The Runner: A Post Apocalyptic Tale

By Eastin Deverna

Saria had never seen the sun, never felt its warmth on her face. What she did feel was the sting of longing for her missing father. He had been sent as a runner to reach the Oracle and he never came home. Now, Saria has inherited her father’s duty. She must go out into the dangerous wastelands and succeed where he had failed... or else everyone she knows will die. From Eastin DeVerna, the creator of Samurai Grandpa comes... The Runner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Source Point Press
• Release date: Jul 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781945940545

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 Eastin DeVerna

Cover Design by Grim Wilkins

All rights reserved. Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

ISBN-13: 978-1-945940-54-5

www.sourcepointpress.com

For you, in the future, who will never quit.

Acknowledgments

Kim, who believes and forever inspires.

Karlie Lacci, Bo and Harrison Stewart, who’ve read early drafts, talked through it, and made it better.

Evan Pickering, who never grew tired of hearing about it, and whose feedback and edits on text and title were integral to the creation of it.

Chapter One

The World is Dead

Saria had never seen the sun. It was tucked deep away behind the eternal gray and glowing clouds, a consequence of her dead world. Yet she ran on, following the long road away from The City, and far from the lifeblood of Fleet Ser, her village, her home.

Her heart beat on steady, knees groaning and clicking and burning bright red with every footfall. Her bare feet made a soft clap clap clup sound as they slapped against the damned dead and dry, hard caked earth. She ran alongside a low cliff and cursed when she saw how little of it was left. Nothing but emptiness before her. A long ways to go.

She looked up and there in the gray and glowing sky, she spotted Drek, her owl. He flew effortlessly, coasting on the hot jet streams high above, keeping watch for scrappers, drummers, or mutes, any wretched villain or shred of food that might be waiting for them. Drek was scraggly and thin, getting older, but his eyes were still better than Saria’s could ever be and she needed him out there on the run, her eyes in the sky.

Saria was sent by the elders of her village and was to reach the Oracle, a woman wise and kind, with sight beyond them all -- sight into the past, into the future, and into all that is. The Oracle was an elder like those in her village, but far greater and she lived alone, atop a high tower, far out at the road’s end -- she would know the way. Upon reaching the tower, Saria was told never to question, only to listen. Listen and hope that the Oracle would tell her where they were to go next. The land back home was black and dying and the water had gone sour. Fleet Ser was all but dead and they needed to move on. The Oracle would know the way and it was Saria’s mission, her sole purpose to hear it.

* * *

Saria came from a long line of runners and she and her family took the responsibility seriously. Long before she was born, communications had devolved. Electricity had died, and so did gasoline and oil. After that, the written letter met its demise as well. And for communication’s sake, the spoken word was all that remained. It was the job of the runner to burn the spoken word of the elder into memory through repetition. Turn the message into a mantra, lock it up, sacred and whole, and never forget it.

Her father, was a runner before her. He left Fleet Ser two years ago to deliver the same message she carried with her now -- the question. He had gone on runs before, she didn’t know how many, but they were mostly short trips out, as far as she could remember. Runs to the villages to the south, where the dirt was still dying and the air was not so dry. He would go there to deliver terms for trade deals, to schedule meetings for the elders, and to deliver warnings of invasions from the Wastelands to the west. Such was the responsibility of the runner.

He was a long and wiry man, weather and sun worn with tired eyes that always seemed to look past whatever was right before him. The day he left, Saria was working the filters with her mother and other villagers. A dirty, but necessary job. About a mile west of the village, at the end of a long and rocky trail, sits a well of dark sludge, the village’s primary source of water. Saria and other youths of the village would run to the well with empty, brittle plastic buckets, scoop up the sludge and run back to the filters where they would pour the sludge and any human or animal urine and excrement through the primitive charcoal water filters before boiling it to drink. What came through the other end was a cloudy, hazy gray liquid -- wretched stuff, but it kept them alive.

It was morning, two years ago. Saria came back from the well to hand over the two buckets of steaming and stinking gray water to her mother when she learned that her father had already left on a run. She last saw him the night before and he seemed in a somber mood, so she went to sleep without a word to him.

* * *

Saria wiped sweat from her brow and cursed silently. The cliff was coming to an end and she would soon be at the mercy of the glowing, gray clouds above, and the stagnant, dead air below -- the expanse of dead earth before her. She took a moment to stop right at the cliff’s end and bent down, rubbed her knees -- red and hot. She squatted and her knees crackled. She took a small sip of gray water from the plastic bottle, which she pulled from the runner’s rope slung across her chest. Up above Drek took note of her rest and circled silently, watching all the while.

* * *

Fleet Ser was one of four villages spread around the outskirts of The City. Far enough away to remain sovereign, but close enough to trade. Some said the villages came about long ago, born of a rebellion. Those who escaped The City had fled the man-farms, the slavers, and the cannibals, the splintered and warring factions within. They fled from their hell and set out to find a new home, a new world. But after long and weary travel, they found the world cruel, with nothing to offer them but despair. Refusing to return, they founded their own villages, close enough to The City, where the land was only still dying and far enough away to live on their own terms. And there they remained.

* * *

It was customary in her village, and as far as she knew, the other villages which used runners, on the outskirts of The City, to give them a proper send-off ceremony before they went. She had attended many for her father and she and her mother always stood up at the front, with the elders of the village. The runner, standing before the people, stripped down and threw whatever tattered pants and shirts from his body revealing the lightweight runner’s uniform beneath -- a short pair of tan shorts coupled with a tight gray tank top. Saria held her mother’s hand and turned her eyes from her father up to her mother and asked why the runners had to wear the shorts and shirt, why those colors, why the runners, who were special she thought, didn’t get those sneakers -- things her father often spoke of, but never had -- and why did they all have to come together like this to say goodbye.

Abigail, her mother, ignored the questions, ignored the fact that a runner would go off one day and likely never return. At the ceremonies, Abigail never took her eyes from Francis, the father of her child, as he stood there with his dog, Rap, a big, lean, and shaggy brown beast. Francis stripped down to his running uniform, slung a length of rope across his body and hooked three water bottles to it. Runners carried no weapons.

Francis then slowly kneeled in the hot, hard caked dirt as the elder approached him and laid a hand on his head. The elder, a man around the age of fifty or sixty, then addressed the village. Here, the elder, Jacob, a worn out, gray haired man with a nose that looked to have been broken at least two or three times, called out to the crowd. The runner, he said, was going out into the wild, the unknown, so that they in the village might have a chance at a better life. He said the runners were the messengers of the people, carrying vital information, carrying their hopes and dreams with them. They were the running blood of the village and without them, the village would become stagnant, dry up, and die. Abigail cheered after the elder spoke. She screamed her praise violently for Francis and for their small village along with the rest of the crowd. Saria looked up at her mother, spittle landing on her face. She wiped her cheek then looked to her father as he stood up, tall and proud, and then ran off with Rap the dog trotting beside him.

* * *

The morning her father left on his last run, before he disappeared, Saria asked her mother if she thought he would reach The Oracle. If she thought he would bring back the good news her people were waiting for and lead them to their new home. A home where the people could be happy and not die from being too thin. Abigail only looked down at her, nodded her head, her thoughts elsewhere. And then she poured herself a cup of brown and potent liquid and went outside to drink it alone.

* * *

Saria shook the sweat from her forehead and arms. Her eyes ached from the constant dull glow of the eternal gray skies. Drek circled slowly overhead. She looked back, the cliff’s protection just wasn’t long enough. She wished it would go on forever and thought it was stupid that it didn’t. Before her stretched an expanse of dead soil and dirt and rocks as far as she could see. Seemingly no end to it, a mix of red and yellow flat land, which she thought was stupid, too. No color, no life. The sky was gray and the world was dead. The clouds and the air were dry and still. She prayed for a breeze, but knew it was useless. The winds were their own master and came and went as they pleased. She had a feeling a breeze would come when she was cold and no longer needed it. She looked up, spotted Drek and whistled. The owl flapped his wings and moved forward. She breathed in deep and let it out, adjusted the lasso slung across her chest and took two or three large steps before falling into a trot. Drek flew on and she kept beneath him as best she could, which did little for her, but serve as a reminder that she was not alone.

The only thing she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, a steady inhale followed by a brief exhale over and over and over again. She looked directly ahead of her as she ran, wiping sweat from her brow whenever it would drip into her eyes, causing her to scrunch her face and squint. She ran for what must have been hours, eyes ahead, mindlessly scanning the land for any rocks she could trip over or stub her toe on, or anything else that might not want her to be alive.

Sporadically, she would raise her thighs and high step four or five times, or she would kick her feet back up to her butt as she ran to stretch her knees. It was the longest run she would attempt, one from which no other runner, not even her father, had ever returned. The run to the tower. The run to The Oracle. She longed for a drink water, but she did not take one. She did not know what lay ahead of her, but she could be close to certain that it would not be water.

Chapter Two

What's In Front Of You

Before Saria was a runner, when she was much younger, she was patient, but not too patient. She and her mother often waited on Francis, eager for him to return