Tails of the Apocalypse

Tomorrow Found (a Wasteland Saga short story) ^{by Nick Cole}

In the night she carried the runt away from the sleeping pack. It was the poor thing’s only hope. Its last chance. She’d given birth to a full litter in the remains of a bombed-out hospital where the pack had been hunting that winter. Five survived; one had two heads and didn’t. The others were starting to bully the tiniest. The runt. They’d bully it to death.

She knew.

It was the way of dogs.

But there was a memory in her. A memory of a different way deep down inside of her. She’d been a part of something she couldn’t articulate and could barely remember. Men. Women. People and dogs. Together. Living along the heat-blasted roads and in the blackened forests that would never grow again. Until they’d met other people. And then the people she’d lived with were no more. She’d escaped in the chaos of loud bangs and repeated metallic cackles.

Fire and screaming.

She’d escaped and in time she’d joined the pack. And they’d hunted the lone stragglers of men who seemed to be fewer and fewer in the days after the world was gone. The pack had even hunted bear and wolves and other dogs. And for a time she forgot the ways of men. The pats. The scraps tossed by firelight. The rubs for deeds done well. The darkness beyond the firelight around which the humans murmured or sometimes wept for what was lost, or softly sang old commercial jingles throughout the cold nights that were especially long in those times.

The firelight.

The pack had argued that gray, rainy, wet day before she’d taken the runt. There was a man making his way along the big road. But there was also a pack of wild pigs. Many, by sign and scent. Sucklings were easy pickings, and the pack had argued violently over which way to go. The Alpha, a big, iron-gray pit with demonic eyes, had been challenged. His challenger had been that night’s meal.

And she’d watched her own young bully the runt as the pack tore at what little the challenger provided. Imitating the big pit who had fathered them. That night, as the pack slept, she picked up the mewling runt by the neck and carried him out into the wind and the rain and darkness that smelled always of ash and death. She carried him across a desiccated plain thrashed by a howling, sand-filled wind that skirled like a nightmare’s scream. She carried him and ignored his feeble protests and his chubby-pawed battings. Sniffing the air, waiting, then moving on, she carried him.

And in time she caught the scent and smelled the smoke and remembered firelight. The smoke went with the firelight. Men gathered around firelight. Men, some men, were good to dogs and could make use of even a runt like she’d once been. Like the one she held between her teeth now, in the darkness.

Men could be good friends.

She found the stranger in the remains of a leaning gas station. The firelight glowed from within, and she crawled on her belly through the darkness until she could smell the lean rabbit the man had killed. She watched him motionlessly staring into the fire. She waited.

The pup whined.

She opened her jaw and released him to the dust. And slowly she began to nudge him forward. At first he didn’t want to go. He simply refused to budge, to leave her and her warmth. And then she nipped at him and he began to waddle forward and into the firelight. Crying for the loss of the only love ever known. Crying because the world was ending once more, again.

And when the man turned and saw the pup, he did not see her out there in the night, watching still. For a long while she watched from the darkness. Watched as the man stared at her mewling runt. Watched as the stranger mumbled to himself and then rose.

What he would do next she didn’t know, but she knew… she knew it had once been something she’d been a part of.

It was the only way. Her runt would never survive within the pack. And a mother is still a mother.

No matter what.

And always.

She watched from within the cold cloak of a howling night as the man bent, held out his weathered hand and waited for her pup. She watched as an ancient thing written into the language of all their DNA began again.

And it was a lost memory found to her.

And….

She knew the pup would live now.

He’d been alone for a long time.

Too long.

Too long since he’d crossed the wastes east of Saint Maggie’s home along the coast. His home. The only home he’d ever known. Too long since he’d steered clear of the craziness the mad wanderers he sometimes encountered called El Lay as he quested. Sent forth, like the others. Sent forth to find what was lost. Sent forth to find the past, if it still lived, breathed, existed.

Sent forth for some hope that the past might still provide.

He’d killed twelve men in his travels because he’d had to. The worn shotgun was down to three shells and who knew if they’d go when they were needed most in a clinch. He wore the gun on his back amidst the clutter of his patchwork armor and road-mended scraps as he crossed the Mojave and the Valley of Death.

In Vegas he’d found silence and nothing.

Nothing that remained of the past.

Nothing in the big rooms he’d searched.

Everything had been burned.

Not even a scrap that something might be written on.

Not even a page.

He’d walked down into the southwest and searched every corpse of a town for a specific building like he’d been taught to look for. Always the finding was the same. The remains of an old fire. Fires. The empty spaces along the crumbling shelves where the past had once waited. Waited to be had for the easy taking. Gone.

Gone.

Gone.

And gone again.

Years passed.

Men died.

He loved a blind woman once, but she wouldn’t leave her people and so he’d continued on in search of the past.

What had happened to them all? he wondered one black dusk when the map didn’t match the landscape and the night screamed again like a howling savage, angry at a world that had destroyed itself for no reason that made sense anymore.

What happened to them all?

Mac.

Teddy.

The others.

What happened to them all? Those who’d been sent forth. Orphans who’d been rescued on that last day.

And in the past two years, as he’d headed back west with no past in his ruck to bring back to the last home on the coast, he hadn’t spoken a word.

Who was there to speak to?

The blackened stubble of once-houses stretching off to the horizon like endless tombstones.

The mutie-blind pigs who hunted him beyond the valley that a big highway had once run through. Where he’d seen the bomb crater from five miles off atop the ridge that led down into it.

The bombs that destroyed the world on the day he was just a little boy on a bus.

He heard the distant sirens from that day again. In his mind. After all those years. The day he was just five and an orphan. The day Saint Maggie had rescued them all, all the orphans, in a stuck bus for “such a time as this,” as Miss Wanda had told the girl who was becoming Saint Maggie.

“How don’t you know, girl…” dying Miss Wanda had cried. “How don’t you know you weren’t meant for such a time as this?”

That was… thought the once-orphan man standing atop the ridge, looking down into the massive crater that the had-to-be-a-hundred-kiloton warhead, musta-been, had left in what had once been an interstate all those years ago….

Thirty years ago….

Thirty-five years….

Maybe even thirty-eight.

Which makes me….

He hadn’t said a word in the two years since the crater.

Who was there to speak to?

He’d crossed the Sonoran Desert and seen a village alongside another highway. They’d given him corn tortillas and offered him shelter, but he hadn’t stayed. He couldn’t speak. Couldn’t think of any words that would mean anything.

A man older than him watched him go and gave a little wave that was like a prayer.

He took the tortillas in a monsoon rain and kept moving on up the highway, smelling their mesquite wood smoke in the miles that followed.

You can only see so much.

That’s how it began.

The thought….

To end it all.

How much can you see? he’d asked himself.

And then he thought of….

All the bones. Bleaching in the desert, and the mud, and the hardened ash.

All the wrecks.

All the airplanes smashed across the landscape.

All the short, dark stubble where once a house, or thousands of them, had been.

All the twisted metal and melting rebar.

All the blasted roads and highways.

All the distant cities that looked like haunted, eyeless scarecrows and the signs that told people to stay away. Poison. Radiation. Plague.

And all the bones that had once been a someone.

Who was there to talk to?

You can only see so much.

And….

There is no past left to put in my falling-apart ruck and take back home.

And….

You can only see so much.

He found the gorge on the edge of a place that had once been a town. Found it at noon and stared into its wide emptiness for the better part of a day.

He imagined the fall.

The final step.

You can only see so much.

That night, back near the town, on its outskirts in an old, abandoned gas station, the wind howled and he stared into his fire and imagined the fall.

And remembered all the bones he’d seen.

You can only see so much.

The past was gone. There was none of it left to take back in his ruck. It had all burned up years ago.

He shifted his head downward in agreement with the thought.

The thought to end it all.

The gorge was wide and empty and it would take him. There was room. He would leave, and in time, just become more bones in a world filled with them.

And that was when he heard the tiny cry underneath the howl of the night. The soft whimper.

He turned and saw the pup.

Puppy, he thought and remembered something from a long time ago before the day the world burned up.

Puppy.

It waddled two steps forward and collapsed down on its stubby haunches.

The man turned and scanned the darkness.

No one, no animal, no thing was out there to be seen.

The puppy began to mewl. Its attempt to howl. To cry for everything and every injustice done. To resign itself to fate without a mother to guide or protect him.

Oh, he thought deep inside the silent well that was himself. Don’t give up, little guy.

And he stood and felt so old, and then again, young all at once. So old from all the years on the road, looking for the past. So young because of that something he could not remember from that same dimly remembered past. That lost word….

Puppy.

He knelt down.

He held out some scraps from the tasteless dinner he’d found no joy in.

And he felt the smile, the first smile in a long time, crack his burned lips as the stubby little puppy snorted and chewed and whined all at once.

The man scooped him up and held the dog against himself and away from the night and the darkness and the world that had died. He watched it throughout the night, waking and waking again to make sure the poor thing was still breathing as the temperatures dropped and the fire withered under the cruel blasts that raced like a lunatic out in the darkness.

In the morning, in the cold, orange light of the epic dust storm’s passing, in the silence that followed such, he spoke.

“I’ll call you Dog,” he barely croaked.

The puppy scratched at a flea behind his flappy ear.

“I’ll call you Dog.” Pause. He swallowed hard. “You can help me find the past now.”

The puppy tried to howl, surprised itself, and then looked around.

That morning they walked away from the town, away from the gorge, away from the fall, and continued on, in search of the past once more.

The dog grew and followed the man. Followed him into all the old ruins as they made their way west toward the setting sun each evening.

The dog who had once been a puppy wove in and out of the collapsed buildings and across the rubble as the man searched for the building he knew to look for, mumbling, “I am still faithful. I will never give up. I was… thank you for my helper. Thank you for my friend. I was just… too long by myself.”

When they, the buildings, weren’t found, and even when they were and they were empty save for the ash in the makeshift fire pits and the few bones they always found in such places, the man mumbled the words again, “Thank you, Lord, for giving me a helper to help me. Thank you for my friend.”

They shared the food they took from the land and the man would talk and throw sticks as they crossed the long stretches of a burning summer and a bone-deep winter until finally they came to the top of the mountain and saw the western ocean glittering far below.

When the man produced a small device, its clickety-clack noise-making made even the dog nervous.

“San Diego is like they always said it was. Annihilated because of the fleets and marines that were there,” mumbled the man. That spring they worked their way along the tops of lonely ridges, heading north along what was once called California on all the maps that had been burned for fuel and heating in the long winter that followed the end of the world.

“It seems like we’re going home, Dog. Giving up. But, there’s one last place to check and then….” He sighed as the wind beat at his clothes, making them flap and crack. “Then I don’t know where else to look.”

Dog thumped his tail against the chalk trail that barely existed anymore. Down below, along the coast well north of San Diego, spread the ruin of a massive urban sprawl that seemed ghostly and abandoned even from this high point.

“How can we have a future if we can give ’em no past,” muttered the man as he set to making their last camp in the coastal mountains.

All that spring and well through summer, they searched the ruin.

They found rusting cars.

Empty houses falling over on themselves.

Raven-haunted buildings.

Bones.

And the occasional salvager who shared a fire and told the man and dog that they were getting awfully close, dangerously close, too close to the El Lay and Mad King Arturo and the Dogeaters he made ally with.

Too close.

Too dangerously close.

On the wide stretch of cracked and broken highway, winding through the ruin of a sea of almost identical houses overgrown with weed and sage and vine, they came to the first totem of the Dogeaters.

Planted in the median, seven lanes of fading gray superhighway on each side. Clusters of housing collapsing along the hillsides above.

“Well…” whispered the man as Dog crept forward and barked at it.

Wide-jawed dog skulls, three of them, silently barked from the top of the rebar pole totem. Fresh guts and old skins dangled away from the sign’s crooked arms.

The man had known the new tribes of yesterday’s survivors to have done such things. To mark out their land with warnings like this. To keep others away. To keep what was within for themselves alone.

It was, in these hard times, the way things were.

But there was something about the dog skulls that was more. Something that said much more about the people who’d put them there.

“Best go wide here,” said the man above Dog’s growl. They moved off the freeway and down along some train tracks, working their way through the dried remains of a small swamp that had once gathered in the bottoms. Among the calcified mud and frozen rubbish of the past, they found another totem. And another further on. In time they were climbing up through dense eucalyptus groves that erupted up from the broken remains of ancient tract homes like the legs of giants, finding another nightmare dog-skull marker within sight of the last.

In the mosquito-buzzing heat within the shade of a massive, fallen eucalyptus giant that’d crushed three one-story houses all at once and long ago, the man dropped his pack and shed his patchwork armor for the day.

They were high up on a hill looking down into a bowl of residential ruin almost forty years gone. A planned community that had never planned for the end of the world.

“This was the last place, Dog,” he almost seemed to cry. “Further up the road and we get to El Lay, and everyone knows to stay clear of the madness that comes from there. Direct hit. Everyone knows that.”

Dog lay down next to him.

The man rubbed the velvet fuzz of the chocolate-brown sides of Dog.

“They find us in there and it won’t be good.” But what he really meant is that it wouldn’t be good for his friend.

“We’ll go back out into the desert, to the east, and skirt wide. After that, I don’t know where to look anymore. Maybe it’s all gone,” he said, staring out into the ruin and wondering about all those people that had lived there. What had they been like? Had they survived? Were they these Dogeaters?

He saw it.

Saw the type of building he was told to look for. Saw it far down there along the dim remains of an old road that wound along a hill above the dead swamp. Well within the borders of the Dogeaters.

All the years he’d been searching, he raged at himself that night, how many times had he found the exact same type of building. Just like he’d been taught to. And how many times had it been empty? Just fire pits and bones. Not a scrap of the past left in them.

“Every time,” he muttered within the vine-overgrown remains of an ancient family room that was scoured and brittle. An old, blackened family portrait still hung askew on one of the two walls that remained.

Every time.

They watched the fireplace and the fire within. In the night, an old owl hooted from the rafter of some nearby tract home, barely upright after forty years of hard sun and bitter winter.

He did not sleep that night. Late, when the moon was fat and low in the sky, he awoke and stood looking down into the valley once more.

Could he return and tell them he’d done his best? Searched everywhere to find the past? Could he?

He remembered her, Maggie. They’d called her Saint Maggie. But he had known her as just Maggie. He remembered the heavy smell of too-sweet flowers on her when she’d first scooped him up as the Doomsday horn rang out over the city and everyone fled. As fighter jets streaked across the sky and cars smashed into one another.

He remembered her running and saying, “I’m doing my best.”

Like it was a chant.

Like it was an explanation.

Like it was a prayer.

In the morning the man donned his armor and checked the last three shells. He loaded two and kept one in his jacket pocket.

“I gotta,” he told Dog. “I gotta do my best. I gotta go down there… and see.”

Dog had just returned from chasing something in the groves of the sweet-smelling giants that had collapsed across the old places.

“If we don’t find the past then they, back home, they ain’t got no future, buddy.” He hoisted his old ruck on his back once more. The old ruck that contained the transmitter he could use if ever he found the past. The times he’d shouldered its burden were uncountable. How many more times would he do it again?

And he could not help but think that today might be his last. Just as he’d thought every day.

They crossed crumbling terraces and followed overgrown streets down into the bowl of the old places. At noon, near an old intersection where large buildings had all burned down, he heard the bark in the silence. It came from an overgrown hill they were passing beneath. The man’s hand went to the worn stock of his shotgun as Dog tensed. The bark had been so harsh and sharp and sudden, it was as though it had come from nearby. And even now in the silence, its echo seemed to resonate down the long lanes of destruction.

A moment later it was answered. Not far off. A few streets over maybe.

And then another.

And another.

“C’mon, let’s move, buddy,” said the man, breaking into a trot.

The slope of the land was now leading downhill into a large section of smashed and broken houses. Their splintered roofs and jagged beams thrust upward like shadows against the dying afternoon. Behind them, a ragged chorus of harsh barking sharply broke the still air.

The man urged Dog on, his own breath coming in heaving puffs as his old boots knocked against the crumbling pavement of the sidewalk they ran along.

“In there,” he shouted, pointing toward the catastrophic wreckage that seemed the worst they’d seen in this place. As though all the houses had been crushed instead of burned or blown away. Dog followed a rabbit trail into the mess, and the man, just before getting to his knees to crawl in, turned and saw them coming.

Dogs. Big, mean, lean, wide-jawed dogs that raced forward, straining at big leather leashes held by rangy men painted in mud stripes beneath the Mohawks on their shaven heads. They waved jagged clubs and came on, ululating in sudden glee.

The man knew he’d been seen.

He turned and scrambled into the labyrinth, following Dog through ancient spider webs and past jagged split lumber and jutting metal.

The rabbit trail went on and on and the man wasn’t convinced it was a warren so much as a series of narrow spaces between the extensive rubble.

What if we find a bobcat in here, he thought, and remembered the one that had stared him down once from the top of a road alongside some train tracks he’d been following. The thing had radiated menace and, yes, evil.

But what was there left to do but follow Dog? And so he did and when he got lost, there would be Dog, snouting his way back through the dark and leading him on further into the maze.

The sounds of the men and dogs faded, and when they came out of the chaos of debris, it was full moonlight and early night. They sat in an ancient drainage ditch, drinking the last of their water. On the hillsides all around, lone torches bumped up and down, and at times packs of wild dogs began to bay.

They followed the old drainage ditch down into the dead swamp that was calcified mud and piles of dust and debris. The man led them along, looking for the landmarks he’d spotted from the hills. The landmarks that lay next to the building he’d been searching for, for what seemed all his life.

The count of all his days.

He stumbled on an exposed root and face planted into the dust. He was exhausted. He got to his knees and knew it was a just a matter of time before the Dogeaters found them.

A matter of time.

Dog was back, licking his face. Reminding him to step away from the edge. To step back from the gorge.

Because that’s where you were, weren’t you? he asked himself. At the gorge again.

He stood, his mind swimming, wondering if he’d banged his head in the stumble. He checked the shotgun and reminded himself that the three shells could not be counted on. Dog paced back and forth, whining slightly.

The man stared up and about. Nothing in the night was familiar, and the moon had already crossed over into the other part of the sky. Soon it would be blackest night, and what would they be able to find then? His mind was suddenly terror-struck.

Stop, he told himself.

But nothing looked familiar and how long had he lain in the dust?

How long?

Dog whined again and started off through the thin, dead, swamp trees.

Follow him, the man told himself. Your friend knows where to go for safety.

He stumbled after Dog, occasionally stopping for a few ragged breaths, trying to make as little noise as possible, cringing when some dead stick snapped in the darkness. He followed Dog through the night along the remains of a sandy-bottomed stream, and then up out of the stream and across a carpet of dead, ash-gray leaves.

The man reached out without thinking and grabbed the rusty iron railing that ran alongside the dusty stone steps leading up and out of the swamp.

It was the touch of night-cold iron that made him realize he was holding onto it. Holding onto something that could lead him out of the dead swamp. He clung to it for a moment and knew… knew there wasn’t much left in him.

He reached up to wipe cold sweat from his forehead and found the dried blood.

Oh… he thought.

Dog whined from the top of the stairs.

Slowly, the man began to haul himself up their steep length, pushing away thoughts of sleep and the edge of the gorge that was big enough to take him.

I can’t leave my friend here now, he thought and smiled up at Dog who beat the air wildly with his tail.

This is all my fault.

At the top of the stairs, the man saw a small empty parking lot ringed by an ancient mesh fence, and beyond lay the building he’d been looking for.

He went to one knee. Dog came up and licked his face.

“Of course,” said the man. “You’ve been searching all these years with me. You were looking too. All that time.”

In the distance, another pack of dogs began to bay and howl, like savage coyotes whooped and called in the night. The man knew the Mohawk’d Dogeaters had them by the thick straps of their large leather leashes, following the scent that would bring them straight here.

Dog bounded off across the parking lot and up the steps of the building.

The man stood and followed, knowing this would be the last search. Knowing what he would find. He climbed the wide steps, knowing that beyond the double doors of this place he’d find nothing. Again.

Nothing but….

Crumbling shelves.

Ashes in a fire pit.

Bones.

And nothing.

The double door was bricked over with cinderblocks. The man looked about. So were all the windows that usually ringed such places.

It wasn’t a large building, and they walked its circumference, finding each and every entrance sealed.

In the distance the Dogeaters were closing. Now they were down along the bottom of the dead swamp, casting about for his trail, baying and shouting bloody murder.

Dog began to growl and whine all at once.

“I know…” said the man, and couldn’t think of what he knew except that they were surrounded and out of options.

He looked up at the roof and thought, That’s all we have left.

Dropping to the ground and removing the pack, he fished for an old orange electrical cord he’d found long ago. For a moment he began to swoon as the blackness tried to consume his vision. Tried to consume him. The howling of the Dogeaters became distant and hollow all at once.

And then he was back.

Quickly he made a harness for Dog and tied the other end around his ruck.

“Stay,” he told Dog as he shouldered his pack once more. “Stay.”

He pulled himself up onto a low concrete wall and then reached out for the side of the building. He breathed deep and began to find handholds that would take him up toward the lip, knowing there would be a moment when he would need strength to pull himself off the ground and onto the roof.

That moment came. It came and he was holding onto the lip of the one-story building, knowing that to fall was to break something he could not afford to pay for. A leg. A hip. An arm. Anything would be a death sentence. Anything was beyond his ability to pay.

The baying of the Dogeaters along the sandy bottom of the dried-up stream reminded him that he was already under another death sentence.

“What does one more matter,” he chuckled deliriously and began to pull. He pulled and knew his strength would not be enough. Maybe if he dropped the pack. But the cord was attached to the pack. To drop the pack was to leave his friend.

“That,” he grunted, as an icy sweat broke out along the fiery iron coursing through his shoulders, “will not happen.”

But as much as he tried to pull—and he knew his strength was fading and there was not more than the smallest bit of it left—he could not gain the lip of the roof.

Some massive dog sent up a howl in the night.

Down near the steps, thought the man.

Its companions began to moan. He could hear the low, harsh grunts of the men who held the thick leather leashes. The Dogeaters.

He thought of the gorge that would take him. Of the fall into it.

It was big enough.

“Please…” he grunted. “For my friend who found me when I was lost and ready to give up.”

He almost screamed as he tried once more and instead exhaled a gusty, “please.”

And he was over the lip, feeling the ancient grit of the roof on his palms. He lay there panting, knowing that he’d pulled some muscle that could never be made right again. He struggled out of his pack and grasped the cord.

He looked down at his friend.

His friend who had found him in the night.

Dog barked.

And the man began to haul his friend up onto the roof.

They lay there for hours, silent as the Dogeaters followed the trail and called and called again into the last of the night. In time, in the early hours, they’d gone off on some new scent.

The man and the dog waited.

Knowing maybe one of the Dogeaters had remained in the shadows to watch and wait.

Dawn came and when the man was sure no one had remained—or if they had, they’d gone off—he got to his feet. The day would be beautiful. Golden light filtered down through the ancient eucalyptus giants that seemed to be everywhere.

In the center of the roof was an old hatch.

“Let’s go down inside, Dog. Even if there’s nothing left, it’s safe for us.”

He broke the old lock with his crowbar and peered down into the darkness.

There was a smell.

Like one he’d never smelled before.

Not death.

Not ash.

Not decay.

Not bones.

He’d smelled those all his days.

Sweet and almost heavy.

And his heart began to beat as he remembered the day she’d held one under his nose.

“I love their smell,” she’d told him one winter’s night, late, when he could not sleep in the refugee camp and there was no food, but she’d found something else to pass the long hours of the night.

“These are our past,” she’d said to the little boy he once was.

Saint Maggie.

The girl who was becoming her.

He carried Dog down into the dark. At the bottom of the stairs he lowered his pack and pulled out his tin of matches. He struck one.

He could hear Dog panting in the darkness.

They were standing in a small hallway. The floor was smooth. Linoleum. Clean except for the dust.

And that sweet heavy smell was almost overpowering down here.

Like it was a dream. Or dreams. Or all the dreams one could imagine. Dreams in sleep that seem so real, they must be. That the world inside the dream is the world and there’s no memory of the one where the sleeper waits for morning.

So real.

At the end of the small hallway was a gray door.

They walked forward, and the man pushed open the door and saw the tremble in his own hand as he heard a soft hiss.

And beyond its portal lay the past in great stacks and along the shelves. Every book in the world, thought the man who had no idea how big the world had once been. How many books had once been dreamed.

But to him, by the thin light of the guttering match, it was all the books in the world. Perfect. Preserved. And waiting.

All the past tomorrow would ever need.

He began to cry, and the match burned out in his hand with a small hiss that echoed in the silence of the place.

“We found it,” he repeated over and over while murmuring, “Thank you, thank you,” through his tears as he fell to the floor.

That night on the roof, with Dog by his side, he tuned the old radio he’d carried in his pack after the ancient solar charger had done its work. First star in the west was always the signal for the time to call. The time when they’d be listening.

He tuned in the station like he’d been taught.

How many years ago…?

Crackle. Hiss. A sudden Pop.

“We found one,” he croaked into the ether and felt Dog’s tail thump the hollow roof above all those waiting books. All that past that might be used again. Saved by some unknown someone who knew man and dog would finally come and find it. And that the world might need the past again one day.

“We found a library.”

They’ll wonder who I mean by we, he thought, and laughed as he patted Dog.

He keyed the worn mic again.

“My friend and me,” he paused. “We found the past.”