Title: What Remains
Date: April 14th, 2025
Author: Z. E. Wayland
License: CC0; To the extent possible under law, Z. E. Wayland has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
If only there was an easier way to forget Carey Stratford. Before that night lit by pillars of light and flame, we had two presidents. One along the west coast, the other on the east, both picking apart the states like children bickering over a spider’s legs. They carved their ownership with drones and tanks and bullets and borders and threats of mutually assured destruction. As our station was loaded up with nuclear armaments, I joked there would be a West Dakota with the other security officers. A few laughed. Ms. Stratford did not. Her first name was disallowed ever since she quit; she cast her gun and tag back to the station. “I want everybody to know exactly where I stand,” she said as she rode the wave of resistance and pulled the tide behind her like horses about to stampede. Ms. Stratford was a disruptor, an organizer, somebody who would grab Eden’s flaming sword by the handle to open its gardens to the world once again. Ms. Stratford became a threat.
Did she see God’s ever-burning eye cast its judgment across broken highways and cities-now craters? Did she anticipate that one of those bombs would land drowning, sleeping, bleeding radiation along the banks of the Colorado River? Did she watch with the countries beyond our borders as the states crowned themselves with wreaths of nuclear fire? Did she know it was inevitable? Futile? I never asked her why, not even when we could still talk. I only watched Ms. Stratford’s progress as she brought crowds to the outer perimeter day by day. They could not see my face behind this mask and its dark lenses, but I could see them. Some brought signs of paper and cardboard. A few jeered and burned flags from the top of a gas station, abandoned when countries stopped exporting to the United States. Others brought their signs in the form of wire cutters and holes in the fence.
Ms. Stratford’s name was only brought up in the same sentence as the nuclear warheads loaded into the station. Her name was only brought up in relationship to how she violated the peace we had to keep. Her name would be unlisted in any casualty list that occupied the nuclear control room in protest. They barricaded the entrances. They had control of the missiles. This was disallowed. So, it was up to us, to me, to correct it. I dragged the battering ram, swung its force against the door, each slam a new dent along the metal surface until the door split from the frame. I dropped the battering ram for my pistol as our shots zipped through the threshold. I should not have been there. She looked at me through my mask, through my soul, as I held my heavier-than-the-movies pistol at her. I held it as god-slaying thunder rang around us. Those were brown halos around her pupils.
I never pulled the trigger. I couldn’t. I couldn’t. Under a hail of gunfire, anybody could have killed her, but I knew better.
It could have been when I stepped over her body, one of many bodies. It could have been when I stood aside when those men with the faces of the four horsemen charted the missile flight paths, retaliations, predictions, interceptions. It could have been when I felt the back-from-the-dead ghost of Carey Stratford try to possess my bones to urge, to beg, to tell me to draw my pistol and blow the panel and break the controls and do anything, anything at all. I killed Carey a second time.
I want to imagine myself, crawling upon my knees, peeling off this mask, over all the others that did not have their voices heard, saying, “We shouldn’t do this.” The horsemen would say nothing because they knew I don’t speak for the dead.
And we broke the sixth seal. Armaments fly from Virginia to Nevada, Texas to Maine, coast to coast. They descended like stars from the heavens. The screens displayed cities and military bases popping as easily as pimples. I stood and watched and felt the ghost disappear, shaken out as the earth quaked from a nearby explosion. And all went dark. And all was quiet. When the days passed and everything stopped, I crawled out like an animal off an ark. I poked at the land to see if it was real. Over the span of days, ancient pine trees withered into dead poles of wood. Electrical and signal towers scattered into pieces like autumn leaves. Nobody could tell us on the radio who won.
It’s down the highway in a white-as-dirt-can-be Honda Accord with siphoned gasoline to cross the Mexican border. They slowly inch their way into the now unclaimed lands of NorthAmerica. Refuge, I can hope. But, no matter how far I drive, I can’t outrace this memory. There is a collapsed mascara billboard along the side of the road that shades a community of tents, piled clothes, and water that watches me pass by. A bus rests, rusting on top of an overpass bridge asks “are you still here?” in graffiti. A motel swallows the sun’s gaze beneath its horizon. The headlights are the only light that pierces the dim glow of the night. There’s somebody waiting along the roadside waving me down.
I look up to the moon. It too judges with its half open eye. I slow to a stop with the windows down next to the hitchhiker. He looks like Carey. Brown eyes. It hurts like nails in my chest.
“Need help?” I ask this time. And one of them is pulled out.