The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Last Tree
by Kathleen McCluskey

   The sun had not been directly seen in twenty-seven years. It still existed somewhere behind the blanket of ash that wrapped around the Earth. Nothing but a dull yellow stain bleeding through the clouds. It gave no warmth. It cast no real shadows. It simply watched as nuclear winter buried the world beneath endless drifts of gray dust. 

   Nathan had been walking for what felt like an eternity. Hunger had become as familiar as the cold, gnawing at him until even the leather straps of his backpack looked edible. Around him, the remains of civilization lay buried beneath the ash. The skeletal frames of skyscrapers pierced the horizon, highways disappeared beneath drifts of gray powder and rusted vehicles sat where they had been abandoned decades before. Nothing lived. Nothing moved. The world had become a silent tomb.

   When he reached the crest of a barren hill, he stopped. A single tree stood against the poisoned sky.

   Its trunk was dark and impossibly straight, its branches spreading like black veins across the yellow glow overhead. Crimson fruit hung from every branch, untouched by frost or decay. Nathan stared in disbelief. Every forest had been torched, every orchard withered. Yet this tree stood as though the apocalypse had simply passed it by.

   His stomach twisted painfully. He bolted for the tree.

   The closer he came, the stranger the place became. The wind died completely. The ash beneath his boots remained perfectly smooth and when he glanced behind him, his footprints were gone. No trail leading to the tree, only an endless blanket of gray.

   Hunger pushed him forward. He reached for the neatest fruit. It came off easily enough.

   Nathan hesitated before biting into it. Sweetness exploded across his tongue. The cold vanished. So did the emptiness inside of him.

   Then the memories came. They flooded in with relentless clarity.

   He buried his face in the frozen earth as the memories continued. Cities vanished beneath expanding suns of white fire. Oceans boiled under radioactive storms while entire coastlines disappeared behind walls of flame. Children pounded against bunker doors that would never open. Families reached for each other as they dissolved into shadows against concrete walls. Millions became billions until the number itself didn’t matter anymore. Every death, every scream, every mushroom cloud traced back to a single signature scrawled across the bottom of a report he had never bothered even reading.

   The flaw had been real. The engineers asked for more time. They had pleaded with him to delay the launch, to fix the software before governments of the world trusted it to humanity’s survival. He remembered dismissing every warning and concern with cold calculation. Eight months of extended research would cost billions. Investors would flee. Competitors would win. It wasn’t personal. It was business. Nobody was going to beat Sentinel Industries and their hotshot new CEO out of this military contract. 

   He was no longer standing in the frozen wasteland. He was back inside the glass lined board room that overlooked Manhattan. The Sentinel Industries logo glowed on the back wall of polished steel while executives applauded the company’s newest achievement. Governments around the world had already signed contracts worth trillions.

   Nathan remembered toasting the launch of Sentinel Industries with champagne as presidents, generals and investors congratulated him on changing the world. The engineers’ report sat in a locked filing cabinet, its warnings ignored for deadlines and profits. They learned that an intense solar flare could fool the system into detecting a massive nuclear first strike where none existed. Three months later, after the system was installed in every major command center on the planet, the largest solar storm in recorded history occurred. Sentinel mistook it for the opening salvo of World War Three. Every nation launched before it could become a victim. Less than an hour later, civilization existed only in memory.

   Nathan collapsed against the trunk, his chest heaving beneath the weight of billions of deaths. Every city. Every face. Every scream was etched into his memory with relentless clarity. He clawed at the bark until his fingertips were shredded and bleeding. He sobbed apologies to a world that didn’t exist anymore. If he had listened…if he had delayed the launch…if he had cared more about lives than profits…humanity would still be alive. Instead he had traded the safety of the world for another successful quarter.

   Gradually, the memories began to unravel. The firestorms disappeared first, then the collapsing cities and mushroom clouds. The faces of the engineers blended until he didn’t remember why they had looked so frightened. Even the boardroom faded, its polished table and raised champagne glasses dissolved into an indistinct haze. He reached for the memories, desperate to hold onto them but they slipped from him.

   “No…” He whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. “Please…”

   Nathan slowly opened his eyes. The frozen wasteland stretched endlessly before him in every direction beneath a sickly yellow sky. Gray ash drifted silently through the bitter wind, settling over the ruins of a world he no longer remembered. He frowned, uncertain of how long he had been walking. His head throbbed with a strange emptiness, as though something important had been stripped away leaving only a hollow nothingness behind.

   Then his stomach growled.

   The hunger arrived all at once, sharp enough to make him double over. That’s when he saw the tree.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image © Copyright Rie Sheridan Rose

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!