Thumb Drive

🌎

Wandering through death, decay, and destruction, to a place I can barely call home, I chance a quick look at the rubble and debris surrounding me. Two years. It's been two years since the world ended. Almost no one survived. Almost. It's good to know I'm not the only one left, though. I may be on my own, but I've been on my own long before doomsday.
The world is grey now, grey and beige. Everything is covered in a fine layer of dust, even me. Two years of exposure makes it damn near impossible to tell the difference between freckles, sunspots, and dirt. I kick rocks as I walk, creating a cloud of dust as I do so. I can't see them, but I keep kicking, listening to their clanks and thuds as they hit the ground and sometimes pieces of garbage. I don't stop until a small metallic ring grabs my attention.
Just over there, in the settling dust, I see a car. Hastily abandoned by its driver and picked clean by looters, even its engine is gone, as the absent hood reveals. It's nothing new and not surprising until I catch a glimpse of the artwork adorning its body. On the passenger side of the yellow Beetle I see a sunflower, its sun-shined petals scratched and faded from apocalypse come and gone. A twinge of sadness crosses my face, but I quickly brush it away, intent on reaching my destination.
Kicking up more rocks and dust, I create a new game: no points if the pebbles hit the dirt, thud, but one point if they hit a piece of trash, clink, and two points of they hit a piece of glass, plink; five if they hit a scrap of metal, ting.
Pushing on, I happen upon a billboard, once grand and lavish, the kind someone would have had to pay a lot of money to keep up, now only tatters and tears on the ground. The words are long gone, but its message is still quite clear, with a luscious green lawn just visible through the faded rips; lawn care. It's a sight for sore eyes, but I must keep going. It's not safe outside at all anymore, especially not after dark.
Fifteen rocks and three points later, I stop cold in my tracks. I know where I am, and I don't want to be here. It's an empty lot, just an empty lot, and that's precisely the problem. It isn't even a mere shell of its former self. There's not enough left. The immense office building was leveled to nothing but dust, wiped clean off the face of the earth. Office supplies still litter the space, pens and highlighters lie crushed and broken. The eerie lack of wind causes scraps of paper lay in the lot, creating startlingly literal stationery. Funny how an entire business complex can be obliterated, while these tiny things are left behind. My mind starts to wander along with my feet and I trip over a stapler, twisting my ankle and badly scraping my knee. Collecting myself, I bend over and pick up the stapler, cursing at it loudly as I cock it up behind my ear. Getting ready to throw it, I glance at it one last time to see the words written on it, intent on cursing them too for putting their stapler in my way. It's not the phone number written in scuffed gold lettering, but the word "gardener" that catches my eye, being a word that has had no relevance for quite some time now. The bittersweet notion stops me from chucking the poor stapler halfway across the bombed-out plaza, but I do kick it quite a ways for tripping me up. Shoving the twinge of nostalgia out of my brain, there's only one word on my mind: "onwards."
Six more rocks kicked, and I've a grand total of five points. I try to not to think of the lot as I trudge forward, kicking a few more rocks here and there. clink. clink. Seven points. thud. thud. ting. thud. Twelve points. thud. plink. Fourteen points. There hadn't been any glass debris for a while, so I go and check it out. My gaze falls onto a shiny black rectangle, some smartphone from some year no one alive can remember anymore. It's not the reflective, spiderweb-like pattern of the cracked screen that grabs my attention, but the colorful outline of the case. Almost as if it was meant to be, the case is completely unharmed, save for a couple of scratches and a few spots where the dirt won't wash off. A quick swipe of the shirt reveals a beautiful tree of life motif, meticulously hand-painted, no doubt. Sprawling branches leap off the edges of the case with a wood grain I can almost feel. A tree of life, haven't seen one of those in a long while. It's almost a foreign concept.
Losing myself in thought, I sway with a phantom breeze, the dusty atmosphere around me becoming a crisp and clean air through my hair and my nostrils. Sparse gunfire in the distance snatches me back to reality, reminding me that I'm not the only one left, that I'm not alone. Walking on, I halfheartedly continue to kick rocks in my tiresome gait. thud. thud. clink. thud. ting. thud. I've stopped counting the points. I've become uninterested with winning my own one player game. Trudging through the dry, silty earth on muscle memory alone, I stop at a small house. Its sunbleached walls glow ultra white against my caramel skin, blistered from hours upon countless hours in the sun. I pull my hands out of my pockets, the right balled up into a fist. Inside is a USB, clenched protectively within the palm of my hand. The pale, fleshy imprint is in stark contrast to the red, irritated skin around it. Looking up from my hand, I suddenly realize that I'm here.
Numbly, I stumble to the door and turn the brass doorknob, hot from its time in the sun, and step over the threshold of the shabby hovel. For one of the only buildings not to have been seriously damaged in the past two years, it sure doesn't look like it, save for a small corner on the other side of the house. There, in the tiny cleared space, sits a computer. As one of the only functioning computers north of the equator, you'd think there would be riots over who got to use it and when, but it seems the people who are left simply don't care anymore. The threadbare rolling chair in front of the desktop beckons to me, the promise of rest almost too sweet for my weary legs and feet to handle. Relief floods my body as I sit in the chair, the welcome escape from exertion hugging me as I do. Realizing my mind is slipping off elsewhere, I sit straight up, arching my back off the back of the chair. I killed myself to get the drive, so why am I stalling? Leaning over, I plug the drive into a slot in the modem and lean attentively into the monitor.
A pop-up window brings to light a lush, green forest. Immense evergreen trees sway in a delicate spring breeze, I can nearly smell them. Animals of all sorts scamper around on an emerald blanket, squirrels burying acorns, hares running about, bullfrogs croaking their deep songs. Butterflies flit to and fro, searching for their next flowery meal. Raccoons wash their scraps in a babbling brook running along the length of the forest. Even the very soil seems to be teeming with earthworms and ants and other insects. So much life, so unlike anything left on the earth.
Suddenly, without warning, hot, fat tears start to roll down my cheeks. The salty drops land on my exposed collarbones, my dirty grey tank, and on my denim-clad lap. The tears create wet spots that grow as I start to cry harder, my soft sniffles turning to loud, breathless sobs. I lift my red, puffy eyes to look at my near slum-like surroundings, then back to the screen, broadcasting such bittersweet juxtaposition. Tearfully, I gaze at the beautiful earth I'll never have. I cry for my broken world, mourning the time when the earth was new.