Canberra
by
Troy Davitt
“This is Arlo Lee, transmitting from Canberra. This is day… seven hundred… seven hundred and twelve, yes that's right.” declared Arlo defeatedly. It had been that many days minus four since he had spoken to another living being. Dead ones, he spoke to them all the time. Mummified bodies lay with him in the arid tunnels below the city, and he had named and conversed with almost every one. Some liked to be spoken to more than others while some refused to even look him in the eyes. Loneliness will do that to someone; cause them to speak to things that cannot speak back. Arlo still transmitted daily. He had lost hope of hearing another voice nearly six hundred days prior, and merely did it now out of repetition.
Arlo never knew what really happened. Total nuclear annihilation seemed like the most sensible answer. He had grown up under the threat of it and so it was the first reason that came to mind, and the way it was up on the surface made it the most viable conclusion. Whenever he would go topside his Geiger Counter would crackle nonstop, sounding like a million fingers tapping on the plastic water bottle he was going to fill. The water he went to retrieve was surely contaminated just like everything else around; he never put the Geiger Counter directly up to it, though. He knew better than to do that. Life was hard enough as it was and there was no avoiding the radiation, so as long as the water didn’t burn doing down, it made no difference to him how bad it was.
Today he went up as he always did, lifting up the manhole cover just enough to peer out and scanning the horizon for anything abnormal. He would play a game with himself every time he would go aboveground and make a guess as to what he would see when he looked. He would make imaginary bets that there would be cargo planes airdropping food, or wasteland bandits circling his manhole cover ready to pounce on him. The only thing he ever saw were wild dogs sniffing at the ground and the occasional tumbleweed making its way across the dusty landscape.
His eyes adjusted to the muted light that poured in from the outside world. The sky was a greenish-gray, the kind of color you would paint a room to make someone feel as unwelcome as possible. The light it gave off was the same color as the sky, covering everything in a glowing poison. Turbulent clouds churned across the sky like they were being stirred in a pot by a witch and only needed a single spell to be made to reach down to the ground and pummel it with hurricane-force winds that blew anything and everything into oblivion.
Arlo pushed the manhole cover off to the side and crawled out. The feeling of the warm asphalt on his fingers was a nice change from the cold concrete underground. He stood up and got his footing as the winds began to push him back into the hole he just came out of. The hat he had tied underneath his chin flapped against his ears and his clothes became skin-tight to the front of his body as they pulled backwards in the torrent of air.
As he put his foot on the manhole cover to push it back into place, he mentally checked himself for everything he needed before heading off: goggles to keep the sand out of his eyes, Geiger counter on his hip, backpack with water containers inside, some snacks thrown in as well, and a crowbar to pry the manhole cover back up once he came back. The manhole cover slid into place with a thud and Arlo was now ready to begin. Before his first step into his adventure, he gently put his hand in his shirt pocket and felt around for a small pebble, one he had sewn in the the bottom of it, right over his heart. One his daughter had found. One she had given to him years ago for his birthday- the first that she was old enough for to be able to tell him happy birthday herself.