The End of the Beginning

Outside Rainbow Lake, Alberta, Canada

Wednesday, March 24, 2027

I will never forget the silence that followed. It was beautiful. But with silence there is also remembrance. When the world all around is quiet, the mind within is not. And that in itself can a be disaster all its own…

Snow coated the landscape. Drifts had accumulated around the trees and their branches slumped under the weight of fresh powder. William liked the cold. He liked laying in the snow. It reminded him there was still something to feel.

He spotted a deer drinking at the edge of a partially frozen stream. Through the scope of his hunting rifle, he lined up the shot, aiming for its chest. This would be his dinner for the next few weeks. He rarely went into town anymore for supplies. His lonely log cabin was a few hundred miles north of the Montana border, just outside of Rainbow Lake, Alberta. The backcountry of central Canada offered him the quiet and isolation he now desired.

A country of extremes, Canada saw the vistas of the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia in the west and the jagged coastlines across Nova Scotia in the east. Wilderness ran across the land, reminding William of the Korean Peninsula before the war six years ago. Like that scorched land he’d once left behind, this new land was calm and serene. Coursing rivers and glacial till enveloped it with dotting’s of bogs and swamps throughout boreal forest. Much of it remained under the protection of the law, but oil and gas exploration had left its mark. Tar sands and pipelines undermined and crisscrossed this expanse like a growing disease, its viral tendrils sucking the life from its nature every day. William hated when he saw a new rig going up or a pipeline being laid down, not so much out of environmental concerns, but because it meant more people.

His finger was ready to make the kill. He was about thirty yards away from the deer when suddenly, a fawn came in between his scope and the adult. The fawn took several licks of water from the stream and began to forage. William removed his eye from the scope and put the rifle down.

“Damn.”

He ran a hand through his beard. Try as he might, he couldn’t kill it. Before the war, he would’ve had no problem pulling the trigger. Now, he was sensitive to anything he saw. He looked around at the dusty rose sky. Nightfall was approaching. The wind was cold.

All he wanted was to return to his cabin in the rural countryside. His cabin only had a few rooms, big enough for two at most, a wood-burning stove, and no electricity. Candlelight illuminated his nights, which he spent mostly reading science fiction novels, cleaning his rifle, and cooking. There was no Internet or phones. For all he knew, the world could have nuked itself to nothing following the events of Korea, and he never would have known. When he did go into town, it was usually to buy E-cigarette cartridges, a nasty habit he picked up a few years after returning to the States.

Odd jobs had gotten him by with the little money he needed to live. He was temporarily a trucker, shipping scientific gear to remote weather stations, but this job bored him. Then he moved to logging but did not enjoy cutting down the trees that helped enable his self-isolation. A Chevron spokesperson came to town one day and promoted a new tar sands project nearby, but no one signed on, including William, so that project never got off the ground anyway. So he took a job at the town’s small airport servicing and maintaining aircraft. He was fired a few months in for missing too many workdays.

Things had gotten bad. The backfire of an engine would startle him into a panic attack or the flash of headlights at night would turn into the flash of a mushroom cloud. William had not spoken to anyone outside of Rainbow Lake for almost five years. He was a recluse, an outsider that came and went. Rumors abounded in town about who he really was and sometimes the media would get close to finding the world’s “lost hero,” but they never reached him. He looked different now. A beard and long curly brown hair covered his head. He was always dirty and smelly. He was always hunched; his back hurting every so often, and quiet.

The moment he had let go of Kyung kept haunting his fragile sleep and he often heard the cries for help from the people on the bridge in the woods at night, or at least he thought he did. The screams would persist every night, coursing through the trees and entering his mind through nightmares, causing spats of panic and alarm that saw him wake up in puddles of sweat and tears.

He was so tired, tired of trying to find himself. Tired of being alone and tired of being hurt and hopeless. What was the point of it all anymore? He wanted to see loved ones faces again, feel their hands, and enjoy their company. He wanted the vacation they never went on. He wanted it all back. He wanted to make the explosions, voices, and screams in the night stop. He wanted to feel something again, his humanity. But he knew there was no rescue coming for him. He didn’t want one anyways.

William wasn’t very religious, but he would sometimes look up to an empty sky and ask what he had done to deserve the life he led. What had made him so different? Surely an all-loving and knowing God would never let his flock suffer like this, would never take away someone’s family so early and so violently, twice. Taking the innocence of a child and the passion of man; was that the way God punished? Was that the way he had punished William for doing seemingly nothing? If there was a God then he had surely abandoned him, he thought, because his burdens were too much to bear for any one person. It was only the good ones that suffered, it seemed.

His small log cabin had a porch, which William used to wash and dry his clothes and just watch the woods. He found himself one day sitting out there, the snow falling in a dusting, staring at his hunting rifle. It was loaded.

Staring at it for quite a long time, he thought, contemplated, and thought some more. Weeks of increasing agony tortured him to bring him to these thoughts. Depression for him came in waves, culminating in flashbacks, images, even smells of war and despair from years earlier. After these episodes, things would get better but the wave would always return as regularly as the lunar-induced tides, sucking William right back down to the bottom. Now he was looking at the bottom of a barrel of a gun. If he used it, things would be over quickly. There would be no pain. No one would hear anything in the remote area and no one would find him probably for weeks. He realized he had an out right in front him. One pull of the trigger would end it all, ending his depression of a tired life.

Suicide. It went against a species evolution. Nature had programmed its organisms to survive at all cost, but suicide was a trick of the intelligent. This was the burden of consciousness. It could give him the peace he wanted, a final peace. William saw himself reaching for his gun, picking it up, and putting it across his lap. The barrel was clean and cold. His grip tightened and prowling fingers slipped towards the trigger.

Moving the barrel closer to his mouth he said, “You told me wasting is worse than living. You were right. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I wish… I wish I could have done better. Done more… but I failed. I’m sorry.”

A lone tear rolled down his rough cheek and into his bristly beard. A noise several hundred feet down the dirt road that led to his cabin turned his attention from the barrel at his lips. He had visitors.