When they came, I was sitting in a pit of my own makin’. Thirst will do funny things to a man. You might get irritable. You might start seeing things that aren’t there. You might go diggin’ holes in search of water or mud or anything that might wet your whistle. I was going a bad way for a long time—we all were—and I figure that hole was a quarter mile deep by the time I was done with it.

I remember when I was real young people were awfully nice to each other. People smiled everywhere I went. The loving and the giving was infectious. Everybody helpin’ everybody. Teachers never gave a bad grade and doctors never told you something you didn’t want to hear. Politicians were the most compassionate people our great nation could produce; wars were a thing of the past. Businesses were so proper and respectful and they wanted to do right by their customers and their employees and everybody. It seemed like the biggest businesses were the best at that, but the small businesses followed suit—for as long as they lasted, anyway.

Maybe I was just young and seeing things through rose colored glasses, but the world seemed to be committed to a vision of peace and unity. I thought I was gonna live forever. I thought I already died and went to heaven and my soul would wander this precious green earth where no wrong could be committed and no forgiveness was ever needed. This harmony, this sense of oneness, lasted all the way up to the year of destruction.

Everyday for a year cargo was late, planes crashed, food went bad, surgeons failed, bridges collapsed, and power lines went down and stayed down. Nobody could explain what was going on. The news blamed this and that, and most people ate it up. We all suffered through tragedy after tragedy and pretended pieces of the old world were still with us. There was a lot of dyin’, but there were still a lot of us livin’. Businesses and schools kept going. The government was still intact. Society stood as long as we stood with it—that’s what we thought anyway. But that summer was a hot one, and at least a dozen nuclear facilities went critical. There was no escaping the radiation. Over the next few months, millions of people got sick and thousands upon thousands died with red skin, half their hair falling out, and lumps all over their bodies. The explosions from the facilities and the radiation that followed overheated the continent and dried up most of the rivers. Swathes of crops and livestock were lost within weeks.

The world spiraled after that. I went eight years without seein’ another person smile. I went five years without seein’ another person. I think they all must’ve gone to the coasts. Not me, though. I stayed right by the very land I was born, diggin’ my hole in little old Missouri where the Mississippi River used to be.

I dug a good ten feet deep every week and every week a little bit of water would spring up from the ground. It wasn’t a lot, and after the week was up I found myself needin’ to dig deeper, but the water was there and it kept me going.

I dug the hole at an angle so I could easily walk up and down it. I’d go down to the bottom and dig deeper and haul the loose dirt back to the surface. After a while, I found myself spending entire days just diggin’ away, and that was just fine by me; there wasn’t much on the surface that I was interested in. Wasn’t long after that I started sleeping down there. It seemed safer than the surface, not that I was running into people or nothin’. It just felt like home.

I managed to live on corn and beans that I planted just outside the hole, the only place that I knew of for hundreds of miles where crops could get both water and sunlight. It was hard livin’ in that hole, but for a while that hole was all I had.

One day, I popped my head out with a bucket of water in my hand to give to the corn and beans and somethin’ big covered up the sun. I thought maybe it was one of them solar eclipses, but the shadow was awfully square. I remember thinking, “Ain’t the moon round?” I sat up on the grass with my feet danglin’ in the hole and watched that square shadow slide its way across the sky for at least a few hours before a sliver of the sun was visible again. I was mesmerized.

Next day, I popped my head up again and I saw water running through the dried up riverbanks. They wasn’t dry no more! Day after that the water doubled. I thought maybe I oughtta sleep on the surface in case the water reached my hole.

I got so excited about the water that I built myself a little raft with some dead trees—just like the one I had when I was a boy—and took it downstream. Feeling the wind on my face, the mist in the air, I lost track of time and before I knew it I was twenty miles away from my hole. It broke my heart, but I knew there was no getting back to it, so I slept on the raft and kept on floating. That water gushed.

A few days later I spotted some tents off the river. I steered as hard as I could to get to shore. There were about a dozen people in that camp living on canned goods and I come to find out I made it down to Arkansas.

They were fine people. Polite. They answered my questions and let me tie up my boat on the riverside. They didn’t wanna hurt me or nothin’, but they didn’t do much to help me either. I didn’t have any food with me, and they didn’t offer me any. All I had was my dinky raft and they made me sleep in it.

The next morning I woke up to see a load of fish swimming in the river right under me. I was groggy, but I was also hungry as hell. Without thinking I stuck my hand in the water and plucked a fish right out. I caught a handful more like that and brought ‘em to camp. They sure liked me after that.

Later that night we set up a fire to cook the fish and while we were eatin’ I got to talking with Dave. He seemed to be the leader of this little tent village. He was telling me how they survived on wild boar the first few years after the destruction. For a while, things were great. It was a nice change of pace living outside, living for the hunt. But the water dried up and the boar thinned out.

“We were careful not to kill the last of them,” he said. “We wanted to ration them as best we could. That meant a lot of hungry nights. Eventually they died out and we started raiding abandoned homes and stores.”

“Tough times,” I told him. “I been there. Corn and beans everyday wasn’t exactly a holiday feast.”

He nodded and took a bite of fish and said, “This fish, though! I hope they keep on coming down the river.”

“Well, I don’t see why they’d stop,” I said. His face got real stiff. Maybe that was a silly thing for me to say after all that had happened.

“You know, when that river started flowing again I was nervous. For a long time it seemed like everything good in this world was being taken away from us by the hands of God. It all just went from bad to worse. I thought that river was gonna bring something bad—like we’d go straight from a drought to a flood. Something changed in the air right after that eclipse—or whatever it was.”

“You saw that, too?”

“We sure did. I was positive it was a bad omen. Like some ultimate evil was on its way. Then the river started flowing and sure enough a few days later you came flowing with it. I thought for sure you’d be up to no good. But here we are. That river is flowing and it’s full of fish and you know how to catch them for us. Maybe we finally have some good things coming downstream.”

“Well, my momma always said I was a good boy and I didn’t go lookin’ for trouble, but that trouble had a way of findin’ me.”

Dave looked at me and smiled the same way Momma used to smile after I did somethin’ silly.

“That’s alright with me,” he said. “If you don’t want to sleep on that boat, we have an extra tent you can sleep in.”

“I would like that,” I said. And Dave kept good on his word; it was a nice tent.

A few weeks went by and I was playing hopscotch with Dave’s son—he’s a good boy. While we were playing, camp got real quiet and I look over and everyone is huddled up in a crowd. Me and Scoop—that’s what I call Dave’s son ‘cause of the way he scoops the pebbles when he’s playing hopscotch. Me and Scoop jogged over to see what was going on.

This strange old fella was walking up to camp from the riverbank. He was kinda short and bald and his skin was so white it almost looked gray, like he’d been livin’ under a rock the last few years. Then again, I was livin’ in a hole, so I can’t say much. He was wearing this funny black jumpsuit and his head was a weird shape. I didn’t really get what the big deal was, but everyone was awestruck, like it was Jesus Christ, or Bill Clinton. Scoop ran over to his ma and hid his face behind her leg.

Then, the strangest thing happened. This old fella wasn’t really moving his mouth, but I still heard him say something I’ll never forget. He said, “I’m from the galactic government, and I’m here to help.”

Them folks were horrified.

---

For fun, scifi themed coasters, check out my Etsy shop here: https://scifideco.etsy.com

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to share the link with friends and sign up for my newsletter to never miss a new short story: