The Ford of Death

The old man looked around.  The river, the smoke, the light drizzle and the soft hump of the body making it’s way down stream to feed the rats of Atlanta.  He’d seen his share of death.  He’d seen worse than this when he was in Africa and the far east where, until not too long-ago death still stalked the muddy streets in the old way.

Disease.  Warlords. Indiscriminate natural disasters and unfeeling politics.  That’s when he’d given up on humanity. Humanity was built on a despoiled pile of human bones and he had given up.  He’d ride out what’s left of his life as a man outside that pile of bones.

He thought about an article he read in an archeological magazine about a pile of bones they’d found in Kenya.  These bones were over 10,000 years old.  A small group of individuals rounded up, slaughtered and dumped in a pit.  This was 8,000 years before Jesus and the Romans.  The first traces of human activity were rife with internecine murder.

He didn’t miss the irony now that he’d gotten his wish in this new world of the apocalypse.  Humanity was back to the level of 10,000 years ago with roaming bands, small groups, looking to survive and murder was as good an option as any.

…

The old man wasn’t as old as he looked or pretended to be.  He found it useful to fade into the background, to be non-threatening in this world.  If the scraps of humanity haunting this place knew his real capabilities it might be inconvenient and dangerous.

At just under 6-foot-tall the old man was not imposing and didn’t look like the athlete he was.  Skinny and balding with a slight pot belly, no one would suspect that he was one of top endurance athletes in his age group.  Perhaps if they looked closer at the ropy muscles twitching under the loose skin of his thighs they might wonder, but they never did.

Turns out being tough and able to move long distances by foot was pretty much the job description of a survivor in the apocalypse.  He’d retired from real life a few years back anyhow, so it really didn’t make any difference to him.  He’d written them all off. He’d seen this as inevitable.

He just wasn’t expecting it in his lifetime.

The old man shook his head and spat into the muddy grass beside the river.  He’d have to move.  This place was too much on the beaten path out of the city.  From the beginning of time people had followed the rivers.  They were the highways of humanity.  If he wanted to avoid humanity he’d have to find a different route.

He put his light pack together and stood with a groan.  Squinting upriver he thought he saw some movement.  A mangy group of two-legged beast emerged from around the bend.  He had wanted to continue south anyhow.  But had hoped to avoid following the river through the city.

They saw him and yelled something.  Looked like six of them maybe.  Men.  He turned and began to move.  They picked up their pace and closed ground.  He took a drink from his bottle and a bite of jerky from a pocket in his shorts.

He stretched it out a little, enlivening the pace to what he thought should do the trick.  The group behind him stopped running and started walking with some more shouts and protestations.

…

One of the many ironies in his life was that he had been a bookish, chubby and non-athletic kid.  Always studying.  Never any time for sports which he considered the games of lesser boys and men.

He notched his pace down and looked around to see where the sun was now.  It was low and too his left, so he was running south.  He would put 20 miles between him and his pursuers by the end of the day, but usually only the first mile mattered.

The old man began singing an old country song that had popped into his head.  Something about the evils of liquor and whorehouses.  That made him laugh.  Turns out bioengineering was just a little bit more evil and there probably wasn’t a song about that.

There was a car in the river ahead.  He slowed to let the panorama paint itself.  He had learned to do this.  By default he let his mind drift and become unfocused when he was running alone in the woods.  Sometimes he had to mentally slap himself back into awareness.

The wrecked car, partially submerged seemed to have come from the overpass above.  That plunge was probably enough to kill the driver.  One more bag of bones for humanities piles of bones.

He knew about bones.  He knew about blood.  He knew most of what made the fragile human body work.  Not because he was some sort of macabre ghoul.  But, Because he had been a doctor.  One of the best.  Top of his class.  Coveted residency.  The culmination of all that studying and what he thought was his dream.

He had married young and had kids because that’s what you did when you were a renown physician.  You did that so no one could accuse you of being a self-centered careerist with a god complex.

It was in the play book.

He felt a stab of pain, a twinge of guilt as he thought of the mousey young woman in his wedding bed and the two young heads in his Long Island study.  He shook his head.  Water under the bridge.  He couldn’t change any of it and he didn’t want to.

All these people. His wife.  His kids.  His colleagues.  Those men futilely chasing him.  The poor sot in the crashed car.  The paleolithic wanderers with their heads smashed thrown into that long ago pit in the rift valley – All bones on the pile of bones that was humanity’s legacy.

He’d quit the game.  They couldn’t get him anymore.  He wasn’t playing.  Humanity was no longer his problem.  If they wanted to die or live or kill each other in the apocalypse he could care less.  His life was his forward motion.  He was waiting for death with open arms when death came for him to take his bones.