When There's Nothing Left

The nuclear winter dragged itself along like a sack of flies.

Ten long years of irradiated hell from which there was no redemption, no salvation. No tunnel out.

The bombs had fallen like snow. Silent, beautiful, all consuming. A coat of lethal buttons for an eternal winter of death.

The Egos at either side of the world had done it. The man child emperors. Two vast arsenals. Two big levers. One insanity to end all sense.

As the seas boiled like soups and birds set alight in a flaming sky, the old farming couple, Zal and Nita, were feeding their herd of pigs. 

It was the smell of gammon that Zal remembers the most. Walking smoking hams. Those were his beloved sows cooking in man-made sun flares metastasizing his land. 

The stench of his livestock roasting, as they shambled on liquified hooves in a desperate attempt to escape the heat, had stayed with him this past decade. It had filled his nostrils and never left.

Now everything was just about running out. The stockpile of cans, the bunker of tins, the freezers of toxic meat, the Jennie's, the red diesel, the water in the well. 

There was virtually nothing left.

Nita was now sick.

Her skin was falling off her shins exposing angry welts of pus and matter. 

There was no hiding it. Her legs looked dreadful and the reek named itself proudly. Gangrene. 

Zal gently ushered his wife of seventy years to the toolshed. She lay down on some rags covering the workbench and whispered something to her beloved.

Zal gently held his finger to his lips and made a shhhh sound, all he could muster after the blasts had cauterized their vocal chords ten years earlier. They hadn't been able to speak a word to one another since. 

It had become an atomic season of silence, scabbed bodies and tender kisses.

The shed held everything a farm needed. Had needed before the war. Most materials had been recycled already, but Zal found some fibre glass on a shelf marked Jack's Jeep. Their missing soldier son.

First cleaning her open wounds with swarfega, he moulded the sheet around Nita's shins and with strong epoxy he did what he'd done to his landrover many times when they had been young farmers. 

He patched up her legs and waited for the stuff the set.

Zal pecked Nita on the cheek and motioned for her to sleep. The fibre-glassing had been agony, but she knew this was the last time they would repair each other like this. 

The aluminium inserts were loosening, the steel toes coming off, the dog's nose rotted away, the timber mulching.

They had maintained each other's fragmenting bodies with nails, wire and screws, as best they could in a world left to shrivel and die.

Some things had stopped working altogether and short of surgery they had reached ground zero, the blood and guts casino at the end of the track, where a mutated vulture always won, the croupier of teeth.

Zal shuffled on his chair-leg to the well. One or two final buckets of fresh clear poison would make their last weeks tolerable. He would have given his last healthy limb for just one cold beer again.

A figure appeared in the farmyard. A crooked drooling nuclear stranger signalling with a twisted hand for a drink. 

Zal reached for his old twelve-bore propped against the well wall, took aim and fired. The massive shot took the figure's head clean off. It exploded into a million bits. 

Zal hadn't even tried to mouth. The time for talking had long since gone. Only the rules of the irradiated crow made sense anymore.

Besides, it would be good to taste meat again, a welcome if corrupted feast for Nita and he as the farm's well ran dry and thirst became their final craven friend.

Zal dragged the headless corpse to the kitchen.

He began to slice and tried to whistle, a rasping quaver cut short on his lips.

A tattoo he recognized in his recycled hand.

Oh please God no! 

His mind collapsed.

This was too near the bone,

He was cutting up their long lost son.