2 : SOFT_CALL

The majority of the people on the old road had sullen, sunken faces. Everyone who thought they'd be stuck on Earth was preparing for their slow, miserable death. They wandered around, with their heads low to the ground, devoid of much interest in anything around them. Some of them still had the energy to brush the ash from their hair, and to wash the grime from their faces, but most had surrendered themselves to not bothering.

At the end of the world, most people didn't care about their appearances, which was of course somewhat unfortunate, but nothing to be surprised by. Some were ruder in their behaviour than others. Some were pushing and shoving, acting like children now that there was no chance for long standing consequences.

There were families on the sides of the roads, too. Pleading for some help to get into bunkers or to be given tickets. Adelaide had considered giving her own ticket away to one of them. Unfortunately, she only had one ticket, and families could only destroy themselves if they had to pick one person of their lot who was allowed to survive.

So she drove past those desperate people, keeping the keys to an escape unusable. As a 'mercy', of course. She would never need them, and so certainly she was only doing a good which required doing. Preventing familial decay that would occur the moment self preservation was an option.

The gas station was one of the worst places for miserable faces– because the depression of the hour ran deep inside the people around. Heads low and eyes focused on nothing. All the money the store was making would mean nothing very soon. All the time and years wasted– on construction of this place, on managing its finances, on working there. It was all for naught, and everyone who was haunting the area knew that very well. For some reason, people had still come into work, though. For a gas station, Adelaide could not understand why.

She pushed another container into her trunk. There was no getting gasoline when everyone was gone– down in shelters or up in space. The failsafes of many of the stations would kick in, and she would get nothing. That was the simple truth.

Adelaide preferred to see the world that way, anyway. Some collection of simple truths, rather than any sort of complexity. Because complexity would require long strings of sitting still and attempting to reason– whilst absolute truths were simple. You could declare them for yourself and follow them forever until you went mad, denying any other truth that you came across with the guise of loyalty or reason.

She slammed her trunk shut, and went back to the pump, pressing buttons and fully planning to fill the tank to bursting. She had heard plenty of times about overfill being dangerous, but in her mind it simply did not matter. The handle grip was rough and there wasn't really much gas left at the station anyway. It had mostly been taken by people who were coming up from the south, so as to head north for the orbitals. People with lives and families. People who didn't want to die alone on this planet the way she did.

Adelaide had repeated words to herself enough times to make them lose all meaning. I want to die on Earth, had been a dialogue she repeated to herself until it sounded like nothing out of the ordinary. She'd begun telling it to herself a bit after the first talks of tensions had filled the papers. She'd gently convinced herself of it as the days passed. A convenient excuse to die while doing some little good of which she was thinly capable. After that, she had managed to turn it so mundane, that she wanted to distract herself with something more interesting. Adelaide swept her eyes over everything.

The gas station sat just a bit away from the road. To its opposite, on the other side of the road, there was nothing more than forest, which went on for miles. There wasn't much to see within the forests themselves, either. The trees, which had managed to remain standing, despite growing ill from the poisoned earth, were not themselves noteworthy. A surprising number of things had managed to survive the sickness festering in the dirt.

Some animals occupied the trees. Birds and squirrels, which looked far more ill than the trees. A squirrel ran down the side of the tree. She followed it with her eye– and as it hit the ground, a silver figure ran into the treeline. A humanlike figure. Adelaide narrowed her eyes, trying to parse what it was that just ran by. Silver– with long hair, and some sort of coat, which shined like the morning mist. And it spread through her mind slowly, like the wet globs of dew drops splattered about a paved road.

A woman– with large eyes and long hair. Wearing the same tattered dress and heavy coat, making the same sad expression she always did. Indeed– it was the infinite beauty which Adelaide's own acts had pulled so brutally from the world. My precious darling, why are you wandering here? Adelaide couldn't move away from the pump– and even if she could, there was no part of her which was so courageous. She wasn't brave enough to chase her wife's ghost, no matter how much she wished she could be.

To Adelaide, perhaps the most beautiful thing in the world which she could focus her eyes on was Jisako. In life, she had not been some belladonna– a poisonously sweet beauty. No, she had been a woman, blessed with some handful of graces, and Adelaide's mind, lovestruck and stupid in its sweet longing, had turned her into something else.

Adelaide considered herself responsible for the fact this woman, who she had only caught a glimpse of and admittedly could not be sure was Jisako, was a ghost at all. Had she been kinder, her countenance sweeter, or her tongue less sharp, she could imagine Jisako still sitting in the car with her. In that case, the car would've been headed north.

She wiped her tears. She couldn't dare call out to the ghost, but its presence was enough to fill her eyes with the sharp burn of leaking regrets. This had not been the road Adelaide found the body on. Jisako's killer was smarter than to dump it somewhere so close to civilization. However, this road wasn't too different from the real thing.

Thoughts were often too fluid to put into words. For Adelaide that meant she could hardly imagine what she might say if she saw that ghost again. If she had the guts, perhaps she'd say, I can see you. I'm sorry for everything. It was hard to determine how valuable any words would be to someone else. Marriage didn't promise understanding, and Adelaide had barely worked to understand when Jisako was alive. She certainly couldn't gain understanding now that Jisako was dead.

The things which Adelaide remembered were tinged with the nostalgia for when they were younger.

Jisako had always been the sort of sweet face who was wrapped up in shawls and soft lipstick. Adelaide could still remember nights of washing light pink lipstick stains from collars, or the way her soft floral perfume would cling to surfaces. She was an ideal woman of the time– pampered and quiet. Yet her mind was always so very grim.

A composer whose songs seemed so deeply pessimistic, they were hard to sit through, despite their craft. She too must've been so deeply lost in her own psychosis, Adelaide thought. Adelaide had never helped Jisako's warped mind. That had always been hard to come to terms with.

Finally, she loaded herself into the car, and it was back on the road, leaving the ghost behind. The road was bumpy as ever– it had always been, the nuclear damage hadn't helped. The blast had actually been quite far from here, but there had been a chain reaction. Panic led to disarray. Disarray became damage. Damage became destruction. Everything slowly came to collapse on itself, and then what was left behind was the state of the world until further notice.

Adelaide continued down the road. Jerry cans shuddered and slipped around over one another in the back. She had no better place to put them– really all she could do was pray that they didn't explode. She knew something like a small spark could send the whole car to kingdom come, and she could only hope it wouldn't while she was on the road.

It wasn't a ton of gasoline, but it would last long enough. Here was the trick: In a couple years, most of the gasoline in the world would be expired and useless. She wasn't really planning to outlive it. The thing she wasn't sure about however, was food. Because most of the food had been bought off shelves in a frenzy by people already. And nothing much was left.

Part of her mused for a moment at the idea she could have simply eaten whatever she came across in the wasteland. Because truthfully, even the obvious danger of a slow, poisonous death, didn't scare her anymore. In fact, it was a small convenience, even, to believe that she could potentially survive in the wasteland for not too terribly long. After all, she was not lead lined.

#

The town was mostly empty, save for the small buildings, which sat squat on large, separated lots. None of them seemed to have any more than two floors above ground. None of them had basement doors as far as Adelaide could tell. They were thrown about like dice on a table. There didn't seem to be any sense of order to where anything was, just a collection of random buildings surrounded by fences in thoroughly bizarre shapes. Each eager to claim and display the misshapen lumps of land they owned.. Most of those buildings were houses. One of them was a church, in a cluster of a couple other buildings, which seemed to be the centrepiece of the town.

The town was far off the beaten path. Rarely the sort of place anyone would pass through without coming to visit it specifically. Its roads didn't go anywhere important. Even the places they did go could be accessed far more easily through a side road. Several people were walking outside, with haggard expressions. Their eyes focused only on the ground directly in front of their feet, and nothing else.

No one reacted particularly well to the arrival of Adelaide. She drove in and looked around at everyone, unsure of how to feel. The townspeople certainly looked at her as she climbed out of her old bug and took in the sights like a tourist. Which was the only time anyone had looked up at all in the last hour she'd been driving in the area. Nice place, she thought to herself. If the nuclear winds weren't going to tear through the town not too soon after, she could really have imagined it being a nice place to settle down. A large house, on the cheaper end in a town like this. One room where Jisako could keep her piano and her tools, and another where Adelaide could keep her own supplies. A large living room and kitchen. A place for a television and a radio. A bedroom with a large bed. A backyard to drink tea in the sun. Their old house had a garden. Maybe if they had a house in this town, that garden could've been larger.

The ambience of the town, despite its situation now, was perfect for someone like Jisako. A beautiful place for a broken mind.

As she looked around, two men, dressed in darks walked up to her. One man had a rather large nose, and the other seemed fairly handsome despite his miserable disposition. The man with the large nose seemed rather more talkative than the handsome one. "What're you doing in this town?"

"Heading south," Adelaide answered, with a simple smile.

"Heading south?"

"I've got some business and a desire to die." She smiled again.

These were men who she could speak her mind to. People who had no real position of authority over her and likely never would. She could never mouth off to a male exorcist, but these two gentlemen, she could mock to the ends of the Earth if she so wanted. In a sense, that was the power structure of most of the world. You could talk down as much as you liked to anyone below you, but you couldn't and most definitely shouldn't have even dared to try speaking against those with any power.

That was just the way it was in her book.

The men seemed a little taken aback, but the handsome one spoke quickly. "Cy, she's probably mocking us."

The large nosed Cy looked at his compatriot, before nodding. "Right, sorry." He turned his attention back to Adelaide. "No humour. Outsiders aren't welcome here– unless you've got good purpose, nothing."

"I mean it. I'm heading south. You know how it is. The perfect suicide? Just imagine that, you'll be on the right-ish track."

Cy frowned rather harshly. "You're staining our town being here then. Don't kill nobody."

Adelaide chuckled. "Of course, sirs."

"And don't go in the church."

"Of course."

"No smartassery."

"Never!" Adelaide gasped with a false offence.

"Be gone by tomorrow, hear?"

She nodded. "I'll be gone. In the meantime– is there a store for cigarettes here? Or any either of you men could offer me?"

Cy once again seemed somewhat taken aback by her words. Most people, even in this town, who knew full well they weren't going anywhere, still weren't so unbothered by the state of the world. Adelaide was almost ominous in her casualness. A stranger who had appeared in town so at random, speaking things barely better than nonsense. "Uh– down the street left. Near the church. But don't go in the church," he repeated, frowning at her. "Oh, and no harassing our priest either."

"You have a rather low opinion of travellers…" Adelaide couldn't help but laugh awkwardly at the sheer obviousness of it. The words didn't sound very intelligent or introspective, but she was far from being any of those things. In this moment, or any other. "Does this town never get any good ones?"

"All we get are stupid children here to cause a mess. Teens with cars they barely know how to drive."

"You shouldn't worry with me. I'm well into my forties."

"Bah. Either way, you heard what I said."

"Of course, Sir." She nodded hollowly, letting Cy head off as he pleased. The other man followed him away, and neither gave her a second glance. In fact, Adelaide mused, it seemed a bit like they were moving to get away as fast as they could. The pair clearly didn't like outsiders to begin with, and Adelaide was just creepy.

She chuckled a bit watching them go, before turning her gaze to the church. She fingered under her tie, poking around until she found it. The necklace underneath– a heavy, metal cross which hung from her neck, with the same solemnity a dead man hung from a tree.

She had always assumed that these sorts of cross necklaces were of a man who had been hung. And when they were on top of buildings, that perhaps he was there, arms open, accepting what was to come. It was a piece of symbolism that made sense to her in that way. The top of the cross was his head, the necklace his noose, the horizontal line his arms, and the rest was just him, hanging miserably. Or perhaps, if she were to be less pessimistic, just simplified.

A portion of her had always wondered why the symbol of the hanging man was so common. Once, she'd asked Forrest, and he had seemed so utterly baffled by the question, she never dared ask again. He had suggested she go to one of those buildings with the man standing, but she'd never had the time.

Adelaide smiled. There would be all the time she needed now that she had reached the end of the world.