thaw, though it takes quite some time. By Five’s best estimates, he’s been here nearly six months at this point. He doesn’t suspect that spring will have much meaning, but he’s ready for the snow to go.
And go, it does.
As the temperature lifts, the snow begins streaming away. It melts in fast droves, leading to flooding and fast torrents. It’s tricky to get around; some of the makeshift rivers are that fast, that strong. But Five feels the thaw deep inside him; he can’t, he won’t stay idle.
He pours his energy into the graveyard. Now that the snow is clearing, he can finally get a better picture of what he’s working with. He tediously removes the remaining piles of melting snow, clearing the swaths of ground before picking up any debris that may have ended up in the area over the long winter. He’s working on laying a footpath of broken cement and stones to the graves, working through the wet ground, when it happens.
Five has shoveled the snow to the perimeter, you see. The drifts there are still substantial, artificially inflated by his efforts at removal. With the sinkhole nearby, the drainage patterns are a mess, and though Five has taken great pains to secure Luther’s position, the natural erosion has been somewhat unpredictable.
He feels the ground shudder at first.
He turns, shovel in hand, when he sees the snow shudder at the far end of the park. It disappears, sucked into the sinkhole, and then a rush of water comes down from the snowbank, sweeping toward Luther’s grave. The marker is dislodged first, swept away in the current. Then, the ground being loose and poorly supported, the whole thing gives away. Five watches as it crumbles. The grave is gone in an instant.
Then, the ground beneath Five’s feet gives way, too.
Frantic, Five lunges forward, just barely grabbing at the edge of the sinkhole as it consumes the park whole. He panics for a moment, adrenaline kicking in as he struggles to keep his grip on the wet ground. He has already lost the shovel, and he’s going to fall if he’s not absolutely on his game.
Breathing heavy, he looks down. There is no bottom; he could fall forever.
Looking back around him, he cranes his neck. It’s gone, of course. All of it -- his graveyard, Luther’s immaculate grave -- is gone.
The loss is sudden.
The loss is palpable.
For a long, horrible second, Five thinks about letting go.
It’d be easy. A long fall. Hell, it’s probably inevitable at this point.
Tears sting his eyes, and he looks back at the hole, trying to imagine what it’d be like. His heart thuds dully against his chest, and he struggles to understand. Luther’s gone. He’s joined Diego and Allison and Klaus. And Ben and Vanya, too, for that matter. Even his old man. All of them. Gone.
Like they were never here at all.
The shock of it rattles Five, and he feels his grip slacken at the knees. He’s not sure what to do.
He doesn’t understand.
All this time, all this energy, all this…
And it’s gone.
It’s gone.
It strikes him coldly, numbly: it’s always been gone.
It’s been gone since he got here.
He’s been clinging to bone. He’s been tending to memories. He’s cultivated a hope for the past.
And every last bit of it is gone.
The shock is throbbing now, pulsing with the beat of his heart as it echoes through his ears. He waits for tears, but they don’t come. He waits for depression, but the numbness is already dissipating. In their places, something else festers. Something more feral, something more visceral. Something far more suited for this dead world than grace and dignity.
He reaches up, grasping at the solid ground. He finds purchase and pulls himself up. His limbs tremble with the exertion, but he ignores it. He drags himself, muddy, cold and wet, back on to the ground, and he sits on hands and knees gulping at the air.
Rage.
That’s what he feels.
Anger and contempt and utter rage.
He gets to his feet. Smeared with mud, he turns to the wagon, where his remaining supplies and the well dressed mannequin are poised.
“Wait for me,” he tells the mannequin as he turns on his heel and stalks off down the street. “I’ll be back.”
-o-
It’s not a coherent thought while Five walks, but when he ends up in front of the church, it’s also not a surprise. He stands there, looking up at the structure, and he has to laugh.
It’s still standing. The church is all but pristine. For all that Five has hollowed out the inside, it looms taller than the wreckage, almost like a damn beacon of hope. He hasn’t admitted it, but he’s taken comfort in that. He’s used it as his refuge.
And for what?
Why is this church spared when so many other things have fallen? What is so special about this building? Why would any God save these four walls when everything else falls? What importance is a building? When there are people -- so many people -- who have died?
Holy ground?
In what matter?
There were exactly six things in this life that Five held sacred, and all of them are lost. There’s nothing sacred left here.
Nothing.
Five climbs the stairs to the church and throws open the doors, crossing the threshold for what is surely the last time.
-o-
He walks up the aisle into the sanctuary and makes his way to the altar. On his way, he grabs the first tool he sees -- an axe, he’s stored by the door. He wields it as he approaches, coming to a stop as he stands at the foot of the cross and sneers.
“If that’s the way you want to play it, then fine,” he says. “Take them. Take all of them. Take everything. Just take it!”
He’s yelling now, his voice echoing off the walls as he throws his hands wide.
“Take me, too! Take me!”
There’s no answer.
Just a quiet church.
An empty church.
Five drops his hands. “Fine,” he says. “Then I’ll do the taking this time.”
He lifts the axe and swings. It lodges into the wood of the altar. Five yanks it loose, sending it crashing down again. This time, a piece splinters off. Five grunts, bring the axe down again and again until the whole unit is in pieces.
Then, he lunges toward the windows, shattering the stained glass. In a rage, he slams through the walls, cuts up the floor. When he crashes through into the entryway, he finds the candles and the matches. He’s left a stock there all this time.
He doesn’t smile as he picks up the matches, kicking the candles over so they scatter across the floor. Instead, Five takes the matches, stalking back up the ruin aisle to the remains of the altar. He lights the match and holds it up.
“This it the valley of the shadow of death, and I’ve been here for six months!” he screams. “And where are you? Where were you when this happened? Where were you?”
There’s no answer, not from relics from a dead religion, and Five throws the match to the altar. It only takes a moment for it to catch, mere seconds for the flame to take hold. Five stands back, watching as it builds and licks up toward the ceiling.
Then, he takes another matches and throws it against one wall. He lights one in the office, sets fire to the stage. He sets the other wall ablaze and tosses one into the basement, tosses another until he’s sure it’s taken. He makes his way back in to the sanctuary as it fills up with smoke, the fire consuming everything.
“Everything falls; everything ends,” he says at the foot of the now-burning cross. He smiles grimly. “Everything.”
-o-
For a moment, the rush of adrenaline is all there is. But then, he chokes on the next breath and he realizes what he’s done. Not the desecration of a holy temple or any nonsense like that. Practically speaking, he’s lit the whole building on fire.
While he’s inside of it.
Sure, it’s satisfying and dramatic, but it also has the potential to kill him if he doesn’t get the hell out.
Five’s not sure what survival even means anymore, but his instincts lean pretty strongly that way. Turning quickly, he starts to make his way back down the aisle with some haste. His forward progress is thwarted however, as the structure begins to crumble. The walls are buckling; sections of the ceiling are starting to fall. The smoke is thick and cloying, and Five realizes dimly that it’s possible he’s let his emotions get the best of him.
This whole thing had been a bit childish and petty. He’d been mad; he’d been hurt; he’d been betrayed. His sanctuary had not saved him, and he had lashed out against it.
Now, it very well could kill him.
Justice?
Five chooses not to pursue that line of thought.
He’s too busy trying not to die in his own foolish haste.
He makes his way a few steps forward, but the whole back wall falls in. It crashes with embers flying, and Five has to retreat quickly. He trips over a piece of the roof, stumbling further in retreat to the burning altar, which is now nothing more than a nub on the ground. Frantic, Five reviews the other exits and he eyes the windows that he’s already broken. Both walls are ablaze, and smoke is billowing out of the office and back storage rooms.
Choking back a cough, Five’s eyes are starting to sting. He lifts his arm to cover his mouth, but it doesn’t do much good. He needs an exit; he needs an out.
And he needs it now.
The building groans, and Five looks up. He flinches when he realizes what’s happening, but there’s nothing he can do but dive to the ground as the back wall of the sanctuary falls down, crashing on top of it in a blaze of fire.
He’s expecting to die, quite honestly, a fiery and painful sort of death, but he quickly realizes that he’s not dead. In fact, he’s not on fire and he’s not been crushed. Rolling himself over, he looks up, and comes face to face with the cross.
It’s fallen free of the wall, twisting in its descent. It is lodged, one short arm jammed into the ground, leaving the whole thing at an angle. It’s strong line of timber is thicker and more resilient than he’d realized. Though he’s charred the outside, it’s still strong enough to stop the drywall from crushing him.
In fact, the angle has provided him with an out. Too shocked to think much harder about it, Five crawls his way out. He drags himself up out of the wreckages, and looks back in shock. But then, he remembers to look forward.
With the collapse of a section of the structure, there is new light pouring in. Light that perfectly illuminates the last, scant clear path toward freedom.
Five doesn’t hesitate to follow. He tracks the light through the burning wreckages, snaking his way around the debris. He has to jump over the remnants of the front wall, but follows the light as it leads him out the front doors. He exits just in time for the whole thing to collapse in on itself, leaving nothing but the desolate doorframe on top of the stone steps he climbed for refuge for the first time six months ago.
The church burns, turning black and fading. Five, though tired and breathing heavily, is no worse for wear.
He’s stands in shock, understanding again that his actions have consequences.
Actions have consequences.
And Five has to live with them.
Five has to live.
That’s the bitter truth, that’s the final condemnation, that’s the last hope.
Five stumbles back from the flames and falls to his knees, staring up as the fire towers above him.
That’s everything.
-o-
Five watches it burn. He watches it burn as night falls; he stays there, on his knees, as the flames die down and the wreckage smolders. He’s still there in the morning, as the dawn breaks on this fallen world, revealing the true extent of what Five has wrought.
There’s nothing left of the church; it’s utter destruction.
Yet, the sun plays across the rubble, twinkling in the dying embers. The daylight glistens with the most surreal kind of beauty Five has ever seen.
He is not here; he has risen.
Hope, you see, is a living thing.
And Five, despite all odds, is still alive.
Five won’t find his hope among the dead. He won’t find it in burials or graveyards. He won’t find it in relics and traditions. Hope can’t be found in the past. Hope is the future. The next moment and the next.
Five’s not been looking at it that way. Five’s been surviving the future in order to cling to the past. He’s actually believe he can go back.
He can’t, though.
Just like he can’t save his siblings’ bodies. He can’t go back home. It’s all rubble, and Five can pick through it to find what’s salvageable, but he can’t go back. Five left it, and this is the consequence.
He stands in the ash of the church and realizes that this is the consequence. There are no lines left to cross, no taboos left to touch. There is nothing sacred left to desecrate. His his siblings -- if his hope of a childhood can turn to rot -- then Five’s been clinging to all the wrong things.
Clinging to that past -- clinging to these comforts -- will kill him if he doesn’t cut them loose. He can’t stay here any longer. He can’t live like he’s going home. At least, not like he’s going home the same naive child that he was. He can’t save that child, but he can save them
Not their graves -- those are meaningless anyway -- but their future. Maybe he can save them all, every person and living being on this planet.
That means he has to stop looking back. He has to look forward.
This requires acceptance.
Total and wholehearted acceptance.
Yes, the world has ended. The apocalypse has been wrought. His siblings are dead. There is no dinner table waiting for him. There is no hot meal.. There is no family waiting for him to go home. Five’s can’t be the 13 year old he used to be. This was his past.
It’s over.
All there is now, in this bleak, horrible world, is the future.
It is a future Five has to build. One he has to scrape out, eek out, burn his way through. If he wants his family, then it’s not faith that will bring them back. It’s calculations. They’re alive in time, so he has to get back to them somehow, and he won’t find those numbers or variables in a hollowed out church.
That’s not even the point, is it?
Faith isn’t found in religious practices or lists of dos and don’ts. It’s relational; it’s relationships.
Faith, they say, can move mountains.
That’s all well and good.
But Five needs faith to move time.
-o-
He doesn’t sift through the rubble -- there’s nothing there to find, nothing he needs to find -- but there’s one small crucifix that survives. It’s fallen off the door, which swung off its hinges in the flames, crashing to the ground in front of the church. Five picks it up and looks it over. He thinks about throwing it back, to turn to ash with the rest, but he pockets it instead.
When he makes it back to the park, he loads up the wagon. He puts the little crucifix with the mannequin for safekeeping.
“I know it means something to you; you liked it here,” he tells her with a shrug, the closest she will ever come to an apology over this. Without the church, she matters to him. She’s all the home he has left, the only constant left. “And we won’t be going back, so I thought we’d take what mattered with us.”
The mannequin says nothing, but she looks silently please. Five rolls her eyes as he picks up the handle. He stands at the edge to give the graveyard one last look.
His siblings aren’t there anymore.
The thing is, though, they never were.
Five turns abruptly and starts down the street, the wagon rattling after him step by step.
-o-
The apocalypse destroys humanity, in the end.
All of it.
It just took longer for it to claim Five.
Five thinks, reasons, calculates, hopes that if he keeps going, he can find it again.