Copyright to this story belongs to Brent Knowles (www.brentknowles.com). You may download this story for your own uses but it cannot be redistributed for profit. The End of the Road By Brent Knowles Wanderer looked down in satisfaction as he walked the old mountain road and saw the town below him. The stagnation of the human race was at an end and the survivors were now rebuilding. So ended the apocalypse. Wanderer continued towards this hotel from his past, an old, sprawling structure sitting high atop a cliff, until loud noises from ahead made him pause. A cat's howl. A woman's cry. The raucous laughter of boys on the verge of manhood, the cruelest and most dangerous of ages. With a sigh he resumed his pace. He was the Wanderer and he would do what needed doing before doing what he needed. The boys ahead were stupid, but even Wanderer had once been a boy (though he remembered little of that time). The skulls of the last ghouls rattled against the metalskin armor he wore as he rushed towards the boys. He thought of the losses suffered along the way, the Feast Wars, the long ghoul hunt, and how he, Wanderer, was now the last again. For how long had it been this way? He did not remember. The armor squeezed the thoughts out of his mind. The cat stopped screaming just as Wanderer crested the hill and saw the boys, eight of them clustered around a young-going-on-middle-aged woman, who lay on her back in the wet snow, shrieking up at them. Behind them all stood the hotel, his destination, still clinging to the mountainside after all this time. The boys shouted their complaints down at the witch -- father dead from exposure, vermin in the food, one family's entire herd missing. Valid tragedies, yes, but none of them were the woman's fault. The stupid boys should have been smart enough to realize that if this bawling woman with the tar colored hair was a witch she would have had power enough to stop them from nailing her cat to the weeping willow. The cat, a yellow and black male, had cried a long time before dying. The boys saw Wanderer and he shouted at them to back away and they obeyed, momentarily awestruck by this icon from the past, a living legend spoken to them by their grandfathers -- Wanderer, the ghoul hunter. The armor glimmered, still functional all these years since the Feast Wars when it was stolen from the aliens. The smarter boys scattered for town as Wanderer closed in on them, but four remained. One of them said, "We're just punishing, is all. God's word says not to bear a witch to live, it does." "Shut up," Wanderer said, his patience lost to the past. "The cat you killed is price enough for the crime she never committed. Go." "But God's-" "I told you to shut up. If you are looking for someone to blame, maybe He is the one you should be calling out. Get, now, or your skulls will rattle alongside my ghouls. Go." The smallest of the boys said, "Pa says you're the righteous hand of God, the one who punishes. Punish her, punish the witch!" The other boys lent their agreement with loud shouts. Wanderer turned his head to stare at the small, stupid boy; his alien helmet resembled a ghastly bug's head, and its ebony surface reflected the boy's pale face as he shrank back. A taller, broad shouldered young man with brown hair and carrying a heavy hammer splotched with the cat's blood stepped forward and handed Short-boy a cut-off shotgun. Wanderer looked into Tall-boy's eyes and saw how truly stupid these town boys were and shook his head sadly. "Go." His last offer. "Jacob?" Short-boy asked the Tall-boy. Jacob said, "Kill it!" Short-boy leveled the shotgun and the others stepped to the side as the gun fired, its roar echoing throughout the valley. The boys who had ran earlier probably heard it, stopped a moment, and then continued their run, planning their friend's funerals in their heads as they sprinted over the half-frozen land. The blast caught Wanderer in the upper thigh and he thought he heard his leg crack but felt no pain as he fell to his knees in a burst of wet snow. Jacob walloped him across the head with the heavy hammer but Wanderer remained kneeling as the spears the other two boys carried shattered on impact with the armor. Wanderer's glove hummed as a shield of energy covered it and manifested a razor-sharp laser around the perimeter of his hand. He swung out, severed Jacob's leg at the knee. The shotgun pellets absorbed by the armor, now popped out of the elastic skin, each one dropping into the snow, steam rising from them. Wanderer stood up and the boys dropped their weapons and dragged Jacob away, a trail of blood marking their panicked flight. The witch squatted at the base of the tree, rocking on her heels, her wild eyes tear-filled, snot coursing overtop her lips. She looked up at him as he moved beside her. "You wear the black mask of the ghouls, I see the dead float in your eyes Wanderer." "You know of me?" "Aye, my husband's fault, that is." Husband? Wanderer looked around, detected no others nearby. "I have come," he began, feeling awkward now, for this woman was not the one he had sought. That one (her mother? grandmother?) was likely long dead, he now realized. "For-" "My charms?" she said, looking up at him, a broad smile on her face and he saw a bit of pretty in her. In his past the hotel had been full of pretty women, for men had worked the mountains and clung to the old life even as the wars were fought. How long ago? The armor squeezed. "If they are offered, then, yes." He said, remembering his reason for being here. She bobbed her head, her eyes gleaming. "Come into the chalet, you'll meet my Missy, you will and then we'll climb into the sheets together, me and Wanderer. But the cat needs burying first." The witch hustled into the chalet, left him to bury her cat. Very little could surprise Wanderer anymore, so he shrugged his shoulders and searched for a shovel. * * * Wanderer opened the dark shed and heard a click as the armor's enhanced vision activated to illuminate his view of the building. Rusted tools and other useless junk were scattered around -- looters had taken anything useful. A shovel -- just the head and half a shaft -- sat in the corner. He took it, stepped outside again, and looked for a good place to make the grave. Between the shed and a low granite wall that used to run the length of the hotel's property was a span of flat, treeless land. He dug the shovel through the snow until he uncovered the raw earth. Water droplets sloughed off the armor and he felt neither dampness nor exertion as he began to dig. The shovel fell with resonating clacks. His mind drifted as he let the armor take over the boring task and he fell into his old memories. Faces, mostly nameless ones from his past life, the one before he wore the armor, drifted through his mind. Most prominent was a woman's face, the one he pretended to lay with each time he fell into the arms of a whore. He could not remember the last time he had done even that. During the war there had been women, including one whom he might even had loved. How many years since the war ended? When was the last time he had lain with a woman and why had he not (still did not) have the urge? His curiosity had forced him here to uncover the answer. Was he truly so old that that part of life was behind him? The armor kept him alive, the ghouls themselves thousands of years old before they embarked on their crusade across space to earth. Each suit of armor was a portable fountain of youth. But perhaps the mind, even the soul -- though Wanderer mostly did not believe in that -- could still age. A loud snapping stopped his monotonous digging and daydreaming. He peered into the hole and saw a skeletal arm with rotten plaid shirtsleeves clinging to it. He jumped into the shallow grave and used his hands to clear away frozen clumps of dirt from the body. The shovel's bite had chewed off the corpse's hand at the wrist. Wanderer wondered who it might be and how long it had lain in here. Not so long he thought, for some flesh still clung to the bones though winter lasted long here and would preserve a body well. He pried the cat's body from the tree and tossed it into the grave, beside the anonymous corpse and then, almost as an afterthought, he added Jacob's leg, covered it all with dirt and entered the hotel. The burden of immortal life weighed heavily upon him, and he hoped to fuck some of it away. * * * He remembered bright streamers and painted girls lining the hotel's entryway. A corporal wearing a ghoul-skin cloak and soiled beret had bumped into Wanderer. His memories were hazy, seen not thru the filtered eyes of the armor, but instead his own vision, his own memory. They had been celebrating a minor victory and the military brass had tried to bring back a bit of the old world, so they could remember what they were fighting for. Wanderer blinked the memories away and saw the hotel for what it was now, almost abandoned, soulless and empty like a beer mug left out overnight, with just a bit of sticky residue remaining. Large windows let in the only light, but there was little to see -- debris, sagging trim, the remnants of a couple campfires and books everywhere. The witch appeared (cleaned and primped, less wild-looking than before) from the main office behind the lobby desk, carrying a chubby candle, its flame flickering as she kicked a couple of the wayward hardcovers out of her way. "You are well read, witch." She cackled, snorted, and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. "They're not so much mine, as his, you know. He was a collector, a stupid, sickly man of books, who rode me till I got fat with child. When not reading, he'd be traveling, looking for more to read. Came home only to ride and read. Said he was rebuilding our knowledge, saving us all with books, his grandfather started the tradition. Dumb fuck, my husband was." She kicked another book across the dull floor. "Was? What happened to him?" He thought of the body in the grave. She stared up at him, her chin jutting out. "The bastard gave me my Missy, then went and died, he did. I had to bury him. Was I surprised? No - that man always found a way out of the hard work. Now, have you anything to trade for a tumble? " He wondered how long she had been doing this, whether she shared blood with the women who worked this place the last time he was here, or had her husband brought her from elsewhere to this abandoned hotel. "Just these," Wanderer said, pulling forth a handful of gold chains from a sphincter that opened at his midsection. Gold still seemed the reliable medium of trade, even in these barbaric outlands and by the witch's smile he saw that she approved. With these she could probably trade for food from the village below for a year, if they accepted her money without killing her first. "For all that, I'll be spreading my legs for a month." "Just a night will do. I don't stay anywhere long." The witch cackled gleefully, snatched the chains and hastened her step across the floor. "Come, up these stairs, we're almost to my room. Careful not to wake Missy." Wanderer followed the woman, tried to detect any signs of her child, but found none. Each room he passed seemed full of books, untidy stacks spilling into the hallways. Only two rooms, at the end of the hallway, were free of the past. Wanderer wondered why his anticipation did not grow as he watched this woman lead him to her bedroom. He felt nothing. Ahead, an odor, rank even through the armor's filters, slowed his pace and he noticed a flickering candle lighting the room beside the witch's. "I keep the light on for Missy," the witch explained as they reached the rooms, "she's afraid of the dark. That cat you buried, it was hers. She'll be heartbroken, my poor little girl. I just need to check on her a moment, just go into my room." Wanderer ignored her, followed the witch into the child's room and without the filters he would have gagged for death clung to the walls -- he did not need to look at the child, all wrapped tightly to the neck in an old but clean blanket, to know the truth. The witch bent and kissed the mummified child on the forehead, but she must have heard Wanderer step into the room for she cast him a nasty look. "I know she's dead," the witch said, "but I just can't part with her, is all. It's a sad thing for a child to be dead and her mother not yet be ready for the burying." "I can do it for you." "Don't you dare!" The witch screamed at him, crossed the room like a ghost and pushed him ineffectively, her palms against his armored chest. "Don't you even say such a thing." He mumbled an apology. She pushed him again. "Get out of her room. Out. Let's just get this over with. And then you can go, leave me and my Missy alone again." He let the woman push him into her own chambers. He saw a pile of books beside the fireplace and the remnants of several inside it -- Wanderer figured the witch was not exactly wanting for fire fuel. She set the candle down on a wooden nightstand and pulled her dress from her shoulders, naked underneath. He stared at her, she was still attractive and he worried himself over why he felt no stirrings as she sat herself down on the bed. "So, are you going to take that thing off, or do we ride with it on?" Wanderer approached the bed as he pulled on the left glove, the armor protesting as he mentally disengaged the seals and connections from the inside. The witch reached out for his hand. "You're trembling like a virgin village girl," she said, snorting in laughter. "You have done this before?" "It has been a long time." "Well, I've been along for some awfully short rides, so don't be worrying about disappointing me. You're the one paying after all. Here, let me help you with that." She tugged on the glove and it slid down his arm. The witch screamed loudly as his rotted arm fell out of the glove, bits of stringy, dried flesh powdering like dirty snowfall to the floor. Wanderer stared down in disbelief and fell to his knees as the witch rushed out of the room, into Missy's, slamming the door behind her, desperate to escape Wanderer's corpse. * * * Wanderer knelt there a long time, staring at his stump and the rotted hand on the floor, the meat mummified, dried out like a biology sample, with the witch's whimpering a soundtrack to his own disturbed thoughts. How could this have happened? He supposed that was as stupid a question as wondering where a pregnancy came from. He knew the answer. He was old. Possibly hundreds of years old and the only thing really alive anymore was the armor. The ghoul corpses had always seemed rotten to him, but given that they were another species he had assumed that this was simply the way they were. He never considered their age, that they might already be dead, that only their armor still lived. Was he still real? Or just thoughts and memories and emotions stored in the armor, destined to exist forever. He wanted to vomit, to squeeze his eyes and fall into the blackest kind of sleep but realized he could not. He was not alive enough to do either -- the armor had tricked him. His wedding band was still wrapped tightly around his ring finger. He remember his wife, the phantom woman, a hazy abstract memory, sliding it onto him, exchanging vows, before she exchanged the other kind, found herself wrapped up in a cult, the one that preceded the ghouls. The priests of the cult had called the ghouls and delivered humanity to them in one neatly wrapped package. But that was a different kind of memory than the ones he had while wearing the armor. On a whim he found he could call up, in perfect detail, any event from the Feast Wars, see most anyone, all crisp and in perfect detail -- as long as he had been wearing the armor. Memories from when he did not wear the armor were hazy, lacking the built in film-crew that was this suit, he supposed. They were memories of memories. He tried to slide the ring from his finger but the bones were brittle and he cringed when the ring finger snapped off. Disgusted with himself he finished pulling the ring free and slid it inside the suit before fumbling for the glove and reattaching it. He flexed his fingers, saw them move, not the dead ones but the armored ones. He wondered when he had died but no memories sprung to mind showing the exact moment. His own death remained a mystery even to himself. A heavy object slammed across the back of his head and he fell forward, his face bouncing off the torn carpet. He rolled onto his back and saw the witch overtop of him, clad in a gray robe and wielding a rusted poker. She flailed at him with it, but it bounced harmlessly off the armor. Finally he snatched it from her and leapt to his feet, grabbing her with his free arm before she could turn and flee. She was screaming shrilly and flailing futilely as she struggled with him but it did not matter. He stared at the poker and the dark blood stains on its surface. "Get your hands off of me you fucking corpse!" "Whose blood is this?" She stopped struggling, breathing heavily with dabs of sweat on her brow. She whimpered, begged him to let her go, to leave her and Missy alone. He repeated his question. Softly she said, "He wanted to bury her, bury my Missy and cover her pretty face with dirt. He said so. Dug the grave and everything but I couldn't let him do it, I just couldn't. My baby can't be covered with dirt, it ain't right." Wanderer stared at her and thought of the woman clubbing her husband across the back of his head. The man had tried to bury his daughter and move on with his life. As dead as he was, Wanderer still wanted very much to cry. The armor had swallowed his soul, had become him. The core of the man he had once been yet remained but competed with the armor's mission. It was why he could never stay long in one place; a constant urging by the armor pushed him ever forward. The human race must be saved. The mission seemed impossible at the moment and he mumbled something to that effect. "You could give it to me," the witch whispered, her bulbous eyes wide with greed. He stared at her and she looked away, as if shamed for speaking her mind. "What?" "Your armor Wanderer. You can just take it off and I promise I'll bury you all properly like." "And what would you do with it? Walk thru the town, kill those that wronged you?" "You're no better, you wander, you kill!" "I make things right. I protect people. Me and the others, we saved this world." The witch looked around her and shook her head. "And I'm spose to be thanking you for this? For Missy? For the cat?" Wanderer bristled; the other armor he had once worn around his thoughts and words was worn thin by the realization that he was long dead. "You were born woman. You and your daughter. Without what I and the others did during the Feast, your ancestors would have been devoured by the scavengers or the ghouls, and there would have been no more of man or woman." "Would it be so awful? If all us," she paused and then made a magician's gesture with her hands, "were just gone?" "Probably not," he said, his bug-like eyes reflecting her a thousand times over. "But we don't go that way so easily, we die fighting, struggling for every breath. That is our way." "It ain't fair -- you're dead, the armor is no good to you now. Don't be selfish, give it over, give it to me. Please." Wanderer wondered if the witch might see the truth he could not. Was he hanging on? Why? The lives he had fought for, the love he had cherished, were as faded as the pyramids, the cities, the old world. Why keep on fighting? Duty. He must because he could and he realized that it was not selfishness that made him cling to this artificial life. "You want this fucking thing?" Wanderer asked, the venom in his words physical, pushing the witch backwards, almost out of his grasp. "This burden I've worn for who knows how many goddamn years -- could you bear it?" "I w-would try," she said. Wanderer tossed her lightly against the wall, her shoulder blades puncturing the drywall and he strode over to the fireplace to pull a burnt book from it. He tossed it at her -- she shrieked, shied from it as if it were a mouse and she not a witch. "I was fooled, but am no fool. A woman who would burn the sweat of her ancestors is not fit to wear this armor." "Kill me then!" she said, "Just kill me! I'm a murderer, a husband killer. You heard me say it. Just kill me, make it end. Please." Wander bowed his head. It would be easy. Her life, his life, either or both could be ended quickly. No worries. The forever darkness, the kind that no one needed to be scared of for it provided the best sort of comfort, the promise of never remembering, or knowing, or feeling, or being. "Is that what you want?" "I don't know." Wanderer stared her full in the face and this time she did not look away. "I thought I wanted a warm woman in my arms, but found instead that I was but a cold corpse. You say you want this armor, to wear, to feel powerful, but I am as much a slave to it, as you are to your child." The witch glared at him. "Don't be speaking ill of my girl." "She is a heavy burden to bear." "Missy's just a little girl, she needs someone to love her." "Missy is dead." "No," the witch said, "she's just like you. That's not dead, not really. My girl would be alive just like you, if she wore the armor." Pity for the witch welled up in him as he finally realized her intentions. Yet she did not understand how the armor worked. "Witch, this suit of armor would do nothing for your girl. It swallowed my memories when I died wearing it. For Missy, it's too late. She's already gone." "No," the witch said, sliding down the wall and covering her face in her hands, wet, slimy sobs coming out of her. "There's a way. There's gotta be. You're just a mean thing, like the ghouls. Everyone says so. Everyone hates you, the moment you turn your back on them, they just go back to their nasty filled lives. You're just a legend for people to mock. You can't fix anything. You think you-" He fled from her and the nasty litany that rolled out of her, like demented scrolls unrolling after him, the words chasing him. She watched in horror as he bundled up her daughter and took Missy outside. The verbal abuse continued, though the witch stayed indoors, just hanging her head out the back window because she knew she could not stop him. * * * Wanderer thought of the rooms full of books, their titles hidden in shade and gloom, their knowledge shut up tight between their covers, like old men with wisdom to offer but not the courage to say what they thought. The books had purpose, could do what he could never. Shoveling dirt on a dead child gave him perspective. He patted down the last of the soil. "You buried her?" The witch asked, finally brave enough to venture out. Her hands worried each other, as if they fought to tear apart her skin, but could not agree which would start first and where. "I buried us both," he said. He still thought, walked, talked but his corpse was no longer in the armor, he had pulled it out, gave birth to his own death. And like the famous timepieces of his past, he kept on ticking. Forever. "She's frightened," the witch said, kneeling at the gravesite. "I can feel it." "That's what this is for," Wanderer said, pointing to the tube jutting out of the earth. It was just scrap plumbing but he had figured it would make the woman happy. And since he needed her help, he figured this one grotesque allowance was warranted. "What is it?" "Just a pipe, for the light to come in for her, for you to talk to her." The witch looked up at him, tears streaking her cheeks. "That's awful nice of you. Its the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me, for my Missy." "I need a favor." "I'm not so good with favors." He tapped his foot impatiently. "This one is easy. I just need to stay here and figure out what's in those books you got. See what can be used to help people." "You'll be here, protecting us?" "Yes. But I need your help. Do you know how to read witch?" She nodded. "That is good. Because you need to continue your husband's work-" "I hate them books." "Those books might have saved Missy's life. There's a lot to be learned from them." "I don't want to learn." "You may not think so, but you won't refuse me, will you?" When she shook her head, he continued, "And I'll help you." "With the villagers?" she asked, her eyes gleaming with possibilities. "I'll keep you safe from them, but I won't hurt them." "Safe is good. Do I get to keep the money chains?" When he nodded her questions continued, "and I don't have to ride you? Because I don't know how that would work, with you being dead and all." Wanderer shook his head, sure that his buried skull was grinning at the woman's foolishness. "So, we have a deal?" "Yes, a deal. But," the witch said, running her hand along the pipe that connected her world to that of her dead daughter, "what is it that you're gonna do?" "Those books represent all that humanity was, before the ghouls and the wars. We are going to read them, catalogue them, teach the knowledge they hold to those who remain. We are going to save the world." The witch let her disgust at the thought flit across her face and he laughed. Convincing her to help him would be just the first step on a long journey. He could only hope it would end where he planned.