Time, this endless river, has lost its landmarks. What purpose does it have when to journey over it leads only to decay?

Henri glanced again at the shot glass in his hand. An ounce of amber scarcity swam within; Canadian Club. It’s what Don Draper would drink. Henri tossed back the drink, burning his throat on its descent and, in an instant, it was as gone as Draper’s world. He’d nothing else to drink for hours, much less to eat. The stinging alcohol threatened to claw itself back up until Henri forced it back down. Henri slammed the glass back on the table and quickly reached for the half-full bottle. He coughed dryly, setting his arm astray and knocked it, spilling the bottle and its contents to the floor; a little more scarce, now. 

The thick fog of the alcohol dissipated into the air slowly, giving scent to the thoughts of scarcity that meandered through, now taunting Henri with blame; he, the cause of the liquid extinction. A moment later all that would remain would be a thick stain on the century-old hardwood floor. He thought of a drunk so desperate they’d suck the floorboards for what little buzz they could get. But not him...no. He held himself back, exhausted. But the drunk, hunched over and sucking the floor, haunted him nonetheless. Thoughts like this often invaded his mind against better reason. Thoughts that defied the performance of who Henri Delille was, even in the years before everything went to shit. Thoughts that pushed in on him despite every honest and good inkling he had. He suppressed most of them, now. Others...

The bar was most recently called ‘McInnis Tavern’ and, like most taverns with ‘Mc’ in their name, they were as Irish as a leprechaun; on closer inspection, just a mirage. The paint on the signs was chipping away while the windows were broken. Debris scrabbled its way casually across the floor and Henri swore he still smelled blood among the broken bottles on the floor. Stale blood. Stale like everything else, now. A few bottles remained behind the bar, but nothing that caught Henri’s attention. Grey Goose, Havana Rums, popular chain drinks that were watered down, he was sure. Nothing strong enough, not really. Time to go, he thought. Besides, he’d already poured one out in memory of his world - even if by accident. 

Henri emerged onto Bay Street. Some time ago this metropolitan street bustled with activity; business, leisure, meals and families who walked along it happily. But She changed all of that. 

That’s not fair, he reminded himself. She was innocent of this cataclysm, at least. But She could have fixed it. Bay Street. Toronto. Canada. Just another place among many that had burned away into nothingness. The streets cracked, and in some of the larger fissures, Henri could still see steam escaping from rocky depths below. Water levels everywhere had lowered and She did nothing when she could have done everything. Now, Bay Street - streets everywhere - were desolate. Below him, in old subway tunnels, were the mousy sounds of denizens scurrying for shelter. Above, in the light, people hid in fear of the air. 

They didn’t know, he kept telling himself. To people who weren’t there, they just thought the world was burning. It wasn’t uncommon for people to still think that the air had become toxic. It had, but only for the first few months or so. It was funny, Henri thought. He knew the air was fine now, but he always kept himself prepared for when it wouldn’t be. All those people hiding high and low feared the air but wore no masks, filtered nothing and just hoped through ignorance that they’d survive. Many of those bunker-diggers and doomsday preppers didn’t even have the time to make it to their shelters. All because she chose...

She made the choice, and it didn’t involve me, it didn’t involve her family, it involved the greater good, or so she keeps saying. She is either lazy or lying about her abilities, but oh! She is strong, everybody knows that. But she’s also young. And the young can be timid. 

So, he ran. Henri ran from her and the new godly people who surrounded her in worship. And he, he who she should have respected and obeyed, was thrown aside. Fine. If he was unwanted, he would run. So he ran as far as he could. All the way to Toronto. It didn’t take too long from Colorado. He’d even found a bicycle that hadn’t completely melted away that got him to Pennsylvania. The rest he walked, looting stores for what he could eat once things began to stabilize a bit. 

Looting. Why the hell did he even call it that? Was it because that’s what the news anchors called it whenever black people went into a store en masse to scrounge up supplies during emergencies? Whites didn’t make the news doing that, though he always saw white people in the same news clips rummaging - looting - in the same stores. The cameras kept their lenses on the blacks, though. They made the white folk feel unsafe, Henri guessed. He bit his tongue whenever he’d see those stories, especially during Katrina or Puerto Rico - Hurricane Maria had it’s own political fallout that enraged him - but Henri couldn’t lambaste the anchors publicly. He wasn’t “that” black guy. He spent too much time with white people who thought they, too, were beyond race but were just as entrenched in the same systems of racial tension; they just didn’t see how strongly they were subjugated in other systemic problems. And through all that false acceptance Henri had become the token black guy for the crews. He was that reassuring, calm presence assuring white middle-classes that, in Obama’s America, racism was dead. Thanks, Obama. Now his blackness had been amplified and there weren’t any cameras to calm anyone down; just eyes, peeking through the cracks below.

  Landscapes had blurred into each other. In the time that had passed, much had become overgrown. Passing from Pennsylvania into Ohio used to awe him. The lush and loose greenery of Pennsylvania was replaced for the clean and straight clear-cut lines of Ohio’s landscapes; the piercing white concrete of their bridges a stark contrast of the damp, wet grey Pennsylvania bridges and roads. Overgrown and unkempt, now, they looked the same. With no one around to care about upkeep when finding food was more important it really wasn’t a surprise. 

If Henri had to guess, which he did often, overall global populations had been decimated. Not in the figurative sense, either. Of the nearly eight billion people on the planet, it was possible that at least a tenth of that was gone. Although, given the weeks of travelling, maybe he’d gotten it wrong; maybe it was the other way around and only ten percent remained. That’d make what, eight-hundred-million or so? In the US that would leave a paltry thirty million if you were to do the napkin math. Wasn’t that what Canada was before all this blew up? He thought so. On a day of walking he’d seen what, maybe ten to twenty people, sometimes the same person a few times? And what about those who had survived? What were they doing to survive? Construction was Henri’s livelihood, so he’d thought he might be working with people to rebuild things; it was just that no one was spearheading those. He could do that, he knew, but his mind was elsewhere, tasked with something more...important. 

It seemed like people were revelling in this apocalyptic demise of infrastructure. Who wanted a return to endless mortgages and jobs they hated? But at this cost? They’d been thrown into some mix of feudal or medieval civilization and were...happy with it? Henri didn’t have the wherewithal or knowledge to really progress towards a new industrial age all by himself - he could order guys to mix and pour concrete or work with detailed CAD printouts to raise structures - but like everything in the world, experience had become increasingly isolated. He’d become an expert order-arounder, and not much more.

Winter was approaching and he’d started to see scavengers wringing their hands together for warmth near oil-bin fires. Shelters popped up in abundance, surprisingly; heat, less so. Frail walls remained, mostly, while remaining foundations were skeletal homes for ash and decay. Resourceful people isolated themselves for safety, at least for now. It was still so soon after that no one really knew what to do, especially with Her around. 

Henri had a plan, though. At least, a hope. One last plea to put some things back the way they were.

He slid the duffel bag from his shoulder to the ground, where it landed with a crinkled thud. Henri rifled through the debris that spat out of it and found the gas mask he’d picked up from an abandoned army surplus store. He put it on. Bulbous goggles and a filter now bubbled off his skull like cancerous growths over his thickened, sun-dried skin. With the mask on he thought he looked like some modern wizard, where this magic he possessed was as much a danger to him as a useful tool. Caution, meet wind. 

Henri had chosen a tall building on Bay Street. Just another office building. Some retail giant or bank that drained everyday people of all they were worth. Henri shouldn’t have judged; he was with a giant construction firm, after all. He probably used the same bank. But, that was the thing about life before it all went to shit; everybody was a part of that same system they told to go fuck itself. 

There weren’t any people still in the building, were there? Now, he wasn't so sure  He could have gone floor by floor and room by room to check, but that would have been exhausting. And would it have mattered? 

Henri's curiosity, instead, was focused on the basement and the building’s circuit breakers. He also spent a lot of time working out his Jerry rig to get electricity to the building. Electricity itself hadn’t disappeared, but most of the infrastructure distributing it had incinerated. A generator, a few common chemicals and a spark was all he needed to get the power going. And the time, of course; another surprisingly overabundant resource. 

He stood across the street from the skyscraper, wind flowing through his open jacket. It looked a bit like a flat beaver’s tail on his back. He ran all the numbers and checks in his head but was still unsure of the math. He entered the building’s lobby and heard the grinding of his generator echoing up from the cavernous hole in the floor before him, looking onto the basement. Rubble covered the basement floor like a rocky riverbed drained of all its flow; concrete and rebar reached up for help only to be held in place by its own weight, waiting for some errant person to fall ill to their dangerous fingers. Early descents were perilous, but Henri had eventually been able to clear enough of the rock to make a small platform that he could fashion into an awkward set of stairs, though not without considerable effort. He’d had to be cautious and tedious to get the generator down there, reaching on his tip-toes and nearly losing his balance and falling backward to get it down. It wouldn’t power the whole building, just what he needed. 

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“Well,” his voice, grizzled with dust, ash, and pollution, pushed through the gas mask in a muffled tone, “better to do it....” He walked out of the building and back across the street. He raised his right arm, his left behind his back, fingers crossed. Truth be told, though, he didn’t really want to fall for superstitious rituals. Regardless, he pressed on. 

Or would have. He heard something. There! He heard it again. 

Running shoes. Two young boys were chasing each other up and down the stairs and through the lobby. One boy stopped, squinting towards Henri. To the boy, Henri would’ve looked fearsome with the gas mask covering his face and Henri’s salt and pepper beard furrowing underneath and his hair exploding outward like straw atop his head. 

Henri slowly raised a finger to the mask, shushing the boy. 

Henri pressed his thumb against the detonator, smiling.

A thunderous shiver rose up the building’s spine; rocking fragments of rubble fell to the street below. The top of the structure started falling in on itself. The boys inside screamed from the lobby, running out to the street. The younger cried out for his mother, trying to run back in but the older stopped him.

“Don’t worry,” Henri’s ghastly form raised its arms and proclaimed to the boys, “your parents’ll be fine.” He was out of his mind. The boys screamed for their mother and father but knew, ultimately, that they were doomed. “Trust me,” Henri instructed, but the boys were in shock, embracing each other in tears and Henri’s voice was muffled by the noise. “Ahh,” Henri shrugged them off, waving his hand and turning his back on them to face the collapsing building through the dust. “Come on, girl,” he said. She was too good to let this happen. She couldn’t let it happen...could She? 

The intersection was engulfed in a massive dust cloud. The sound was horrendous. Dear God, he thought. And then he laughed. The thought of “God,” after all this, was meaningless after all.

Come on, come on. He counted the seconds - she was really letting a lot slide on this one, he thought. Five seconds after the collapse started Henri thought he saw the boys’ parents’ faces screaming in the dust; bloodied faces crushed by falling concrete and metal. Now, the dust was all he could see, the rumble of destruction all he could hear - his world was destruction. 

Six seconds. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. 

The low, constant rumble ceased. The dust dissipated quickly, fading away into the background instead of sitting in the air to slowly fall to the ground as it should. There was no echo of catastrophe. The children weren’t screaming anymore. In fact, they weren’t behind him, either. 

For Henri, it had been simply one second for the tall office building to appear - rebuilt - before him. He smiled glibly.

How long had that taken her? 

“There you are,” he said to himself. She emerged from the fading dust, taller than when he’d seen her last. Walking towards him, she rubbed her head with her palm. She was dressed differently, today in a sleek brown dress that fell straight to her ankles while a brown leather jacket fit comfortably over her sharp shoulders, closely matching her skin. Thin cornrows - those are new, Henri thought - were tied in a tight bun at the back of her head. She walked towards him, crossing her legs over each other with each step. He took off the gas mask, “What took you so long?” He smiled glibly; hoping to taunt her. A bitter chill filled the air, a significant drop in the temperature. Oh, she’s good. 

She glared at him. How he’d missed her eyes, eyes she’d shared with her mother; sparks of green glimmering through the darkness. “I thought maybe I’d let you live with this one,” she said.

“Nah,” he said, “you wouldn’t do that. I know you.”

“And I know you,” she replied sharply, barely letting him finish. She squared her shoulders and quickened her pace towards him. Henri saw that she was taller, now, moreso even than he thought at first. Maybe even taller than him. “That hurt, Dad. And my answer is still no. It will always be no.”

“I haven’t even asked you, yet,” he smiled. “You’re not a mind reader, not really.”

Henri heard her teeth grind. “No, I’m not. It doesn’t take mind reading for me to figure out what you want. You’re willing to blow up a fucking building just to get my attention, I can only think of one thing that would make you do that. The answer will always be no. End of discussion,” and she disappeared. There was no flash of light, no whishing or clicks or sound of any kind, and no slow dissipation away. She was merely gone. 

The smile faded from Henri’s face. 

Running shoes echoed in the lobby again. Two boys ran around the lobby playing tag while their parents killed time in an abandoned office suite in the building several floors up. This was life, now. Purposeless. Kids could play and their parents could fuck and laze around. The lucky ones, anyway. Clarissa’s meagre provisions were improving, though, but Henri thought that maybe she was being too generous. He’d seen it on the road. He knew she couldn’t just put things back the way they used to be, but maybe she didn’t want to. She was just a kid, after all. She wasn’t going to willingly put kids back in school or people back in jobs they hated just for the sake of it. She said that people could do better and set her heart to doing better. But, it hadn’t inspired people like it should have, at least not in Henri’s opinion.  

That was why no one had started any rebuilding - not even half-heartedly. “Think of the people left behind,” he would tell people on the road. “This all happened so fast, no one had any time to prepare a proper survival plan.” World leaders caught unawares died in minutes from the fracas. What remained was a random assortment of people without any reason to be. And they were supposed to make things like they used to be? Henri caught the truth of it, that’s for sure. The old ways of things needed to die, and those left behind caught on, too. Why would anyone return to a world where people were killed in wars, famines, or strained to their worst and basest impulses spending most of their time hurting, depressed, or self-medicating? Governments were corrupt and always would be, so why return to that? Whatever philosophical truth you believed in, conversation on the roads now always returned to the one truth they all agreed on: we would not turn back. 

Well...mostly. 

There was that one little thing Henri wanted, and She adamantly denied it. 

So, instead of turning back, he went forward. He left behind the empty bar on Bay street and the building that his mind assured him he had destroyed and turned northeast. That was where he’d go. 

See, Henri wasn’t a man to hinge his plans on one thing. If the destruction of a building failed to get Clarissa’s attention, he had other plans. All of them involved the potential of harm, but Henri knew Clarissa would - as she did today - not let harm come to the few innocents who remained. So, if his backup plan involved making a local water table fatally toxic or going North up to Bruce county and creating a nuclear meltdown - he’d done quite a bit of reading on the subjects with the ubiquity of available information on Four Mile Island and Chernobyl - he could take a crack at it. And if he failed those? Well, failing to cause a nuclear meltdown through incompetence would leave a grand total of zero human souls harmed. But, in the end, he didn’t need to go to those extremes. Clarissa wasn’t the only one who might be able to help him, after all.

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, sitting at a nearby park bench; one of the few that remained in the city. A signpost stood, decapitated. Whatever information about the park it once enlightened was gone, and with it the name of the local philanthropist who had paid to have his name immortalized on the sign. He placed his duffel bag on the ground in front of him and removed from it a tool bag full of supplies that he had scrounged along the way; a couple of hammers, ratcheting screwdriver sets, useful electronics or hardware and other bits and pieces. Whatever he thought might be useful. 

Sweat beaded into his itchy eyes; the itch started small and - as it did once or twice a week now - immobilized him. It started with a wet feeling in his eyes and then his sinuses welled up. If he’d kept his one eye closed, trying to flood it with tears, the itch slowly dissipated until he opened his eye again. When he did, the eye screamed. He buckled under it’s stupid weight - I’m a grown man, goddammit, this shouldn’t fucking cripple me like this  - but pain has a strange way of working on a man. A small sliver of wood, caught underneath the skin will cause inflammation within minutes. That inflammation will soon hinder movement and - if the splinter is in the finger somewhere, near a joint, perhaps - as they usually are - the digit will take on a sort of rigidity and pain that doesn’t seem to befit such a small and negligible injury. But, as Henri would always say, “how big or small something is, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the pain it can cause.”

His burning eye kept up its own invisible game. He couldn’t even really be sure that the sweat was what caused the immeasurable itch, after all. An eyelash adrift could slip slowly into his eye and his body would unconsciously respond to the “threat” and try to push the lash out. That could’ve caused this tiny inconvenience forcing him to rest on a park bench waiting for it to pass. 

It passed after a minute that felt like twenty. He blinked the wetness away, focusing his eyes and finally saw the park in an uninterrupted view. It was ugly. Like the rest of the world now. Whatever beauty it once had, it had become vile shit. Air here smelled like shit and the grass and dirt under his feet in the park were yellowed bile, like the world had expunged it’s beauty and evacuated all over itself. It was going through it’s hangover, and this would be a long one.

He roused himself and decided it was best to move on. Remembering was getting painful. Below the former Gardiner Expressway, in the tunnels, he met the same sociable types of homeless that had been there in the early 2000s. Unlike those destitute souls, back in that day, these sidewalk cardboard dwellers wouldn’t bother Henri or anyone else. What was there to bother anyone for? Today was his lucky day because even he, Henri Delille, was a vagrant like all the rest. 

Well...like most of the rest. 

On the walls was the one that got away. The old fuck lives on. Except somehow he wasn’t as old anymore. Ted’s head floated on the wall. Whoever painted it did a stellar job of capturing the emptiness in his eyes. They made the wise decision to put the devil horns in his bald spots. Most other graffiti renditions of Ted Sturges made the devil horns from receding hair on the sides of his head, above his ears. It was cute, Henri thought, but they didn’t know that Ted didn’t even have that much hair. He was basically bald. Henri knew. He’d spent more than enough time with Ted. He also liked a few other touches. Most renditions had a devilish tongue slithering from Ted’s mouth, but this one wisely left it absent. It wasn’t with his words that Ted made his wilful lunge for control. It was with something far more sinister. Still, this Ted-Devil on the wall had most of the hallmarks of a young man’s first experience with satire - mainly a lack of subtlety. The image was red faced with horizontal goats eyes. Scrawled underneath the horrifying visage were the words, “Fear for what you are about to suffer.” The whole thing made Henri laugh. Ted wasn’t the devil. No, he was something far more sinister. The devil, Lucifer, Prometheus, and all the theological and mythological beings that “the devil” derive from was a compassionate aid to humanity; the bringers of fire, deliverers of light.

Ted was darkness and void. He brought nothing, he was the vacuum of the cosmos and it’s inevitability.

Myths meant nothing now. It was best for Henri to forget them. Walk on, Henri. It’s what you do now.