Only Crows

It’s spring. 

 I was waiting for hard summer to come but it’s too late, I should keep moving. The desert is just over the mountains. I want nothing more than to pass without revelation, to crunch deathly russet sands under my boots and collapse into oblivion. 

There’s little time. 

Everyday I feel it dripping down my back and through my bones like I’m a walking hourglass. The machete in my hands is dull, pitted and loose at the handle. The rotting corpses at my feet have stopped twitching.

I think it’s been 40 years, which makes me about 83 now. Feels like the right number for me to die. I only wish I’d sired some children. The compound is far, far behind. The dead ones had come, rickety and hungry as always but this time in more numbers than we’d seen. I was the first to create the place and I’m the last to leave it. My dream is dead. My compound is dead. My apocalyptic family is walking-dead, walking fucking dead.

Crows call overhead. They are my solace like a cool drink. I dream about showers, how the hot water would scorch my skin red in the best way like a lover’s slap in the face. I kick an ugly redheaded man and wipe his leavings off my blade on the rags of his pants. Fuck I miss Ginny. She had red hair like a blaze in the night. So many crows. I figure there’s got to be as many a’them as there used to be people. I’m the only people now, probably. 

My map’s old, almost as old as the road signs that point the way to destinations long pillaged, long ravaged. Lake Tahoe, I’d heard of it when I was a lad pissin with my shirt open on crops of the middle country. Ain’t a country anymore. That took about a decade though. We martialed quick and we had the best weapons in the world. The fuckin problem though was so many people couldn’t put two bullets in their children's heads. They’d get bit, shit spread and the crows feasted. Probably for the next thousand years they’ll be eating. Cleaning up our mess.

Time to walk, too much walking left to do and not enough time. I want to make it south. Die in the valley of death. I was born there, a birth in Death Valley. My ma called it poetic justice for the place but she was an idiot. She couldn’t kill her husband, just like she couldn’t leave him in life, just like she couldn’t stomach violence on TV. People didn’t know how to fight for life and that was the biggest problem. For three years I watched on the TV, while it still worked, while I still had ice cubes and bullets from the sports store down the block. I watched how whole families got eaten up and I saw my ma, when I went to visit that third year, the year it all went to shit and I couldn’t find a hot shower ever again. She hated violence alive. In death, she was death, she took out a whole church because she was too proud to admit the teeth marks on her thigh.

The sky always gets prettier. I love the sunsets on this final hike of mine. People said that the blood color of it was a terrible thing to witness everyday but it’s so rare now to see fresh victims coming. I saw an Eskimo once, must of come down off a glacier by the look of his parka shredded like a hobo’s. The things I seen... and I never lost the gratitude of a sunset. Funny, before, I didn’t give a nothin for it. Fucking sun was gonna come back the next day, waking me up for some crappy job, some crappy coffee and crappy traffic to get through it. I miss driving now. Any gas we siphoned never went into cars, there were too many other ways to use it. Don’t get me started on coffee. ’Bout 20 years ago I found a coffee transpo warehouse. Cleaned out. That was probably the last time I cried.

I love these woods. I love how the sunlight dapples into long shadows and mixes in the rising dust. My eyes still haven’t left me. This is not such a bad place to die and sleeping in trees keeps the crawlers off me. But there’s something about the idea of the sun baking my cold bones till some crazy aliens find ’em a million years from now and figure me for the last man on earth that didn’t suffer from the craziest fuckin myth come to life. Ed used to say it was an alien virus or some kind of X Files crap. We laughed. 

If you’re reading this then I was wrong. You’re alive. You can take these bones and place 'em in the desert for me and let 'em bake till they’re white as shark teeth. I know it might be a lot to ask but at the same time, what else you got to do, stranger?

My name is Bart Gilley and today I’m goin’a die before I turn. I seen it enough but it’s so goddamn weird to feel. It’s like when I used to go to the dentist and got numbed up. It starts around the bite, mine’s in my left calf, and my foot’s gone to sleep after a couple hours. 

The moon’s rising and I can’t walk no more. I’m just listening to the crows. I think they know when one’s gonna take his own instead of turning. They’re smart bastards. Perhaps they’ll inherit the earth and do somthing better with it.