The trawler rumbled over the jagged terrain, it’s massive, rutted tires easily scaling over the boulders and shrapnel of the ruined city.  The heavy duty electric piston engine rumbled like heavy thunder, the lights on various spots of its cab blinking in and out with the same random consistency as a swarm of glow flies.  The forward crew compartment, hidden behind polarized blast shields, held two bucket seats with room for another eight in the roomy passenger quarters further back.

Though it was midday, the sky was possessed by a perpetual orange gloom casting the entire landscape in a rusted glow.  Giant shadows leered from the gloomy, turbid haze of the horizon, ancient apparitions of a city blasted into oblivion.  Their twisted girders reached out into the open air like the gnarled fingers of a dying god.  The ground was pockmarked and broken.  Only sickly scrub grass could grow in such harsh conditions and even then only tenuously so in the parched, cracked soil, scraping by on the few droplets of moisture that fell each year since World’s End.

Other than the labored groans of the trawler, the rest of the world seemed abandoned, empty, a vast museum of an extinct people.  Even the carrion birds, at first fat and bloated, had long since vanished with starvation as the weeks had turned in months and years.  Slowly the gears of time were grinding down even the most colossal of monoliths.  Structures failed, brick turned to dust, and steel into rot.  There were no longer roads, just gulches between decaying artifice.  The large vehicle was carefully piloted down an avenue of least resistance, avoiding the sprawl of fallen skyscrapers and the sunken streets collapsed into a metro chasm of useless track.

The steady drone of the heavy duty engine paused ominously for a brief second, a momentarily lapse in its whir of repetition.  A sharp, thunderous crack ripped from the engine housing, followed by a shower of white sparks sprayed onto the lifeless ground.  Metal on metal, the rending sound of the electric pistons tearing itself apart.  The fall of warped and twisted components in a trail of mechanical breadcrumbs from the undercarriage.  The trawler’s heavy machinery abruptly stopped with a grinding crunch and a deep shudder, teetering dangerously forward before settling on all four wheels.  The trawler was silent, still.

The running lights on the cab flickered for a moment before switching to auxiliary power.  The internal life support unit buzzed back to life with a gentle hum, maintaining the comfortable environment within the crew cab with mechanical vigilance.  It was followed by the affirmative beep of the food dispensary system sounding it had also returned to life on secondary power, complete with powdered recipes for several years of nutrient paste and massive titanium water tanks running the length of the exterior.

The side hatch of the crew compartment slowly wheeled open from the cab.  It revealed the forward crew compartment just behind the pilot’s seat.  One by one, three men climbed down the rungs and steps built into the side of the cabin.  Each wore blue-tinted goggles with heavy scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths.  Their worn and patched clothes were heavily dusted in orange silt.  The last man to emerge from the trawler had a high beam rifle slung over his shoulder that chirped occasionally signifying the nearly empty energy cartridge.

The driver of the trawler was a man named Till, a man fond of smiling.  He pulled a particle detector from a leather holster on his belt and scanned the underside of the trawler.  The readings from below moved the needle with an anxious twitch.  The trawler’s core was leaking, but it was hardly an amount to worry about now, Till noted with a wry grin.  Each of them would register on the detector with the same frenetic tremors of the indicator by now anyway.  With a sigh, he returned his meter to its holster and looked to the horizon.  The burning storms that ravaged the surface were in full rage, tearing the slumbering giants of the ancient city into shrapnel.

“But there on the shining metal his hands had put instead an artificial wilderness and a sky like lead,” his companion noted from behind, sharing his view.

Till turned to examine the speaker, a man named Wystan, the oldest of their trio.  He was a dapper fellow, dressed in a ragged tweed jacket and bespectacled with a pair of wireframe glasses.  He was a lean man, soft and reflective in his nature, but assuredly possessed of the rugged determinism required to persist in such environs.  Wystan pulled down his scarf and produced his signature calabash pipe, a relic from a world nearly forgotten.  With nimble fingers, he pinched a yellow cigarette and forced the small, finely cut tobacco leaves into the end of his pipe.  After a few heavy pulls with a well placed match, Wystan exhaled a sweet plume of purple smoke.

“It could be worse.”  Till nodded towards the red maelstrom at the edge of their eyesight.

“A plain without feature, bare and brown, no blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,” Wystan grunted back between puffs.  He added with a curmudgeon snarl, “nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down.”

“It could be better.”  The smiling man shrugged his shoulders in agreement.  The gruel produced by the food dispenser system was hardly edible.  It had the consistency of toothpaste and the flavor of chewed bubble gum.  Regardless it kept them alive, whatever that was worth.  As he always did, Till smiled.

“What’s with you?”  The third member of their party walked forward, one hand fingering the rifle that was tightly secured to his body.  He was irritated at the interruption and unhappy to be outside of the trawler.  Even with his heavy goggles, he squinted uncomfortably.

“Good sir, I have not a care in the world,” Till said grandly with a bow, both hands outstretched as might a stage performer.

Alveus did not seem impressed with the theatrics.  He was a different sort and not just in contrast to Wystan and Till.  He was the youngest, barely a boy at World’s End.  Till wondered how much of the Old World the lad truly remembered.  He never spoke of it.  In fact, he hardly seemed distressed by their current circumstances as if the emaciated world had always been so.  The tragedy of it seemed lost to him.

Despite the scarcity of luxury and convenience, Alveus sported a roll of fat, under his chin and thickly coating his ribs.  Long exposure to the HUD display of the trawler’s computer codec had bleached his flesh a pasty white.  He sported a dull, half-lidded expression that suggested arrogant disinterest in all things except for the most banal distractions.   Yet despite his dim demeanor, he was the one sporting the high beam rifle.  Regardless of the irony of their current position, Till knew that it was best not to press his luck.

“What’s wrong with it?”  Alveus stood next to one of the massive tires, craning his neck forward to look tentatively at the scraps that had fallen from the ruined engine.  His understanding of the workings of the electric piston engine bordered on primal superstition.

“Other than the sparks, the litter of what I can only assume are essential pieces to its operation, and its refusal to move another inch, I don’t know.  I believe for now our journey to nowhere is temporarily halted.”

“They marched away enduring a belief whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief,” Wystan said below his breath, but loud enough for Till to hear.  Another puff on the pipe with furrowed eyebrows.

“Well, fix it.”  It was not a request.  It was a command.

“Alas, I cannot.”  Till held up his palms defensively.

“Why not?”  Alveus was growing annoyed.  Till noted with a growing edge of trepidation that the barrel of the rifle was being slowly lowered from its vertical position almost as if unconsciously.  The youngest walked a few paces away from the trawler, scanning the landscape as if looking for a destination.  There was nothing.  There never was.  He returned expecting his answer.

“There was only one person that could fix this.”  Till’s eyes flashed momentarily before resuming his merry expression.  “But I don’t believe that Dalton is up to it at present, but I could ask.”

“I told you never to mention that name again,” Alveus snarled.  The open bore of the rifle drifted back forth between the smiling man and his scholarly comrade with a heavy digit fingering the trigger.  The energy cartridge beeped again, signaling it was nearly depleted.  Till could see the red LED on the side of the weapon, counting the number of shots left in the cartridge.  In block lettering it showed a 2.  Just enough.

“Sweet Alveus, I only say that I am the driver.  Wystan there, he is the navigator.  It was … ahem … the other one that knew how to make things.  And well … as you know full well … he was deemed non-essential a few weeks ago.”

“What about the lights?”  Alveus turned back to the glowing lights on the cab.  “They are still running.”

“If you remember before the current regime promoted his irrelevancy,” Till smiled and bowed apologetically preemptively for his observation, “our late companion converted the auxiliary generators to solar panels with a tertiary system on wind turbines.  The batteries are fully charged and given the current conditions could conceivable continue … indefinitely I presume.”

“Good.”  Alveus stood for a moment in obvious debate.  “How much food do we have?”

“I would hardly call the slime produced by the dispenser proper food, good Alveus, but for three men the computer estimates that we have enough for five years, longer if we ration our water.”

“How long would it last if there were less than three?”  The question was asked, leaving an icy chill in the air despite the winnowing heat of the orange sky.

“Less than three, Alveus?”  Till nodded.  “With two, perhaps eight years, and with one, well, that goes without saying, right?  Half the people, double the food.”

“I see,” the youngest pursed his lips.  “So a lot longer then.”

“Wystan, I believe that one of us may have just assumed irrelevancy status alongside our dear friend,” Till beamed brightly and stepped in line with his bespectacled companion, forming a row.  “Perhaps even both of us.”

“A crowd of ordinary decent folk watched from without and neither moved nor spoke as three pale figures were led forth and bound to three posts driven upright in the ground.”  Wystan taped the remainder of his pipe onto the ground using his boot heel.  He faced the rifle with grim courage, a stark contrast to the smiles of the merry prankster by his side.

“If the trawler can’t move, then why do we need a driver?  If the trawler can’t move, why do we need a navigator?”  Alveus smiled with boyish delight as he weighed his decision.  One hand held the rifle grip with his finger on the trigger, the other strummed a thoughtful cadence on the barrel.

“The mass and majesty of this world, all that carries weight and always weighs the same lay in the hands of others; they were small and could not hope for help and no help came.”  Wystan looked introspectively at his pipe before casting it aside onto the ground.  Till could see the resignation in his eyes.

“Dear Alveus, we are certainly more than just a driver and a navigator, remember.”  The smiling man held his finger to his temple.  “There is more than just our present circumstances, skills that are quite useful.”

“Eenie, meenie, miny, moe …”  Alveus moved the barrel back and forth between the two with each word.   His pig eyes were glimmering for the first time since Dalton.  The words lingered in his mouth.  The look soured Till’s stomach.  “… catch a tiger by the toe …”

“You are far too young to remember the world for what it was.  Our good friend, Wystan here, is well learned.”  Till gestured to his companion at his side.  “Thousands of years of human existence.  Don’t you want to learn who we are?”

“… if he hollars make him pay, fifty dollars every day …”

“Their shame was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride and died as men before their bodies died,” Wystan said calmly in response to the nursery rhyme being used to decide their fate.  He slowly unbuttoned his tweed coat and the shirt beneath to expose his breast.  He lowered himself to one knee and then the other.

“… my mother told me to pick the best one …”

“Perhaps if we study the knowledge files on the trawler’s codec we can learn how to repair the engine,” Till offered.  “Five years is plenty of time for that, don’t you agree?  If we get the trawler working again, then you’ll need both a driver and the navigator.  Convenient, I daresay, because a driver and a navigator stand directly before you.”

“ … and you … are … not … it.”  The barrel of the high beam rifle rested directly on Till, aimed at his chest.  The smiling man shrugged his shoulders.  Alveus’ mouth twisted playfully for a second, a moment of indecision.  “But you make me laugh sometimes.  So …”

Without additional ceremony, the youngest of their number turned the weapon on Wystan and pulled the trigger, his face void of expression.  A yellow beam of focused energy lanced through the old man’s chest, cauterizing the wound almost as quickly as it was inflicted.  His face twisted in momentary agony, his eyes lit with the fire that filled his lungs.  His mouth worked as if trying to produce words that were unable to come.  Mercifully, the suffering was short.  Wystan fell backwards on his knees, his legs trapped awkwardly beneath him.  His glasses fell from his face, breaking on the loose stones half-buried in the yellow, gypsy sand.  Finally, he lay still with only the wind left to lightly tug at the folds of his tweed coat.

The barrel of the weapon curled with blue, acrid smoke.  Alveus stood for a moment eyeing the smiling man, who stood perfectly still.  Till bowed grandly waiting to join the others.  The final shot in the high beam rifle was not fired, at least, not fired yet.  Instead, Alveus re-slung the rife on his shoulder and climbed up the side steps of the trawler.  With a final effort he hoisted himself into the crew cab.  The HUD system in the pilot compartment was activated as he blissfully returned to his digital stupor.

Till remained in place.  Wystan lay dead at his feet.  Beyond the dying embers of the world continued to darken as the titanic storms reduced the great monuments of mankind to dust.  A shrill whistle signaled that the winds had changed.  The red maelstrom was now approaching, random and fearless in its orientation.  Soon the trawler would be engulfed in its razor winds, beaten with debris and shrapnel.  Regardless, the cabin was well reinforced and protected.  The inhabitants inside the trawler would remain safe in the air conditioning of the life support system and well fed by the grey paste of the food dispenser system.

He bent at the waste to pick up the discarded calabash pipe.  He could still smell the withered tobacco ash, sweet and pungent.  Till ran his finger over the lacquered wood before tucking it into his pocket.  First Dalton and now Wystan.  The trawler’s journey through the wasteland, as farcical as it was, was finally over.  It now joined the permanent landscape as a sour womb.

Till knew that his fate was already decided.  In fact, he had come to accept it when Alveus had first used the weapon that had been discovered during one of their salvage missions.  Wystan had known it as well.  When his usefulness ended, he too would be promoted to irrelevancy, the merry recipient of the last blast from the energy cartridge of the high beam rifle.

As he always did, Till continued to wear his mask of smiles.