after the end

no one ever considers what comes after the horrible end, if such horrible ends do come. In such sad stories it is simply said "he died" or "they died", and you are to hang your head, to feel the pang of sadness at their tragic end. It's rarely considered what comes next. Our story starts after the end. The bombs had all fallen, the heroes all dead, the battles all lost. No one really wins in the end, the logical conclusion of war is death. And there was death, so much death. A layer of ash lay over what was once some part of America, if I cannot tell you what part it is only because almost all of it looked much the same, lifeless, fields and valleys and mountains of fine grain sand. For hundreds of miles, a layer of sand and silt lay over the landscape, broken by an occasional oasis, the once verdant lands converted into nearly endless dessert. I suppose you might be able to figure out something by the fact that the wind when it blew was not so cold that it would kill, and the heat during the day was not so hot as to cause instant dehydration.
The days really have no number either, but I can tell you it was some time after the end that the man emerged to survey his new dominion. In those days it was said that every man was at least the equal of a duke, or perhaps even a king, because there was so much land available to any one man that they could be considered as rich as the dukes and kings of early centuries. There would be no more competition for land, not for some time. I cannot even be sure of the other survivors, just of the man I will tell you of. He had the luck, if you can call it luck, of being in a shelter when the horror struck. Regardless, he had been knocked unconscious, and had laid out for time beyond memory. He did not dream, and hardly found a need for food or even a great amount of fresh air for some time. The time he laid there was at least a week, it could have been a month or two, perhaps even several years, all the clocks were broken, and calenders need human hands to advance the months and to mark off days. You probably think I'm silly for estimating such a long time for our friend to have laid in repose, recovering from the disaster. People always forget the strangeness of the human body itself. The tale of rip van winkle may not be so far off from the truth. I tell you that what I think happened, and again I cannot be sure for I am no doctor and there are few experts who could tell you, is that his body greatly wished to sleep through whatever calamity had befallen mankind. And after his mind and body met in conference and discovered there was no sleeping through the awful fact, why I believe at that point they decided that death would be a better fate than living in such a world. I wouldn't be surprised if an eye was cracked at that point, and upon opening closed very quickly to try and block out such a cruel reality.
Again, this is all conjecture, but what I can tell you is that a man is not so much the captain of his own fate as that his body will stop when it is supposed to. Like I said, this is a story about what happens after the end. The man's life did end, in a way, on the day the bombs fell. But of what came before I'm not here to tell. He opened his eyes, and emerged from the structure that had been a building of some kind. In fact, it had been a post office. Our hero was no post man, he was simply checking his postal box in the well built structure, and the structure itself protected him. He had been the only one in the building at the time not near a window, and so he was the person to disturb the dust as he sat up, and dusted himself off. He found his way to an outside door, opened it and surveyed the landscape. The sun beat down too hard for him to see for a minute, but as his eyes adjusted he saw the endless dust covering most of the remains of his hometown. He tried running to his car, but parked on the street it had become an unrecognizable hulk. So he started jogging across the wasted landscape, towards where his home and family had been. He found no street signs, and so from memory he tried to find his neighborhood. But it, like most of the town, had been converted to sand and ash. when he dug through almost a foot of the ash mix he found what had once been the ground, the concrete of a foundation and in another place the still nutrient rich soil was all that remained of a house and lawn, perhaps his, perhaps his neighbors, perhaps someone he didn't even know. He realized he was still holding something, his mail. It was the day the bills had come, how funny was that? he chuckled at the bills, no more worrying about that. "I'm immortal" a voice in his head seemed to mutter, half to himself, half proclaiming it to the world. So he said it out loud. "I'm immortal" he said in his normal speaking voice, still trying to figure out why he had said it, and was he really?
He saw there was more than just bills in the stack of mail. He found a sales flier. The sales flier was for home insurance. He chuckled again. Then he laughed, he laughed and laughed so hard he had to sit down. He screamed and laughed at how silly it was. It said "Protect your investment, you never know what might happen." No comedian on earth had ever said a sillier set of words. Danny Kaye, or Robin Williams or any comedian of any time period would be envious of such a perfect joke, with such perfect timing. He laughed so hard he cried. He cried so hard he ran out of air and passed out in the sand. And that is what happened after the end.
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I just had this story to tell, there might be more, I just don't know. I hope you liked it.