Josh Poole and Travis Wellman: Authors

Here’s a short story that we wrote for another online contest. Let us know if you enjoyed it, even if it is rougher than our more recent work.

-Travis

The World Ends, but an Archaeologists Work Does Not

By Travis Wellman & Josh Poole

The civilized world had ended five hundred years before, and many continued to argue about what, exactly, had caused The Cataclysm.  Whether it was the result of one of the superweapons theorized to have existed at the time or the countless demons that poured out of underground vents at night was entirely unknown.  

Trevor had been born into the post-Cataclysm world, and frankly his work wasn’t impacted by what caused two thirds of the world to be eradicated in a single year.  He was interested only in the prospect of finding remains, which had almost all been devoured by the demons hundreds of years before, leaving scant organic traces of the previous civilization.  The fame from such a find, he thought, could get him all he ever wanted.  

He was an archaeologist for the University, the ruling entity in his corner of the wasteland.  The massive structure of the University itself still loomed in the distance as he scoured the ruins of an ancient shopping complex as a dust storm raged outside.  Lacking any sense of adventure, the rest of the team had hunkered down in what had been one of the many small stores buried deep in the complex itself.  He had thought that it had likely sold clothing in the past, judging from the faded images on the walls and the polychromatic contents that had mostly been looted or destroyed by the fires. 

Sand blew in through shattered skylights and gaping holes in the distant ceiling as he walked along the hallway that ran between gutted shops, passing by intervals of scorch marks that dotted the walls and dark stains of indefinite origin that covered the ground beneath the rubble.  The others undoubtedly would have taken a much closer examination of everything he passed by, but they were what he liked to think of as simpletons amused by research for research’s sake.  Show them a ruined timepiece from before the Cataclysm, and they lose their minds studying it.  He was looking for something more interesting than the discarded scraps, he wanted to find the kind of big-picture stuff that could change the narratives of history and slap his name right next to it in the annals.  

The hallway eventually opened up into a cavernous space, with more broken skylights inviting in sand and sunlight.  Trevor recognized it as some sort of cafeteria space, similar in layout to the ones at the University with the exception being the individual kitchens encircling the room.  He figured that any stragglers from the Cataclysm would have sheltered where the food was located, making the area ripe for artifacts if the demons hadn’t taken everything. 

“Hello, anyone out there?”  Trevor called out with a laugh, shining a flashlight into the engrossing darkness. 

Silence.

“Well, hopefully your remains are here at least,” he said before letting out another, harsher laugh.

Without wasting another moment, he made his way to the closest of the decaying kitchens.  A tormented counter of melted steel separated the kitchen from the cafeteria space, running almost the entire length of the room.  Creeping cautiously around it, he found himself amongst the remains of kitchen equipment that was either too big or too useless for looters to rip from the floor and walls.  With each step, he shined the light into every corner and nook, wary of any demons that might be waiting dormantly for their next meal.  

Trevor weaved through the maze of deceased machines, carefully looking for the unique outline of human remains.  He made it across to the back wall where a heavy metal door was embedded formidably into the structure.  He heaved at the handle with his free hand, but it refused to budge at all.  

With a sigh, Trevor propped his flashlight up on some nearby surface, so the beam rested on the door as he went about using both hands to wrest the latch from its rusted position.  After a struggle, the mechanism relented, and the door swung open with a horrid, demon-attracting screech along with a cloud of dust.  After adjusting his fedora, he grabbed his flashlight and peered into the chamber with interested eyes, listening for any movement outside of the buffeting sandstorm.

Metal shelves with small heaps of detritus lined the walls while the floor was sodden with spoils long turned to sticky dust.  He made his way more cautiously than he had through the kitchen, as, if there was going to be anything of great intrigue, he knew it would be in there.  

The sealed chamber proved to be useless, a tomb of nothingness.  From what Trevor could discern, it contained wasted food scraps and the remnants of their containers alone.  He had hoped that when the Cataclysm happened that at least the few humans with functioning frontal-lobes would have barricaded themselves into such a place to survive the initial conflagration. There wasn’t time to wallow though, as plenty more storage rooms had to exist in the other kitchens around the complex.  There could still be remains in one of the others.  

Trevor searched through five kitchens and four storage rooms, his steps silent as a rodent’s before finding himself in awe before the fifth such room.  Near the back wall of the small enclosure, two partially mummified bodies sat huddled, their clothes little more than rags Time had not been kind to the cheaply made, mass produced fabrics of their day..  

Despite the poor condition of the clothes, they were still some of the most complete specimens he’d ever seen.  It was the find of a lifetime!  A find more than sufficient to cause the  others’ minds to explode in a flash of jealous wonder.  He stooped over the corpses, his light reflecting off something dangling around the neck of the smaller mummy.  He leaned in closer to get a better look while he reached to touch it with one hand. 

His hand felt the cold of metal as he grasped it and pulled it further into his light.  It was a heart shaped pendant, and upon closer inspection he noticed that it was not just a pendant, but a locket.  He had seen a few of them in the archives, but they weren’t very common amongst the pre-Cataclysm people and it was thought that the demons hoarded the precious metals. 

There could be a picture inside the locket, potentially of one of the corpses before him in the world before.  Should there be such a picture, without a doubt future archaeologists would learn about him and this moment of gritty exploration.  He took a deep breath, and prepared to open the locket and see the scale of his fame. 

The roar of the sandstorm suddenly intensified, buffeting against the building with so much violence that Trevor felt his heart begin to pound.  The roof shook in long intervals of warping girders and struggling infrastructure, heaving and bending like the ribcage of an enormous giant.  Trevor felt trapped, knowing that the structure had remained intact for hundreds of years, but also having never felt a storm on such a scale emerge so suddenly.  

Just as he worked up the courage to continue perusing the mummified remains, a crash obliterated his hearing, replacing the undulating sounds of a pummeled structure with a high-pitched ring that ran from ear to ear with a thread shot through his brain.  He tried to find the source of the crash in the darkness as another noise blasted his eardrums just as he wandered out of the storage room.  That time, however, sand splashed against him in a violent explosion.  A metal beam had fallen from the ceiling high above, impacting the floor with countless tons of force.  

Trevor panicked, stumbling back into the storage room with a gait rendered clumsy by the loss of his hearing.  He flung himself inside, dropping the flashlight and spinning around just in time to see another girder crash where he’d been standing only a moment earlier.  Then another, and another, until the entire roof had crashed down just outside the door as a cascade of sand fell atop the illuminated pile, sealing him inside the room with the two carcasses.  Sand poured into the room itself, forcing the door to pinch shut as Trevor rushed over in an attempt to escape.  The weight was enormous, like a great ocean wave crashing as the sand continued to pile on the other side of the enclosure. 

Trevor leaned and pushed at the door, even as all that remained was an embrasure no wider than his knuckles.  All his strength and might, things that he had always prided himself in as he competed against his classmates in the barbaric but celebrated sports of his time, became as weightless as a grain of sand blown in a strong wind.  The door was unsealed, but immovable, allowing him to see a freedom that he could no longer possess. 

As it became clear to him that he couldn’t move the door, he picked up the flashlight and scoured the room for an escape.  There was, however, nothing of the sort.  The walls were dense and metallic, with strong rivets holding it together with a fortification that didn’t bend at all even as Trevor pulled against it so hard that his fingernails loosened.  He thought about his colleagues, the ones too timid to follow him and who would have no reason to assume he was there.  Darkening his thoughts still, was the idea that perhaps they wouldn’t even look for him at all.  

Trevor collapsed into a hopeless puddle next to the remains, pulling the fedora off his head and resting it in his lap as the storm continued to rage, its noise dampened by the increasing mass of the gatekeeping sand outside.  He looked over at the carcasses, at the sunken eye sockets and the skeletonized hands that clutched tightly against their rib cages.  He stared at the hands, wondering what was so dear to them that they would hoist it closely even as they succumbed to whatever force that killed them, and then saw that they had been clasping at the locket he’d noticed before the debris had sealed his fate.  

He focused again on the heart-shaped locket, seizing the possession and prying it open with a weathered, gritty snap.  Inside, there was a photograph of two people, a man and a woman, standing in a colosseum filled with countless thousands of others as some sort of sporting event commenced far below.  Their faces were characterized by heavy smiles and a blatant optimism that, if only for an instant, infected Trevor’s own heart with a fleeting consolation.  He clutched the necklace close to his chest, reflecting on a life guided by self-importance, and wondered how long it would be before he joined them in death as a brilliant yet doomed archaeologist.