THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: LIVING IN THE FUTURE (Patreon)

After the first two years, Dana had given up trying to escape. The rooms were vault-like, and completely sealed, he knew (and didn’t he know everything about the rooms by now?) but it still had everything he needed to…exist. No windows. But clean water poured continuously in from a 2-inch hole in the ceiling and left via a 4-inch hole in the ground. A square metal plate seamlessly set in the naked cement provided a cooktop (with no controls or access to gas, that would not do, no, no, no…) 

There were four other rooms filled with boxes of freeze-dried food stocked to the ceiling. Two hundred old, mildewed magazines from when Reagan was President (all read and re-read a million times) that were his sole form of entertainment. After a time, Dana had found that you could write in watered down pudding with one of the plastic sporks, if you desired to do so, and for a time, he had. Now, he just left marks to keep the time.  

He kept count the best he could and as far as he could tell, he was somewhere in the third year here, in the tombs — as he thought of them, now — when the vault door suddenly began to make noises one…what? Morning? Afternoon? Late at night? But who really knew if those noises were real? He had had hallucinations before. Full-blown, Busby Berkeley flights of fancy filled with every imaginable thing.  

It felt like a thousand years (and could it be?) since he asked the man. He’s just a man, say his name. SAY IT-

“ALZIS!” Dana shouted at the clanking vault door, and empty silence echoed back. Then the noises started again. CLANK. CLICK. CLICK-CLICK-CLICK-CLICK.

It took some time for the vault door to open. And even as it was opening, after-images of the giant metal door swinging wide played in his vision, like they were unreal. Was this all another hallucination? Dana tried his best not to blink. He feared he would open his eyes and find the door sealed as it always had been.

“Dana,” the high-pitched voice said, and the little man in the vault doorway was a shadow with perfect teeth. Dana found himself suddenly wishing this was a hallucination. 

“Dana, my friend. Are you ready? Do you remember what you asked me five years and seven months ago?”

Dana stumbled up. Listed to one side drunkenly, and then righted himself. He was aware for the first time in months, perhaps years, of his huge beard and hair, and the fact that he was wearing a rotted, half-ruined pair of sweatpants and nothing else. His mouth worked for some time before the word came out. 

“No,” Dana croaked.

“You asked me to show you the end of the world. Well. We’re here my friend. You made it. Come and see…”

That voice didn’t come from a man. It came from a hole in the world cut out for a man, but something else was there, instead. The shadow left the doorway, but Dana found his feet would not let him follow.