Plains of Wrath: A post-apocalyptic thriller by Logan Keys

Author:Logan Keys [Keys, Logan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Le Chat Publishing
Published: 2023-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

17

No one spoke about the extinct animals. I think because next, was us. And only us. No one wanted to talk about how there’ll never be a circus again, or a petting zoo, not like before. Not so sure I’d miss those… I bet there were a few idiots with goats in their barn the same as I had my mare, but that didn’t mean that you’d ever see a zebra again. No one could hoard enough water for elephants, that’s for sure.

Everything under the sun had become extinct and so even if the water came back, what would it be like then?

Cole had to leave. He didn’t explain, he just said he’d be back, and I believed him.

I didn’t believe him.

It didn’t matter what I believed.

Proof in the pudding as they used to say. Or something along those lines. If he came back, he meant what he’d said about helping me. If he did then he’d be the dumbest person on the planet. But one that I’d do almost anything for.

I took a long look at my hands, yelling at them in my mind, not to grab him by the shirt and beg him not to leave me alone. How proud I was that I’d not gotten down on my hands and knees. Instead, I watched from the window, and then sat down with the ghosts of Walker farm for dinner.

One day went by then another.

My only visitors were the crows.

I’d said that the birds liked to hang out. They seemed to know where the water was. Such an underestimated species. Before the drought, the only warning we’d had was the ice.

Strangely, before the well of the earth and the sky dried up, we’d been very very wet that season. That winter had been sleet and sleet and more sleet. Water, then a freeze, over and over.

I remembered it well. Kids skating down main street. The hardware store sold ice skates in case you wanted to turn that pond into a fun rink until things went back to normal.

It wasn’t like Oklahoma was the ice-skating capitol of the world, so, we were mostly sliding and falling, but it was the only highlight for a very strange and extra dark winter.

I only brought it up now because of the birds. When the freeze came, we were slammed with subarctic temperatures. The first one, we survived, no problem. The second or third or fourth storm, well, the cold started killing everything you couldn’t bring inside.

But not the fowl. The birds. I had no idea, neither did my father, just how hardy chickens could be. Them, and the bunnies who’d fluffed up with dense coats, and even the horses ducked deep in the forest, tails to the wind from the north.

Our goats, and our cattle took the brunt of it. We lost almost everything that year. Crops were dead. The earth was a hard packed ice cube and the calves born early that next year were all found with white eyes, gone, even when we heated them up, just gone.

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