In a world ravaged by war, famine, and death, a lone orphan struggles to survive in the ruins of civilization. Sana, now twenty-seven, carries a secret that scares her; a secret that she would sooner wish to forget.
Logan has picked his place in the Huckleberry Mountains, a sixty acre parcel that was never meant to be open to outsiders. For many years, he's kept a dark secret to himself, but when a hungry, desperate woman breaks into his property, he finds that she quickly breaks through all of his defenses--even the one that surrounds his heart.
The Brilliance at the End
is a 7,000 word short story.
Waste
Moonlight on an icy autumn night slipped like a silken sheet over his face, a welcome cold luminescence that he'd missed the last few nights. The storms had been constant, returning night after night, angry clouds roaring in the sky. The rainwater had been welcome--but the barrels had filled up fast on the first night, and still, the rain continued, overflowing, cascading down the Huckleberry Mountains of Stevens County, Washington.
Waste. Waste. Waste.
He didn't like that, Logan. Fresh water was hard to come by with the government nearly shut down, barely surviving, and no infrastructure to support a world that was--dying. Nearly dead.
The pandemic had come so swiftly. One month CNN reporters were making jokes about another Covid-19-esque toilet paper shortage, and the next, entire empires were falling. Hospitals overflowed. Millions died in mere days, and it kept going for weeks. Logan remembered that all he could think was
waste and more waste.
He'd bought this land before the first wave of the pandemic, all sixty acres of it. With his cabin situated on a hill, he could overlook the valley below, and the rushing Columbia River that flowed through his property could be heard on quiet nights. It had been safe then.
Before the world came crashing down. Before bandits and scavengers started picking through the wilderness. Before he'd had to put up high-voltage electric fences and trip wires around his cabin. Not to keep them out.
He was keeping himself in.
Logan had never planned to let anyone in. He'd planned to stay on his parcel and live out his days with the land sprawled out before him, beautiful sunrises and sunsets even though out there, everything had gone to shit. He'd planned to take Nightmare, his stubborn steed, out for rides in the craggy mountains, climbing between all the timber. Just his horse and the fresh air, his land an abundance of beauty to explore.
But he was lonely.
Isolation had become a part of him, strung like a thread through his soul until he knew nothing but the silence of solitude.
He truly hadn't meant to let her in--but that was the thing about Sana. She didn't ask permission. She broke in, just as she'd been born and bred to do. She was like the light between the curtains, running like a seam down his cheek, deceiving in its warmth.
It wasn't until he got to know her that he found out she was just like him.
A waste.
And There She Was
He almost shot her.
Rifle pointed at her chest, his eyes wild with anger, glaring at her like she'd personally shat in his coffee that morning.
"Get off my land. Go back to where you came from."
Easier said than done. Where she'd come from had just gone under. Vancouver Seclusion--VS--was overridden with hunger and the violence that stemmed from it was not pretty. The government had been overthrown, and the last of the remaining Seclusion Cities in Canada was officially down.
Just when the world felt like it had reached its lowest point, it dug just a little deeper and fell even lower.
She put her hands up in surrender. "Don't shoot."
The man's jaw tensed. He lifted the rifle to aim it at her head.
"How did you get through my fence?"
She turned her hands so he could see her dirty fingernails.
"I dug under," she said.
He tilted his head to the side, a curious expression on his face.
"What?"
He frowned. "The others never thought to dig."
"I thought this place was deserted. Someone told me back in Spokane--"
"Seems like
someone
lied to you." He pointed his rifle behind her. "Go back. And do not return here if you wish to live."
"Then pull the trigger. I'd rather die than go back."
He raised a brow. "This isn't a fucking weekend getaway, woman. Get the fuck off my land."
"There's nothing to go back to," she said in a harsh voice. "VS fell. Spokane is a scary place. The community in Wyoming--" The man snorted. "--it's done for. Famine. War. Death."
"Not disease," the man said quietly.
"Not since--not for a while, no."
"Thanks for the riveting chat. Now leave, or you
will
die."
She backed away, grabbing her backpack straps.
"I'll be by the river, if you change your mind."
She was almost out of earshot when he replied.
"Change my mind about what?"
"Letting me stay," she said over her shoulder.
Deafening Silence
Sleep evaded him that night.
He laid there all night--in the loft of his cabin with only a bed and a big slanted window on the roof that'd splurged on, doing his best not to look through it toward the river.
Logan hadn't been very successful with that. He'd glanced more times than he'd care to admit, and each time, he'd seen her there by the river, huddled up with not a tent or a blanket to shield her from the bitter cold.
It was distressing how thin she was. He'd known it was bad out there, but the people he'd encountered in the mountains were wild yet well-fed from nature's abundance in these parts. The woman was a rail of a thing, all bones and copper brown skin with high, round cheeks and big, sunken, mollifying eyes that made him wonder why he hadn't just shot her.
It was tempting. He could end her and be done with it.
Then she'd be gone and the deafening silence would return to his soul.
To Feed the Wild Woman
"Here."
The tin box rattled to the ground by her feet. It was a food container with a metal spoon stuck into an indent on the lid.
Sana plucked the spoon out and opened the box to find--beans! Barbecue baked beans. She hadn't had any since... Well, a long time. Her memory wasn't what it had once been. She wasn't well. She hadn't been well in a while.
"I'm feeding you so you'll leave," the man said.
Sana looked up at him as she shoveled a spoonful of beans into her mouth.
Oh, fuck.
That was good. Really, really fucking good.
"Thank you," she said between mouthfuls. "So, so much. This is great!"
The man frowned down at her. "You will leave my property."
"You don't own the fucking river."
"I own the riverbed you're sitting on."
"What if I crossed to the other side?"
They both looked at the wide river and the rushing water and knew that she'd never make it.
"I own that, too," he said.
Sana chuckled, throwing her head back as she nearly choked on the beans.
