aftermath

short story

abyssinian cat on brown couch
The Last Funeral
by
Leslie Vedder
I hate Service days. Every noise in the bunker seems too loud—the hum of the air recirculating fans, the buzz of the hot blue algae lamps, the rattle and clank of the elevator beneath my feet slowly climbing from the sublevels up to the MainCenter, where I’m supposed to be.
     I can see my reflection in the warped mirror of the door, my face shining with sweat and grime and my shirt stained under the faded yellow jumpsuit. I jerk the zipper up as high as I can and pull my fingers through my tangled red curls of hair until I can trap it in a loose bun. I can’t go to the Service looking like I’ve come straight from the reprocessing center. The hours before service are supposed to be spent in contemplation and reflection.
     Already I miss the solitude of the bio reprocessing center in the sublevels. I was the only one down there this morning, checking on the new strain of algae growing in the long shallow tank. Or at least that’s my excuse. My fingertips ache with the memory of the cool water and the soft mossy surface of the submerged organism. Sometimes it’s nice to touch something living on Service days, before I join the throngs heading to the heavy reinforced concrete of the Silo on the surface, where Mother Cordera’s waiting.
      The doors bang open, throwing me out under the stark artificial lights of the MainCenter. The air is drier here; I long for another breath of the moist, salty air around the algae tanks. High overhead, a single slow fan revolves like a clock’s arms, throwing its long shadow over all of the people down below. Men and women—some in jumpsuits like mine, others in layers of black cloth wound into a shroud—duck their heads into their collars, filtering up the long staircase to the Silo. No one looks at me as I join the last of the line, waiting to ascend the stairs. I can’t be any later than the man one spot in front of me, but it’s like they sense something in me—some reluctance that sits like a stone in my gut, growing heavier with every step.
     No one asks me where I’ve been. No one even looks up. On most days, the MainCenter is a hive of activity, with builders and restoration engineers calling to each other over the noise of soldering and hammering, the citizens of the bunker buzzing about their assigned tasks. Everyone must work to maintain the bunker, even the young ones—that’s the rule. It’s all we can do to give ourselves a chance. There isn’t always enough, when an algae strains dies, or one of the reclimators fails, or the water filtration system gets overwhelmed. We lose people, often. But it’s still far better than being outside at the mercy of the cataclysms, facing the Sun Rot or the radiation—or worse, the Rovers still around from the Resource Wars.

I’m from that world outside, though I don’t remember it. Mother Cordera brought me here when I was three and gave me the name Annika. I asked her once about finding me. All she said was: You had a mother who loved you very much for as long as she could. She gave her life for you, Annika, and held you even in death.
     When I was young, it scared me, imagining myself a baby clutched in the arms of a dead woman as she stiffened and went cold. Now that I’m old enough to look at the women around me agonizing over their growing bellies, I understand. To have a child is the ultimate act of a survivor. I don’t remember the outside, but I was born out there. My mother lived out there, in the World on Fire.
     That’s what people call it, out of earshot of Mother Cordera and the acolytes of Renewal: the World on Fire. I’ve seen the pictures in books and heard the stories from some of the Olds, about a planet with continents and countries and cities, oceans and forests and so many people everywhere they almost overwhelmed the earth. I can’t even imagine it. Most of the people left in the bunker are Survivors generation or later. The World on Fire is all we’ve ever known.

I reach the winding stairs and then jump as a hand catches my arm. “Annika!” a voice hisses.
     I turn to face Bash, crossing my arms. No one else would be so bold on Service day. “What?”
      “Skiv off the Service. I’ve got something to show you,” he says.
     Bash is tall, almost a whole head taller than me, with sandy blond hair that falls into his dark blue eyes. He’s only a few years older than I am, maybe in his late twenties, though he’s also an orphan, so we can’t be sure of his age. He’s a survivor from the outside, but he was out there longer than I was, and he bears the marks of it. His lungs are burnt out, so that he coughs uncontrollably sometimes, and his skin is gouged with a strange pattern of scars, pale hatch marks carved into his back and his shoulders like ciphers in a language I don’t speak. He either doesn’t remember how he got them, or he just won’t tell me. I spend the nights with him sometimes, in his tiny alcove in the MainCenter, when the sublevels are closed. He’s soft and alive in the dark, and his eyes are vibrant like bioluminescent algae. Those eyes that burn into mine now, as he holds me in place.
      “I’ll be missed by Mother Cordera,” I tell him. “And so will you.”
     Bash just raises an eyebrow, as though in a dare.
     I feel a smile tugging at my lips, but I bite it back. I would never skip a Service. “I’ll meet up with you after.” I start up the stairs, and then turn around when Bash calls my name.
      “Annika…right after? You promise?” Bash’s face is strangely serious.
      “Promise,” I call down, racing up the stairs and trying to banish the shiver from the cold expression on Bash’s face. He can be odd. People say it’s from so much time on the outside.

By the time I slip into the Silo, everyone’s already kneeling for the first silent prayer. Mother Cordera stands at the center of the round building, her head bowed. With everyone’s bodies bent, I can see the decorations on the walls, a vast painted mural that stretches from the floor to the faraway ceiling, engulfing us on all sides. I recognize the images from books. Swirling oceans of pink coral churning with silver fish. Trees studded with white blossoms. Sparkling cities with towering skyscrapers. The luminous eyes of great beasts, with black stripes rippling in their burnt-orange fur. The pictures have been painted over and between each other so many times that most of them are just fragments by now, bursts of color crowding each other out. It’s a tribute to everything we’ve lost, in the World on Fire. Everything that will never come again. At the Silo’s highest point, someone painted a shimmering golden halo almost too bright to look at. No one in here will ever feel the Sun on their skin again; it’s too dangerous now, when one case of Sun Rot could wipe out the entire bunker.
     The Silo is the only part of the bunker that’s on the surface. It’s always harder to breathe in here, despite the thick reinforced walls. The hard concrete floor where everyone kneels is sometimes freezing like arctic ice, and sometimes so hot it burns my palms and leaves them red for days. No one complains, and no one stands until Mother Cordera does, no matter how long it takes.
     I join the crowd, dropping to my knees so hard they crack against the stone. We are here to regret. We are here to reflect on how we reached this point. We are here to pray for a Renewal. We are here to try to deserve it.
     Mother Cordera rises. Her long dark robes seem to pull down on her thin form like a heavy weight. Black circles of paint ring her eyes. In her rough-throated voice, scarred from decades breathing on the surface, she begins the prayer.
      “We have sinned in our selfishness. We have sinned in our survival. Each and every one of us has blood on our hands. The blood of our fellow humans. The blood of our fellow creatures. And the blood of the earth itself. Today and every day, we mourn, for this is the funeral of all who do not survive. This is the Last Funeral.”
     Mother Cordera’s dark-ringed eyes meet mine, and I find myself caught in that blistering gaze. Mother Cordera doesn’t like the World on Fire because it makes it sound like the planet just burst into flames, spontaneous combustion—an unstoppable tragedy. But it wasn’t unstoppable. We just didn’t stop it.
     Mother Cordera is giving the litany now, calling out the names of peoples and islands and places that were wiped out by the cataclysms this week. She names creatures that I have never known and will never know. She talks about poisons in the air and in the water and in our hearts. The Service is the Last Funeral, but it’s unending. Every week we gather on this floor to mourn the passing of our world, because it is the only thing left we can do. There’s no space on the walls anymore to memorialize what we’ve killed. We have to engrave those names onto our hearts instead.
     And what happens when we run out of space there? I can hear Bash’s voice in my head, the bitter words he whispered to me once during Service. It felt like he’d cut me open and let the dry, hot air rush into my chest. When Mother Cordera reads the litany, I try to imagine everything she names as green and growing and alive, but all I ever see is the parched soil beneath dead rivers, tree trunks cancerous with black fungus, and bleached bones under a scorched yellow sky. Sometimes I worry I’ll start to calcify, holding all of this death inside of me.
     This is our funeral too. That’s what Bash says. We will hold an unending funeral until the death stops or we are all dead.
     He always shrugs when he says it, like he couldn’t care less one way or another, and his expression is cold enough to make me shiver. Like it was on the stairs today.

There’s a sudden commotion in the Silo as Kiko collapses to the floor. The eyes in her wrinkled face are squeezed shut, and her long gray hair pools on the concrete. She looks pale and sickly, but no one makes a move to help her. Kiko has been eating plastic every week for the last year as some kind of penance. She won’t live much longer. Mother Cordera doesn’t generally approve of those kinds of stunts, but anyone can see that Kiko’s great remorse is real, and so Mother Cordera allows it. She even leads a special prayer for Kiko to find peace.
     Kiko is the oldest person who attends the Service. The rest of the Olds don’t come. Mother Cordera says it’s because of their shame. They were part of the generation of Hoarders that caused the great unbalancing of the world. But Bash says it’s because they don’t want to leave their things, coveting their last possessions even now. People hear them wailing sometimes, in the dead of night, a long eerie moan that echoes through the alcoves in the bunker like a howling wind. But they still don’t attend the funerals. Maybe Bash is right, and the only thing they really feel is regret for all the things they won’t have. That was the problem with the Hoarders—they caught a sickness that spread to the whole world. Then there was no shame, and no compassion, and no remorse. Just the Hoarding.
     That’s why Mother Cordera will let Kiko and the others who show true remorse die. It’s why we finish each Service by lowering our eyes and whispering the names of the children we wish we could have. It’s a promise and a prayer, a reminder that everything we do affects more than ourselves. We are not a single point in a solitary life, but a very small part of an unbroken line. We’re the survivors—not just for now, but for always, and we must renew and restore what is lost. Not for ourselves. Not one of us kneeling in this room will ever see it. But for the slimmest possibility that, for the unborn children of the unborn children attending this Service in their mothers’ wombs, there could still be a future. Bash doesn’t think so.
     The one time I asked Mother Cordera about it, she stared a hole right through me, her stern brown eyes blistering inside the circles of black grease paint. You don’t do what’s right only if you are assured a certain outcome, Annika. You do what’s right regardless of the outcome.
     I reflected on that for weeks. Wondering if that was how it started for the Hoarders—wanting something for themselves, wanting the promise of a certain outcome, and becoming blind to everything else.

The Silo is a sea of bowed heads, everyone’s lips moving silently. I’m supposed to be whispering the names of children in my heart now, but I don’t have any. I can’t imagine them. My mother was Survivors generation, and she had me, in spite of everything—but I don’t know if I could do the same, if I should. What if I have a daughter, and this is her funeral too?
     The Service ends and people start getting to their feet. I’m near the back, so it’s easy for me to slip down the stairs ahead of the rest of the line. I hurry as quickly as possible without running. I don’t want to seem irreverent. It’s one of the greatest sins here—rejecting the Services, refusing to take part in the penance and prayers for Renewal. But Bash is waiting.
     And something about that look he gave me, coupled with his words—You’ll come right after? You promise? It’s been niggling at me, growing like a pit in my stomach. What could Bash possibly want to show me, today of all days?
     I step off the stairs onto the bunker’s ground floor. MainCenter rises around me like a honeycomb, dwellings and workspaces of corrugated steel stacked on top of each other from floor to ceiling, every wall pocked with tunnels and passageways darting away into the dark. Underground is the great warren of the sublevels, which have been under construction my whole life. Bash’s place is toward the top of the hive, near the long access tunnel that leads up a rusted ladder to the surface. He’s one of the bunker’s few Scavengers, who layer their bodies into suits and gasmasks and venture into the outside.

When I arrive at Bash’s place, the door is open. For some reason, the heavy gasmask with its empty black eyes is sitting out on his narrow shelf bed. Even stranger, there’s a second mask next to it.
      “Bash?” I call out, unsure. When I step inside, I find Bash standing with one arm braced against the wall, his eyes distant as he stares out his small circular window. It doesn’t look out on the surface, but down on the heart of the MainCenter, where people are still trickling down the long spiral staircase from the Service. From that window, we’ve watched Sasha, one of the Olds, forever drawing and erasing a map of the forgotten world onto the concrete floor from memory, his eyes long blind from staring at an angry red sun. From there we’ve looked out on the bunker at night, when everything is quiet, and picked out constellations in the thousands of rivets shining in the corrugated steel walls, and I’ve fallen asleep listening to Bash talk about looking up at the stars, my cheek pressed to his shoulder so the words are vibration as much as sound.
     For a moment, it’s just me and Bash, as we’ve always been. Then I see the open bag at his feet, the contents spilling out of its open mouth. There’s the glint of watches and archaic old coins, a filigreed necklace of silver trimmed with ancient rocks that glitter like purple glass. I’m confused—I don’t understand. These things could only have come from the Olds, the ancient things they wouldn’t be parted with, even when they came to the bunker. There are also little green chips seared with bright wires, the kind that contain key system programs for the bunker, as well as packs of food—more than a family would be allowed to take. More than the whole block would eat in a week.
     Bash has taken these things from everyone.
      “Bash…” I breathe. I don’t even know what to ask him.
     His expression isn’t at all what I expect. He doesn’t look serious anymore, or sad. There’s something else on his face—anticipation, maybe. My heart starts to pound my chest.
      “Annika. Listen to me,” he says. “I have a plan to get out of here.” He reaches out and takes my numb hands into his. “On my last Scavenge, I met a traveler from another place—another bunker. But this one’s not like ours, with Mother Cordera and everyone else obsessed with the labor and the fantasy of Renewal. They still have money there, and trade, and people live, Annika—they really live. Not like this place. We could go there together, and with all of this—” He lets go of my hands to wave at the things at his feet. “Just imagine it, Annika. We could live like kings!”
     I finally understand the emotion on Bash’s face. It’s excitement—an almost manic glee at the thought of all he could have. I feel sick, like I’m going to throw up.
      “Bash, what have you done,” I whisper. I bring my hands up to cover my mouth.
     Bash’s eyebrows knot in confusion. “What have I done?” he repeats. Suddenly there’s an angry edge to his words. “I’ve saved us. I’ve saved us from this awful life.” He reaches out for me again, palm up in offer, and his eyes are shining with promise, glowing like the algae I love so much.
     For just one moment, I imagine the life Bash is offering me. We could have a room twice as big as we needed, just to have the space. We could eat the flesh of the world’s last few animals, the creatures in Mother Cordera’s litany, or anything else we wanted, whenever we wanted. We could have new clothes for every occasion. We could greedily use power to start up old lost technologies, and even change the temperature at our whims. We could have anything, and anything we didn’t want, we could just throw away. We could live every day just for us.
     And it would be so meaningless. I’m shaking in fear because of the part of me that still wants to take Bash’s hand. It would be so easy…
     I want to run. I want to find Mother Cordera. I want to throw myself onto my knees on the hard floor, because I finally understand. Bash has the sickness that the Hoarders had. He has it, and he almost gave it to me.
     I can’t think of the right prayer. I can’t think of the right words to hold this back. And then suddenly I think of a child. A child with the same wild red hair I got from my mother, who held me even in death. My mother whose last heartbeat and last breath and last thought must have been love. My mother who was a survivor for me. I think of a little red-haired girl who I must survive for now, who I must make a world for, who I must never forget for one instant.
     Bash seems to realize I’m not going to take his hand. It drops slowly back to his side. “You could just come with me,” he begs. His voice is desperate and hoarse.
      “You could stay, Bash,” I tell him. “Give everything back and just stay. You could be a part of something—something bigger than yourself. Something that connects us all.”
      “And attend my own funeral? No thanks.”
     Bash bends down and slings the bag over his shoulder. I could try to wrestle it away from him, to at least save the food, but I don’t, because everything he has hoarded away in that bag is meaningless. Having it is meaningless. Bash is living in a single moment, a solitary life, and I am living every moment in a long unbroken line. Though he’s still in front of me, on his knees, scraping the last winking shiver of coins into the bag with his scarred hands, already I can barely see him. I have already all but forgotten him. He’s just a ghost image of the old world, faded and static as a picture on the Silo wall.
     Bash will die, like many of the Hoarders did, not understanding what he lost and how truly little he ever had. That’s why the funerals are important—not just to remember the dead, but to remember how precious each of us left living is. How we must treasure the minutes we have, however few, and use them to build something beyond ourselves. Because how can we ever hope to deserve a Renewed world someday, or take care of it, if we don’t sit with the old one while it dies. If we don’t feel every loss, and understand that it is our own doing.
     The next service, I will mourn for Bash, and I will say the name of my future daughter silently to the hard stones.
     Ai. It means love in a beautiful lost language.











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