#oneaday Day 656: Wasteland Diaries, Part 4

It was time to get moving. I tucked the diary into a jacket pocket and resolved to read a little more the next time I stopped.

Stopped where? Get going where?

I paused for a moment, this obvious question pushing its way to the forefront of my mind. I knew that this “Evie” woman was important for some reason, and that I should find her. But how would I go about doing that, given that I had no idea where I was and no idea where she was, either?

I scratched my nose — some skin was flaking off it in the dry heat — and pondered this for a moment. Then my mind returned to the phone that I had pocketed. Perhaps something in there would offer some sort of clue? I switched it on again. The screen took a moment to respond, then lit up with what I assumed was the manufacturer’s logo, as it was also present on the rear of the device. I waited for what seemed like an age for the phone to start up, and was then presented with a screen of icons.

I touched the “Mail” icon and looked over the messages I’d previously read again. I returned to the message to “Annie” from “Evie” and, curious, tapped on the name “Evelyn Anderton” at the top of the message. The message scrolled to one side, and I was conveniently presented with what looked like Evie’s contact details. There was a phone number and an email address — not that those would be much good given that the phone clearly had no signal — and a listing of her birthday: January 1, 1981. A New Year child. No address though. Of course it wasn’t that simple.

I frowned. Perhaps there was somewhere else I could find the information. I returned to the phone’s inbox and scrolled back another level. The previous owner of the phone had kept her messages organised well, it seemed, and it wasn’t long before I found the “Evie” folder, apparently containing the two women’s past correspondence.

I didn’t have time to read all the messages, so I skimmed over the subject headings, back through several months until a date some time in the previous year — 2013. Around that point, one message immediately jumped out at me as important: “New Address.” I tapped on it to open it up and, sure enough, there was a brief note with Evie informing Annie of her new home.

The trouble was, I had absolutely no idea where this place was, or even if it was in the same country as I was in. I assumed it was, since Evie hadn’t seen fit to add a country name after the postcode, but that may well have been a foolish assumption. I wasn’t to know.

Equipped with a new lead, I turned the phone off again, headed back downstairs and out into the heat of the day. The sun was beating down on the street by now, and the air felt dry.

Something flashed across my mind’s eye — a fleeting vision. A memory? I wasn’t sure, because as quickly as it had flown across my imagination, it was gone again, out of reach, impossible to grasp. I had a sense of the colour green, and of a warm. dry day much like this one, but little else.

I shook my head. It wouldn’t do to go cracking up now. Or would it? There was no-one else around, and the closest I’d come to another human being had inexplicably crumbled to dust at my touch. As I started walking along the street, I looked at my hands. They looked normal and hand-like, not like any kind of destructive force. So why had the woman’s body fallen apart like it had done?

Answers weren’t forthcoming. All I could do for now was to keep walking forwards until I found something that would help me in my new-found mission: to find Evie.

I didn’t know why she was important, but something in the tone of her messages had convinced me that she had an idea of what was going on — and not just in the sense of what people knew through hearsay. But there was something else, too. Something at the back of my mind, out of reach, like the fleeting memory that had just passed me by. A sense, a knowledge, a feeling — Evie was important.

Given the lack of anything else to go on, I had little choice other than to trust my instincts.

I walked along the street for some time. As I continued, the size of the destroyed buildings seemed to be decreasing. Perhaps I was coming to the edge of this town. The devastation wasn’t any less, but it was a different kind of devastation — these buildings looked more like small houses rather than the larger blocks I’d previously been seeing. Some had small patches of grass, yellowed in the heat, out front, and some had rusted, battered, ruined old cars. Few of the buildings looked safe, so I didn’t risk heading inside.

The street was still eerily quiet. I felt a slight breeze and heard it blowing past my ears, but no other sounds — no animals, no birds, not even the sound of rubbish clattering around in the road. The sense of loneliness was palpable, like I was living in some sort of parallel existence to the rest of the world, and all I had to do was to tear down the wall of reality separating me from the people I knew and loved — whoever they were.

I knew that couldn’t be the case, though. My memory may have failed me, but my sense of rational thought had not. My thoughts turned to the only possible explanation — that something terrible had happened, and that I was the only survivor.

But why me? What was so special about me? Why should I survive when everyone else disappears, or turns to dust?

It was a question that would not get an answer for some time.